Is World War Z Really a Horror Story?

 World War Z is a clever story, a series of interviews of the people who got through an apocalyptic zombie infestation that turned the world into a feeding trough for the somehow re-animated dead: heaps of gray flesh, brittle bone, chattering teeth, and moaning mouth-holes.

What World War Z teaches is the brutal war we writers will have to slog through to accomplish literary success: research. Max Brooks seems to have conducted inexhaustible research to create the characters, cultures, and settings he has pieced together to reveal the psychological and sociological weaknesses of humankind. What we are in our comfortable, distraction-filled lives is not at all what we really are when our lives, individual and collective, are on the line. It demonstrated to me, like a slap to the face and punch to my paunch, how much more research I must needs perform to imbue my own thesis project with vibrancy, imagery, and realism to make it a tour-de-force, if I may wax trite for a moment. 

The novel makes Brooks seem omniscient as he displays the full range of what he has learned about the intelligence profession, a capitalistic economy and the workings of the market, exo-suits, submarine maneuvers and combat, the human economy of desperation, politics, and the workings of the human mind to preserve itself, among many, many other subjects. 

So if I am going to write a story, I must research it and experience it through and through. It cannot only be reading research but must be experienced research, too, so that I know and understand what I am writing and passing on to others. Even though this is fiction, and in my case fantasy, it must ring true, it must be rooted in truth, or at least in ambiguity and uncertainty. I must leave the reader asking, "Could this really happen?"

If realism and rootedness in the truth are the benchmarks for storytelling, can we say World War Z is a horror story? The answer is a qualified, no. 

True, Brooks's story involves zombies and the ubiquitous, ineluctable danger their insatiable hunger for human flesh poses to humankind. It also represents the psychological perils such an ever oncoming monster creates in minds not built to handle such a distortion of reality. 

Yet for me the story did not read like a horror story but like a geopolitical, military thriller that happens to have zombies in it. I thought I was reading a Tom Clancy novel. Brooks could have removed the zombies and replaced them with another kind of infestation (it was easy for me to pause and consider our own situation with the virus, which also began in Red China). He could have interchanged them with extraterrestrial aliens or a new kind of weapon that had been developed or with the appearance of a new evolutionary species on Earth.

Why not? What was it about the story that turned it away from being horror? It was the format Brooks used to tell it. He wrote a book of memories, a book of reminiscences about the war. The story examined the plans we made to survive and the cost of those plans; the efforts we took to survive and the preconceptions and ignorance and half information we held; the worldwide human loss and the way we lost our loved ones along the way; the weapons, tactics, and strategies we tried and changed as we learned more: personally, locally, regionally, nationally, internationally. 

Horror tends to end badly for the audience because of how it ends in the story. World War Z ends well - at a cost, mind you - but the human race survives, which it had to for Brooks to present the recollections. Brooks makes a last ditch effort to flood the final pages with worldwide psychological damage, but it's rushed and too late. The effect would have been the same for any kind of global catastrophe he may have inserted. That's the key, Whatever Brooks would have inserted as the villain would have been horrifying on such a global scale.

Don't misunderstand me. Brooks wrote quite a story. It has zombies. But - and I hate to write this because Scott will rebuke me - but people are the monsters. Zombies happen to be the trigger, but it is our defective nature always lurking below the surface but always ready to foam to the top that tortures us with fear and despair, that makes us suicidal and homicidal. We sacrifice others in the false belief that it is the only way to save ourselves. We sacrifice others to save the country, imposing false value judgments on what the life of a person is worth. And the very government and scientific and economic leaders who got us into this mess are the ones who end up finding themselves essential and saving themselves. 

Perverted, to say the least.

I got the feeling Brooks took some cheap shots at the U.S. and that he did not like what he called fundamentalist religion. His migration scene from the U.S. and the satisfaction the Cuban official obtained from that "irony" was copied from The Day After Tomorrow (migration from the U.S. to Mexico). I think he also copied the character of the VP from that movie. Batista was a rotten dictator. So what did the Cubans do? They replaced him with another rotten dictator. Way to go.