In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent shares a review of the newest audiobook he’s enjoying: World War Z.
Transcript:
I finally read a book. Well, I listened to a book, but that counts as reading, right? I do a lot of reading in the nonfiction world, but I finally just sat down and listened to a fictional book I really enjoyed, and I thought I would share that with you all today.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. Monday, Wednesday, we talk apologetics and theology, but on Free for All Friday. It’s a free for all. We talk about whatever I want to talk about. Now, most of the reading I do, I’ve been reading books nonstop throughout my whole academic career, my adult life. But typically what I read is nonfiction. I’ve got to read history, science, philosophy, theology, biblical studies. I could spend a whole lifetime and never read all of the books and studies I wish I could read to be knowledgeable on different subjects. I just couldn’t.
So I can get consumed in it and a lot of times I felt like reading fiction wouldn’t be that great of a use of my time because there’s so many of the things I just have to learn about, which is sad because you actually learn a lot about life through fiction. You can learn a lot about history, for example, through historical fiction. When you read great works of literature, it helps you to understand the time and place in which it was written. So I really do enjoy fiction. Most of the fiction books that I read, like the classics, for example, I remember, I think I was in seventh grade, I was in junior high, and I just went through this kick where I didn’t really like hanging out with people very much. I was a tad antisocial. So I would just go to the library, sit in the library, play a round of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego on the old Apples, and then I would read just the old books on the shelf, just the classics.
I think one of the first ones I picked up was Melville’s, Moby Dick. And then when I needed a break from that, I’d hop back on the Apple computer, do Sim City, Oregon Trail, and then hit other classics. So I read most of the classics, I would say junior high, high school, a little bit into college before I got more into all of my nonfiction research. And I did a lot of nonfiction research during the latter part of high school, which was my conversion to Catholicism from deism. But I remember though, back in 2003 when I was a senior in high school, Max Brooks, who’s actually the son of Mel Brooks, by the way, so the famous director, he wrote a book called The Zombie Survival Guide. And in the early 2000s, if you’re one of the younger crew listening to this podcast, you may not be familiar that the early 2000s, it was just zombie craze.
Everybody was obsessed with zombies, especially when… Well, it was because in 2004, they did a remake of the George Romero film, Dawn of the Dead. So there had been other zombie films before that in the 70s and the 80s, but this was the first time at least for the using 2000s film tech and editing styles to create this kind of gripping, zombie apocalyptic thriller. And I remember being obsessed with it. My friend Andy and I, whenever we would drive to community college after we saw the film, every day we talk about, “Okay, what’s our plan when the zombies show up?” We probably spent the next three or four months, the only thing that we talked about were the plans like, “Okay, what do we do when the zombies get here? What are we going to fortify? Let’s get to the Costco. Board it all up. It’s easy to defend. This is easy to defend. That’s not easy to defend.” 2004, 2005, 06, that’s what people in high school and college, guys at least, would be talking about.
And so in 2003, Brooks released a book called The Zombie Survival Guide. It’s a satirical survival guide meant to teach you how to deal with zombies. In particular, these were the Romero zombies. These are different because a lot of the modern zombies in the early 2000 films, they were the fast zombies. There’s different kinds. For example, in 2002, there was a film that came out, 28 Days Later. Remember, this is the whole zombie zeitgeist. And in 28 Days Later is probably the most realistic of the zombie movies because the zombies are just people infected with a rage virus that can be transmitted with bodily fluids when you attack someone. So they’re not the undead, they’re just living human beings who are infected with a virus that turns them into raging monsters that attack and bite and try to kill other people around them.
So they spread, and then it ends up taking over Europe and Great Britain. It’s a very good film, but what’s interesting is the survival there, it’s a bit different. I don’t see how you would end up having… They talk about it in the sequel, what was it? 28 Weeks later, I think it was the sequel, about how it’s spread and it’s tampening down. But they mentioned in the film like these zombies, they can’t stick around. These are rage-infected human beings. They’re still susceptible to things that can kill them. They can be run over, they can drown, they’ll die of starvation. They don’t know how to make food. Their bodies will break down and they’ll die. They’re just rage-filled human beings. They’re not the classic undead, but they’re also fast. So when Dawn of the Dead, they were like the undead zombies, but they could move really quickly.
But the classic Romero zombies like you have in that old film Night of the Living Dead, which is still a classic. “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.” Do you remember that scene in the cemetery? In the original Night of the Living Dead, the classic Romero zombies from the director, George A. Romero, is that they’re slow. When you think about the stereotypical zombie in media, they shamble, they just walk. They’re not very fast. You could outrun one of these zombies. What makes them dangerous is when there’s very large hoards of them, all coming at you and you’re boxed in a building or you’re trapped and they pin you. And what also makes them distinct from the 28 Days Later zombies is that they’re truly undead. Either if you’re bitten, you die, or in some of the variants, if you die from any cause, you will come back to life as a zombie.
So you are a corpse who is reanimated, and as a reanimated corpse, yeah, you’re slow and you shamble around. But in the Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide, and in the book I want to talk about today, the Undead, the only way you can un-undead them, the only way you can stop them is by destroying the brain. But they are walking corpses, they’re decomposing, and because they’re walking corpses, they don’t need to eat. They can be frozen and be thawed and still survive, which presents challenges in the book that I’m going to discuss. They can survive underwater, they don’t need oxygen, so they’re extremely durable.
These zombies and the Zombie Survival Guide and in World War Z, the book we’re talking about today, very durable, but they’re also very slow when they shamble about, they’re primarily dangerous when they corner people or people aren’t expecting it or they don’t understand the threat.
So now to the book, I read the Zombie Survival Guide. I read half of it in a Borders once in 2003. Remember, Borders, anybody? The old bookstores, they’ve been out of business a long time. And I read the Zombie Survival Guide, I was just a broke high school student, early college, working at Harkins Movie Theaters making $5.15 an hour taking tickets.
I can’t afford to get a Zombie Survival Guide, but I remember staying in the bookstore and reading through about half of it, and it just said, “Do this. Don’t do that. If you have long hair, cut it, put it back into a ponytail so you don’t get grabbed by the zombies. What kinds of weapons are effective against zombies? Flamethrowers aren’t that effective because the zombies will just keep walking through the flames.” They’re impervious to pain. What to do? What’s the right melieu? Weapons? Right strategies? Buildings and complexes you think will be safe, but actually aren’t.
Like I said, 2002 to 2005, you had 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, there was a sequel of Dawn of the Dead, I think it was called Day of the Dead. I think John Leguizamo was in it, and Dennis Hopper was in it, of all people. Not as good as the original Dawn of the Dead but that’s what people were all talking about. And I thought it was really fascinating. So in 2006, Brooks released this, it’s kind of an anthology. It’s an apocryphal oral history of the zombie war. So it’s called World War Z, an Oral History of the Zombie War. And I really enjoyed it because it was released on Audible in 2007 and the Audible… So it’s a series of interviews. What I love about it, and do not compare this, by the way, with the movie World War Z, with Brad Pitt, totally different. Talk about that in a second.
What I liked about World War Z, the Oral History of the Zombie War, this Audible version of the book itself is that it takes place 10 years after a worldwide war against the zombies. There’s a worldwide zombie epidemic. The zombies take over, humanity fights back, and eventually defeats the zombies. And so this is an oral history. It’s a series of fake, obviously, which I have to say that to you guys. Come on, we know it’s fake it’s a series of interviews with people who fought in the zombie war. It’s a wide variety of people. So you have high profile politicians, government leaders, scientists, soldiers, but you also have just regular people. You have regular people that fled to the wilderness of Canada and bad things happened there. Moms recounting what happened. All different kinds of people, people who trained canine units, mercenaries.
There’s just a great part about a kid in South Korea who is so obsessed with video games he doesn’t know the zombies are attacking, and how he just tries to escape his apartment and get out of the city and what he has to do to be able to do that. So it covers a wide variety of people that are interviewed. It was inspired by a book called The Good War, an Oral History of World War II. It was published in 1984 by Studs Turkel. So it’s this oral history, and what I like about it is that you really enter into it hearing the narrations of what all of these different people went through. You might be think, “Come on, this is kind of nerdy, right? Do you really care about zombies that much?”
No. What makes the book interesting, and I would definitely recommend getting the Audible version because the voice acting cast is phenomenal. Alan Alda from MASH, Mark Hamill has a prominent role as a particular soldier in it. He does a great job, but it’s very good. What I like about it is that the book is very well researched. Brooks is very thoughtful about, “Hey, what would happen if this plague really happened and how would people respond?” This was written in 2006, and what’s hilarious about it is that there are a lot of beat for beat similarities to the COVID-19 pandemic that took place 14 years later. So in the book, the zombie plague begins in rural China where someone is bitten, and so the zombie outbreak starts, but the Chinese government covers it up and doesn’t want people to know about it. So it spreads from rural China to other rural countries and areas around China. Chinese government does its best to cover it up and hit the hotspots where it can, the zombie virus.
So what happens is if somebody dies in China and they’re a zombie, sometimes immediately after they die, their organs are cut up and sold on the black market organ trade. The zombie plague spreads not by zombies marching around, but you have a heart taken from China from a zombie, but you don’t know what it’s a zombie yet, goes to South Africa for the black market organ trade, gets put in somebody. Then they wake up, they’re reanimated as a zombie, and then it spreads from there. So the Chinese government covers it up. The US government plays it down saying, “Oh, it’s not that big a deal.” They send special forces to deal with it. People in the media in the US, they think, “Oh, it’s just African rabies. It’s not that big a deal.” The book calls this “The Great Denial”, but then eventually the outbreak, it gets more and more, it spreads.
And like I said, these zombies don’t require air. So a lot of them, when people are trying to get rid of them, they dump them in the ocean and forget about them. But the problem is the zombies keep walking on the ocean floor. And then there’s a scene in the book where a mom just talks about… She lives in a suburban area of San Diego, and a zombie comes to her door and it reeks of the tide and seawater because it just walked out of the beach. And people are like, “Oh, is this guy okay? What’s going on? Ah, brains.” They don’t say brains, but they lunge at people and then try to bite them and eat them. And then when you get hit, you turn into the zombie. So I was like, “Oh man, this is pretty beat for beat with the China coverup.”
They try to do a vaccine saying, “Oh, there’s a vaccine that protects you from this. It’s okay.” But the vaccine doesn’t actually work. I’m like, “Man, this guy was really ahead of his time.” So then the book continues, and I’m not going to say everything about it, but I do just want to talk about the parts I found really enjoyable. But yeah, the book continues, and the great denial becomes the great panic. People realize that the world’s being overrun by zombies. So a lot of people just get in their cars and RVs and they’re told, “Go north, zombies freeze in the cold. They can’t hurt you.” So they flee into Northern Canada where the book says 11 million people died of starvation, hypothermia, and cannibalism. So this great interview with a woman who went there with her parents when she was 15 years old, or a teenager and talks about other people, “Oh, they’re having such a great time in the woods and it’s going to be so fun, and we’re camping out.”
But they didn’t think ahead and bring enough supplies and as supplies start to dwindle, people start to fight. Bad things start to happen. And it’s narrated from her perspective, having lived through it, and it’s gripping.
Oh, back to the thing I said earlier, “What was the big deal with the zombies?” What I like about the book, it’s not the zombies per se, it’s the fact that the zombies are used as a narrative device to craft a story about war, about refugees, about the worst things that humanity can endure and has endured throughout history and how humanity can overcome that. So instead of just reading a depressing book about a genocide in Africa or Ugandan Civil War or World War II or something like that, the zombies, they make it a little bit absurd, but also peppered in to keep it from being so… Because there’s a lot of depressing elements about it but the thing that makes it depressing in the book in World War Z is this happens in real wars.
For example, there are feral children who are trying to be integrated into society who don’t have language skills because their parents were killed by the zombies, and they’re like four years old, and they somehow have survived off of supplies that were left over in abandoned towns. And now they are these feral children that have grown up and have to be reintegrated. That does happen. There have been feral children in history. Usually there are these civil wars, like in Southern Africa, parents are killed, everyone’s killed. They go and live in the jungle to try to survive, and they don’t develop human social skills or language abilities. They act more like animals. And there’s other things. There are the quislings. They’re the people who are so psychologically traumatized by the whole thing, they start to act like zombies. But that’s similar to Stockholm Syndrome and what can happen to people who have been occupied by the enemy. They want to just please the enemy so badly they become the enemy.
But talking about how food supplies run out, what people do in desperate situations, how the military’s mobilized, one of the best chapters is the Battle of Yonkers. So it’s overrun and the US government’s like, “Look, people are panicking. We got to show we’re in charge.” So they stage a media fight, a battle with the media filming it in Yonkers, New York to try to show we can stop the zombies. But the problem is the military is using non zombie strategy. So they use artillery shells and tank rounds that yeah, that will cause a normal human being to die from their organs exploding. But if a zombie’s organs don’t need to work, he’ll just keep marching through all that stuff. Or the soldiers who are fighting, they’re in trenches fighting the zombies on the ground when you don’t need trenches, the zombies don’t have guns.
Instead, they’re trying to shoot the zombies, but they’re all trained to fire at center of mass when you need to hit the head. If you’re not trained to hit the head, it’s hard to do. Lots of other things, it all goes wrong. They get overrun and people see the military doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Here’s part of the Battle of Yonkers where Mark Hamill aka Luke Skywalker does a great job reading from this soldier’s perspective in the battle. I also love how in the story, which is what people do in real life, they come up with nicknames for the zombies. So they call the zombies Zack or Gees. G Stand for ghouls, which makes sense because throughout most wars, there were nicknames that were giving people on the other side. But I like Zach and Ghouls or Gees.
Mark Hamill:
The fire was dying. Zach was still coming, and the fear, everyone was feeling it. And the orders from the squad leaders and the actions of the men around me, that little voice in the back of your head that keeps squeaking, oh,(beep) (beep) They came by the thousands spilling out over the freeway guardrails, down the side streets, around the houses, through them. So many of them, their moans so loud, they echoed right through our hoods. We flipped our safeties off, sighted our targets, the order came to fire. The initial burst was too low. I caught one square in the chest. I watched them fly backward, hit the asphalt, then get right back up again as if nothing happened. Dude, when they get back up-
Speaker 1:
PS, I added in those bleeps. So if you’re thinking about getting this for one of your kids, it is definitely more mature content. I’d save it for older teens or adults.
So then the book transitions into the military. The government has retreated to Hawaii, pan past the Rocky Mountains where the zombie hoards end up freezing. And they also narrate, by the way, also what happens in India, India and Pakistan, or no, I think it was Iran and Pakistan. Who was it who destroyed themselves in a nuclear war? It was Iran and Pakistan, and they have miscommunication about everything. They destroy each other in nuclear war. Also, the winters are longer and colder because of the forest fires, the nuclear fires, the campfires that are just started by people to warm themselves, changed the atmosphere. He really thought through a lot of things about what would happen in a global conflict.
It doesn’t have to be zombies. It could be what would happen if there was a global thermonuclear war? What if there was a covid plague? But covid was 10 times more fatal and a hundred times more transmissible, for example. What would happen in these situations? And I think Brooks shows well that we would see a lot of the population die off. We would see living standards go back maybe 300 years. Now in the post-war, when… It’s neat, they go through how they defeat the zombies, how the nations apply different strategies to do that, and then how do you rebuild society? And they talk about how in this future society, the most valuable people are construction workers, plumbers, machinists, people like that. Whereas a lot of people who have white collar jobs, they’re not very useful now in the post zombie world, and they have to be retrained to do other things.
So it’s interesting if you had that, if you had a post apocalyptic world, it wouldn’t send you back to the Middle Ages because we’d still have memories of technology. We’d have technology. Let’s say you have cars, you don’t have gas to put in them, at least you have the cars. You could reverse engineer how things work, how to build machines, how to eventually create new technology. Well, although see this is one of my favorite scenes though is they talk about how in the end, when they’re trying to rebuild society, they got to get the oil wells up and running. So the problem is the people, the underwater technicians for the oil wells keep getting attacked by underwater zombies. So they have to send in special divers in metal suits to fight the zombies underwater, narrated really, really well.
By the way, when I mentioned World War Z, the Brad Pitt film, don’t watch it. If you do, it has nothing to do with the book. Even Brooks said that when he watched the film, he said, “I wasn’t mad about the film because it had nothing to do with my original story, except for the title.” The Brad Pitt movie is just generic Brad Pitt travels the world trying to fight zombies and find a cure. It’s so boring. When this book, what it deserves… The problem was when World War Z came out, which was in 2013, it was meant for theaters obviously, and there wasn’t any real streaming technology to make it a big deal at home. Now though, I think that World War Z could get a great adaptation as a streaming series on Amazon or Hulu, HBO Max maybe. And each episode, it’s episodic because the book is episodic and each season could be a chapter of the book, and each episode is just a story, and the stories are really gripping.
You have a narration of a feral child explaining she’s a grown adult who talks like a 4-year-old, what it was like when her whole family and church were killed by the zombies. You’ve got a great one from a guy who talks about what it’s like being in the canine unit and how he used to hate dogs, but then how they train the dogs to fight the zombies and lead military groups. Like I said, oh, there’s another one about a mercenary who worked at a house of celebrities who are riding out the apocalypse and they’re all live streaming, “Look at us, man.” Or not live streaming, they’re all on TV with their cameras like “We’re riding it out here.” And then the other survivors crashed the place, and all these celebrities get killed by zombies. So much great stuff that you could do episodic for a streaming series.
So if you’re out there and you work in Hollywood, please do it. I would watch at least, I’m sure others would as well. It is been a long enough time since the zombie craze. People aren’t sick of zombies, like they’re sick of superhero films now. Give it a shot. So that’s my review there. I just say it because I took a break a little bit from all my intensive research. I just wanted to listen to a fun fiction book. If you’re going to listen to a fiction book, why don’t you listen to “Insert this classic”? Because sometimes I just want to have fun. So I’ll get to the classics, I’ll read more classics when I have more time to wind down on things. But this was fun. World War Z by Max Brooks, the audio book. Get the Audio. I think there’s only one version that has the cast that reads all the different things. I read the unabridged edition. Really good. Yeah, so I found it interesting, and I hope you found today’s episode interesting as well. Thank you guys, and hope you have a very blessed weekend.