It starts in the poorer countries. Of course it does; that's where all the major pandemics start, among the people nobody cares about. Odd happenings; a Chinese farmer attacked by a child who appears to be rabid, quickly discarded rumours from the shanty towns outside Jo'burg... the governments try to hush it up, old enemies blame each other for trying to spread panic, the smarter businessmen try to make money off it... all for nothing. Because yes, the dead are rising. When there's no more room in hell, yada yada yada. The zombies eat the flesh of the living, and all of mankind's defenses that we've put in place over the millennia - whether military, political, religious or psychological - prove hopelessly inadequate. The victims number dozens, then thousands, then millions, then billions. And every victim gets up and becomes the enemy. By the time we start figuring out what to do, it's almost too late: the entire human species is outnumbered, cornered - and as always, still at each others' throats.

Brooks' novel definitely owes a lot to the classic zombie stories - Matheson, Romero, Fulci - but where most of those stories focus on a small group of survivors, he takes a universal (if slightly US-centric) view. The whole book presents itself as a series of interviews with those who survived - from politicians and military leaders down to ordinary people who made it either by dumb luck or by committing acts just as inhuman as those of their opponents.

Of course, this sort of storytelling is so easy to get wrong - for one thing, it removes a lot of the tension, since we know right from the get-go that the war was won (after a fashion). For another, in order to make us care about these characters that are just in the story for 5-10 pages, Brooks has to pull out all the stops and resort to storytelling cliches a little too often. The good news is he's a good enough writer to pull it off (most of the time) and that the format makes it possible for him to touch down on different parts of the conflict and tell the story in detail - leaving it to the reader to piece it together into a whole.

Weaving in shades of classic post-apocalyptic tales like On the Beach, The Last Man or War of the Worlds, World War Z manages not only the genre-obligatory social critique and "are we really better than them" angle (though the latter could have been more fleshed out) but also a number of scenes that stick in my mind. The US army taking a stand that turns from PR coup into disaster and near annihilation; Russian clerics taking it upon themselves to execute all infected soldiers to spare them from suicide; mankind's last great fleet, cobbled together from everything from old warships (the HMS Victory, the Aurora) to rowboats, trying to escape out to sea; North Korea simply... disappearing; Iran and Pakistan nuking each other into oblivion to stop the billions of Chinese and Indian refugees - but of course, radiation doesn't stop zombies; American families trying to survive without training in the frozen wastes of Northern Canada; and all those... people, all those individuals.

So what if Brooks makes it very obvious which buttons he's pushing now and then? So what if we can figure out how it ends? It's chilling, riveting, and somehow painfully realistic. Four BRAAAAAAAAAAAAINS out of five.