For all of a the strengths that this book has in the oral style of the telling, massive inconsistencies mixed with plot holes and obvious conflicting facts should keep most people who care about the zombie genre from truly enjoying it. It is clear from the first page that this is Max Brooks' first attempt at a novel that isn't a page by page description of how to get through a zombie fallout (Zombie Survival Guide). While the overarching faults of the book don't keep you from continuing to read, it does make you wish that you hadn't paid full price for the experience.

The book is a collections of tales from people who managed to live through the entire zombie outbreak that almost ended the world. The characters interviewed range from the man who found patient zero, to the two people who seemed to single handedly clean out all of Japan from zombie hordes. Parts of the book are ingeniously done, while others seem to have no real merit in the book other than to advance the story. It would have been nice if Brooks had decided if the book was going to be a oral history of the way (as it was presented) or just a straight out novel. His indecision on the matter leaves the book prey to the faults of the oral narrative without giving it any of the strength of a novel.

The biggest fault, as any massive fault with most zombie movies, is that the Brooks never really seems to settle in his mind what a zombie really is. He will go through great length to describe what a zombie cannot do but then half a book later he is asking for you all to forget that he ever said that. Climbing is the first example that springs to mind. He mentions, several times, in the first dozen narratives that a zombie cannot climb things (ie. ladders), but then towards the very end of the book he walks you through the process of telling you exactly how they do manage to climb other things (piles of dead zombies, up chains in water). He spends no time trying to example any of it away, and even goes so far as to point out that at the beginning of the book he said that they could not climb. The more examples that are presented just prove more and more that Brooks didn't spend the time fleshing out his idea of what a zombie is.

With the attempt at the oral stories Brooks attempts to take on the persona of both the person talking, and the person conducting the interview with them. This normally leads to one of three outcomes: 1. he does a good job and you are intrigued with the story. 2. He does a very poor job of keeping a plot twist under his hat and you figure out what is going on less then five sentences into his retelling. Or 3. He is totally unconvincing as the person and you end up being completely taken out of the experience. The first example is probably the one that takes up most of the book, more on that later though. The second outcome only happens several times throughout the entire book, but they do manage to happen every time the opportunity is presented (a pilot crashes and talks to a person over the radio to help her survive the experience. The person on the other end of the radio happens to be the pilots imagination, which would have been surprising if the first page hadn't revealed that her radio had broken in the escape from the plane). The third likes to happen every third story, if not in the middle of several stories in a row.

Brooks doesn't ever really seem to know where he wants to go with the book. At first it shows the signs of being an all out zombie fest, then it turns gears to how the rest of the world just followed in America's shoes. Everyone who wasn't an American was a pure figment of Brooks' imagination, while everyone who was was a celebrity that he simply could not get the rights to use the name of and he just uses vague descriptions of them hoping that you will catch on that he is talking about Paris Hilton.

The book itself does garner itself some praise, there are several instances that leave truly memorable marks on how well parts were written. The section about how VH1, or some channel like it, was doing something along the lines of “The Surreal Life: Zombie” still hangs on how original and plausible that entire section was. The part about the actual World War Z was rather interesting as well. There were other large chunks of the book that were good, but normally completely forgettable.

While not overly impressive the book isn't a terrible way to spend a day without internet. That is pretty much the best way that I can sum up the entire experience of the book, it is just a little less entertaining then spending an entire day surfing around wikipedia, learning new facts that may or may not have any basis in reality.