South Central Review

This book might seem an unorthodox choice for a favorite novel. But who didn't see parallels between dystopian fiction and the realities of the year 2020? World War Z by Max Brooks¹ is a work of fiction that reads like non-fiction, now more than ever. Fully titled World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, the book follows the pattern of Studs Terkel's The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two² by reporting documentary-style on a global zombie pandemic through a series of first-person interviews with survivors. The Guardian called the parallels between today and Brooks' episodic, geopolitical perspective of a pandemic "breathtaking."³

Students assigned to read the novel for English composition and rhetoric class have sometimes questioned World War Z's sense of realism, arguing that while the style of writing draws comparisons to nonfiction, the outrageous events are uber-fictional. Then came 2020, with its Covid-19 pandemic, racial injustice and social unrest, and a contentious election, all followed in early 2021 by a Capitol insurrection, political and ideological divisions, and a campaign to vaccinate millions. Suddenly fiction became reality and the themes in World War Z reemerged as relevant, prompting me to read the book again despite its disconcerting apocalyptic feel.

World War Z is born from a government report akin to the real 9/11 Commission Report. The author's boss, chairperson of the fictional United Nations Postwar Commission, deletes half of the report, arguing that it contains "too many opinions, too many feelings. […] We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor."⁴ In response, the author compiles extensive personal accounts into the 342-page oral history, arguing that "by excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may […] lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"⁵ As I re-read World War Z during the Covid-19 pandemic, I considered how key scenes and characters mirrored the current and real threats to Max Brooks' notion of the "human factor," not only in a literal and physical [End Page 17] sense through the virus, but also by diminishing our abilities to care for our most vulnerable and to interact civilly with those who hold perspectives other than our own.

The first parallel between the book and reality is the stories' origins: World War Z begins with a virus that originated in China. Chapter 1, "Warnings," opens with an interview with Dr. Kwang Jingshu, who discovers patient zero running a high fever, shivering violently, and with a bite mark on his right forearm.⁶ While readers might dismiss similarities between the virus in World War Z and Covid-19 because of the "bite mark," this scene represents the beginning of the shared politicism of a virus. In reality, then-President Trump ordered travel to and from China to end and states' governors imposed stay-at-home orders hoping to flatten the curve. Americans reacted as typical capitalists, hoarding toilet paper and Lysol. Like World War Z's third chapter, titled "The Great Panic," primary responses were fear and denial. In March 2020, author Max Brooks created and shared a video about the importance of social distancing, pointing to his father, legendary comic Mel Brooks behind a glass door: "If I get the coronavirus, I'll probably be OK. But if I give it to him, he could give it to Carl Reiner, who can give it to Dick Van Dyke, and before I know it, I've wiped out a whole generation of comedic legends."⁷ Brooks seemed to realize that we were entering into a time eerily similar to his fictional zombie apocalypse.

When staying at home and flattening the curve did not end the pandemic, some citizens began to mistrust science, and here readers see another parallel. One of the more despised characters in World War Z is entrepreneur "Breck" Breckinridge. While real conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was peddling fake coronavirus cures online⁸ and President Trump was hyping hydroxychloroquine, Breck was inventing Phalanx, a "vaccine" for the zombie virus. Breck based his idea on something he learned from his history professor, who believed that "Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells."⁹ When later pressed about why the vaccine didn't work, Breck claims, "It protected them from their fears. That's all I was selling."¹⁰

Promoting a fake vaccine is not the most despicable way to eradicate a global virus. In America 2020, whispers began of achieving herd immunity by encouraging people to catch the virus, claiming that the death rate would affect only the elderly, who faced death soon anyway. World War Z exaggerates the contemptibility of such a solution through the character Paul Redeker, an academic whose research had earned the attention of the apartheid government. Redeker is asked to revise an ultrasecret government program called "Plan Orange," a scenario intended [End Page 18] for the country's white minority to deal with a possible uprising by the indigenous African population by determining whom to save and whom to sacrifice. In Redeker's revised plan, a small fraction of the civilian population—determine so by income, IQ, fertility, and a checklist of "desirable qualities"¹¹—would be evacuated and saved from what was then called "African Rabies," the fictional counterpart to Trump's "China Virus." Those left behind would be used as human bait, distracting the undead from following the valuable citizens retreating to their safe zone. Zombie fiction has a long history of the othering, monstering, or dehumanization of people. With characters such as Breck and Redeker, we again see this dehumanization of citizens and degeneration of the "human factor" that concerned Brooks' narrator.

Whether the enemy is a zombie, a virus, or politicians, one of the most powerful rhetorical clashes in both fiction and reality is that between truth and lies, bred by the proliferation of information but also misinformation. For example, the CDC is at the center of both of these stories. At one point, social media were abuzz with theories that CDC numbers were wildly inaccurate, fueling the theory that hospitals were being pressured or paid to report all deaths as Covid-related. Kaiser Health News quoted Donald Trump directly as perpetuating these theories by saying "this country and its reporting systems are just not doing it right."¹² In October 2020, the American Hospital Association called the accusations "malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided," and both they and the CDC issued lengthy explanations of how underlying medical conditions and deaths due to Covid-19 are reported.¹³ Early in the pandemic, Brooks was treated by media as something of an expert on apocalypse; while researching for World War Z, he had studied diseases such as the Black Death and influenza, toured the CDC, and examined disaster preparedness plans. He told NPR: "I think in addition to social distancing, we have to practice good fact hygiene. What I mean is we have to be careful what we listen to, what we take in—just as if it were a virus. And we have to be careful also what we put back out, as if we were spreading the virus."¹⁴ In stronger words, he told USA Today: "We are facing a combination of incompetence and cowardice and blatant lies. Because the narrative is, 'We were caught completely unaware,' which is not true at all." Referring to his own research, Brooks said, "The master plans are sitting right here on my shelf, including a master plan for pandemic, which not only was developed by our own government, but which is open-source."¹⁵ He was referencing the National Response Framework, which is available on FEMA's website.¹⁶ [End Page 19]

People can respond to crisis with positive collective thinking, as is evident in news coverage of allies marching in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protestors during the summer of 2020 or of American retailers banding together to require masks of their shoppers and employees. But far more often, both real and fictional events followed the pattern of what Trump erroneously referenced when he intended to discuss herd immunity and instead said "herd mentality."¹⁷ Brooks created a fictional group of characters called Quislings who "[…] started acting like zombies. […] They're always drawn to what they're afraid of. Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it."¹⁸ Brooks' Quislings "don't scream. They just lie there, not even trying to fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by the very creatures they're trying to be."¹⁹ It's worth noting that quisling is a real term, meaning a traitor or one who collaborates with an enemy and named for Norwegian war-time leader Vidkun Quisling, who collaborated with Adolph Hitler.²⁰

America 2020 exhibited many examples of this zombification of citizens' thinking: followers or supporters of a particular candidate or philosophy were called "sheep," for example, which became a social media insult complete with an animal emoji meant to inflict further offense. Social media rhetoric often guided users' lines of thinking on an issue: Were George Floyd and Breonna Taylor "murdered by police" or should we "back the blue"? Was January 6 a rally of patriots trying to #stopthesteal or an insurrection that threatened democracy? Was wearing a mask a sign of personal responsibility or a loss of freedom? This rhetoric is binary in its nature, leaving no option but complete belief or rejection.

Interpretation and validation of information and misinformation are also issues of contention in World War Z. A central document in the novel is the Warmbrunn-Knight Report, a threat assessment of the danger posed by a pandemic of the undead penned by and named for Israeli and American intelligence analysts. The Warmbrunn-Knight Report urged the United States to prepare over the winter, when zombies were less active, to launch an all-out attack on zombies in the spring. Of course, the U.S. ignored the report, which resulted in the eastern two-thirds of the country later being overrun by zombies. Mistrust in the report began at the highest levels of government, mimicking reality, when the Trump administration ignored the work of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and its predecessor the Obama administration's handling of the Ebola outbreak. World War Z's White House Chief of Staff Grover Carlson, calling it the "Knight-WarnJews Report," derisively describes the Warmbrunn-Knight report as "[…] typical alarmist crap. We got dozens of these reports a week […] all of them claiming that their particular [End Page 20] boogeyman was 'the greatest threat to human existence.' C'mon! Can you imagine what America would have been like if the federal government slammed on the breaks every time some paranoid crackpot cried 'wolf or global warming' or 'living dead'? Please."²¹

Fortunately, World War Z also became relevant again in the way that it reflects the triumph of truth. World War Z's commander of allied forces describes the moment when the zombie threat is finally recognized as real: "[…] suddenly you had a room full of military professionals, each one with decades of combat experience and more academic training than the average civilian brain surgeon, and all of us speaking openly, and honestly, about the possible threat of walking corpses. […] the taboo was shattered, and the truth just started flooding out. It was […] liberating."²² Similarly, in his first press conference in President Biden's administration, after having been banished for a few months from the public eye by Trump, Dr. Fauci said, "The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know and what the science is […] it is something of a liberating feeling."²³

At the end of the novel, World War Z character and small-town mayor Mary Jo Miller says of her generation: "Yeah, we stopped the zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a menace in the first place. At least we're cleaning up our own mess, and maybe that's the best epitaph to hope for. 'Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess.'"²⁴ As I re-read World War Z while simultaneously living through the consequences of a pandemic, I couldn't help but to see fictional and real dichotomies between science and government; truth and lies; collective thinking and herd mentality. Brooks still doesn't take credit for the parallels between his fiction and our reality, telling USA Today, "I'm not some prophet-genius. I'm just a guy who looks at history. And history follows very predictable patterns. This is the pattern; I just zombified it."²⁵ Perhaps the book can even give readers a bit of hope or make us feel better about our reality. Max Brooks' World War Z can be read and re-read as a cautionary tale—a roadmap, not only for what not to do, but for what to do to emerge from apocalypse. And hopefully, that emergence is how history will look back and define the year 2021.