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Any good Zombie Survival Books?

F

FragMonkey

New Member
Hello. I am a new user here, and require some assistance. I just picked up "The Zombie Survival Guide" by Max Brooks. It a serious yet humorous book on how to survive a zombie outbreak, complete with "documented" accounts and everything. Its truly well written, but the author makes it seem as though such a thing could really happen. In fact, I actually now think it is very possible!

Now to my topic. After recently watching "28 Weeks Later" I became suddenly interested in all things zombie.

Are there any good zombie survival books? Such as where a person or group of people try to survive in an urban environment overrun by the living dead?

Sorry, my question is kind of specific, but I don't know where to look.

Max Brooks also wrote another book, titled "World War Z," and that one is a history of a global zombier war that happens in 2012. I'm sure to pick that one up soon too, but it is apparently written in a matter where there really is no character development, as it is told through short stories and articles.

Thanks ahead for any help :)
 
I've read both of those and liked the Survival Guide much better the World War Z. Z was okay but I don't like that style of writing either. Check out the Autumn series by David Moody. You can get the first book free theinfected.co.uk there just add the www in front, won't let me past links here yet. Also Brian Keene has a two book series The Rising and City of the Dead that are pretty good. His zombies are possessed by spirits from another plane and like to taunt you while trying to eat your tasty flesh so they aren't the standard kind but still a fun read.
 
Hey FragMonkey,

I'm also a member of a zombie forum, there are some good recommendations over there. I'm just branching into zombie fiction myself, let me know if you find anything good!
 
Thread hijack!

My local bookshop had Monster Island by David Wellington on their recommended table. I didn't buy it at the time as I'd never heard of it and wanted to read some reviews first. Does it have the zombie forum seal of approval?
 
Not sure, as I've only recently joined and haven't looked through most of the threads. I have seen it mentioned a couple of times.

Having a trawl through one thread, I see "I Am Legend" mentioned a few times (even though it isn't a zombie book - still a great read). The Brian Keene novels are discussed; I think I might look for these next.

BTW, steer clear of Cell. I love King, but man, that is an awful book.
 
I read Cell because people were saying it was better than King's writing has been in a long time. Unfortunately that wasn't saying much. It starts off very promising, and I was enjoying it. But that only lasted for about a quarter of the way through and then it turned into a suckfest.

I Am Legend is ace though. It got me wondering what experiments I'd like to do while the world was asleep.

You can download Autumn for nubbin. It wasn't great, at least I didn't think it was great, but different strokes and all that. You might enjoy it and free is free.

http://www.theinfected.co.uk/
 
Thanks for the replies. The Autumn series seems to be just what I was looking for, as do the Brian Keene books.

EDIT: I was just looking up on some reviews for Autumn and they were average at best :/
 
Do you have a personal zombie survival plan?

I've been watching Jericho lately and my heightened paranoia is meshing well with my boyfriend's zombie fear.
 
That's why I'm reading The Zombie Survival Guide.

I pretty much know what to do depending on the level of crisis and how to recognize one :)
Great book so far, but slightly frightening in the sense that it seams so real, and could be possible.
 
I've read Monster Island and thought it was just ok. Its the first book in a series but I haven't bothered to read the other books in the series yet. I may in the future if I get bored enough and my library has them. There is a big thread about the books on that zombie forum that somebody posted and most of them seem to like it.
 
I live near a graveyard and I do find myself thinking about zombies more than is probably healthy. We have the survival guide, I just need to get round to reading it.

They don't do a roaring trade there so most of the corpses must be in pretty bad shape so I reckon I can probably take them.
 
My plan has for years echoed much of what is written in the Zombie Survival Guide. I actually read it with a bit of a 'no duh' attitude, but that's the result of a macabre youth spent watching horror and playing scary video games.

Basically, get ye some canned food, burneth thy stairs, avoideth the insanity.
 
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks.

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.
 
I just finished World War Z,it's read good read.Multiples stories and very coherent,if the Zombies exist,they be just like that.
A down note for me was the audio version,Max Brooks does the journalist and as a little nasal voice,some of the actors over do it a bit to.Be i really enjoied it.
 
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