World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
by Max Brooks
(Duckworth)
Shade’s children
by Garth Nix
(HarperCollins)
The Carhullan Army
by Sarah Hall
(Faber and Faber)
The end of the world didn’t bother Michael Stipe much, but three authors beg to differ. In new novels by Max Brooks, Garth Nix and Sarah Hall, the apocalypse — or a close facsimile thereof — has come and gone, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces.
Of these three, perhaps the most intriguing is Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. George A Romero’s all-devouring movie zombies never seemed to do much more than terrify a handful of Americans; here, the zombie plague had spread around the world with devastating effect, only halted by a rather extreme plan, and the novel is presented as a series of journalistic ”interviews” with survivors in very different circumstances all around the globe.
South Africa plays a central role (ever imagined a zombie rampage through Khayelitsha?) with a surprising twist as survivors tell graphic and nuanced tales of political turmoil and intrigue, nuclear mishaps, human suffering and much more during the war against the zombies.
Brooks manages to turn clichéd horror into a well-researched study of the likely effects of such an unlikely event on the world’s nations (too bad about the several typos that slipped past the book editors).
Nix has gained a reputation as a reliable author of fantasy for teenagers — for example, the Abhorsen trilogy.
Now, Shade’s Children is set in a world where a mysterious event instantly wiped out every person on Earth older than 14, leaving all the children under the despotic control of the enigmatic Overlords, who may or may not be cruel aliens.
The aforementioned event also unlocked useful powers in some of the children’s minds — powers used by those who escaped the Overlords to live a precarious life outside the net while trying to learn more about their fate.
Nix has crafted an interesting plot, though the target market ensures that some of the darker themes are never fully developed.
As an adult novel, it could have been a mind-bending Lord of the Flies.
The third and most serious of these novels, Hall’s The Carhullan Army, finds a world devolved by war, with the once-mighty Britain reduced to a hopeless, military-controlled country where citizens are little better than slaves, kept barren by the ruling Authority.
We meet Sister, a demure but ultimately confident woman who slips away in the night from her estranged husband to flee to an enclave of women living far away in the countryside, free from the rule of the Authority.
They grow their own food and live by their own strict rules, ruled by a matriarch with a dark past and even darker intentions. It’s as much a novel about Sister’s journey to self-discovery and emancipation as it is about women’s lib in a broken world — but soon it’s clear that even the Carhullan women cannot escape reality.