Undead geekery

[torrain_circles]

Just picked up World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It's by Max Brooks, the same guy who did The Zombie Survival Guide; it's fiction rather than tongue-in-cheek guidelines, set a decade after the titular event. The author was hired to compile a report, and created a book out of all the stuff he collected that didn't fit with said report's "Just the facts, ma'am" direction.

I am scarcely thirty pages in, and it is beautiful; I am praying he maintains the tone. So far it's very much a focus on the human factor, whether as a cause of the spread or as the perspective through which a particular event is viewed. Not to mention a perfectly sensible idea from a doctor performing illegal transplants, which makes sense but I'd simply never thought of before:

But the donor... Doesn't have to be fully reanimated. What if he's just newly infected? The organ may not be completely saturated. It might only have an infinitesimal trace. You put that organ in another body, it might take days, weeks, before it eventually works its way out into the bloodstream. By that point the patient might be well on the way to recovery, happy and healthy and living a regular life.
[...]
You remove the heart not long after the victim's died... maybe even while he's still alive... they used to do that, you know, remove living organs to ensure their freshness... pack it in ice, put it on a place for Rio... China used to be the largest exporter of human organs on the global market. Who knows how many infected corneas, infected pituary glands... Mother of God, who knows how many infected kidneys they pumped into the global market. And that's just the organs! You want to talk about the "donated" eggs from political prisoners, the sperm, the blood? You think immigration was the only way the infection swept the plant? Not all the initial outbreaks were Chinese nationals. Can you explain all those stories of people suddenly dying of unexplained causes, then reanimating without ever having been bitten? Why did so many outbreaks begin in hospitals? Illegal Chinese immigrants weren't going to hospitals. Do you know how many thousands of people got illegal organ transplants in those early years leading up to the Great Panic? Even if 10 percent of them were infected, even 1 percent...

It makes sense. I like it.