'Word War Z' author explains parallels to coronavirus and what a zombie plague could look like
Max Brooks, author of 'World War Z,' talked to Yahoo Entertainment about the differences between his book and the blockbuster movie and the eerie similarities between how the coronavirus pandemic has played out and his fictional virus.
Video Transcript
- Everybody out of the car.
KEVIN POLOWY: You've talked about how dissimilar the book "World War Z" is from the movie. How did you feel about the movie? Were you with it?
MAX BROOKS: I didn't feel much of anything. Thank God. I mean, the best thing they did was throw my book away. People say, like, did they ruin your book? I'm like, no, they didn't ruin my book. They ignored it, which was kind of good because I didn't have to watch my characters being mutilated or my plot being eviscerated. None of it was in there.
So, I mean, once you get past the title, you can close your eyes. The title goes by. Then you open your eyes and you're like, wow. I'm just watching a really jacked-up, kind of cool "28 Days Later."
KEVIN POLOWY: Let's talk some "World War Z." And this is published in 2006, so clearly you are a time traveler, or those things have just never gone away. But seriously, like, patient zero was in China. I mean, they later called it African rabies, which sounds an awful lot like the Chinese virus. The US greatly downplayed the severity of its threat, reacted too slowly, likely in part because it was an election year. There was a much hype treatment that turned out to be a placebo.
And I'm not describing reality right now. I'm talking about your book again. Has it dumbfounded you in any way how prescient certain aspects of that novel were?
MAX BROOKS: I was just being historically accurate. I wasn't looking forward. I was looking back. You know, everything that's happening today has already happened throughout history. Pandemics tend to come in very predictable cycles, and everything that is happening today happened with SARS, happening with AIDS, even happened with Ebola.
KEVIN POLOWY: What do you think is the closest thing we've had to a zombie outbreak in real life?
MAX BROOKS: I mean, there's different elements of a zombie plague in different events. When you talk about just utter anarchy, well, that was the Rodney King riots, which I lived through, which the LAPD started and then just magically poofed out of existence when we needed them. So having to watch communities like Korean Americans having to sandbag their mini malls and go on the roofs with rifles to protect their livelihoods-- I think when it comes to the utter [BLEEP]-upedness of the people we entrust to protect us, I think we're pretty much living that
KEVIN POLOWY: Well, "Zombie Survival Guide" deals with official virus. "So-lan-um," is that how you'd pronounce it?
MAX BROOKS: Yeah.
KEVIN POLOWY: All right. Tell me about the creation of that. Like, how deep did you dig into the actual virology and conceptualizing it?
MAX BROOKS: So in order for a pandemic to work, it has to have things like it has to be very contagious. And something like COVID-19, which has a two-week incubation period that's asymptomatic-- really, what I needed was the holy grail of pandemics which is a disease that can be ignored, and that allows us to build a psychological condom in our minds where we go, well, I'm safe from this. Don't worry about it.
In fact, actually in "Dawn of the Dead," 1978, the original "Dawn of the Dead," which is the best zombie story ever told, ever-- better than anything I've ever done-- you actually have a character in the director's cut saying, why don't people just organize? Why don't they just do the right thing? We can stop this.
And to me, that was what's so fascinating about zombies. It's not how scary they were. It's that they expose our weaknesses.
KEVIN POLOWY: We got to talk about your upcoming book, "Devolution." Congratulations. It is already getting excellent early reviews, prerelease. I'm excited to read it. What can you tell us about it and the inspiration behind it?
MAX BROOKS: Just like we've discussed, my work is all about fictional threats that you have to solve with real-world solutions. And through the course of it, you might actually learn something about how the world really works.
Well, zombies, now it's Bigfoot. And it begins with a high-end, high-tech eco community called Greenloop based in the Cascade Mountains. And then Mount Rainier erupts, and they are cut off, this community, and they are forgotten.
The irony is while "World War Z"-- everyone's talking about "World War Z" sort of predicting-- not predicting but illustrating what's happening now. My personal life here at home is much closer to what happened to my characters in "Devolution" because it's much more personal. "Devolution" is really about these people that are stuck in their homes, and they don't know how to do anything. But what happens when all the threads of the society is cut and you have to do everything? And that's pretty much what my wife and I and my son have been doing for the last two months now.