Zombies and Psychos

For the last two months I’ve been reading ‘American Psycho‘ by Brett Easton Ellis. It doesn’t usually take me this long to get through a book but I tend to have to stop for a while every time the character takes another girl home, slices up her sexual organs, chainsaws her in half and has sex with her entrails. I’m a bit of a wuss that way. In between those scenes, the book is fantastic – the character of Bateman is hugely compelling and the world Ellis has created is both alien and familiar, attractive and repulsive. In the morally ambiguous, superficial and self-centred society Bateman inhabits, it’s no wonder he acts the way he does.

But, when I started reading it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it all felt very familiar; as if I had read it before even though I knew I hadn’t. It wasn’t until maybe 60 pages in that I realised that Paul Howard had lifted the style of the book and applied it to Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. It made perfect sense: both worlds share that shallow, label-obsessed materialism. But for the next 50 pages, I couldn’t shake the image of Bateman just being Ross in a suit and living in late-80’s New York. Very distracting.

The other reason for taking so long though, was that in the middle of reading ‘American Psycho’ I picked up a book that had been lying around the house for a while, called ‘World War Z‘ by Max Brooks. It belongs to my cousin, on loan to my brother, who – months on – still hadn’t read it. Basically, it’s a series of around 40 interviews with people who lived through the massive zombie pandemic that drove humanity to the edge of extinction and 10 year war to reclaim the planet and destroy the zombie menace. I was pretty sceptical. Y’see, even though I try my best not to be, I tend to be a bit (a bit? hah!) of a snob; turning up my nose at certain genres – particularly chick-lit, fantasy, romance, Tom Clancyesque action/adventure and so on. And a book about zombies? I wasn’t expecting to get past the first five pages.

And I was wrong. It had me hooked. Even though the book is concerned with large, sweeping events like a world-wide collapse, the near-total disintegration of society and the economic, sociological and military ramifications as well as a global war, the interviews root the events in the personal experiences of the characters. He paints the picture of a political and human response that’s scarily familiar and each character is fantastically realised with emotional depth and individuality, which is what made it so compelling.

‘American Pyscho’ is considered a modern classic; a seminal work of post-modern literature, perfectly capturing a desensitised, amoral society of isolated materialists. ‘World War Z’ was, apparently, warmly received by the critics and while I wouldn’t make the claim that it’s a classic, I found it pretty interesting who these ‘critics’ were. Most of the reviews were from genre specific publications (scifi/gore-movie magazines) and smaller newspapers. It was pretty much ignored by the “establishment”, which doesn’t come as a surprise. But it wasn’t ignored because it’s a bad book – it’s not. It was ignored because it’s about zombies. They had the same reaction as I did: “Zombies? Lame!” And as hypocritical as it is, that annoys me. Perhaps I expect too much from the “literary establishment”, irritated that people much smarter and more experienced than me didn’t look past the cover to find a suprisingly good book underneath.