[This neighborhood is, according to the brochure, the “New Community” for the “New America.” Based on the Israeli “Masada” model, it is clear just from first glance that this neighborhood was built with one goal in mind. The houses all rest on stilts, so high as to afford each a perfect view over the twenty-foot-high, reinforced concrete wall. Each house is accessed by a retractable staircase and can connect to its neighbor by a similarly retractable walkway. The solar cell roofs, the shielded wells, the gardens, lookout towers, and thick, sliding, steel-reinforced gate have all served to make Troy an instant success with its inhabitants, so much so that its developer has already received seven more orders across the continental United States. Troy’s developer, chief architect, and first mayor is Mary Jo Miller.]
Introduction: male interviewer.
Warnings, GREATER CHONGQINGN THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA: male doctor
LHASA, THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF TIBET: male smuggler
METEORA, GREECE: male soldier
THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, BRAZIL: male doctor
BRIDGETOWN HARBOR, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION: male teen
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL: male intelligence agent
BETHLEHEM, PALESTINE: male teen
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA, USA: male CIA
VAALAJARVI, FINLAND: male American military adviser
VOSTOK STATION: ANTARCTICA: male snakeoil salesman
AMARILLO, TEXAS, USA: male White House chief of staff.
That is, thirteen sections in, we have the first female main character.
Now, you can easily argue it makes sense that, when he’s interviewing important people with important jobs, most of them will be men, because glass ceiling and all that. You could also argue, though, that there was no real need to make it the Brazilian surgeon and not the Brazilian nurse recounting the zombie heart transplant story, especially when she’s the one blogging about it. (Hell, why not just reproduce her blog post?) And that there are two people who were teenagers at the time, and I don’t believe there’s a glass ceiling for teens.
In another book you could also say that it’s just reflecting the unconscious sexism of the interviewer, but that terrible defense can’t be used when the interviewer is explicitly the author’s self-insert.
And what do we know about her? Well, while male teenagers go on to run superboats in the post-zombie-apocalypse world, she’s in charge of the ultimate gated community protecting against a defeated threat. Women are homemakers, you know.
Shall we find out more about our first female interviewee?
Oh yeah, I was worried, I was worried about my car payments and Tim’s business loan. I was worried about that widening crack in the pool and the new nonchlorinated filter that still left an algae film.
She explains she didn’t bother with news because she had enough to worry about as it was, which is showing a critical failing of the author’s understanding of how society works. When people have actual problems you distract them with news, not the other way around. So people chatted about it a bit but then winter happened, zombies got frozen because apparently “winter” just freezes everything at once, people forgot about it. But one of her coworkers did bug out for Alaska, because Alaska sure is a way to die before zombies reach you.
I thought that was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, especially from someone like Inez. She wasn’t one of the ignorant ones, she was a “clean” Mexican. I’m sorry to use that term, but that was how I thought back then, that was who I was.
And who you still are since no one asked you exactly how you used to be racist and yet look, you volunteered.
So, only woman interviewee is a racist twit. On the brighter side, her kids react to the stress with the girl starting fights and the boy getting afraid of the dark, so at least it’s not all stereotypes all the time.
How did you and your husband respond?
Zoloft and Ritalin SR for Aiden, and Adderall XR for Jenna.
While there are valid concerns about overdiagnosis, the treatment for ADD is to give kids speed. If they don’t have ADD, that means it makes them more hyper. It’s noticeable, is my point. Its side effect also include panic, so they’d just be channeling their extra energy into more fights and fears. And drugs for depression and panic work even if it’s due to an outside reason so that’s actually perfectly valid. This is just stupid anti-drugs stuff.
Also, they’re all “on” Phalanx which apparently is a pill you just keep taking and also insurance covers it and hey I just realized that’s a powerful group that’d have fought against the “rabies vaccine” tooth and nail. Also her husband bought a gun and intended to take her to the shooting range to learn to use it. Actually, I bet bullet prices would’ve skyrocketed from people doing this and other people hoarding ammunition and still other people starting to hoard ammunition in response to prices shooting up from the first two and so on.
Their warning is their dog barking, which she ignores because apparently a dog barking at a rabbit sounds exactly like a dog going crazy with terror and even owning the dog for years won’t give you enough experience to tell the difference.
(We even learn later that the zombies also eat animals, but apparently the sound of dogs screaming as they’re eaten alive is still indistinguishable from barking at rabbits.)
I’m not sure when the other dogs started barking, or when I heard the car alarm down the street.
Look, these people are obviously very invested in dying and you know, I feel maybe that decision should be respected.
It was when I heard something that sounded like a gunshot that I went into the den.
So. She heard her dog barking crazily. She heard all the other dogs barking crazily. She heard a car alarm go off. She hears a gunshot go off and she still does not even look out a damn window.
I’m probably more sensitive to this because I have cats and chickens, who are both prone to more trouble. But you learn what sounds are, don’t you? I know what a cat outside the door sounds like, and what a cat outside the door with something maybe still alive if I run down fast enough sounds like, and what a cat getting into a fight sounds like and what a terrified cat sounds like, and what a treed cat sounds like.
And then there’s the birds. Even before we had chickens, if the birds start screaming outside you run out because it’s probably the cat. And when the chickens are attacked they scream. And a hawk-scream or crow alarm or a dog bark means I should rush out too.
And even assuming that she personally did not look outside, no one on her street did either, because there’s no human screams.
Anyway, she also doesn’t have peripheral vision so it’s only her son seeing the zombie come into their backyard that warns her right as it smashes through the sliding glass door.
It was about five foot ten, slumped, narrow shoulders with this puffy, wagging belly. It wasn’t wearing a shirt and its mottled gray flesh was all torn and pockmarked. It smelled like the beach, like rotten kelp and saltwater.
Also, it’s now extra torn up because it just walked through glass. But anyway, these are probably the dumped zombies we heard about earlier. Nicely creepy!
Her husband engages that one while her daughter starts screaming because a zombie smashed through her window and grabbed her hair – seriously kid, you can’t run from that?
When I try to remember, everything goes by too fast. I had it by the neck. It pulled Jenna toward its open mouth. I squeezed hard…pulled…The kids say I tore the thing’s head off, just ripped it right out with all the flesh and muscle and whatever else hanging in tatters.
So inadvertently, this chapter serves to illustrate the zombie threat only goes so far. The ocean zombies are bloated and damaged from that, then they’re smashing through glass, and by this point their flesh isn’t going to be all that firmly attached.
She does claim she doesn’t think she could’ve actually torn the head off, but at the same time presents no other explanation for what happened. Humans vs zombies barehanded is a win that goes to the humans. Twice, in fact, since her husband also beats the other zombie and only gets the gun after that. These people are completely unprepared, actively ignore all advance warning, and do fine. Sure, a sufficient number of zombies would’ve killed them, but for zombies to be a problem they have to kill far faster than they’re killed. As presented here, there could never be sufficient zombies for there to be a problem.
Tim came in the room, with this thick, black goo all over his shirt. He had the gun in one hand and Finley’s leash in the other. He threw me the car keys and told me to get the kids in the Suburban. He ran into the backyard as we headed for the garage. I heard his gun go off as I started the engine.
You know, when I originally read this I thought he was committing suicide, because that’s why I’d end like that, but that doesn’t make sense in the context of the book, so I guess this just means he’s shooting another one. The abrupt ending doesn’t really work unless what happens next is awful enough she wants to just leave it implied – if he shoots another zombie or two, then runs back to the car, that’s the natural stopping point. For that matter, the whole of the narration is really forced because she’s focusing on what exactly she heard or saw and not really what she thought and how it’d be filtered through her memory – she should remember that what happened was her husband came back and said there was another zombie he needed to shoot and then when retelling she’d say “I heard him shoot another one while I started the engine.”
Anyway, as you can see this is our standard zombie setting – the other ones were in more unusual locations and now we’re seeing the zombies hit suburbia proper. And never have the cracks in the story been more obvious. This chapter really serves to underscore the impossibility of a zombie apocalypse. It’s 90% handwaving their obliviousness down to the main character not even able to see one behind a glass door.
Come to think of it, that’s likely a huge part of why the zombies in the movie were fast zombies – sure, they might have just gone with that because it’s trendy, but anyone who’d have argued for slow zombies would have taken one look at the plot and admitted that yeah, this can’t work unless the zombies are like rocket monkeys on crack. The scene in the movie showing the zombie attack actually works because it’s happening too fast for people to react. Here, I think everyone’s secretly suicidal but for religious/insurance reasons has to pretend their death was accidental, so they do their best to pretend they can’t see the zombies but have to fight back once their kids point them out.
I don’t think the narrator talking about her past racism makes her a racist. She’s admitting that at the end of the day, she dismissed her coworker’s fears because her coworker was Hispanic and explaining the rationale that she used. It’s a pretty honest bit of self-reflection, although I think the author mostly put it in there to underscore the theme of the chapter, which is that people pre-zombies were petty and distracted by trivial things instead of working together.
But yeah, I think this chapter does inadvertantly poke a lot of holes in the idea that slow zombies could just amble into suburbia and no one would notice until their faces were being chewed on. It’s possible the narrator’s house is backed right up to the woods or some other area without people, but the rest of the folks in the neighborhood would surely have become aware of the screams and sounds of gunshots way before the zombies actually arrived.
She’s admitting that at the end of the day, she dismissed her coworker’s fears because her coworker was Hispanic and explaining the rationale that she used.
But it says the opposite of that! She says she is surprised by her coworker’s reaction because she thought her Hispanic coworker was one of the good ones, that it was especially shocking for her of all people to be worried. It would have made far more sense to say something like I hought that was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, but I didn’t think much of it. Inez was Mexican, you see… That was how I thought back then, that was who I was
It’s possible the narrator’s house is backed right up to the woods or some other area without people
Hm. Come to think of it, their house doesn’t make much sense. They appear to be right against the ocean but a very sparsely populated beachfront property, since ocean zombies are walking straight into their backyard. Also, despite the ocean being right there, they have a pool. I could maybe see there being few people around if it’s a really cold area, but in that case what’s with the pool and why is the algae doing so well?
Since the answers are ostensibly coming from an interview, I assumed the set-up to that section was basically:
Narrator: Did any of your coworkers run for it?
Mary Jo: Inez did.
Narrator: Why didn’t you do the same?
And then a rumination on what stopped her from paying more attention to the concerns of someone who she presumably thought was pretty sensible. It seems likely that “Wacky brown people, always so superstitious” is how she reassured herself. Since so much of the chapter is her talking about how she (and by extension, the WASP-y middle class) were willfully petty and blind, I interpreted her talking about Inez as fitting into that willful blindness and trying to explain it all away with DEFINITELY NOT ZOMBIES.
Re: the pool, assuming her family was upper middle class, it wouldn’t be too unusual for them to have a pool despite living near the beach. Shows like House Hunters or what have you often have people requesting both beachfront property and a pool. Which seems so weird to me, but *shrug*
why is the algae doing so well?
Zombie algae will be the plot of the sequel to World War Z, titled World War A.
We usually see the interviewer’s questions, though. What you’re saying seems like the only thing the author could’ve meant, but it’s just set up so terribly, especially with I thought that was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, especially from someone like Inez. She wasn’t one of the ignorant ones, she was a “clean” Mexican. which sets it up as the same as if she’d said she was shocked Inez said it because Inez was white and not a superstitious Mexican at all.
Shows like House Hunters or what have you often have people requesting both beachfront property and a pool.
Oh god seriously? America is broken.
Yeah, I think it definitely could have come less out of left field. Like, kudos to Max Brooks for at least attempting to address race and class issues in the context of zombie apocalypse, but a subtle and nuanced writer he is not.
If it’s any comfort, the same request happens a lot on House Hunters International, so I think it’s a “people with too much money” thing rather than just an “American people with too much money” thing.
[How did you and your husband respond?Zoloft and Ritalin SR for Aiden, and Adderall XR for Jenna.]
This bullshit annoys me so much. Do you know how many people who could lead normal lives don’t go on medication because of this kind of BS? Then they kill themselves. Yay!
RE: Dogs: The idea that a dog-owner couldn’t tell a panic bark from a hunting bark is nonsense. I can tell whether my dog has to pee or wants to play from the way he stares at me, never mind being able to distinguish between interest and genuine fear via actual sound. Those are the words of the kind of dog-owner who gets a large breed because they’re “outside dogs” and interacts with them by throwing kibble out the window sometimes. An alert bark and a panic bark are as different as an “Ah!” of excitement and one of fear.
(Also I keep trying to talk Boyfriend into chickens and I think he thinks I’m joking but I am so not.)
“This bullshit annoys me so much. Do you know how many people who could lead normal lives don’t go on medication because of this kind of BS?”
I know! There was a discussion about this at my school, and people kept saying things like “people on Prozac are like empty shells” and that sort of shit. Can you imagine people saying that stuff about people on, say, antibiotics? “Those people on penicillin, man, they’re practically zombies.” (No pun intended.)
Another fun one is “Meds like Prozac change you into someone else.” Of fucking course they do! They change you from a miserably depressed person incapable of taking interest in things to a real, live human being.
But how will you be a great artist if your brain isn’t cooking in its own misery? And how will your works be worth a lot if you don’t kill yourself before thirty?!?!?!?! Think of the art collectors!
There was a discussion about this at my school, and people kept saying things like “people on Prozac are like empty shells” and that sort of shit.
I remember a psychologist talking about how while there’s definitely worries about overmedicating and stuff, if you look at the case studies from the days before medication, there are symptoms of depression that don’t even exist anymore – people who actually were blank eyed shells of human beings. And that’s what would come back if people really insist on fixing this stuff without chemical assistance.
I blame Mind/Body dualism. For some reason, people don’t think you can bootstrap your way out of cancer, but all manner of mental illness is a fault of character and “why can’t you just act normal? I do it all the time, it’s easy”.
You have been lucky enough to avoid much of the stuff aimed at cancer patients, haven’t you? Because the level of “think positively and your cancer will disappear!!! I said, think positively! Why aren’t you happy I told you to be happy?!?!” is terrifying.
In fact, the more an illness has symptoms which aren’t obvious at first glance to other people, the more such people will be told that if they just XXX, they’d be cured, and obviously they _want_ to be sick if they don’t do every single one of the “simple and easy” XXX. People with mental illness suffer from this the most, obviously, but unfortunately, they’re not the only ones.
Especially stuff where we don’t know how it works. A lot of cancer treatments are trial-and-error based, so we’re not entirely sure why they’re helping. Therefore, the thing you just made up about crystals must work too!
There’s also the fact that the people who stay perky the whole time probably aren’t as sick, so they get better more. Conversely, when cancer spreads and gets all over, it causes all sorts of pain and makes people not smile so much, and those people usually die. The less sick people don’t die as much, so why can’t you act less sick, that’s how it works!
Well, it’s hard when you can’t see it. You’re out of milk? Well, step out the door already! I can see your LEGS and they are fine, and I can’t see the chunk of your brain that’s going to make you curl up in a ball if you pass the doorstep, therefore you can leave the house any time you want, so why don’t you just go get milk already? Why are you so difficult?
Preach!
My sister has ADHD, and before she got on Ritalin, a task as simple as emptying the dishwasher could take her half an hour, while school seemed impossible. People though she was just a moron, but her IQ is actually a good notch above average. It was such a relief for her to finally be able to focus.
But you know, ADHD is a fake illness only created to sell medicine right?
But you know, ADHD is a fake illness only created to sell medicine right?
You totally should’ve removed all sugar and gluten from her diet instead, then bought thousands of dollars in all-natural supplements that are totally unregulated when that didn’t help. Those aren’t an industry at all!
Then they kill themselves. Yay!
But their corpses are all natural!
Those are the words of the kind of dog-owner who gets a large breed because they’re “outside dogs” and interacts with them by throwing kibble out the window sometimes.
Come to think of it, that does seem to be the sort of person they are.