#24 in Horror
World War Z
- 428
- Pages
- about 8 h
- Reading time
- Film 2013
- On screen
- NYT bestseller · 8 weeks on the list, peaked at #6
- NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
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Our view
“World War Z” tells its zombie war after the fact, as interviews with survivors from every corner of the world, and that form is its great strength: the catastrophe is examined from political, social and economic angles few horror novels attempt. Some readers find the same form disjointed, since voices come and go and the larger picture is left for them to assemble. Others find its politics dated and steeped in American patriotism.
Worth knowing Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, wrote it as an oral history modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: interviews with survivors gathered ten years after a global zombie war. It reads as geopolitics more than horror. The 2013 film with Brad Pitt shares little beyond the title; the full-cast audiobook stays much closer to the book.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. It is broken into eight chapters—"Warnings", "Blame", "The Great Panic", "Turning the Tide", "Home Front USA", "Around the World, and Above", "Total War", and "Good-Byes"—and features a collection of individual accounts told to and recorded by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, following a devastating global conflict against a zombie plague. The "interviews" detail the experiences of survivors from different walks of life and all over the world, including Antarctica and outer space, and explain the social, political, religious, economic, and environmental changes that have resulted from the crisis.
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen once.
- FilmWorld War ZIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.0 across 2,298 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 94% of the weight and the score stays at 7.9 — the Horror average of 7.5 barely moves it.
The rating sources disagree by more than a point, so the score leans more on the category average than usual.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.8 | 138 | 6% |
| Google Books | 9.0 | 309 | 13% |
| Hardcover | 7.8 | 1.9K | 81% |
Frequently asked
How long is World War Z?
It has 428 pages — longer than 60% of the ranked books in Horror.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Horror — with scores between 7.8 and 8.0, closest to this book.
