The Zombie Survival Guide
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| The Zombie Survival Guide | |
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| Author | Max Brooks |
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| Cover artist | Max Werner |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Zombies |
| Genre(s) | Humour, Horror, Informative |
| Publisher | Three Rivers Press |
| Publication date | September 16, 2003 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback), Ebook |
| Pages | 272 |
| ISBN | 1400049628 |
The Zombie Survival Guide, published in 2003, is a survival manual dealing with the fictional potentiality of a zombie attack. Its author, Max Brooks, lays out detailed plans for the average citizen to survive zombie uprisings of varying intensity.
Contents |
[edit] Contents
The book is divided into seven separate chapters, plus an appendix.
The first chapter is entitled Myths and Realities. It lays down the specific ground rules that are referenced repeatedly in the book. The most important of these describes "Solanum", the fictional virus that creates a zombie, along with details on how it is spread(such as through an open wound, when coming in contact with infected blood) and treatment of the infected(suicide or amputation)
The second chapter, Weapons and Combat Techniques, discusses the weapons at the reader's disposal and weighs them against the various threats that may be faced during confrontations with the undead.
The third chapter, On the Defensive, looks at options for an individual to stay in a stationary location. It focuses on remaining stationary in an undead siege.
The fourth chapter, entitled On the Run, explores dealing with attacks while traveling.
While chapters three and four emphasize avoiding zombies, chapter five, On the Attack, specifically deals with engaging ghouls to ensure their destruction.
The sixth chapter, "Living in an Undead World" looks at survival during a doomsday scenario, a Class-4 outbreak would see zombies becoming the dominant species on Earth. Advice in this section is adapted from previous sections; recommendations for surviving a siege is repeated, though altered for relevancy to the long-term entrenchment a Class-4 outbreak represents.
The guide concludes with a fictional list of documented zombie encounters throughout history. The oldest entry is 60,000 BC, in Katanga, Central Africa, although the author expresses doubt to its validity. Instead, he presents evidence from 3,000 BC in Hieraconpolis, Egypt as the first verifiable instance of a zombie outbreak. The most recent entry is 2002, in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.
The journal section also introduces a lead in to the next novel, World War Z, in describing how a group of zombies came to be in China, which is listed as the outbreak's source.
The Appendix takes the form of a sample "Outbreak Journal", with the fictional author noting a covered-up zombie outbreak being seen on the local news. The following pages are blank entries, presumably for the reader to use as a basis for their own journal; their inclusion furthers the overall feel that the book is a survival guide to a life-threatening possibility.
[edit] Solanum
The guide attributes the zombie outbreaks described to a virus known as "Solanum". It is said to be neither water-borne nor airborne; the only means by which to become infected is through direct fluid contact, in which case the virus is 100% communicable with a 100% mortality rate. Solanum converts the brain of human victims into a specialized organ that needs no oxygen, water, or food to survive, and it renders body tissues toxic, significantly slowing the decomposition rate. It then begins to control movement of the body, resulting in a zombie. The downside of this is that the new brain has nothing more than bare instinct to feed and motor skills. It also prevents the body from regenerating, thusly the victims eventually rot away.
[edit] See also
- World War Z
- How to Survive a Robot Uprising - A similarly styled book on how to deal with rebellious robots.
- Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency
- Zombie Squad
- Zombie apocalypse
- Zombies in popular culture
