As you can predict from the title, this is a guide about surviving the zombie incidents. The book guides the reader to survive from occassional zombie threat to global zombie-end-of-the-world-we-are-all-gonna-die scenario. Like all good guides, The Zombie Survival Guide is of course divided into different parts.

First half of the book is the guide in case of zombie attack. We get to read detailed chapters about zombies such as myths and realities of the undead and how the zombie virus works. There are also sections of weapons, defending yourself, being on the run and methods to attack zombies. I feel that there would have been opportunity in making a more realistic survival guide in The Zombie Survival Guide that would have been a fun gift to give someone. Althought there are some handy instructions in the book, you don’t really benefit anything in terms of prepping from reading The Zombie Survival Guide (unless you plan to take a plane and fly it to nearest abandoned oil rig and hold your ground there). But on the other hand, a zombie survival guide without talk about machetes, remote defense locations and attack techniques would not have met it’s expectations.

 

Recorded Attacks

Second part of the book is Recorded attacks, a section of zombie attacks recorded through history. Starting as far as 60,000 BC and ending in modern times, there are over 60 short stories of zombie outbreaks through history. The stories are really short (about one page length each) so they are more a description of an event than story. As much as i love zombie fiction, For some reason the stories did not quite rise my interest and i leafed the stories through, reading the most interesting ones. 

 

I had really mixed thoughts after reading The Zombie Survival Guide. Although i love zombie theme, i found hard to decide how i felt about the book. The zombie survival theme was really entertaining but i found it problematic that the book does not offer that much. The stories at the end of the book were so short that there was no connection to characters. On the other hand the guide section of the book was quite far off so you can’t use it as a humorous prepping guide to give to your friends.

Although The Zombie Survival Guide is Max Brooks’s first book on the subject, you can see it as a spin off of same author’s great World War Z which was released few years later (you can find review here). As standalone book The Zombie Survival Guide is not as much interesting as bundled with World War Z (and if remembered correctly, World War Z also mentions The Zombie Survival Guide). 

So if you zombies are THE thing for you, you should definetly get your hands on Zombie Survival Guide. Otherwise i’d advice for little research before making the purchase. 

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