The Zombie Survival Guide
The Zombie Survival Guide Author: Max Brooks
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Publication Date: September 16, 2003
The Zombie Survival Guide, published in 2003, is a fictional survival manual that deals with the 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: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 zombies, along with detailing how it is spread, treatment of the infected, and why the zombie infection does not spread to non-human organisms.
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 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.
SolanumThe 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.
