Max Brooks, the World War Z novelist who writes the apocalypse as a survival manual

Max Brooks

Photo: Doczilla STOMP! / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 22, 1972 Manhattan, New York City, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Known for	Justice League: Secret Origins, To Be or Not to Be, The Public Eye
Awards	Emmy · Audie

Max Brooks writes about the end of the world as if it were a supply problem. His zombies are never really the subject. The subject is who hoards the water, which governments lie about the first cases, how many days a city can eat once the trucks stop coming, and why the survivors are rarely the ones with the most guns. It is an odd body of work for the son of the man who made The Producers, and it explains why a novelist known for the living dead holds a senior fellowship at the Modern War Institute at West Point.

His most famous book has just turned twenty. Del Rey marked the anniversary of World War Z in July with a deluxe slipcase edition carrying hundreds of new annotations and a fresh introduction, in which Brooks writes about his family, the real events behind the novel’s best-known scenes and the research he did to make the undead plausible. Speaking to Popular Science in September, he described the book as the product of frustration rather than fandom: “I had big picture questions nobody was answering.” On what has changed since, he was blunt: “We’re living in a time where all facts have become tribalized.”

The son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, Maximillian Michael Brooks was born in Manhattan on May 22, 1972, and grew up in Los Angeles. He is dyslexic, and he has credited his mother, who put her career on the shelf to raise him, with arranging audiobook versions of his school texts. He studied history at Pitzer College and film at American University, voiced characters in animated series such as Batman Beyond, and from 2001 to 2003 sat in the writers’ room of Saturday Night Live, sharing the show’s Emmy for writing in 2002.

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The first book came out of that period. The Zombie Survival Guide, published in September 2003, is a deadpan manual: the virus gets a name, Solanum; weapons are ranked by reliability rather than drama; there are chapters on defending a house and living on the run; and the last section catalogues “recorded attacks” stretching back through history. Many readers took it for a joke. The joke was that Brooks meant every practical word, and the advice on water, shelter and panic works just as well for floods and blackouts.

World War Z followed in 2006 and turned the manual into history. An agent of a United Nations Postwar Commission collects testimonies from survivors around the globe, from the first infections in China to the rout of the American army at Yonkers and the long campaign to retake the planet. Brooks has said the model was Studs Terkel’s The Good War, the oral history of the Second World War, crossed with the films of George A. Romero. The hardcover reached number nine on The New York Times list, the book had sold a million copies by 2011, and the audiobook, voiced by a cast that included Alan Alda and Mark Hamill, won an Audie Award. He later returned to that world with “Closure, Limited,” a story written for Christopher Golden’s anthology The New Dead.

The book’s fame also produced its strangest twist. The 2013 film directed by Marc Forster and starring Brad Pitt put the title in front of a global audience and threw away almost everything that made the novel work: the chorus of voices, the political satire, the slow accounting of who paid for whose mistakes. Brooks has said the adaptation had nothing in common with his book other than the title. Millions of people now know World War Z as a Brad Pitt action film, and the novel’s real argument, that a disaster is mostly a test of institutions, belongs to the readers who went back to the page.

He has spent the years since refusing to stay in one lane. The Harlem Hellfighters, a 2014 graphic novel drawn by Caanan White, tells the story of the 369th Infantry Regiment, the African American unit that fought in the First World War. Brooks first heard about it from a tutor when he was ten, pitched it to Hollywood as a film, was told nobody wanted the First World War, and made it a comic instead. Sony later bought the screen rights.

Then came the move that surprised his horror readers most. Minecraft: The Island, published in 2017, was the first official novel set in the game: a narrator with no name and no stated gender wakes up alone in a world made of blocks and has to learn its rules from nothing. Mojang released two audiobooks, one read by Jack Black and one by Samira Wiley. NPR admired its internal consistency, while critics at 1843 magazine felt the game mechanics crowded out character and plot. Brooks kept going with Minecraft: The Mountain and Minecraft: The Village.

Devolution, published in June 2020, landed in the first months of the pandemic, which suited it uncomfortably well. It is built from the journals of Kate Holland, a resident of Greenloop, a high-tech eco-community near Mount Rainier, where an eruption cuts the residents off and a group of Sasquatch comes down the mountain. Legendary Pictures holds the film rights, with the New Zealand director James Ashcroft attached.

This year Brooks also appeared in Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, the HBO Max documentary by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, speaking about how his mother’s death in 2005 affected his father, who turned 100 in June. He has been married to Michelle Kholos since 2003; they have a son and live in Venice, Los Angeles.

The next book is already announced. The First Hundred Hours: A Story of Alien Invasion is due in 2027, and Brooks has framed it with his usual precision: “If World War Z was Studs Terkel’s The Good War with zombies, then The First Hundred Hours is Tom Clancy‘s Red Storm Rising with aliens.” The question behind it is one he says he has carried since childhood: why would anyone want to invade Earth? The preparation, he admits, has been hard going. “The amount I’ve had to study for this new book has been excruciating.”

Tags: novelists, Mel Brooks, Max Brooks, Devolution, Minecraft: The Island, The Zombie Survival Guide

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