“It might seem like Max Brooks has returned to the well. But I’m not so sure.
World War Z is a horror book, but it’s also a book about human hope and resilience. I would say it’s an optimistic book.
Devolution is less optimistic, though I think it does have something to say about the value of useful work and the ways in which people might be better than they think.
WWZ was almost an escape into the past. It reads a lot like a WWII book. Devolution is definitely about the clash of modernity and our nature, specifically modern convenience and how our lives have distanced us from the natural world. And I don’t mean “the natural world” in a spiritual, hippy way. I mean that version of the natural world that’s mean and dangerous.
Devolution is also a lot more violent. Or maybe violent in a different way. World War Z has a lot of death, but Devolution makes the deaths a lot more personal, and they’re more graphic. Graphic is a weird word to use when we’re talking about a completely non-visual medium, but whatever.
What makes this one less fun that WWZ is that it’s a little bit more like a modern horror movie where part of the whole story is that you, the reader, see where this is going WAY before the characters. Because you’re reading a book with a subtitle that includes the phrase “Sasquatch Massacre.”
In World War Z you know there’s a zombie thing, but that book kept pulling out surprises. The scale was shocking, the breadth of experiences helped move it along. The surprises weren’t so much about zombie behavior, they were about our reactions and human ingenuity.
In Devolution, there aren’t a lot of big surprises. A monster that is said to massacre people in the title…massacres people.
I think people like this structure because it makes them feel smart. As the reader, I see what’s coming ahead of time, and I can catalog the mistakes and missteps that make the whole thing worse. It’s almost a version of head authority (gaining the reader’s trust through knowledge) that works as a push/pull. First the reader gets to have authority in knowing what the characters should be doing, then the characters get to be clever and try some things the reader might not have come up with. I think most people don’t want to listen to a character that’s TOO clever, but if they feel like they participated as well, maybe even have their cleverness acknowledged in the book (statements like, “Now I realize I should have…” that acknowledge what the reader is thinking) they might be more tolerant towards giving the character a turn.
I don’t prefer this structure. My brain is…different. And one thing I don’t like to do is predict narrative. I don’t like to predict what’s going to happen in movies or novels. I prefer to go along for the ride. Part of what’s engaging about books for me is that escape into a different reality, and I’m not in another reality if I’m thinking about a fictional narrative as a fictional narrative. One thing that’s been ruined for me when I started writing more, it’s hard to stop thinking about HOW a story was made and to just let it be what it is. So when I get the chance to let a story do its own thing, I like to take it.
I also don’t feel clever when I can guess what’s going to happen. Because in a fictional narrative, that’s almost certainly by design. If you’re writing a mystery, you want people to know the answer SLIGHTLY before your detective does. Not so long that they get bored waiting for this dumbass to catch up, but long enough that they have time to feel clever. If you’re watching an action movie, you want the character to demonstrate something early on, a skill or a little trick, that will then come in handy when they’re facing off with the bad guy and things are at their worst. The viewer will then remember this, seemingly moments before the character does, and then the viewer predicts, the character puts it together, the character acts, and the bad guy is blowed up. Or frozen in liquid nitrogen and gets his head kicked all the way off his body.
I don’t place personal value on that space between predicting and executing. I really prefer a story that goes an unexpected but logical direction. A story with a true twist, one where I couldn’t have predicted the twist if I tried, but that once revealed, makes complete sense. Fight Club and The Sixth Sense are obvious examples, but the twist doesn’t have to be at the core of the story to make it worthwhile. World War Z is a great example where the twists ratchet up the tension and the stakes much higher than you’d expect, but they follow a logical, easy progression that makes sense, and they aren’t information that defies the expectations you’ve built up during the entire reading experience.
I think the big success of World War Z, for me, was that it took a very traditional structure, a WWII story as an oral history, and grafted this horror element onto it. I really think it was at the forefront of the whole zombie revival thing that we’re just now exiting. I think it also really turned the most tiresome zombie trope “The Real Bad Guys Is Us!” on its head.
Devolution wasn’t as successful in that way. The structure didn’t make something new, and the bad guys is the bad guys. “