The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse by Steven Schlozman
My rating: 2/5 cats
i love the idea behind this book, it just wasn’t much fun (for me) to read. but then, i am a zombie nerd, not a neuro-nerd. (neurd??)
it is not because of the lack of whizz-bang zombie attacks.
world war z did not have any “zombie action” as such, and i still really enjoyed it. in that book, there were so many unexpected facets of zombie aftermath touched upon, it showed that a great deal of thought about All Things Zombies (the best of all NPR shows) had been taken into consideration. this one was more single minded, and its focus was just beyond my ken. wwz was a dissection of a society in the wake of an event, this was a more literal dissection of braaaaaains.
if you are into brain structure and brain function and your whole life is brains brains brains, you are either a neurosurgeon or a zombie. or the guy who wrote this, who is a psychiatrist and professor. and i can just picture this guy writing this, hanging out with colleagues and students, and them all having a ball with the possibilities. and i am sure that they love this book and see it as the first professional zombie novel. and if you have any pals who are both brainiacs and zombie lovers, this is probably the best present ever.
but for me, it doesn’t add anything to the canon of zombie entertainment. it is a curiosity piece, like “oh, and then someone wrote this, and it was a great idea, but kind of boring to read.”
because what is more boring than medical talk?? bureaucrat talk. and the end of this is pages and pages of UN/WHO (insert clue joke here) assembly packets about how the disease is to be dealt with and what the status of its victims. so you get your “what it means to be human” philosophy dose for the day, but in the most boring (but probably accurate) writing of all. plus flow charts.
here is an example of missed opportunities. at the end, after appendix II (ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome/natural history and early therapeutic maneuvers), there is a list of 31 “references” taking up four and a half pages. and i read them, hoping there would be something funny in the details, or something revealing, plotwise; a gift to the close-readers. but no. just reference after reference showing what? that there is a lot of scholarship on the zombie situation in this version of the world? i think a page and a half would have been adequate for that, right?? i was totally slogging by this point. there is a lot of medical speculation, but not much in terms of a story.
i enjoyed the zombie illustrations, because i am apparently a moron who only likes pictures and isn’t ready for reading yet.
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