BLARG on my blog

I mention a few posts ago that a friend of mine from work lent me a book to read.  I haven't finished the book yet but I love love LOVE it.  It has me thinking and questioning the world/government around me.  How would the American people react if this plot were true is a question I ponder with every page.  I know, you are sitting, gripping the seat you are sitting in while waiting in suspense for me to drop the title and the author so that you can run to your nearest book store to buy your own copy.  You are probably thinking it is something like Ishmael or 1984 or A Brave New World or The Giver...books that if read, you can have a different view on societal matters....but it is none of those titles....it is World War Z by Max Brooks. 

Typically it is hard for me to finish novels, and while I haven't finished this one yet, I know I will.  It is an oral history on the zombie outbreak and the war that followed.  It is great!  But has got me to thinking...how would we react if/when the zombie outbreak occurs?  There would obviously be a cover up because that is how the government likes to respond to anything that could affect  masses and cause panic.  So we know that they would do nothing but rumors would spread.  I know you are thinking that I am a bit off my rocker with this one...especially because I dropped the "when the zombie outbreak occurs" bit....but let's face it....it can't be that far off into the future.  Think about when Mary Shelly wrote her story about Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster he created.  She conjured up this story and published in the year of 1818.  Although it isn't known for sure what Shelley's influence were for her story, she and a group of people, her husband and friends, were traveling when her first oral version of the story was told.  It is believed that she referenced multiple stories such as Promethean myth from Ovid, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, William Thomas Beckford's Vathek, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Humphry Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy.  But regardless of where she got her inspiration, the idea of creating a cognitive being from dead body parts, reanimation of dead cells is far beyond the time.  For 1818, it is very far fetched that the Monster could ever be created....if you put the story in the context of now, though, it doesn't seem as crazy.  At the time Shelley wrote her novel, the world was 149 years away from our first heart transplant, something that I am sure was unheard of at the time she was deciding how to write about a reanimated human being.  With that in mind, think about a viral outbreak that would create reanimation of dead humans-way less nuts-o than a heart transplant in the year 1818.  Now....I know, you are getting concerned about my mental health right now and wondering is I smoked a little something before sitting here to right this...I am of clean mind and body, I promise.  I am just saying, that we can't discount the idea....and I think that when it does happen, it will be because we created it to happen.  Zombies will not just occur on their own as a natural phenomena, but they will be created as a botched science experiment much like the Monster in Frankenstein.  It will be created and reek havoc on the person who created it...and then the world.

So everybody should just built their houses on stilts now and buy up all the guns in the world to get ready for it...don't forget to aim for their head!


But seriously....read this book, if you believe in/like zombies or not...read it.

(and if you have never read Frankenstein....read that one too)