You may love it, or you may hate it; for me, it's an uneven collection of stories as some of them deserve their own standalone novel and some others truly deserve to never be mentioned again. ( )

It was okay. Closure Limited fleshed out the WWZ world slightly, and the other stories were all right, but nothing special. I would say the most interesting story was the one about vampires in a zombie apocalypse. It's not bad, but I wouldn't say it could stand on its own. ( )

Holy crap, it really is short.

Anthology includes 4 stories, all in the same world as WWZ, set during and after the war.

Chapter 1 - Set after the war, a company makes bank altering zombies to resemble lost loved, or not so loved, persons. People pay for the privilege of putting a loved one out of their misery, or to enjoy the chance to pop a few rounds into someone who always really deserved it. This one had the voice closest to WWZ, in my opinion, but its all build up to a big reveal that wasn't that big. Enjoyable, and probably the strongest of the four, but I don't know how much re-read value it has.

Chapter 2 - Short story about a man trapped in a water closet, with only the toilet tank for water and his belt for food. He holds out hope of rescue as he starves to death. I kept comparing it to the 2004 Dawn of the Dead short film, The Lost Tape: Andy's Terrifying Last Days Revealed. It doesn't have the quite pure dread of The Lost Tape (and it really needs it), but it has a cute intro that plays with your assumptions. An average tale.

Chapter 3 - Man, this was the odd one out. It was one of the most fleshed out stories, but was completely out of left field. I enjoy little twists on my expectations (see Clean Sweep), but this was a massive shift for the established universe, and not one I am sure can be pulled off in a single short story. In short: Vampires. Super fast, super strong, sunlight-sensitive,human-eating, immortal vampires. It wasn't terrible, just an average short, but it didn't fit. The characters also seemed kinda dim, but that is explained in-universe as the memories of an immortal gradually taking up too much brain real estate for conscious thought.

Chapter 4 - Short story centered in China and the rebuilding of the Great Wall. If you liked WWZ you'll probably enjoy it - it feels like (and its alluded to as) cut content from that book. Its hard to say "More of the same" without it sounding like an insult.

This book overall is definitely weaker than the first two entries in the series, but I think its still a bit ahead of The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks. My biggest issue is the length - it really is short. 2-3 more short stories would have made a huge difference.


( )

Four breezy short stories from the pen of World War Z author Max Brooks. Two of them – 'Closure, Limited' and 'Great Wall' – are, I suspect, material cut from the final version of World War Z. One of the others is the inconsequential 'Steve and Fred', and one – the longest – is an adequate vampires-in-a-zombie-apocalypse story called 'The Extinction Parade'. The slim book is filled out with a lot of white space and blank pages; it screams of opportunism after the success of Brooks' novels and you should only really read it if, like I did, you can get it on the cheap and you have a lazy hour to fill. ( )

Il primo è un bel racconto lungo, con protagonisti vampiri su sfondo catastrofico-zombesco. I seguenti sono stralci più o meno brevi, ma sempre incisivi, in stile World War Z, con cronache e ricordi dall'apocalittico mondo pre&post bellico ( )