Max Brooks Is Not Kidding About the Zombie Apocalypse Dan Winters for The New York Times I've never seen a zombie movie where someone drank from a puddle and died of explosive diarrhea. Jonathan Sheldon Max Brooks, age 15, with his very famous (and very protective) parents in West Berlin in 1987. On a Saturday evening in late April, Max Brooks stood on a stage, in front of a lectern, plaintively trying to convince an audience of about 250 in the auditorium at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Ill., that the coming zombie apocalypse won't be anything like what they've seen in zombie movies or on zombie TV or in Jane Austen-zombie mash-up novels. He seemed frustrated. He's talking about real zombies here, not the movie kind. Does the audience get that? Believe him, most people in a zombie apocalypse would die not from zombie wounds or anything as sexy as that. They'd die, he explained, from the lack of a clean-water supply. And as anyone with even passing familiarity with his books "The Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z" knows, the biggest risk in a zombie invasion is fluid loss from all that running. "It's not exciting, I get that," he told the audience in the affable but slightly patronizing manner of an I.T. guy. Brooks then dived into an extended riff in which he played the different characters in an impromptu scene. He isn't big - he's 5 foot 7, trim but stocky - but his manic energy filled the stage as he pinballed around. First he's the rugged, zombie-movie guy who says: "Quick! The zombies are coming! We gotta get outta here! Then he's the other guy, the one who's dehydrated, the one who put an ax in his survival pack but no water, and he's hunched over, holding his temples, saying: "You go on without me, Brad Pitt. I got a terrible headache. I gotta go lie down. Here's a small sampling of other topics Brooks covers in his lecture: Chernobyl. Flatulence. Snow Klingons. Fjords. Rambo. Saber-toothed tigers. Ball cancer. Crystal meth. Socialists. Rodney King. Rednecks. Glitter. What's clear from all this is that Brooks has a deep understanding of history and geopolitics - he isn't just a standard-issue sci-fi author hopping on the zombie train. Rather, he's the engineer of that train, at least in its modern renaissance. "W.W.Z." was featured on a reading list put together by a former president of the U.S. Naval War College, and Brooks has lectured at various army bases on zombie preparedness. He's a zombie laureate, our nation's lone zombie public intellectual, touring everywhere from Long Island to Ireland to Sugar Grove to prepare humans for the coming zombie plague. What's not clear is just how much of this zombie stuff he believes himself. One thing is for sure, though: Max Brooks is very afraid of something. When we met in West Hollywood for lunch two days after the Sugar Grove lecture, he tried to explain. He's not making a joke. It's not even that he's being hammy or gimmicky. It's just that it feels obvious to him: Of course there's no such thing as zombies. And yet - "Since 2001, people have been scared," he explained. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down. He can be a little intense, but hear him out. It's Hurricane Katrina. It's neighbors knifing each other for food, women being raped, the cops not showing up, children dying of starvation, an old lady dying in a wheelchair. Brooks reasons that many folks can't cope with real-life dangers; they (like him) would prefer to metabolize their anxiety through science-fiction. "If all that happens because of a zombie plague, then you can say, "Oh, well, that would never happen, because there's no zombies." " He leaned forward, eyes locked on mine, hands karate-chopping the table to emphasize his points. At 41, he looks like his mother, the actress Anne Bancroft, but he has the stature and frenetic affect of his father, the writer and director Mel Brooks. When Random House wanted to sell his book as comedy, he worried that his fellow nerds would see him, as he puts it, as "Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft's brat, who's probably some coke-snorting, sports-car-driving, trust-fund [expletive] who basically took time out from his partying and his supermodels to piss on something that we love" by writing zombie books.