I sincerely believe that World War Z (the book, not the atrocious Brad Pitt movie of the same name) would be on high school curricula across most of the US except for its genre. Deep themes. Sophisticated literary devices. Also, zombies.https://twitter.com/mayli/status/968044956186062848 …
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I won't spoil it for you but: It's a better realized dystopia than 1984 or Hunger Games, by a lot. The text is explicitly a semi-reliable narrator working through analysis of primary source documents and *other* unreliable narrators, including one who is Plot Twist.
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There's also quite a bit of the "Let's take a jaunt around the world and Experience Cultures Different Than Ours" and while those are sarcasm caps it was clearly high-effort and sincere. (Including the rare acknowledgement for high school fiction that US culture is complicated.)
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It also manages to be a better Lord of the Flies without even trying, has a better case for monarchism than the entire US lens on the English literary canon tossed off in two paragraphs of flavor text, has a critique and countercritique of US power, etc etc.
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It's not about the zombies, is what I am saying.
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Replying to @codinghorror
I don't know to what exact I am reacting to the book and to what extent I am reacting to me reacting to the book, because it featured in my nightmares for ten years, but that suggests to me that it's waaaaaaay better than almost all genre fiction and literary fiction I've read.
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(Importantly: it's not the zombies which are the scary bit, Internets, and it's not the surface-level Walking Dead "Hah, twist, it was humans who were monsters all along", it's the sheer psychological terror of what individuals and societies are willing to do under scarcity.)
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Replying to @patio11 @codinghorror
This is the most Patio11 explanation of a nightmare i could possible imagine
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Replying to @ianlandsman @patio11
Needs 8,000 more words to be a true patio11 post :)
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