Top Of The Pile: The Zombie Survival Guide - Recorded Attacks

A sequel to his brilliant World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival - Recorded Attacks is a compact graphic novel, consisting of a dozen short stories, progressing through history (from 60,000BC to 1992) documenting mankind's encounters with the living dead.

Each story is more of an anecdote, designed to impart some particular nugget of information (such as the real reason for the construction of Hadrian's Wall or why Ancient Egyptians extracted the brains of the dead before mummification), than tell a full story with beginning, middle and end.

All wonderfully, graphically illustrated by Ibraim Roberson, the tales vary in length from about three pages up to 14 for my favourite story, which concerns an isolated French Foreign Legion fort in 1893 French North Africa besieged for three years by hordes of zombies, and 16 pages for the 121 AD episode which sees vastly outnumbered Roman legionnaires taking a stand against massed barbarian undead.

Many pieces, such as these particular stories and the World War Two and later incidents, lend themselves as set-ups for interesting wargame scenarios, while others, such as the the one about an Ancient Japanese zombie-fighting society - The Brotherhood of Life - are great ideas for smaller-scale, roleplaying game backgrounds.

All are delivered in the third person - except for a few diary entries - rather than direct character, speech bubble, dialogue, which makes for an initially strange reading experience for those of us weaned on more traditional American comics and graphic novels.

At less than 150-pages, Recorded Attacks is a quirky little book that isn't substantial enough to win over anyone who isn't already a zombie addict, but is an interesting companion piece for those of us already bitten by Brooks' particular strain of the living dead.