In the afterword to this sixth book, Aleksandar Hemon dedicates a word of thanks to his agent for keeping a straight face ‘when I told her I’d written a book she’d known nothing about’. I doubt she kept it for long, because one of the many ways in which The Making of Zombie Wars differs from Hemon’s other work is that it is dreadfully, wrigglingly, antisocially funny: the sort of book that’s difficult to read in public without undignified honks of laughter. Hemon’s work often crackles with humour, but it’s never been this uproarious — and it would be a stony-hearted reader indeed who made it through his last publication, The Book of My Lives (2013), and specifically its closing essay on the death of his daughter, without being reduced to a snivelling puddle. He is, clearly, a creature of opposites.
The Making of Zombie Wars circles lugubriously around the lives and entanglements of Joshua Levin, an aspiring screenwriter living in Chicago at the time of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
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