Read: World War Z, by Max Brooks.
It’s strange to read this following the (certainly inferior) film, but more so to read it now that zombies aren’t exactly in vogue anymore. Romero’s (underrated) Land of the Dead was released the year before this book, and this was highly-anticipated after Max Brooks wrote The Zombie Survival Guide, and it’s a good book - it really commits to the idea of being an oral history, largely consisting of interviews with a number of subjects who had one role or another in the years-long zombie war.
There’s nothing dry about the approach, but it also refrains from dealing in hysterics - unlike the film, the whole account is intended to be retrospective, so no-one is recounting anything where the (emotional) wounds are still fresh. That’s one of the novel’s chief successes - it’s a fascinating account of something completely fictional, but doesn’t give into genre tropes of philosophizing on the Nature of Man, often talking about the so-called Great Panic as an institutional problem rather than focusing on individual crises. It ultimately feels like reading - appropriately - a history book, rather than a novel, which both hurts and helps; occasionally, you feel like there’s an essential human component missing, but as a wider picture of the teardown and slow rebuild of civilisation, it’s a fascinating book.