I’m not in the camp that thinks the zombie genre is oversaturated, at least when it’s done right (but then I wrote a pretty great action-horror spec script involving the rotters, so I suppose I’m biased). And although most of the recent movies featuring the shambling undead deserved to be returned to the grave, the cinematic corpses will inevitably rise to consume a bit of raw human flesh.

Paramount is getting the flesh-eating apocalypse in gear with assistance from Brad Pitt and his Plan B production company, who grabbed the rights (after a bidding war with Warner Bros. and Leonardo DiCaprio) to the upcoming book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. The novel comes from Max Brooks (son of Mel) and seems to be just what that unambiguous title implies: “a sober telling of the aftermath of a war fought against a legion of humans who were inflicted with a virus, died and were reanimated into flesh-eating zombies.” So we might finally see a full-blown chaotic conflict against deadly meat! Without having to actually live it, anyway.

Brooks has previous knowledge and devotion to the mobile deceased – he wrote The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (buy it HERE!), an exhaustive reference manual on what to do in case of an infestation, from weapon and combat techniques to how to live in a world overrun by undead, plus a nifty summary on the myths and realities surround the living dead and a listing of zombie sightings throughout history.