Writer and history buff Max Brooks claims it's not. The son of comedy legend Mel Brooks describes himself as a nerd, and confesses that he takes the security threats posed by zombies very, very seriously.

"A lot of people think I'm cooler than I am," he says during an interview while driving across Los Angeles to deliver a copy of the book to his former ROTC advisers at Claremont College. "They think I'm a political satirist or something. I'm just a big geek who knows how he would survive a zombie attack. And believe me, when they invent a light saber, I'll have one of those."

Brooks, the younger, claims he was inspired by a more straightforward work,The Good War, Studs Terkel's oral history of World War II, but the futurist novel he produced seems nearly unclassifiable. Not nonfiction, not humor, exactly, or even straight sci-fi, but a genre to itself, something like "Horror-Apocalypse."

"It's an insert-your-own-fear book," says Brooks, who will teach Utahns to defend themselves from zombie attacks at a Wednesday Oct. 25 talk at Westminster College. "Remember those 'Choose-your-own adventure' books? This is a 'Choose your own disaster' book."

Published last month, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War debuted on the New York Times best-seller list, and with 100,000 copies circulating, is already in its fourth printing. The novel, which pays homage to George Romero's classic film about the living dead, earned additional buzz thanks to a high-profile bidding war between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio for film rights; Pitt's Plan B production company won the skirmish.

World War Z's popularity is built on the success of Brooks' 2003 The Zombie Survival Guide, with 400,000 copies in print internationally, and which has become something of an underground phenomenon locally, selling "hundreds of copies," at Salt Lake City's Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore, buyer Catherine Weller says.

Even the press materials for Z adopt a mock-serious tone. "While World War Z does remind us of our past mistakes and the vulnerability of the human race, it also serves as a reminder that the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as the 'living dead' is the human factor," according to the Crown Publishing Group release, which labels the work as Brooks' "life work."

His lifetime obsession with zombies has secured the 34-year-old writer's reputation, helping him climb out of the shadow of his famous father. In fact, the younger Brooks is considered "one of the world's foremost zombie preparedness experts," if you believe the biographical notes posted on the Greater Talent Network speakers' bureau Web site.

Of course, there's not a lot of competition in the talent pool of post-zombie Apocalypse talking heads. What makes Brooks' work so successful is that he gets the deadpan, nonironic tone just right, says Weller, praising the writer's skillful invention of the language of war in what reads like transcriptions of nonfiction interviews. "It's just really a good book," the bookseller says, laughing as she adds: "especially if you are interested in zombies." Who knows, exactly, why zombie stories are so wildly popular with horror and comic book fans, but one young reader has been discussing a theory with her friends, which has something do with how technology seems to separate people. "Metaphorically it seems almost like we're asleep," says Sherri Paul, a 25-year-old bookseller at Sam Weller's, "and we're aware of being asleep, and we're trying to wake ourselves up. You can literally walk around and people won't even look at each other. Like zombies, they're talking to themselves on their cell phones."

As for Z, Brooks says the book grew out of years of research, every event based on some factual story. For example, one character in the novel sells a fake antidote for the zombie virus, which is a take-off of a real scandal in South Africa where criminals sold a cure for AIDS.

"Somewhere deep down there's a part of me that's terrified of zombies," Brooks says. "I know my material. In Q & As, I get asked real zombie questions: 'Should I use a flame thrower? Should I use body armor?' I have to be diligent and do my homework and give them a real answer."

Apparently, in a state such as Utah that is culturally obsessed with preparing for natural disasters, Brooks' deadpan delivery strikes just the right note. In January, student organizers at Salt Lake Community College were surprised when more than 800 people turned out to hear the writer speak at the Grand Theatre, the biggest crowd he drew in a five-lecture series across the country.

"We had to start 30 minutes late because we didn't have enough tickets printed," says Jared Kubly, a former SLCC student body officer, who described the crowd as a diverse mix of students, comic book lovers, zombie film fans and families, "people wearing everything from button-up shirts to spiked collars and Mohawks."

Brooks augmented the talk with Power Point slides, and brought visual aids, like a 5-foot machete, to demonstrate how to properly fight zombies. "Don't be Rambo," Kubly remembers the writer telling the crowd. "This is a survival situation. Be conservative with your actions."

"At the Q & A, everybody was jumping up and down, screaming 'Pick me! Pick me!,' waving their cell phones," Kubly says. "It was like a rock show."

The rock star-sized success came as a surprise to Brooks, a graduate of American University's film school, who worked as a field researcher for the BBC in Kenya and Uganda before settling down to try and make his own name in Hollywood, the business he was born into.

"I lived in the Valley, the Siberia of L.A., and wrote screenplay after screenplay, and my agent kept telling me what studios wanted. They sucked, and I was miserable," says Brooks, who supported himself with voice-over work and bit acting parts. "After the Y2K fear, all these survival guides were hitting the shelves. And I thought: 'What If I were attacked by zombies. What would I really do?'"

He tried to set aside all the cliches he knew from zombie movies, and started writing a book just for himself. After the Survival Guide was published, in another kind of lucky fluke, Brooks was hired for a two-year stint on the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, where he earned an Emmy, just like both his parents.

If the young Brooks learned anything from that kind of intense comedic boot camp, it was that he could stand on his own as a writer, rather than drawing upon his father's fame. "People automatically assume if your parents are famous, you must be an idiot," he says, "and there's a stigma that you must have gotten where you are because of connections."

For his next project, he's co-producing "The Watch List," a series for Comedy Central spotlighting comedians of Middle Eastern descent, "kids who were American until Sept. 11 and now they're Arabs," he says. He hopes some of the stand-ups will break out and become comedy royalty, the next Dick Gregory, the next Richard Pryor.

If readers find his books to be both smart and funny, Brooks is grateful, but says it's not intentional. He doesn't consider himself a humorist, but in the words of "Mark Twain or Thoreau or maybe it was Will Rogers, I'm a dork." "The humor just happens," says Brooks, who claims the world's freaks and geeks as his people. "I don't intend to be funny. I sit down to write about zombies. It warms my heart to know that people aren't laughing with me, they're laughing at me."

Contact Ellen Fagg at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib .com.