“Survival Guide” is just that, a survival guide, something you’d get from the C.D.C. about disaster preparedness, chronicling everything from the life-span of a zombie to its ambulatory speed, which, thank heaven, is slow. (Brooks is an ardent believer in slow zombies. He doesn’t even want to try to comprehend how we’d deal with fast ones.) It goes through symptoms, weapons, details of the virus and how it spreads, killing methods, survival packs and, of course, hydration.

Brooks wrote it for his pleasure. It was the kind of book he would like to read himself. He put it in a drawer and moved to New York to write on “Saturday Night Live.” He did some work he was proud of there, like the first sketch he wrote that got on the air, in which Superman visits the Fortress of Solitude and has a conversation with his father, Jor-El. In Brooks’s sketch, what ensues is an awkward talk between a father and a son who just moved out. “Do you need any money?” the father asks.

Still, Brooks didn’t like working on “S.N.L.” “It’s a very collaborative environment. I’m not a collaborative guy.” The feeling was mutual. After two years (2001-3), his contract wasn’t renewed — news he learned just days after he married Michelle Kholos, a journalist and playwright.

By that time, though, he had sold the “The Zombie Survival Guide.” To this day, he assumes his agent marketed it as some kind of parody. “How I think my agent pitched them was like, Mel Brooks’s son, who has just won an Emmy for ‘S.N.L.,’ wrote this unbelievable parody, tongue in cheek, he never breaks character. He’s totally making fun of a zombie plague.”

On the eve of the book’s publication, he decided that the way to publicize the book was to create a lecture around it. It worked. Since then, he has had a steady gig flying around the world and giving his lecture. He won’t confirm how much he makes for these events, but one of Brooks’s representatives suggests it’s in the neighborhood of $10,000. Later, Brooks sold the movie rights to “W.W.Z.” for a reported $1 million to Brad Pitt’s production company. He wasn’t asked to write the screenplay, which is just as well, because he would have been faithful to the book, which is structured as an oral history with no central character. In fact, when the book was reissued for the movie’s release, Brooks insisted that the new cover not have Brad Pitt’s face on it, because Pitt plays a character who doesn’t exist in the book. “I was very clear with Random House that while I would not lead a boycott against the movie, I was just crazy enough to boycott my own book.”

With the books, and the lectures, and the movie deals, he has found a way to have his fears and profit from them too. He no longer challenges his anxieties. Now he leans into them.

If his books are seismographs for his neuroses, it’s no wonder that Brooks wrote the sprawling “W.W.Z.” during a rough patch. The book is an after-report of a zombie apocalypse, a series of testimonials from survivors. The world in “W.W.Z.” is ravaged. Nothing will ever be the same.