Zone One

Mark Spitz -- not his real name -- is a sweeper. Meaning that it's his job to search room by room through the empty buildings of the walled-off section of Manhattan known as Zone One looking for any stray zombies the military might have missed in their initial attempts to reclaim the city for living humanity. Mostly all that's left are stragglers, that small percentage of the undead who, rather than shambling around biting people, simply freeze in place in some bizarre tableau of the actions they performed in life. When he's not shooting stragglers in the head, Mark Spitz contemplates his past and his PASD -- that's Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, natch -- and carefully avoids envisioning a future.

This is most definitely a literary show more zombie novel, one in which subtle reflections on the human condition take center stage over plot and action, and in which every sentence is carefully crafted and evocative. It's a combination I like, one that might seem unlikely but feels like a natural fit to me. And what it's doing, it does really well.

My only complaint is that... Well, this is a novel that, in one way, feels very grounded in modern American culture, a post-apocalyptic scenario in which tacky chain restaurants serve as nostalgic reminders of the former world, and humanity's attempts at reconstruction come with corporate sponsorship and catchy optimistic theme songs. Which is clever and great, except that those cultural touchstones are weirdly vague. Familiar brands and companies are described at length so that you have no doubt what they are, but always referred to in generic terms, like "the multinational coffee concern." Or else their identities are ambiguous, leaving you wondering just which tacky chain restaurant you should be picturing. Or they don't quite correspond to anything familiar in a specific way, leaving the vague feeling that this universe is not quite our own, in more ways than just being one of those zombie apocalypse scenarios where nobody's ever heard the word "zombie." No doubt this is largely for legal reasons, but it did make things often feel very slightly off to me and sometimes more difficult to connect to than they should have been.

Despite that quibble, it's an impressive book, beautifully written, thought-provoking, and affecting. And having finished it, I find myself reluctant to pick up anything else for a little while, as the ending lingers with me. show less

If you were to say to me, "Hey, Kate, I suggest you read a post-apocalyptic zombie novel," I would have a) laughed b) explained that I wasn't laughing AT you, but at how unlikely it was that I'd ever get to a zombie novel when so many enticing non-gimmicky and rich novels awaited me and then c) tried to think of a zombie joke to ease the awkward tension between us.

So what the heck happened here? I seem to have read this book and then gave it four stars?

That naughty monkey Terry Gross is to blame. http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141422845/... Her interview on Fresh Air convinced me that Colson Whitehead had some amazing writing chops and that the subject was something I should not allow to deter me. (You can listen to the full interview show more via that link above.)

I agree with an earlier reviewer that although this book is not long, it bears slow and careful reading and that the beauty of the sentences is densely packed. The sense of humor feels freshly minted and the main character's ruminations on how all of his photographs and emails and memories are lost in "the cloud" of the (now destroyed) Internet was especially topical.

I love how Colson frames his "hero" as the individual whose skills hadn't been so rewarded in the pre-apocalyptic world but are exactly what is needed for surviving this fictional world's zombie plague.

I was also intrigued that initially Colson had wanted to write the "black Day of the Dead" or "black Zombie Apocalypse" but then ultimately didn't emphasize race in Zone One. But I also wanted to see what kind of zombie novel an African American writer would create.

Beautifully written and can't wait to check out The Intuitionist. show less

I read Colson Whitehead's essay in the New Yorker about growing up in New York City addicted to B-grade horror movies acquired from mom-and-pop video stores. He described how he tried to write "Zone One" and then abandoned the manuscript, so I was very glad to see that this one had finally been published. I also know that this particular bloody zombie-killing adventure is really a labor of love. How often can you say that?

"Zone One" is a really great read, and I get the feeling that Whitehead had a great time writing it. His "The Intuitionist" aggravated me a bit because I found it too abstract and distant, but he seems to be tapping a much deeper, more personal vein of memory here. Kinetic, action-packed, gory and darkly humorous, it's show more filled with memorable, likable characters and plenty of good fight scenes. "Zone One" is a serious novel that you could take to the beach. It's also beautifully written: it's easy flow and impressive efficiency -- the author doesn't seem to waste a word -- suggests that he's at the top of his game here. In a sense, it's less political and more personal than the other Whitehead that I've read. Race -- often the focus of Whitehead's writing -- is mentioned only briefly, and many of Zone One's characters spend a lot of time trying to reconcile their favorite memories of a vanished world with a bizarre, violent present. This translates to a sort of middle class nostalgia. Mark Spitz, the book's main character, is a thoroughly average Long Island dude just trying to make it through the zombie apocalypse, and while trying to make it through the zombie apocalypse, he often feels nostalgic for the middle class comforts of his youth, which makes him, I suspect, a bit like the author. I also don't think it's a coincidence that Mark Spitz's unit is tasked with eliminating non-threatening zombies that, mysteriously, return to the places where they lived and worked to mindlessly perform repetitive actions. In any event, Mark Spitz's memories, and the tight friendship formed by the three members of his three-person unit, make "Zone One" a surprisingly warm and relatable reading experience. Warm and relatable for a novel that features a lot of flesh-eating and exploded craniums, I guess.

When "Zone One" gets political, it does get pretty dark. The ending's not an entirely optimistic one. Whitehead touched on the paranoia he used to feel while growing up in eighties New York, and that's certainly present here, too. The novel is a delicate balance between the hang-together attitude displayed by the characters as they try to clean up a world overtaken by the living dead and the author's suspicion, expressed in his essay, that the zombie apocalypse might be just around the corner and that anyone you know might suddenly want to take a chunk out of you. I'm so glad that Whitehead decided to go back and finish this this one up. Recommended. show less

After a zombie apocalypse, the survivors struggle to pick up the pieces. A new government is formed and groups of sweepers go through Zone One, an area of New York City, to ensure that all zombies are truly eradicated. This book is told from the point of view of one of those sweepers as he does his job and reflects back on how it got to this point.

This book doesn't seem to have the large-scale appeal of Colson Whitehead's other books, but I truly enjoyed it and felt it was a perfect read for the time we're living through now with the world reacting to a global pandemic.

I could see how others might not love this book, especially if they were looking for a more traditional horror story about zombies. Here the z-word is never used; show more instead there are "skels" (the brain-eating, violent variety) and "stragglers" (undead and shuffling about with no purpose). The story is more about the people and how they are attempting to bring back some sense of normalcy in a world that will never be the same again.

Much of the book is told in flashbacks and ruminations as our main character thinks over all the things that have happened since "Last Night," the day that the zombie outbreak happened. This sort of musing and contemplation is not going to appeal to those who want an action-packed, 'let's slay zombies' kind of story (although there are some of those moments as well).

But for me, it was so interesting and engrossing, as Whitehead unpacks so much here about society. Consumerism is a big theme throughout, but there are other deep topics touched upon as well. There were so many passages that resonated deeply with me; I put some of those in the "Quotations" feature here on LibraryThing because they were too good not to share.

The ending is ambiguous and open to interpretation, which I suppose isn't for everyone but I think it worked well here. It seemed fitting with the elusiveness of hope that is seen throughout the book.

The audiobook narrator did a fine enough job for a book that is primarily in one character's head throughout. show less

I wanted to like this one more, but ultimately I appreciated it for what it was trying to do, rather than the story itself. What we have here is a literary fiction approach to the zombie genre. It moves at a glacial pace, with the main character going about his days in a sweeper unit of Zone 1, in which he and 2 others on his crew look for any straggler "skels" that the military might have missed in their initial clear out of New York City. His thoughts jump around to different periods of time, from childhood, to times after the apocalypse, and what he was doing during Last Night, the night when the world died. The character waxes sardonic about life before the fall, and how useless it all seemed, and still seems. He, and most other show more survivors are suffering from a condition called PASD, post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, which makes them behave in unusual ways. I feel like all of the jumping around in time, the reminiscing, are all symptoms of PASD for our MC, something that helps him survive, but also keeps his focus drifting so that he doesn't think too much about one thing. Constant movement is constant survival. In fact, for the MC, nicknamed Mark Spitz (old monikers are part of the old life), he never fully trusts one location for too long. In fact, he is starting to become distrustful of Zone One because he has been there for too long and feels like it can't possibly hold for too much longer, despite all assurances otherwise. As far as the plot goes, much of the novel is just anecdotes, small stories told by Mark Spitz or between other characters. The actual plot is incidental to the eulogy to humanity that the character is giving. But the last 30 or so pages do become more action-packed, seemingly to make up for the previous 280 that weren't. For those looking for a fast-paced zombie thriller, look elsewhere. For those looking for a grief-stricken eulogy for what was, this is the book for you. show less

This post-apocalyptic book takes place in on Manhattan Island (Zone One), where Mark Spitz and his colleges work as "sweepers." Their job is to remove all the straggler-zombies from the area and bag them for disposal. This book isn't plot driven so much as world-building-driven. Whitehead uses beautiful prose to describe the "reconstruction" of America. As spell-binding as his sentences are, however, this flowery language distracts from the few action scenes...making this book not so much about zombies as about compulsive and overwhelming mediocrity. I don't mean that Whitehead's writing is mediocre--not in the slightest!--but that the book is about mediocrity. The mediocrity of Mark Spitz is described in beautifully pregnant prose. In show more fact, Mark had "unrivaled mediocrity" and all the "advantages this adaptation conferred in a mediocre world." The zombies themselves were a metaphor for the mediocre masses of Manhattan. Many of them harmlessly flipped non-existent burgers over ovens that had broken down long ago. They window shopped in front of boarded up displays and vegged in front of dead televisions. Thus, the book had a rather dark view of humanity...that we are descending irrepressibly into mediocrity.

On top of that mediocre metaphor, Whitehead flirts with an allegory for the post-Civil War reconstruction. He compares the "untold Americans" who were not a part of the reconstruction to "slaves who didn't know they'd been emancipated." I pondered the meaning of this slave metaphor for a long time. Did Whitehead mean that these slaves hadn't been told about the reconstruction? That there were untold numbers of them? That nobody would ever tell their story? Maybe he meant all of that? Following through with his mediocre-zombie metaphor, it seems that Whitehead meant that America is filled both with mediocre masses who live like zombies and their slaves...slaves of technology, slaves to the whim of the mediocre masses, slaves to the unpredictability of a fickle universe.

I had a hard time reading this book because of all the flashbacks and literary musings--I don't recommend people listen to the audiobook version due to these unexpected and frequent changes. I probably would have enjoyed it much, much more if I had physically read it. :) I think this is an excellent work for its meaning and its prose, but it's going to get bad reviews from the zombie-fiction-lovers out there, because, in the end, it's not really about zombies. show less

For my tastes, the book didn’t lean in far enough on what seemed like an interesting theme about identity and identity politics. For short stretches, The Zombie Apocalypse sits in the background, representing a mythical hard reset on identity and its accumulation of social biases. In those moments, there is some engaging introspection on what it means to reclaim and rebuild when the institutions and places upon which former identities were built no longer really exist and the most meaningful personal distinctions that effectively matter anymore are between the living and the dead. Those parts of the book really worked for me. The parts where The Zombie Apocalypse took center stage felt unnecessary and distracting, like pop culture show more leftovers from the feast of Zombie Apocalypse that has been laid out for us for the past 15 years or so. show less