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Zone One

3.26 of 5 stars 3.26 · rating details · 6,992 ratings · 1,547 reviews

In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuilding civilization under orders from the provisional government based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettl...more

Hardcover, 259 pages

Published October 18th 2011 by Doubleday (first published October 6th 2011)

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Dec 27, 2011 karen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: death-is-not-the-end, tastes-like-people, october-is-spooky

AHHHHHHHH!!!

jesus christ, but colson whitehead can write. i read the intuitionist way back when everyone was praising it to the moon as the masterpiece of the next great american writer, but that book didn't really do a lot for me, while this one keel-hauled me.

it was strolling along at a solid four stars until the ending, which just reached in-between my ribs with insistent fingers and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. the last 100 pages or so just blew me away. and it's not even a long boo...more
AHHHHHHHH!!!

jesus christ, but colson whitehead can write. i read the intuitionist way back when everyone was praising it to the moon as the masterpiece of the next great american writer, but that book didn't really do a lot for me, while this one keel-hauled me.

it was strolling along at a solid four stars until the ending, which just reached in-between my ribs with insistent fingers and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. the last 100 pages or so just blew me away. and it's not even a long book, 259 pages, but it took me three days to read; partly circumstantial, partly because unpacking his sentences takes a really long time. this man is the master of the dense sentence. and also at creating these descriptive arabesques of imaginative digression: speculations about characters that do not exist in the novel as such, but are representative of a type of person who might still be existing in this post-infestation world and what that type of person might be doing, thinking, even though they are only a subjunctive character in a three-sentence authorial daydream. who bothers to do that? it is madness! but a madness that stands out as a truly original technique of an incredible writer.

this is both not at all a zombie book and the purest zombie book i have ever read. it is so hard to describe it. i am going to have to read it again, because circumstances muddied up the first half of the book for me a little. part of that is that i really feel this book should be read with as few breaks in the reading as possible. there are so many details, many of whose significance do not become apparent until much later - it is best to read with full attention, in as straight a sitting as you can manage.

ceridwen's review is probably the best review i have ever read. not just for this book, but ever. i would love to review her review, but i don't think i am even savvy enough to articulate how perfect that review is, never mind trying to discuss this book. i love this part best: Then there is the New Yorkiness of this book, a resident recounting his mixed irritation and affection for the cityest of American cities, carefully prodding nostalgia that at any moment might stir and bite. And when it does, put it down with a bullet. that is a perfect encapsulation of this book. whitehead takes the danny hoch stance of "gee, new york (brooklyn, for hoch) is really changing" and ramps it up with fury. and yet - it is new york, and always will be, no matter how many trust fund babies move in, no matter how many buildings have their outsides gentrified or mirrored, no matter how many zombies cross over into it from new jersey. whitehead's final panning shot of the zombies is a masterful and familiar descriptive passage, despite being utterly horrifying. this is new york, warts and all.

it's a very emotional book, despite a main character who is more a bundle of instinctual calculations than emotions. even before the events, he is someone who carefully gauges what he can get away with, what he can do to pass through life with the least resistance, rather than someone who is experiencing life as a series of emotional occurrences. a coaster. so, in many ways, the perfect observer, the perfect survivor. and yet - the surroundings are definitely meant to inspire an emotional response, even to non new-yorkers. new york is a microcosm to the world, after all, the corroded melting pot. and this situation, eyeballed by this character - the extraordinary translated by the mediocre - is made all the more haunting for it.

now i understand the whitehead hype.

aside: i was actually in tribeca on tuesday, where the action of this novel takes place, and i could not help superimposing the narrative upon the scenery - the nearness to halloween didn't hurt matters. but yeah, a terrible part of town to try to withstand a zombie apocalypse. and, to ceridwen, i understand your bristling at the midwest barb - there was a little one for queens, too. why i oughtta!

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Dec 28, 2011 Stephen rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, audiobook, dead-heads, post-apocalypse, science-horror, ebooks, literary-fiction

Attractive, well-dressed writing and some buxom, sexy phrase-turning make this novel’s surface shiny and pretty. However, its hollowness, lack of depth and monotone emotionlessness make the interior a soulless, vacuous fail. It’s prose porn with no emotional money shot, and like traditional porn Zone One dispenses with plot, character and any hint of deeper meaning in favor of excessive, gratuitous word humping. The language is technically proficient and has an appealing shape, but inside is sha...more

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Nov 04, 2011 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, apocalypse-now, horror, modern-lit, zombies

When the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers, and undead cannibals trying to eat your brains will definitely suck, but I always figured that the trade-off was that at least there’d be no more paying bills, standing in line at the DMV or having to tolerate corporate buzz words and slogans.

But in Zone One not only are there plenty of zombies, there’s still silly bureaucratic rules and paperwork as well as...more When the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers, and undead cannibals trying to eat your brains will definitely suck, but I always figured that the trade-off was that at least there’d be no more paying bills, standing in line at the DMV or having to tolerate corporate buzz words and slogans.

But in Zone One not only are there plenty of zombies, there’s still silly bureaucratic rules and paperwork as well as a government more concerned with public perception than in actually accomplishing anything. It’s like the worst of everything.

Mark Spitz (a nickname explained late in the book) was completely average and his only real talent seemed to be a knack for coasting through life with a minimum of fuss. Once the zombie apocalypse comes, Mark Spitz’s ability to get by served him well and allowed him to escape the initial zombie outbreak and survive in the aftermath.

Now Mark Spitz is one of the sweepers assigned to clean-up Manhattan. The surviving government in Buffalo sent the Marines through to kill the most vicious zombies, but there’s a remaining element of ‘stragglers’, about 1% of the undead who just return to old homes or jobs and seem vapor locked there as they mindlessly watch blank tv screens or punch buttons on dead copy machines.

Buffalo has rebranded the refugee camps of survivors with names like Happy Acres and has a plan to clear and repopulate New York. As Mark Spitz spends his days popping and dropping stragglers, he reflects on his aimless days before the zombie outbreak on Last Night and his time as a wandering refugee before he was found by Buffalo’s army.

This is the first book I’m aware of that tries to do the zombie genre as Very Serious Literature. (No, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies doesn’t count.) Overall, it succeeds remarkably well. Mark Spitz’s reflections on pre and post zombie life are intriguing and his melancholy drifting through his days cleaning out Manhattan have the feel of a guy eulogizing an entire world. My only complaint is that the memories and current events sometimes get so tangled that it made it a tad confusing at times to figure out where we were in the story of Mark Spitz.

On the zombie front, Whitehead delivers some tense and horrific action in the encounters with the undead. (In fact, Whitehead delivered more zombie fightin’ action and detailed descriptions of the walking dead in 240 pages than Mira Grant has in her two 500+ page horror genre novels. Read this and take notes, Mira.)

I especially liked the idea that the government in Buffalo has started doing asinine things like issuing orders against the sweepers doing more property damage than necessary while clearing buildings and prohibiting looting while also issuing pamphlets about the dangers of zombie post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems kind of insane at first but after thinking about it a while, I came to the conclusion that it was highly likely that the political image consultants and corporate marketing whizzes would probably, like cockroaches, be the ones to survive a zombie apocalypse and promptly start trying to rebuild the world the only way they know how, conning people into doing shit even if it flies in the face of common sense.

Great book that elevates the entire horror genre. It doesn’t take the #1 spot from my favorite zombie novel, World War Z but I think it’s got a lock on the #2 spot for now.
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Apr 01, 2012 Carol rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: zombies, urban-fantasy, male-lead, apocalypse, multi-culti

Oh dear. Is it possible to make flesh-hungering zombies seem dull?

While I never thought so, AMC and Whitehead have both been giving it their all by enveloping them in navel-gazing Philosophy 101 monologues and odd series of pastoral flashbacks in the midst of life-or-death situations. Whitehead, at least, delivers his philosophy with amazing prose, while the writers at The Walking Dead (season two) rely on repetition of words like 'humanity' more times than Hobbes could shake a stick at. We get...more Oh dear. Is it possible to make flesh-hungering zombies seem dull?

While I never thought so, AMC and Whitehead have both been giving it their all by enveloping them in navel-gazing Philosophy 101 monologues and odd series of pastoral flashbacks in the midst of life-or-death situations. Whitehead, at least, delivers his philosophy with amazing prose, while the writers at The Walking Dead (season two) rely on repetition of words like 'humanity' more times than Hobbes could shake a stick at. We get it: apocalypse stories are essentially about hope; how we create meaning in survival and and how we cope with a massive breakdown in society. While I'm optimistic for The Walking Dead, I'll take a pass on Whitehead's version of humanity--this is the Kafka version, where people are roaches--or mannequins--before transforming into zombies. Nihilism at it's most uninspiring.

As I began Zone One, I started falling in love with the language, the clear and exacting prose Whitehead uses to describe everything from technology to buildings. As I read on, it became apparent that while Whitehead can turn an apt phrase, he has no love or passion for his story; this is a chronicle of decay, both before and after the plague apocalypse.

There is little in Zone One for the fans of action and plotting, and only the barest of character development. Instead, we are given ink sketches in broad frames, all the better to hang the dirty laundry of Whitehead's social commentary. The setting is conventional plague apocalypse; 'something' starts transforming people, it spreads before awareness of infection, and society melts like a wet tissue, except for small encampments of people. The plot centers on teams sent out to cleanse New York City of the remaining dead once the Marines have swept through. The narrator is an Everyman, nameless until christened by his teammates, who relives his memories as he scours the city for zombies.

Darkness begins on the very first page when we read: "the camera was so backward that every lurching specimen his father enlisted from the passersby was able to operate it sans hassle, no matter the depth of cow-eyed vacancy in their tourist faces or local wretchedness inverting their spines." Descriptions of people before the plague strangely resemble those of people after, and it's not because of compassion for the zombies. Right there, I knew the level of disdain for the father, the mediocre, the simple, even for humanity.

Every word is selected with care, conveying decay and blight. Photos are "culled" for an album. The buildings of pre-plague New York aggressively "collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another's shadows." When they are redeveloped, "their insides were butchered, reconfigured, rewired according to the next era's new theories of utility... sweatshop killing floor into cordoned cubicle mill." The disdain carries over into people, especially lawyers. "If you'd asked him about his plans... the answer would have come easily: lawyering. He was berefit of attractive propositions, constitutionally unaccustomed for enthusiasm, and generally malleable... Hence, law." Likewise, design firms, receptionists, number-crunching bureaucrats, fast-food friers, soldiers--none are spared from the contemptuous voyeuristic lens.

Living characters are suspiciously similar to zombies. Gary, on Mark's team has "fingernails which were seemingly constructed of grime as if he had clawed out of a coffin," and Kaitlyn, the leader, is a clear "grade grubber before the disaster... maintain(ing) a grade-grubbing continuum." Even people at the camps. "Everyone he saw walked around with a psychological limp... the all-over crumpling, as if the soul were imploding or the mind sucking the extremities into itself."

This is one of those books that destroys Goodreads rating system. Technically brilliant, structurally competent and ultimately both cynically distancing and ironic, it lacks the heart and characters that truly engage me on a deeper level. Two stars for personal enjoyment, problems with world building (which, in fairness, I believe weren't meant to be resolved as it is meant more as a metaphorical tale), four stars for deft use of language and general conception, and one star for it's dim view of human nature.

Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2012/1...
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Jul 27, 2012 mark monday rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: unstable-narratives, horrortime, rain-man-reviews, navel-gazin-reviews

(view spoiler)...more

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Sep 19, 2011 Ceridwen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: zombies, america-and-environs, omg-were-all-going-to-die, reviewed, the-future-is-now, 9-11

Maybe it was just a matter of the timing of my read because the tenth anniversary was last week, but I feel like this book was a 9/11 novel. I don't mean to be reductive - there's certainly other stuff here - but there's this thinly morose elegy for New York going on, cut with something less combative than sarcasm and more emotional than irony. I spent the fortnight leading up to 9/11/11 - a stutter of a date - narrowly avoiding public commentary, while committing a series of glancing asides wit...more Maybe it was just a matter of the timing of my read because the tenth anniversary was last week, but I feel like this book was a 9/11 novel. I don't mean to be reductive - there's certainly other stuff here - but there's this thinly morose elegy for New York going on, cut with something less combative than sarcasm and more emotional than irony. I spent the fortnight leading up to 9/11/11 - a stutter of a date - narrowly avoiding public commentary, while committing a series of glancing asides with friends. Where were you? 9/11 in public has been rendered cinematic, that famous long-shot of the towers burning is maybe too restrained for Michael Bay, but it certainly lacks the ashy situated experience of the day, all phone calls and slowly dawning horror. One thing that kept popping up in my conversations of rememory was the almost whispered question - do you remember the people jumping, falling from the towers? Do you remember the reports of the smack of their bodies hitting the ground? Do you remember the footage? It's gotta be out there somewhere, not that I want to see it again, but it's been collectively wiped from our retinas, an eye rub that seeks to dislodge the sleep-ash of the nightmare. But it's been ten years. We've stuttered into our new normal, the uneasy and easy everyday of a world walking on.

Zone One follows with an intimate third person a character called Mark Spitz. He's not the Olympian Mark Spitz, his name instead a post-armageddon macabre joke about his relentless averageness. Whitehead tosses off a lot of incisive, tending towards over-wrought descriptions of other characters and places, but his lead is so blank, so lacking in affect that you feel the chill of loss despite the semicoloned literary style. The action of the book takes place over three tight days, but the true incidents are lappingly recounting in flashback, the scum of the blood-tide peeled back layer by dried layer. Much of the supporting cast could dissolve into quirk-fests if it weren't for constant reminders of the sources of these quirks, the almost laughingly named disorder PASD - Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. PASD when spoken aloud sounds like "past", a sometimes funny, always awful double entendre.

Mark Spitz - and this name is never familiarized to Mark, nor do we ever learn his given name - begins the book cleaning out "stragglers" from the titular Zone One, which is a section of Manhattan barricaded from the rest of the island by the reforming government of the US and cleared of the more active skels. (This set-up is not dissimilar to the set-up for 28 Weeks Later, though the colonial and family psychodrama aspects are much more understated.) The zombies are Romerian (Romeroian? Both of these are ugly adjectives; I apologize) - shambling, biting, unintelligent and relentless - but for a small percentage of stragglers - the undead frozen in tableau, unmoving, unblinking. Mark Spitz and his sweeper team work through the grids of this zone building by building, opening the closets, shooting the active skels and casually trying to divine the mysteries of the stragglers. Why here, bent over a copy machine? Why in a field flying a downed kite? Are these the actions that defined their lives, or just a burp of a recording set to pause at a random frame?

The social rules of survivors recounting the trauma of Last Night are meticulously cataloged by Mark Spitz. There's the Silhouette, for those to whom no connection was felt; the Anecdote, suitable for large groups and the more long-term of the short-term traveling companions; then there is the Obituary, told only to the intimate, though not without rehearsal. This declension of the narratives of trauma reminded of my fortnight of 9/11 recountings this year. I was getting ready for work when I got a call from my sister in Midtown after the first plane but before the second, and then a gush of extraneous details; a friend tells of the ash beginning to fall on Brooklyn; another relating only the tersest of details. I don't know if I'm allowed to quote from the bound galley I have, so please know that this may not be in the final draft, but, "At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running." The towers were hit, and then they fell, and where we were at the time is both intimate and immaterial.

Then there is the New Yorkiness of this book, a resident recounting his mixed irritation and affection for the cityest of American cities, carefully prodding nostalgia that at any moment might stir and bite. And when it does, put it down with a bullet. There's a lot of that insular provincialism found in any person writing about their hometown - a running gag where Mark Spitz refers to Connecticut, where he spent a bad part of the interregnum, always with a damning adjective: damned Connecticut, hated Connecticut, abhorrent Connecticut; or a one-line dismissal of the Midwest which had me both laughing and bridling. Critically elegiac, the love/hate of the before that did not prepare for the after. Sometimes this doesn't work, and I found myself boring through a description of the family eatery, its essayish tone slipping to droning, too many meanings, too much memory. But I see your point.

There's the stink of the inevitable all over this story, and if you're paying attention at all, you will know how this three days in Zone One is going to end. This is not a spoiler, but a statistic: 100% of people have died, except for the living, who will likely succumb to statistics just like the rest of history eventually. Despite the zombies, this is not a genre exercise, not really. There are no hat-tips to conventions of the zombie narrative, no attempt to science up the zombies or ruminate on causes. Ten years later, it's just a done deal, something to recount while picking through the mess, the carrion body of historical fact. Even then, zombies carry with them certain inexorable truths in their rotten bones into this literary landscape. Reflection is a sad, useless business, self-serving in the abstract and distracting in the specific. But reflection is also compulsive and necessary in our human states: silhouette, anecdote or obituary. What does it matter where I was? It simply matters that I was. We pick up and shamble on.

(An ARC of this book was provided to me free of charge by the publisher, but no conditions were put on my review. Fyi.) (less)

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Nov 21, 2011 Trudi rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: apocalyptic-types, zombies, 2011-reads, dystopia, horror, survive-this, on-my-kobo, hugely-disappointing

Damn, this book is cold. Like, really, really, C-O-L-D. The language is magnificent; there is no doubt Whitehead can write, but he writes with no heat. His writing here is like a perfect, shiny new Cadillac (but with no engine). Without the engine, what’s the point? You can sit and look pretty all the live long day, but you’re not gonna get anywhere worth talking about (or remembering).

Whitehead’s problem here seems to be that he gets so caught up in delivering the goods on literary stylistics...more Damn, this book is cold. Like, really, really, C-O-L-D. The language is magnificent; there is no doubt Whitehead can write, but he writes with no heat. His writing here is like a perfect, shiny new Cadillac (but with no engine). Without the engine, what’s the point? You can sit and look pretty all the live long day, but you’re not gonna get anywhere worth talking about (or remembering).

Whitehead’s problem here seems to be that he gets so caught up in delivering the goods on literary stylistics and gymnastics that the story (what little there is) limps anemically along side by side with underdeveloped, emotionless characters. While there may indeed be a method to his madness, I’m not biting, because for me story trumps EVERYTHING. If you ain’t got a story to tell, what the hell are you doing writing a novel?

Not once did Zone One grab me by the throat and make me sit up and pay attention. I felt like a detached spectator, ambivalent, witnessing unfolding events in a clinical matter like the scientist who examines a bug under the microscope.

Whitehead gets too cerebral -- mining his material for metaphor and symbols, layering his post-apocalyptic landscapes with foreshadowing and poetic images. Beautiful yes, but nevertheless soulless and unsatisfying. Which brings me back to my original point -- cold.

And here I will quote from my review of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. It applies here just as well as it did there:

I hate “big” ideas (insert jazz hands here) that don’t come wrapped in a gripping story that’s going to smack me in the face. Story. Comes. First. Always. You may be brilliant and have awesome insights into the human condition, but unless you can weave a tale that’s going to put me on my ass I don’t want to hear about it. And I’m not helping you along by faking it When Harry Met Sally style pretending you wrote a great novel because I’m keen to wax poetic on how the world is shit and then we die.

But that's just me.

If you want a literary zombie novel that will put you on your ass, read The Reapers Are the Angels. That book is everything this book is not.

"Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before."

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Nov 28, 2011 Joe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, doubleday, 2011

Zone One bats clean-up after Shaun of the Dead in the ironic zombie literature line-up. Where Shaun wanted to show how easy and delightful it is to have fun with this seemingly essential genre, Colson Whitehead's novel endeavors to explore the materialistic aspect of humans losing their humanity. Wandering through an empty city in Zone One, Whitehead forces us to stop and look at every little organic bath product and focus-grouped chain restaurant in confessional detail as Mark Spitz, the main z...more

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Jan 18, 2012 Nosocialize rated it 2 of 5 stars

Below is the review, but I've also made it fight with another book at this site: http://www.adventuresinpoortaste.com/...

A pretty terrible experience. No, not a zombie outbreak, this book.

There are flashes of interesting in this book, but overall you just want to skip ahead. The book utilizes stream of consciousness to express the protagonist’s detachment from reality, which is interesting and a probable way of someone in a zombie apocalypse coping, but it's a horrible way to tell a story. Told...more Below is the review, but I've also made it fight with another book at this site: http://www.adventuresinpoortaste.com/...

A pretty terrible experience. No, not a zombie outbreak, this book.

There are flashes of interesting in this book, but overall you just want to skip ahead. The book utilizes stream of consciousness to express the protagonist’s detachment from reality, which is interesting and a probable way of someone in a zombie apocalypse coping, but it's a horrible way to tell a story. Told in first person, the protagonist may start to give some much needed back story, but his story will wander and eventually the protagonist will actually lose track of the point of his story, and ask his buddies “hey why was I talking?” Great question for the lead character to be asking when the reader doesn’t know why they’re even reading it themselves. This one takes an instant blow to the chin for being extremely frustrating and annoying.

Taking place in Manhattan in the not to distant future, Whitehead does take the time to discusses zombie behavior, which follows in George Romero’s steps in using zombies as social commentary. In Zone One zombies linger in their cubicles waiting for the copier to make the print outs that will never come, stand in iParty starring at guerrilla costumes wishing they could afford what they are wearing, or laze in recline-able chairs endlessly pressing the power button on the remote control. It’s social commentary at it’s finest, but really could be reduced to short story.

A big twist at the end deals with the protagonist's race, and I found this twist utterly pointless. I suppose the author is trying to say, “when all humans are at odds with an enemy that is not human, they forget about race and racism disappears,” but this point isn't very clear.

And that’s ultimately the problem. The entire book isn't very clear. It reads like the ruminations of an old woman trying to figure out what it all means: God, meaning, was that crab cake I ate in 76’ bad? The reader can't get a bead on why we should care about anyone or why we should care about any of it. For a book trying to do something different with zombies and move away from violence and action it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be.

The book feels like it never got beyond the short story phase, but to get it on the rack the author stuffed it with 120 pages of filler. A frustrating experience.(less)

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Feb 26, 2012 Maciek rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012, reviewed, post-apocalyptic

The problem of this book is that it doesn't really know what it wants to be. Is it genre fiction? Literature? Social commentary? Speculative fiction?

It tries to be a bit of everything, but doesn't really succeed. What really brings it down is absolutely glacial pace, and almost complete lack of plot. Even the action scenes are narrated in a way reminding one's grandfather sitting in his old chair and lazily reminiscing about his war experiences and going on all these tangents in a way which only...more The problem of this book is that it doesn't really know what it wants to be. Is it genre fiction? Literature? Social commentary? Speculative fiction?

It tries to be a bit of everything, but doesn't really succeed. What really brings it down is absolutely glacial pace, and almost complete lack of plot. Even the action scenes are narrated in a way reminding one's grandfather sitting in his old chair and lazily reminiscing about his war experiences and going on all these tangents in a way which only retired people can do. An action scence of attack of the undead which should be breathless and page turning drags on and on and on, like its own ghosts, or a zombie (this is a pun). To put it simply, the book is not very compelling. Its mundanity might be intentional, but even well written mundanity is still mundanity, and despite its lenght Zone One might prove hard to finish for some readers.

It reminded me of another speculative novel which I also thought didn't quite work out, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Atwood writes like an angel and her prose style is almost palpably delicious, thought it was hard to me to muster the will to finish that particular efforts of hers. I share the same sentiment with Zone One - good writing doesn't make up for disjointed and confusing narrative, lack of plot and lethargic pacing. I would even go as far to say that Zone One is a case of a talented writer tackling an ambitious subject, but having little, if anything, to say. This work is not as groundbreaking or memorable as Richard Matheson's classic I am Legend, and chances are high that throughout the years it will sink into obscurity, and won't be remembered as the author's finest effort.

Why three stars, then? The author obviously knows and feels strongly about the city of New York. Being born and living there. he can offer what can be named an intimate insight into the metropolis and the community which inhabits it. The concluding passages pick up; the imagery and pacing become stronger, faster, and even the ending of the book is not a real surprise, it's satisfying, though not exactly original. While I didn't found the whole of the book memorable, it's not exactly paperback trash, too; obviously too much effort went into writing and polishing it, but the exact point of it is never made clear, and we're left wondering if the time spent reading about these characters wandering around Manhattan couldn't be spent better.(less)

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Apr 15, 2012 Elaine rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

Ugh. No one more disappointed than me in this book -- I loved Sag Harbor. Loved. A poignant brilliant epic of a very specific time and place that struck home in both its generality and its particularity. Plus, I'm a huge fan of the horror genre -- how many Stephen King and Shirley Jackson books ended up on the front porch b/c I was too scared to have them in the house with me? So Zombie + Colson W. = exciting? No. This book was a slow moving dour clumsy essay about the meretricious banality and...more

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Dec 16, 2011 Andrew Neal rated it 4 of 5 stars

This one has the distinction of being both artsy and fartsy. It's also both intelligent and clever, but it's a slow burn. In the first segment of the book, I felt like I was tripping over far-too-clever statements on society, as well as the whole thing where everybody who writes about zombies has to come up with their own terminology for them, as though folks living in this modern world full of zombie movies, zombie books, zombie comics, and zombie TV wouldn't just call the damned things "zombie...more This one has the distinction of being both artsy and fartsy. It's also both intelligent and clever, but it's a slow burn. In the first segment of the book, I felt like I was tripping over far-too-clever statements on society, as well as the whole thing where everybody who writes about zombies has to come up with their own terminology for them, as though folks living in this modern world full of zombie movies, zombie books, zombie comics, and zombie TV wouldn't just call the damned things "zombies."

The wade through terminology and clumsy social commentary* in the earliest part of the book paid off for me; either he got a little more subtle with it, or I got in line with what he was doing. I'm not sure which it was. The last third of the book was thrilling, both viscerally as well as finally clicking with the back-and-forth in time method of storytelling.

I was even reminded of (view spoiler) though the "punchline" was delivered in a very different fashion.

After thinking about this book for several days after finishing it (that's a good thing, right?), I keep getting hung up on one thing: The main character is described consistently as mediocre, as doing exactly what he has to do to get by in every aspect of his life, but he's also described repeatedly as a B student. Doesn't "B" mean "above average?" Shouldn't he be a C student if he's consistently mediocre? Is the entire readership of a book like this assumed to be made up of overachievers who fought their professors over every B+? Maybe so. I mean, I shouldn't worry about it. I'm old enough to know that once you get to a certain point in your life your grades in school just don't mean anything. Wait, no, forget I said that. Grades are real, just like money.

Sincerely,
Andrew Neal, BFA

*I was reminded of a story a kid wrote in my high school creative writing class in which the world had ended and there was nothing left but a skate ramp where California used to be, an ear of corn where Kansas used to be, and a cigarette butt where North Carolina used to be. It wasn't that bad, but still, it's what I thought of. What I'm talking about here is the whole bit about (view spoiler). I mean, I get it, consumerism. Is it ironic that I'm talking about being hit over the head with a lack of subtlety in a review of a book which is gonna be way too slow and subtle for the type of reader who just wants to read zombie apocalypse survivalist porn? Maybe. This footnote has shambled on far too long; let's put one in its head and move along, shall we?(less)

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Jun 23, 2012 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

even when I didn't enjoy it, I admired it. Colson slums into zombie genre, but still makes a literary work that challenges readers. the emphases are misplaced (genre-wise) giving him room to talk about a host of topics: real estate, commodity culture, late capitalism, personal entanglements, propaganda, attachments to places, and more with wit and occasionally humor. The flashbacks have flashbacks. The tangents have tangents. It has a loosely stream-of-consciousness willingness to dogleg around...more

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Dec 17, 2012 Jason added it

Shelves: read-2012

This book angers people. The literary people are upset because this is a novel that fully delves into the zombie genre. There are waves of attacks, heroic bursts of gunfire, a few witty one-liners here and there and plenty of gore. The zombie novel people are upset because Whitehead is constantly killing the tension--stopping the first zombie encounter to crack on shows like Friends, pausing the forward action in a moment of crisis to go on a four page long exploration of character and etc.

For t...more

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May 08, 2012 Brett Talley rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: zombies-literary-fiction-horror

In an addendum to my original review, I initially gave this book three stars. Then I watched the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead, and it struck me that if a television show can display complex human emotion and interaction while simultaneously incorporating what is expected of the genre, this book should have been able to do the same thing. If you think that is ridiculous, so be it.

In the interest of full disclosure, Zone One is one of the books that beat out my novel, That Which Should N...more

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Sep 23, 2012 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: zombie, 2012, apocalypto

There was something seriously missing from this book... Was it a plot? Well developed characters? Action? Flow?

Well, all of those were weak, but the majorly lacking element here is the element of hope. One underlying, fundamental concept of zombie stories is the fierce characters fighting to save society and rebuild. Instead, Mark Spitz sleeps in trees and vaguely eludes to meeting people and hallucinating strange ash. The book ends with a great, big, boring, utterly hopeless scene. I felt so di...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Mackenzie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Colson Whitehead's use of language is lively, wry, and thoroughly original, and he's really good at describing things. If he wrote a book that simply walked me through a series of rooms and described all the things in them and wrote about the memories they reminded him of, I wouldn't be able to put it down. Such digressions, however, are distracting within what's really supposed to be a tale of zombie-slaying adventure. He tries to contain the story within three days' time, but the bulk of the t...more

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Dec 14, 2011 Babydoll rated it 4 of 5 stars

In a blink of an eye, the world morphed into the land of the dead. The remains of humans once living normal lives before the plague, are now draped in weathered clothing exposing emaciated bodies with decomposing skin; tattered with open sores and half bitten flesh. These are the majority inhabitants of the new world, darkened by its venomous embrace. The survivors are merely strangers to this once known world, living only to survive and see the dawning of a new day. Zone One is an unconventiona...more In a blink of an eye, the world morphed into the land of the dead. The remains of humans once living normal lives before the plague, are now draped in weathered clothing exposing emaciated bodies with decomposing skin; tattered with open sores and half bitten flesh. These are the majority inhabitants of the new world, darkened by its venomous embrace. The survivors are merely strangers to this once known world, living only to survive and see the dawning of a new day. Zone One is an unconventional tale of a formidable plague engrossing the earth, the reconstruction of a nation destroyed by that lethal plague, and the restoration of the remains of a bustling society.

Zone One presents a raw portrayal of post-apocalyptic New York, through the eyes of Mark Spitz, the audaciously brave main character, with an indistinguishable will to live. A native New Yorker from Long Island, Spitz volunteers himself to be a sweeper in the zone one territory of Manhattan. As a sweeper, he is ascribed to a unit and assigned buildings to thoroughly search for the dead, either isolated or trapped within the desolated structures. The Omega Unit consists of Spitz, along with Kaitlyn and Gary, who both escaped the clenching jaws of the Last Night; the day the plague consumed the world. Where Spitz exhibits pessimism toward the task of the destruction of the dead, both Gary and Kaitlyn adopt a more optimistic outlook. Gary, who was once a rebellious mechanic, enjoyed the bandit lifestyle prior to the plague. He also embodied a slouching gait and a sarcastic wit. However, Kaitlyn is presented as the austere leader of the unit, whose stern constancy awards her respectful reverence from her unit members.

In an attempt to annihilate the undead and reestablish a nation, a transient governmental structure is formed, with its headquarters stationed in Buffalo, New York. Lead by a robust lieutenant, Zone One consists of the island south of Canal Street. Throughout several parts of the country, zones are established in an attempt to destroy the dead and rebuild a broken nation. Survivors of the dead are known as the American Phoenix or “pheenies”. Typical to the zombie narratives, the dead inhabit majority of the earth. However, in this story, the dead are comprised into two groups; the skels and the stragglers. The skels, short for skeletons, are the moving dead who senselessly navigate the land to quench their insatiable hunger for humans. The stragglers are the dead who seem frozen in time. They don’t have the mechanical ability to move their body, nor the thirst for human blood and skin. Instead they seem stuck in a time warp, frozen in a seemingly catatonic state, in the exact position they were in when the Last Night occurred.

It’s quite staggering to see the depth of lyrical abilities that author Colson Whitehead exhibits in this book. Throughout the narrative, he incorporates his usual witty humor, while offering poetic like staccatos within the text. The obvious difference is the subject matter. I have never been a fan of the popular zombie movies, series, and books that have emerged in pop culture. Yet, through my familiarity and admiration for Whitehead’s literary talents, I knew that this was a book I could not miss out on. The highly descriptive narrative allows the reader a firsthand experience of post-apocalyptic New York, while the characters remain relatable and memorable. Whitehead’s restraint from revealing the ethnicity of the main character, Mark Spitz, until the concluding chapter of the book is also equally impressive, for it eliminates the reader to expound any preconceived notions upon the character. Whitehead brilliantly exhibits a keen array of knowledge of the dark world of zombies, which makes this novel simply a success. This is indisputably a superb novel that I highly recommend to others.(less)

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Mar 28, 2012 Doug S. rated it 2 of 5 stars

I have chosen to write this review in the form of a bunch of random thoughts...because I feel that this generally reflects Whitehead's writing style in this book.

Flows with dense, plodding language.

Ok. Maybe it doesn't flow exactly...

This interaction between two characters late in the story sums up the entire novel perfectly.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m getting there.”

In this brief bit of dialogue, the reader could easily be the first speaker, the author the second one. And despite the author’s reass...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Ruby Tombstone rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

Shelves: apocalypse-please, bloody-shamblers-of-course, dystopia-utopia-anytopia-will-do, littry-fikshun, creepy-kooky-and-or-spooky, favorites

Holy. Fucking. WOW.
Review to come...

[Cut to the next day....] Okay, I've recovered my senses enough to put together a review now. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is the pinnacle of post-apocalyptic zombie fiction. I didn't think it was going to be - I was more than 60pages into the book before I realised what I was reading was pretty special - but in all the PA fiction I've read, I can't think of a more nuanced, realistic, humorous, cynical, horrific and poignant approach to...more

6 likes · like · see review

Nov 10, 2011 Sam O'Heren rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

4 likes · like · see review

Jun 16, 2012 Tania Malik rated it 3 of 5 stars

An average man (and the author tells us many times how average and undistinguished he is, from his B level grades at school to his humdrum job and boilerplate parents and suburban house), survives the initial wave of a zombie apocalypse and is left to find his way in the landscape of what remains of the world. The story deconstructs the apocalypse through the eyes and experiences of this average protagonist and though pedantic at times, it offers a different take on this genre. (Made me think th...more

1 like · like · see review

Jan 31, 2012 Kate Merriman rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: post-apocalyptic, signed, fave-21st-century-fiction

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 given it four stars?

That naughty monkey Terry Gross is to blam...more

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Oct 23, 2011 Patrick Brown rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: humans

Shelves: best-of-2011

Does it ever seem to you like everything sucks? Not just your own life -- with its minor setbacks and Pyrrhic victories -- but the entire existence of mankind. You know, all of humanity? I think that sometimes. When I'm filling up my car with gas, for instance, and I see a guy wearing scarves as shoes. And then later that day, the person in front of me orders a coffee drink with more than two modifiers (half-caff and no foam and part-skim). Or whenever I accidentally listen to sports talk radio...more Does it ever seem to you like everything sucks? Not just your own life -- with its minor setbacks and Pyrrhic victories -- but the entire existence of mankind. You know, all of humanity? I think that sometimes. When I'm filling up my car with gas, for instance, and I see a guy wearing scarves as shoes. And then later that day, the person in front of me orders a coffee drink with more than two modifiers (half-caff and no foam and part-skim). Or whenever I accidentally listen to sports talk radio for more than ten minutes. I'll sit there in my car, listening to that ad for Dockers and think, "When all of this is over, when the world comes apart and we're back in the streets chucking rocks, I'll throw a freakin' party."

But there are also moments -- tiny triumphs or glimpses of beauty -- that make me think I'll really miss this life when I'm grilling a squirrel in the bombed-out husk of an Albertson's. I'll miss my family, of course, if they don't make it through The Troubles, that should go without saying. But I'll also long for Google Maps and continuously-hopped IPAs and raw denim jeans and all the other accoutrements of modern American life.

Which brings me to Zone One. Zone One is a novel about zombie-like creatures called 'Skels,' a plague of which has destroyed human civilization at some point in the near future. As the plague goes into remission, the survivors begin putting the pieces back together, starting with lower Manhattan, where the military has walled off a segment of the island. Sweeper teams -- civilians with assault rifles -- comb through the city killing any remaining skels and stragglers (half-skel creatures that lurk about the world in a frozen state of unconsciousness). Our hero, Marc Spitz, works with one such sweeper team, and it's through his eyes that we learn about the end of the world and its potential rebirth.

But Zone One is really an elegy for the modern world. Marc Spitz and his comrades reminisce frequently about the good old days, the days before "Last Night," the night when all hell broke loose, literally. Marc Spitz says he misses all the same things that everyone missed -- "the free wifi" and whatnot -- and there's the sense that this is what he misses, the conveniences of life. But its in the moments when he makes a fleeting connection with another person that the book really delivers. In a world where 95% of the people are dead (or worse), finding another person you can love is a rare and precious moment. Of course, the same is true in a world without zombies. And that's sort of the point of Zone One.

Zone One is both achingly, heartbreakingly sad, but also laugh out loud funny (LOL, as they used to say, before the fall). Its sentences will carry you along more than its story, and you can't miss the subtle longing that seeps through every page. It seems to be saying "This place we're living now? This life? It could be so much worse." This is the rare novel that simultaneously critiques the world as we know it today and reaffirms its existence. That it does so while inhabiting the body of a zombie novel is, I think, just another of its many miracles. (less)

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Nov 17, 2011 Lillian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: doorway-language, doorway-setting

Colson's new one is an ironic, dry, witty take on a post apocalyptic New York City infested with the living dead. Taking a lead from Justin Cronin, the word 'zombie' goes unmentioned.

A virus has devastated the planet leaving in its wake, the living and the living dead. New York becomes the seat of reconstruction, Buffalo, the provisional government and Manhattan has been designated for resettlement. Our protagonist is part of the civilian team assigned to sweep out the last of the stragglers; t...more

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Jul 28, 2012 Nick rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, apocalpyse

Whitehead intentionally or not has turned his writing style into a Zombie. There's a few writing tools that Whitehead employs in his clever descriptive narrative, and then he repeats and repeats these methods until you realize the author had been infected while writing this novel. It's a literary cirque du soliel, with a single act repeated over and over, and the audience is bored and ready to bolt for the exit long before the show is done.

1 like · like · see review

Sep 06, 2012 Stephanie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: dystopian-post-apocalyptic, fiction, horror

Another zombie apocalypse but with a literary bent. The format was basically three days in the life of "Mark Spitz". "Mark Spitz" (we never learn his real name) is a sweeper on the Omega team, working through Manhattan, block by block, clearing out straggler zombies and removing bodies for the Disposal unit to pick and burn. The story of the plague is told in flashbacks and we are given glimpses of the current situation of life in camps and a little bit on the state of the planet now that monste...more

5 likes · like · see review

Jan 31, 2012 Jeremy rated it 4 of 5 stars

I had a dream about zombies eating me last night after I started it.

Dare I say a literary zombie book?

2 likes · like · see review

Mar 29, 2013 Siobhan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Not one of his better books. I really love Colson Whitehead and stuck with this read purely out of loyalty to him. Nothing particularly new in the genre here and I found his insistence on writing the lead character as "Mark Spitz" and having to read "Mark Spitz" over and over and over again really jarring, irritating, and ultimately counterproductive to creating any kind of atmosphere in the novel. Whitehead's prose is way way too good for what his plot, or lack thereof, has to offer here, he's...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Justin rated it 4 of 5 stars

The zombie apocalypse genre has enjoyed a surprising array of interpretations, from straight-up action to teen romance. Colson Whitehead's Zone One is the first (that I know of) to give it an intellectual spin.

Whitehead is a true scholar of the craft of fiction, a hyper-literary writer whose intricate prose seems at times geared more towards impressing his fellow scribes than delighting the reader. Self-reflective to an almost unbearable degree, even the most mundane action sequences break down...more The zombie apocalypse genre has enjoyed a surprising array of interpretations, from straight-up action to teen romance. Colson Whitehead's Zone One is the first (that I know of) to give it an intellectual spin.

Whitehead is a true scholar of the craft of fiction, a hyper-literary writer whose intricate prose seems at times geared more towards impressing his fellow scribes than delighting the reader. Self-reflective to an almost unbearable degree, even the most mundane action sequences break down into elongated mazes of contemplation, and at first, Zone One is a bit of a chore. Whitehead was surely ultra-aware in writing the book that his plot of a disease outbreak turning legions of humans into ravenous flesh-eating automatons has been, to put it mildly, done before. The details of his particular zombie plague and its subsequent horde of ruination are merely hinted at -- his focus is on the still-conscious people, and every zombie encounter is another opportunity to descend backwards into the depths of human consciousness and behavior under the most devastating duress imaginable.

It's extremely grim, heady stuff, but like a zombie attack, Whitehead's prose slowly advances towards you, then circles you, and finally enshrouds you as you succumb to its relentless progression. Once you accept that this is a thinking person's zombie novel, and that no grisly action sequence, no suspenseful chase scene, will let you enjoy it without meticulous dissection of its position in the greater context of civilization's meltdown, there is much to savor in Zone One. Whitehead has some wonderful innovations on the genre, like a riff on the typical zombie case he calls "stragglers." Where most people bitten by zombies turn into brain-dead monsters themselves, the stragglers are a different breed of infected, comatose humans frozen forever in a position befitting of some activity that dominated their former, sentient lives. As Whitehead's main characters -- a sort-of clean-up assassin crew roving through a decimated Manhattan, picking off zombies as society struggles to rebuild -- navigate an ocean of walking dead, these islands of mysterious paralysis are almost freakier than the zombies, because they are so utterly strange.

About halfway through, Zone One became one of those books that rivets me, the kind you want to keep reading as you walk from the bus to your job. It's the only zombie genre work I've encountered that has haunted my dreams since finishing it. Something about Whitehead's over-intellectual analysis of a classic pulp-horror genre scenario made it feel eerily real. A cultural critic above all else, he understands acutely the superficial contrivances that guide modern life, from toaster ovens to social media (the main character, Mark Spitz's former job was as a social media coordinator for a Starbucks-like coffee behemoth). I think what was scary about his book was not the zombies themselves, but what they took away from us, and how little remained in its void. (less)

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About Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music.

His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Awa...more

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Quotes from Zone One

“We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.” — 48 people liked it

“Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.” — 10 people liked it

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