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 zombie-hunting character, unpacks the memories around each. Although his wry dismissal of every little unnecessary object becomes excruciating at some points, it's necessary that we see it all in order to take in the magnitude (be it very large or very small) of what can be lost in the collapse of civilization. Whitehead pulls off a neat trick by making the book third person, but then sticking very close to his protagonist's thoughts on the sad vapidity of our pre-undead lives, in order to make sure we don't dismiss Spitz's cynicism as a simple heroic outlier. It comes with the ultimate insistance that whatever we don't set aside to survive will be set aside for us: the end is nigh, say Starbucks' social media campaigns. Colson Whitehead believes the only end of the story is bad: what we don't know is whether he's talking about Mark's, or ours.