Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Nov 20, 2011 Stephen rated it it was ok

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

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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Oct 25, 2011 karen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: zombies-r-bitey, 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 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!

come to my blog! ...more

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Mar 26, 2012 carol. rated it liked it

Shelves: zombies, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, urban-fantasy, multi-culti, male-lead, nyc

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 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 scathing 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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Oct 29, 2011 Will Byrnes rated it really liked it

Shelves: horror, fantasy, nyc, new-york-city, fiction

Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today

There is a lot to sink your teeth into in the latest book from MacArthur Genius grantee Colson Whitehead. The nation has pretty much collapsed, with the implication that things are no better elsewhere in the world. But there is still some hope. A provisional government has been set up in Buffalo, and some organization is returning. The government wants to clear Manhattan of undesirables, in order to repopulate, in order to show that there is a future, ...more

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Nov 04, 2011 Trudi rated it it was ok

Shelves: apocalyptic-types, zombies, on-my-kobo, survive-this, the-big-letdown, 2011, dystopia, not-for-me

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 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."

...more

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Sep 29, 2011 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: horror-modern, world-of-insects, unstablenarratives, mnemonic-devices, unicorn, super-private-journal

FRIDAY

mark monday got up at his usual hour, in his usual bed, and after leisurely winding his way through his various morning routines, made his way to work, to perform his usual functions. it was a friday, a day where most of his colleagues found reasons to be elsewhere - appointments and such - and so this was mark's favorite work day to be in the office. the lack of potential irritation meant more work could be accomplished. on some level, he realized that this was perhaps a rather uncharitab ...more

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Feb 27, 2014 Jeffrey Keeten rated it really liked it

Shelves: post-apocalyptic

”He hooked up with strangers for a while, exchanged a grimy jar of cranberry sauce or a juice box per the new greeting ritual, and swapped information on the big matters of the day, like dead concentrations, and small things like the state of the world. A few months into the collapse, only the fools asked about the government, the army, the designated rescue stations, all the unattainable islands, and the fools were dwindling every day. He hung with them until they decided on divergent destinati ...more

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Oct 31, 2011 Kemper rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2011, apocalypse-now, modern-lit, horror, 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 a 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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Mar 17, 2017 Kelly (and the Book Boar) rated it did not like it

Shelves: nomnomnom, super-meh, read-in-2017, liburrrrrry-book, the-great-white-hype, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

After having my morbidly obese patootey pretty much blown away by The Underground Railroad, I knew Colson Whitehead was an author I wanted to read more of. When attempting (unsuccessfully, natch) to get a library copy of Isaac Marion’s latest, this one popped up on the “sorry we didn’t have the fluffy zombie romance you were hoping for, maybe you would like to read a super smart zombie book instead?????” window.

Zone One is a story man ...more

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May 15, 2017 Felice Laverne rated it liked it

“The dead had paid their mortgages on time…graduated with admirable GPAs, configured monthly contributions to worthy causes, judiciously apportioned their 401(k)s…and superimposed the borders of the good school districts on mental maps of their neighborhood, which were often included on the long list when magazines ranked cities with the Best Quality of Life. In short, they had been honed and trained so thoroughly by that extinguished world that they were doomed in this new one.”

Zone One is full ...more

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Mar 17, 2017 Donna Backshall rated it did not like it

Shelves: least-favorite-narration, military, on-overdrive, aborted-efforts, reviewed-goodreads, fiction, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, reviewed-bookbub, reviewed-amazon, terrible-editing

Unbearable. That's all I can say. I bailed about one-quarter of the way in. I am so done, I don't want to bother reviewing, but I need to dig my head out of the word salad that was this book and warn fellow readers.

Are there commandments for novel writing? If there are, I want to submit these for consideration:

- Lists do not constitute atmosphere.

- Noting a man's actions does not constitute character development.

- Words need to have purpose, not just look fancy on paper.

We all have access to ...more

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Oct 23, 2011 Francine rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: People who love spaghetti zombie apocalypse novels that go absolutely nowhere

Shelves: books-i-don-t-care-for, philosophical, kindle, speculative, modern-lit, postapocalyptic, litfiction, american-lit, zombies

There is a reason I hate stream-of-consciousness novels. I can't follow it. I like my novels to travel down a path - it may veer off every now and then, and that's okay because those little detours may prove to be wonderful, terrifying, heart-stopping, mysterious or whatnot, but they are almost always revelatory. Sometimes immediately, sometimes long after the fact that you need to really remember and say "Oh yeah, I remember when that happened! Huh! That's what that meant." Either way, it doesn There is a reason I hate stream-of-consciousness novels. I can't follow it. I like my novels to travel down a path - it may veer off every now and then, and that's okay because those little detours may prove to be wonderful, terrifying, heart-stopping, mysterious or whatnot, but they are almost always revelatory. Sometimes immediately, sometimes long after the fact that you need to really remember and say "Oh yeah, I remember when that happened! Huh! That's what that meant." Either way, it doesn't matter. Because the detours had meaning, they had purpose, and you can trust that a good (read: conscientious) writer will have a reason for taking you down that path. And in the end, it will be okay. You've traveled from Point A to Point B and took a dozen turns here and there, but you got there, and there was a point to it all. And in the journey, you were entertained, bewildered, thrilled, sickened, fell in love, hated someone passionately. In other words, you were cajoled out of the quotidian confines of your life temporarily, living vicariously through some fictional character's (mis)adventures.

My problem with stream-of-consciousness works comes down to this: I get lost way too easily if I can't see how anything is connected, and when I start getting lost, I get distracted and don't care to pay attention anymore, and the work just becomes tedious because all I can think of is "Where is this going? What just happened? Crud, I have to get the clothes out of the dryer. Wait, don't I have to go to the grocery store? Phooey, I'm out of kale. Is that the phone? I need to send that bill out. Oh, sigh, the dog needs to go out again. For a walk. In the rain. And she wants to roll around in the mud. After all the worms have come out. Great!"

And before you know it, 40 pages have gone by (and yet you have the distinct feeling that nothing has happened, but the character's thought processes have brought me from Point A to Point M to Eastern Jabib and the next thing I know, I'm in the slums of Qatar and I still have no idea what's happening because of all the navel gazing going on). The worst part is, not only do I not know what happened in the last 40 pages, but I don't care. And that bothers me, because when I read, I I want to care.

And while I stick to it and hope that at some point, it will all come together and make some sense (I am not that deluded to think it will all make sense), and there will be some big reveal that will tie everything together, there is a sinking feeling within me knowing that I am too far gone and the last two days have been a loss, and I get caught up thinking of what I will say in my review.

That was how I felt reading Zone One. Exposition galore. Ruminations about everyone and everything, past and present, tediousness and ennui all rolled into one. In the middle of a zombie attack, I want to feel that my hero is in peril (and by extension, that I myself am in mortal danger). I want to know how the next few minutes will play out...within the next few minutes. I do not want to be in the middle of a zombie attack with four very hungry zombies who want to eat me, and think about how people are holed up in Chinese restaurants where no one is allowed to have fun anymore, what my high school GPA was and how average I was back then, questioning the purpose of insurance forms years ago when people weren't zombies yet, what the crazy old coot from my old neighborhood was doing, running down an empty street, talking into a headset when all communications were down. Nope. I want to know if a zombie will pierce through my armor and will get to my wonderful meaty and bloody skin and whether the zombie will get a chance to eat me and turn me into one of them.

But no, I need to slog through pages upon pages of meandering, aimless, spaghetti exposition (beautifully written spaghetti exposition...I'll give Colson Whitehead that much, albeit begrudgingly). And for what? For what? Another 20 pages of blathering on and on about things that are totally unrelated to the attack that was supposed to last five minutes. It was the longest five minutes of my life. More like two hours.

*sigh*

For a great review of this book, see Mark Monday's review on goodreads. It was fantastic! I wish I'd read his review before I bought the book, but I didn't. Oh well. Weekend gone. Much like our intrepid zombie hunter. ...more

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Jul 12, 2011 Patrick Brown rated it it was amazing

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 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. ...more

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Oct 06, 2011 Melki rated it really liked it

Shelves: they-re-coming-to-get-you-barbara, up-at-the-crack-of-doom

A powerful, thought provoking oddball of a book. How to even categorize it?

I suppose it is a thinking man's zombie novel, though it is lacking in the required skin-ripping, intestine-chomping, walking dead action that would hold most zombie aficionados' interest. The living ARE hunted by the dead, but Whitehead does not linger on the messy details.

A team arrives in New York City to clear out areas for possible reclaimation when the crisis has ended. The city looms large in this book, pulsating ...more

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Nov 25, 2011 Brett Talley rated it it was ok

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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Nov 08, 2013 Rick Riordan rated it really liked it

I've got to respect a Harvard-educated literary novelist who decides to defy expectations and write a zombie novel. I think that takes a lot of guts (bad pun, sorry) as well as brains (okay, I'll stop now.)
Colson Whitehead's Zone One follows the exploits of a protagonist known only by his nickname, Mark Spitz. To explain why he's called that would be to spoil some of the fun. In the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, the human survivors are attempting to reclaim the island of Manhattan. Marines I've got to respect a Harvard-educated literary novelist who decides to defy expectations and write a zombie novel. I think that takes a lot of guts (bad pun, sorry) as well as brains (okay, I'll stop now.)
Colson Whitehead's Zone One follows the exploits of a protagonist known only by his nickname, Mark Spitz. To explain why he's called that would be to spoil some of the fun. In the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, the human survivors are attempting to reclaim the island of Manhattan. Marines have cleared most of the undead from the borough and set up walls around the first target grid, Zone One, but Mark Spitz and his fellow sweepers are charged with destroying the stragglers to make the island safe for resettlement.

We follow Spitz over the course of one weekend, with frequent flashbacks into his past -- from Last Night, the beginning of the zombie plague, through his days surviving in the wilderness, and finally to his connection with other survivors, who are slowing being herded into guarded camps with names like Happy Acres. A new American bureaucracy has arisen in Albany and has taken no time at all to implement ridiculous rules: No more raiding for supplies, unless the supplies are endorsed by one of the government's official sponsors. No breaking windows or damaging property while fighting off zombies, as those buildings will need to be reoccupied. The government's propaganda machine is in full swing, provided peppy songs for the rebirth of the American Phoenix, a constant stream of good news about a set of newborn triplets and an Italian model/zombie fighter, and even government-sponsored notepads from a company that makes children's merchandise about a cartoon armadillo and his cute friends, perfect for taking notes on how many zombies you kill each day!
The more time we spend with Spitz, the more we feel his discomfort at the way society is reforming. We begin to suspect that things are not as rosy as the folks in Albany have reported. We begin to ask: Which would we prefer: a return to 'civilization' with corporate sponsors and theme songs, or life in the zombie-infested wasteland?

The novel is not a straight-forward, plot-driven narrative. You should not expect 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead. The story is told over three days, but is mostly achronological, skipping back and forth from past to present, lingering over the stories of different characters and revealing Mark Spitz's life in a series of vignettes. It reads like a cross between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, both writers who would've appreciated the dark humor and poignant absurdities which infuse Zone One.
It's not an easy beach read by any means, but it's well worth your time. I found myself thinking about this book for weeks after I read it, wondering about Mark Spitz and what I would've done in his place. ...more

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Apr 12, 2020 Blaine rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2020, hardcover

He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.

Reading other reviews for Zone One, it seems that in the Venn diagram of “people who like zombie stories” and “people who like literary fiction,” the union is pretty small. But this novel worked for me. I had no issue with the story’s structure: a three-day stretch in which a team of sweepers works to continue clearing zombie “stragglers” ...more

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Oct 28, 2011 David Brooke rated it it was ok

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 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. ...more

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Nov 15, 2011 Brian rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: All Goodreads chums

Second Reading: June 30 - July 4, 2013

We are studied in the old ways, and acolytes of what's to come.

I was a young teen (13? 14?) when I first watched Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead. Watching with my two friends, we vocalized our response to the undead onslaught: advice on which windows needed better fortification, admonitions on how to deal best with the character that's losing his/her shit, and the most expedient way of dispatching a ghoul - all of the responses in no way unique ...more

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Jun 07, 2015 lark benobi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: male-identified-authors, social-distance-reading

The banality of zombie apocalypse, beautifully rendered. Reading this book was something like reading a book about housecleaning, if housecleaning were to have life-and-death consequences.

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Mar 03, 2012 Gerhard rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2012, favorites, horror-thriller-mystery

Don't believe the nags who say Whitehead over-writes or that Zone One is plotless: this is a rip-roaring, blood-curdling horror novel that will make you ache with laughter the one second and your toes curl the next.

Besides, one of the greatest features of the Kindle is the built-in dictionary, which means you don't you have to leave Post-it reminders all over pages to check out word meanings.

Zone One is also written in crystalline, incantatory prose so beautiful you will find yourself reading ch ...more

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Mar 05, 2012 Jason Pettus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: contemporary, subversive, personal-favorite, sci-fi, dark, hipster, smart-nerdy

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

As regular readers know, there's a special quirk to CCLaP's 10-point rating system that maybe a lot of other places don't have; that no matter how good a genre book like science-fiction or crime thriller actually is, in terms of sheer quality, it's not allowed to score in the 9s or above unless it somehow (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

As regular readers know, there's a special quirk to CCLaP's 10-point rating system that maybe a lot of other places don't have; that no matter how good a genre book like science-fiction or crime thriller actually is, in terms of sheer quality, it's not allowed to score in the 9s or above unless it somehow transcends its genre and becomes of interest to a general audience, a rule which I believe makes CCLaP's ratings far more accurate when it comes to any particular random person trying to decide whether or not to pick up any particular random title. So for a genre novel to score a perfect 10 here, as has happened only two or three times in the five years and 700-odd reviews that have been published at CCLaP, means something special indeed -- that it's not only exquisitely done, not only one of the best books ever published in that genre, but is a title that should literally be forced on people who normally hate that genre, the proverbial "one [fill in the blank] book you should read if you only read one [fill in the blank] book a year." And ladies and gentlemen, I have found that next rare genre book to score a perfect 10, ironically by complete accident on the "New Releases" shelf at my neighborhood library; it's called Zone One by Colson Whitehead, and could very well be the very best post-apocalyptic novel since Cormac McCarthy's The Road six years ago.

And indeed, like McCarthy, Whitehead is not a genre veteran but actually an academically celebrated mainstream author, a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient whose most famous novel Sag Harbor (an autobiographical coming-of-age tale about wealthy blacks in 1980s Long Island) is talked about online by its fans in the hushed, revered tones of the religiously faithful. And like McCarthy, this first foray into genre actioners by Whitehead is actually a highly metaphorical tale as well; for by setting it a full ten years after the outbreak of a plague that turned 99 percent of the population into flesh-eating zombies, and by concentrating the story on the efforts to reclaim lower Manhattan as a source of national pride to a deeply shaken population, Whitehead is clearly echoing the real events of 9/11 and the dark chaos of the resulting Bush Era, not from the perspective of those actual years like so much "Bushist" literature in the early 2000s did, but rather from our current Obamian recovery times, a period here in the 2010s when it seems that we are perpetually on the cusp of America devolving into permanent ruin, offset by glimmers of hope and a can-do attitude but by no means with any guarantee yet that we won't be sliding straight into the abyss around every next corner.

And in fact, this is the main issue that makes Whitehead's book so brilliant in the first place, and so profoundly more original and inventive than almost any other zombie story that's ever been written; because by setting the story in a time and place where the majority of the most dangerous "skels" have now all been killed, the novel instead explores the complex ways that the survivors have learned how to cope and even think of the events that transpired a decade previous, and of all the complicated factors that would actually go into rebuilding the country back into a state of normalcy, the novel's first page being where most zombie stories usually end. It's here where Whitehead really shines, offering up literally dozens of little tidbits that will make you think as you're reading, "Oh, that's a smart touch; oh, and that's a smart touch too" -- just for one great example, how the recovery process (being directed from the new national capital in Buffalo, New York) is mostly being funded by corporate interests, with various surviving vice presidents and CEOs giving formal permission as a PR stunt for the growing civilian/military population in the semi-safe "Zone One" of lower Manhattan to "officially loot" this or that specific brand or product from the hundreds of abandoned stores around them, and with a thinly-veiled Disney being the official supplier of the new zombie-proof armor of this post-disaster world, all the helmets now emblazoned with a gun-toting, cigar-chomping Mickey Mouse on the side.

And why does this growing population in Zone One bother following these kinds of regulations over what can and cannot be "officially" looted in the first place? Well, because following rules is one more detail that makes things feel like they're finally getting back to normal -- hell, just the fact that there actually are rules again in the first place -- which is yet another brilliant thing that Whitehead has done here, is pay mere lip service to the usual fantastical Mad-Max scenarios that most other post-apocalyptic novels offer up. For example, through extensive flashbacks that pepper this entire manuscript, Whitehead makes it clear that literally thousands of little fiefdoms, communes, warrior tribes, militia compounds and slave plantations actually did arise in the aftermath of his apocalyptic event; but he also makes it clear that nearly all of them collapsed of their own volition mere months later, and that the vast majority of the population quickly reverted back to normalcy and decency because that's what most human beings are, normal and decent -- that this is how we get even the definitions of terms like these, because most humans are simply hardwired in their DNA to act in a normal and decent way, and that the minority who aren't pretty much all died at each other's hands not even a year after this state of anarchy was established in the first place. And just to make it clear, there's literally a dozen more pages of these kinds of insights I could point out in this review but won't, concerning everything from race and class to why most of us both love and despise effective marketing, just an incredibly intelligent story but one that absolutely does not skip on the usual firefights, rotting flesh, and heart-pounding excitement you expect from genre actioners.

But even with all this, what truly makes Zone One an instant classic is its unforgettable ending, the details of which I won't spoil but let's just say now stands as one of the most emotionally moving catastrof-cks in the entire short history of 21st-century literature. And again, Whitehead uses this not just to offer a thrilling, fanboy-satisfying conclusion but to make a metaphorical statement about our own times, a pretty devastating one at that -- that as bad as 9/11 and the resulting Bush years were, they're a mere drop in the bucket to the looming disasters still to come in this country, as it becomes more and more undeniable that the United States as a hegemony has finally and fully reached its "Fall of the Roman Empire" moment in the larger picture of world history, and that all the "Yes We Can" posters, "Detroit Pride" commercials and Starbucks "Let's Create Jobs" bracelets in the world won't amount to a damn bit of difference when all is said and done. And that's because like every hegemony in history, from the Romans thousands of years ago to the British Empire right before us, America has grown insolvably lazy, stupid and corrupt because of its role as undisputed and unstoppable global champions; and that just like the pagan barbarians that eventually overran the Roman Empire no matter how much money or how many soldiers they threw at the problem, the only destiny possible for a "F-CK YEAH U-S-A!" is a bitter, violent and humiliating total collapse on the world stage, a series of disasters just around the corner that will make 9/11 look like a freaking tea party.

That's a hell of a statement for Whitehead to symbolically make, but may turn out to be the most prophetic one you'll hear all year; and by making such a pronouncement not in the middle of the Bush years when things seemed at their worst, but at an Obamian point of optimism about the future, Whitehead differentiates himself for the better from The Road and all the other dour Bushist novels that came out last decade, daring to look unblinkingly into the gaping maw of Downfall right at a time when it is politically incorrect (at least among academic liberals of color) to do so. It's for all these reasons combined -- the keen insights, the powerful metaphors, the simultaneous embrace of potboiler genre conventions, the poetic style, the unexpected conclusions -- that Zone One today becomes the first book of 2012 to receive a perfect score at CCLaP; it's an unforgettable novel, destined to become a landmark of our well-meaning but deeply flawed Obamian Age, and it comes strongly recommended even if you normally despise zombie stories.

Out of 10: 10 ...more

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Feb 21, 2012 Maciek rated it it was ok

Shelves: reviewed, read-in-2012, 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 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. ...more

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Sep 02, 2017 Obsidian rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017-library-love-challenge, tbr-2017, halloween-bingo-2017

I read this for the "Diverse Voices" square. "Zone One" by Colson Whitehead. Whitehead is an African American author. I read one other book by him "The Underground Railroad" and decided that if that book was fantastic, this would be too. Unfortunately that wasn't true. This book was divided into three parts and the only part that became mildly interesting was the "Saturday" section. "Sunday" was the shortest and for that I'm thankful. Though the writing was top notch, the flow was off and I was I read this for the "Diverse Voices" square. "Zone One" by Colson Whitehead. Whitehead is an African American author. I read one other book by him "The Underground Railroad" and decided that if that book was fantastic, this would be too. Unfortunately that wasn't true. This book was divided into three parts and the only part that became mildly interesting was the "Saturday" section. "Sunday" was the shortest and for that I'm thankful. Though the writing was top notch, the flow was off and I was bored. Maybe if this was told in the first person it would have worked better.

Story begins with a Mark Spitz (not his real name) remembering visiting his Uncle in New York. From there the book lumbers along til you get to the point, the world has devolved due to something that has turned some of us into skels (zombies). Mark and his unit have come back to take over what is called Zone One (island south of Canal Street). The idea is that they sweep buildings to ensure that all of the undead are out down. Mark is part of a three person (don't know why so few) unit that is sweeping. We find out units at play throughout the course of the story. Mark and his unit mates (Gary and Kaitlyn) all have roles to play in this new world.

Beginning with a countdown (Friday) you know something is going to happen by the end of the book. Too bad I could see it coming a mile away. Hello plot contrivance my old friend. What? Yes, I know you have nothing to do with this, but you have to admit this was a mess.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are just hodgepodge tales of things that happened to Mark pre zombie plague and after. It is not told in a linear format so enjoy that. It jumps around a lot to the point that I stopped trying to make sense of the timeline. I just didn't care and wanted to be done.

I also started thinking about The Walking Dead and realizing that show even with it's heaps of issues, is still better than this book. There's actually development of some of the characters over time and even when it feels like the A plot has ground to a halt, there's still something to root for. I didn't care a whit about any of the characters we meet. We don't get to know them at all.

I think Whitehead wanted to show that at our core, humans, are selfish and when push comes to shove we will trample on each other to get out alive. But that's too cynical for me. We read of some settlements that are set up now that the worst of the plague seems to be over. But what's that plot contrivance? Yeah I don't know, that all got ignored for that whatever ending.

Part of the book is taken up by people's "Last Night" tales, AKA the last night before the end of the world as they knew it. That was an interesting idea. Whitehead would have been better off just making that the book. Follow unit members as they go to secure a building, settle up for the night and tell each other their stories. Also tell it in the damn first person. Sigh.

The flow was awful. "Friday" was the worst of the sections. If you can get through that, cheers.

The setting is in America and mostly in New York with some forays here and there with Mark Spitz.

The ending was an eyeroll moment. I actually want to read another book for this square, but will see where I get with my reads. Back to the library this goes. ...more

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Sep 18, 2012 Nicky rated it did not like it

Shelves: post-apocalyptic, zombies, speculative-fiction

After reading this article in the New York Times, I had to try reading this. I mean, I love genre fiction and I have a degree in English Literature, so you'd better hope I've got the intellectual side down since that's about all my degree seems to be good for demonstrating... Surely I'd get the best of both worlds out of this.

And, you know, apparently that degree doesn't say a damn thing, because I just found Zone One boring. I read the first twenty-five pages rather hopefully; something about t ...more

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Sep 08, 2011 Joe rated it it was amazing

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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Aug 08, 2016 Alex rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2016

"Manhattan was the biggest version of everywhere."

"Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another's shadows. Inevitability was mayor, term after term."

This is a New York book: you can tell by how much shit it talks about Connecticut. (Abominable Connecticut; abhorrent Connecticut. Accursed, repulsive, maddening, degenerate Connecticut with its pustulant hordes, Bad News, repugnant, loathsome, mephitic fucking Connectic "Manhattan was the biggest version of everywhere."

"Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another's shadows. Inevitability was mayor, term after term."

This is a New York book: you can tell by how much shit it talks about Connecticut. (Abominable Connecticut; abhorrent Connecticut. Accursed, repulsive, maddening, degenerate Connecticut with its pustulant hordes, Bad News, repugnant, loathsome, mephitic fucking Connecticut...this is the most thorough hatchet job on Connecticut ever written, which is quite an achievement considering what Connecticut is.)

But it's also - well, it's also a book length "Black guys can't swim" joke, which is...funny I guess? I don't know, I watch Survivor so I've heard a lot of "Black guys can't swim" jokes. Colson Whitehead is a black guy, if that affects how you feel about it.

It's also a zombie book, and if you were expecting a specifically black take on zombie books you will sortof be disappointed (btw what exactly did you think that would be?). It's a pretty straight zombie book. You find out about 80% through that the protagonist is black. I'd mark that as a spoiler but I assume you assumed that and it has nothing to do with anything anyway, so really what Whitehead is doing is writing a colorblind zombie book. Is it a good zombie book? It is.

Best Books About Zombies
1. The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman and it's not even close: Kirkman's epic is so definitively the best zombie story ever that you really don't need to ever think about zombies ever again, and btw zombies are not intrinsically very interesting anyway.
2. This, probably, I guess
3. Nothing else is that great? World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is entertaining.
4. Fine, The Road, okay? Cormac McCarthy got sentimental as he aged.
5. I haven't read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies because why would I.

What's fun is when a seriously talented author decides to take on genre, and that's really Whitehead's whole thing: he's a terrific writer and he likes genre books. The Intuitionist is apparently scifi noir or something. His new book The Underground Railroad, which made it onto Oprah's reading list and Obama's, is...some sort of Railroad to Narnia? Which, I mean, wow. That book, the NY Times used words like "important," and certainly I don't know who wouldn't want to read it. This one is just escapist genre fun. It's a good book. I do not know if Colson Whitehead can swim, but he can write. ...more

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Feb 13, 2012 11811 (Eleven) rated it it was ok

This audiobook book experience was like firing up crushed Ambien in a crack pipe. Highly recommended to anyone who has trouble falling asleep.

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Nov 15, 2013 Ron Charles rated it liked it

Shelves: spooky-creatures, war-fiction

Word that Colson Whitehead was working on a zombie story spread through literary circles faster than a flesh-eating super virus. It sounded like another gift from the gods of Halloween, right up there with Justin Cronin’s decision to stop writing lovely, unread novels and give us a bang-up vampire saga .

Of course, we should have known that Whitehead, the 41-year-old MacArthur Foundation “genius,” wouldn’t do the zombie walk in lock step with George Romero, but what’s most surprising about “Zone Word that Colson Whitehead was working on a zombie story spread through literary circles faster than a flesh-eating super virus. It sounded like another gift from the gods of Halloween, right up there with Justin Cronin’s decision to stop writing lovely, unread novels and give us a bang-up vampire saga .

Of course, we should have known that Whitehead, the 41-year-old MacArthur Foundation “genius,” wouldn’t do the zombie walk in lock step with George Romero, but what’s most surprising about “Zone One” is how subtly he reanimates those old body parts for a post-9/11 world. Although the ambling, rotting hordes are still here, this is a night of the living dead lit by melancholy and nostalgia rather than violence and terror. Horror fans hungry for new thrills may find too little meat on these bones — stick with AMC’s “The Walking Dead” for that — but now that zombies have infected everyone from Jane Austen to the above-average folks at Lake Wobegon, perhaps quieter reflection is in order. (Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has posted helpful advice for fighting zombie infection.) Readers who wouldn’t ordinarily creep into a novel festooned with putrid flesh might be lured by this certifiably hip writer who can spin gore into macabre poetry.

The story takes place over a weekend in Manhattan; indeed, “Zone One,” a dark paean to the Big Apple, is an undead version of Whitehead’s elegant essay collection, “The Colossus of New York.” It starts, appropriately, with a young man’s fond memory of going into the city with his family to visit an uncle who had all the hottest tech and all the hottest girls. Staring out a high-rise window, the boy used to watch churning buildings rise and collide, wave upon wave: “In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel into steel.”

But now that vibrant commercial world is a ghost of itself, the future looks like a bloodstain and “hope is a gateway drug.” About a year before the novel opens, a plague ravaged the planet, turning almost everyone into inexorable, flesh-starved monsters whom Whitehead describes evocatively as “the angry dead, the ruthless chaos of existence made flesh.” Our hero is a survivor nicknamed Mark Spitz, who works on a cleanup crew in a portion of the city — Zone One — recently pacified and sealed off by the Marines. As part of the reconstruction initiative, Mark and his buddies — “completely inured to the agenda of catastrophe” — are assigned to move through New York office buildings shooting the heads off “stragglers.” These are nonviolent zombies, more poignant than scary, caught in some pathetic loop of their former lives: waiting for the phone to ring, restocking a shelf, lifting and closing the hood of a photocopier. In rare moments of grandiosity, Mark thinks of himself as “an angel of death ushering these things on their stalled journey from this sphere.” Other times, as when he shoots a “brain-wiped wretch standing at the fry station of a big hamburger chain,” he’s disgusted that anyone, “out of the abundance of a life, would choose fry duty.”

That grim humor slithers through most of this novel, along with touches of Whitehead’s topical satire: Even when their lips are eaten off, New Yorkers are still cursing the traffic. As the “necrotic multitudes” descend on one doomed office, a disciplined administrator looks around his desk for the proper form to record a casualty. The remnants of a national government holed up in Buffalo work on “rebranding survival” along the lines of President George W. Bush’s “go shopping” response to Sept. 11. And the whole industry of corporate-sponsored optimism — profiteering even in the final moments of life on Earth — gets flayed in these wry pages.

The climate of sorrow makes some of this a fairly mirthless parody. After Gary Shteyngart’s exuberant satire of consumer culture in the dystopian future of “Super Sad True Love Story,” Whitehead’s riffs on the superficiality of social media or the ubiquity of Starbucks seem tired. Mark’s soul-weariness infects the tone and pace of the novel, too, which offers more eulogy than suspense. Whitehead borrows bloody chunks from Romero’s gore fest, but he’s stingy with the thrills. There are only a couple of good zombie battle scenes to get the heart pumping. The spine-tingling progression we expect is repeatedly interrupted by the narrator’s aimless chronology and memories of Mark’s previous life. Some of these flashbacks are particularly effective, such as the night Mark walked into his parents’ bedroom. (Hint: Freud’s primal scene is transformed into a zombie primal scream.) But other sections of the novel seem aimless. Whitehead’s previous book, the autobiographical “Sag Harbor,” didn’t have much momentum either, but it sparked with linguistic energy and its chapters worked charmingly as short stories. The pieces of “Zone One,” alas, are not so animated. There are — forgive me — too many dead spots.

A more serious problem may be the blandness of our anti-Olympian hero, Mark, “a mediocre man, [who] led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality.” Given that the novel is overrun by zombies, who are necessarily personality-impaired, it’d be nice to have a hero who wasn’t quite so blank and colorless. That’s an especially odd portrayal given that, in 1968, Romero boldly cast Duane Jones, an African American, in the center of a white mob out to devour him, and many scenes in “Night of the Living Dead” visually emphasized the racial dimension of his ordeal. Mark is also a young black man, but strangely that element of his identity is bleached away in this novel, as though colorblindness and zombie-ism came to America at the same moment.

But my reluctant disappointments were burned away by the last section, “Sunday.” Everything comes to life in this perfectly paced, horrific, 40-page finale shot through with grim comedy and desolate wisdom about the modern age in all its poisonous, contaminating rage. It’s a remarkable episode, drenched in the matinee carnage of classic horror but elevated by the power of Whitehead’s prose to the level of those other ash-covered nightmares imagined by T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cormac McCarthy. Here the all-consuming maw of the city reaches its apotheosis, luring and destroying. In this great melting pot, flesh is actually melting, but still they come, by the thousands, moaning what this island has told every hopeful visitor since the Dutch arrived 400 years ago: “I am going to eat you up.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta... ...more

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Feb 11, 2013 Aubrey rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: person-of-everything, r-2015, antidote-think-twice-read, reviewed, 1-read-on-hand, r-goodreads, 3-star, antidote-think-twice-all

3.5/5

I like horror. Rather, I like what I most recently expanded on in a piece about Coleridge's 'Christabel' written for class: the evolution of narrative when it comes to scaring the living shit out of us. The aforementioned composition is a narrative poem, and within it you can see the crossroads of Le Morte d'Arthur and Carmilla in ways I, personally, am very much intrigued by. Whereas vampires and the seductive guest are meant to stand for the aristocracy (assuming I have my recollected tid 3.5/5

I like horror. Rather, I like what I most recently expanded on in a piece about Coleridge's 'Christabel' written for class: the evolution of narrative when it comes to scaring the living shit out of us. The aforementioned composition is a narrative poem, and within it you can see the crossroads of Le Morte d'Arthur and Carmilla in ways I, personally, am very much intrigued by. Whereas vampires and the seductive guest are meant to stand for the aristocracy (assuming I have my recollected tidbits right), zombies are the hordes, the plague, the everymonster that need not possess any inherent quality to inherit the earth. Classist overtones galore aside (which in the case of zombies most likely result from the appropriation rather than the origin), I will always be interested in how the creations of the future interpret these bumps in the night. Considering the atrocities my government and co. are up to these days, the stranger reality is there for the taking.

While I would like to gainsay this work's abysmal rating, my great liking for the 'The Walking Dead' TV series and concurrent reading of Dhalgren became the one-two punch that knocked this down to an inauspicious 'like'. If you want to appeal to my tastes, you either need the blackest of black humor or be deadly dead serious, and 'The Walking Dead' fulfills the latter far better than this book did with either of the two. As for Dhalgren, it's everything that I wanted this book to be and more despite the complete and utter lack of zombies, so. Bad timing all around.

However. The reason I tacked on that .5 up there at the top is how Whitehead goes beyond the usual of literature tackling modernity and gets right into why this world of ours breeds a terror all its own. For those who haven't read it, the gutting happens far enough along for me to tell you to find it out yourself. For those you have read it, (view spoiler) In short, progress is a funny funny thing.

In other news, this book got me really keen on starting to watch 'The Walking Dead' again, so that's a plus. ...more

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