Zone One [Paperback]

Colson Whitehead (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 10, 2012

A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong…

At once a chilling horror story and a literary novel by a contemporary master, Zone One is a dazzling portrait of modern civilization in all its wretched, shambling glory.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Guest Reviewer: Justin Cronin on Zone One by Colson Whitehead

The phrase “the thinking person’s [something]” may be terminally overused, but surely that’s what Colson Whitehead has accomplished in Zone One--a savvy zombie classic, the best addition to the genre since George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

In a nutshell: Zone One is a story of three days in the life of one Mark Spitz and his squad of three “sweepers” moving through the eponymous Zone One of lower Manhattan, a walled-off enclave scheduled for resettlement in the aftermath of a zombie plague. The great masses of the undead, known as “skels” for their skeleton-like appearance, have been violently dispatched by a Marine detachment. It falls to Spitz and his fellows to take care of the handful that remain, as well as a second-tier of the infected known as “stragglers”: zombies who have bypassed the cannibalistic urges of their more lethal fellows in favor of a hollow-eyed, eerily nostalgic repetition of some mundane act. Surfing a vanished web. Switching the channels of a dead remote. Filling helium balloons in a ransacked party supply store. Running a photocopy machine, presumably for all eternity.

These trapped souls, like much in Whitehead’s novel, evoke a pure pathos. But Whitehead’s tale is as much a chronicle of the living as the dead. Survivorship is his true subject, and with its lower-Manhattan setting, Zone One’s suggestive nod to a post-9/11 New York is no accident. Part of the novel’s power flows from the reader’s uncomfortable sense that Whitehead’s apocalypse, for all its strangeness, also feels strangely familiar.

But what truly sets Zone One apart from the literary and filmic zombie hordes is the sheer quality of the writing. Whitehead’s language zings and soars. The zombie genre is an intrinsically playful blend of horror and slapstick, but Whitehead takes this maxim to vertiginous new heights, producing a shockingly full-throttle immediacy in the process. The distance between the real world of the reader and the imagined world of Whitehead’s skel-infested New York, in all its aching pity and graveyard comedy, collapses to nothing. In these pages, the world of the undead is brought vibrantly to life. Friends, you are there.

Readers of Whitehead’s previous novels may be surprised to find him traveling the halls of zombie horror. They shouldn’t. For a long time Whitehead has strutted his stuff as one of our smartest young writers, and Zone One is every inch the book he was born to write, a pop-culture thriller of the first order. It will make you think. It will make you want to bar the door and weapon up. It will make you miss the obliterated, lovely world for the duration of its reading, and for some time after. It’s that kind of book: a zombie novel with brains.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“It's a book you want to read rather than one you should read…while still providing the chilling, fleshy pleasures of zombies who lurch, pursue, hunger. . . . One of the best books of the year.” —Esquire

"Whitehead writes with economy, texture and punch. . . . A cool, thoughtful and, for all its ludic violence, strangely tender novel, a celebration of modernity and a pre-emptive wake for its demise." —The New York Times Book Review

 “Uniquely affecting. . . . A rich mix of wartime satire and darkly funny social commentary. . . . Whether charged with bleak sadness or bone-dry humor, sentences worth savoring pile up faster than the body count.” —The Los Angeles Times

"A zombie story with brains. . . . [Whitehead is a] certifiably hip writer who can spin gore into macabre poetry.” —The Washington Post

"Zone One is not the work of a serious novelist slumming it with some genre-novel cash-in, but rather a lovely piece of writing...Whitehead picks at our nervousness about order's thin grip, suggesting just how flimsy the societal walls are that make possible our hopes and dreams and overly complicated coffee orders." —Entertainment Weekly
 
"Colson Whitehead's Zone One isn't your typical zombie novel; it trades fright-night fodder for empathy and chilling realism…yielding a haunting portrait of a lonely, desolate, and uncertain city." —Elle
 
"The stylistic exuberance on display would be overwhelming if it weren't so well controlled, shifting weightlessly from M*A*S*H-style battle narrative to a melancholic Blade Runner-like vision of Urban devastation. . . . The smallest of details is marked by originality of language." —The New Statesman
 
“Leave it to the supremely thoughtful and snarkily funny Whitehead to do interesting things with a topic that lately has seated itself in the public’s imagination. . . . Not just a juicy experiment in genre fiction but a brilliantly disguised meditation on a ‘flatlined culture’ in need of its own rejuvenating psychic jolt.” —The Seattle Times
 
“If you’re going to break down and read a zombie novel, make it this one.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Stylishly entertaining. . . . [Whitehead’s] sentences are interesting, his plotting brisk, his descriptions lucid, and his asides clever.” —The Plain Dealer
 
“In precise, elegant prose [Whitehead] deliberately layers the ever more disturbing elements of the story, one upon the other, allowing the reader to discover the horror in the same fragmentary manner we imagine frantic survivors might. . . . Resembles Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. . . . An intense meditation on the way we cope with disaster and the stubborn, often inexplicable, persistence of the human will to survive.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
 “A sharp commentary on the rat race of contemporary life. . . . Zone One lifts all the gore and gunfire and oozy bits one might expect from the genre. But this is Whitehead, so there’s also popular culture to critique and parallels to draw between zombies and contemporary society.” —The Houston Chronicle
 
“[Whitehead] takes the genre of horror fiction, mines both its sense of humor and self-seriousness, and emerges with a brilliant allegory of New York living.” —New York Observer
 
"Highbrow novelist Colson Whitehead plunges into the unstoppable zombie genre in this subtle meditation on loss and love in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, which has become the city that never dies." —USA Today

"For-real literary—gory, lyrical, human, precise." —GQ

"A satirist so playful that you often don't even feel his scalpel, Whitehead toys with the shards of contemporary culture with an infectious glee. Here he upends the tropes of the zombie story in the canyons of lower Manhattan. Horror has rarely been so unsettling, and never so grimly funny." —The Daily Beast

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (July 10, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780307455178
• ISBN-13: 978-0307455178
• ASIN: 0307455173
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (304 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #57,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #72 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Satire

More About the Author

Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels Zone One; Sag Harbor; The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award; John Henry Days, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Apex Hides the Hurt, winner of the PEN Oakland Award. He has also written a book of essays about his home town, The Colossus of New York. A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in New York City.

His next book, a non-fiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker, is called The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death. It will be published in 2014.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 101 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Coulda' been a contenda... October 28, 2011

By Robert Johnson

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Did I like this book? Yes, actually. Instead of splatter, gore and terror, the author chose to think out (which seems to trouble some reviewers no end) what it would be like to try to live within a collapsed society, with a collapsed psyche and collapsed dreams. Instead of inventing heroic and invincible characters to slash and crash their way through hopeless situations, Whitehead's characters, each one flawed and vulnerable, bumble and stumble their way to another day of survival, which is how most real human beings are, after all. The idea of this zombie book was not to be like the other ones, but to work out daily life in which all norms have been shattered, and in which the common and regular are - then as now - the pawns of the great and mighty.

That said, Whitehead is this book's worst enemy. He takes every opportunity to show off his inventiveness, preen his considerable literary plumage and display his intimate acquaintance with the thesaurus. In playing with the narrative thread and timeline, sometimes just because he can, he adds unnecessary stress to what is not a terribly sturdy plot in the first place. Perhaps as he matures, he will write to make the story the thing instead of himself. If this book had 35% less exhibitionism and 30% more plot, it could have been a real showpiece. Instead, it is a pleasant, if sometimes tedious diversion written by an obviously talented, but all-too-self-indulgent author.

114 of 134 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars a tedious but amusing read September 10, 2011

By Jordan Michel VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

If like me you were excited to hear that a well-respected, intellectual author has ventured into the apocalypse genre, I should warn you, Zone One is not The Road (Oprah's Book Club). The Road had characters and a relationship that you could connect to and an engaging plot. Zone One has none of that. It has a main character whose most notable feature is his mediocrity, a few moments of mild suspense, and an unbearably tedious pace.

It seems that the reviews for this book are distinctly divided. Fans of the zombie/apocalypse genre have offered some pretty scathing reviews and low ratings. Fans of "literary fiction" are giving it a bit more credit. I'm generally more aligned with the literary fiction readers, but I think the zombie fans have some legitimate criticisms.

The main criticism against this book seems to be the lack of plot, and I can't disagree. A lot of the book is mildly amusing; it's just not very compelling. Even the (rare) engaging passages are frequently interrupted by reflections about the past, which significantly slow the pace. It took me about three time as long as it should have to finish the book, because I literally fell asleep within a few pages nearly every time I picked it up.

Although there's little plot, the book's main character is somewhat interesting. He's survived a long time since the "Last Night." His survival, though, is not due to his courage, strength, or cleverness. He's completely average with the exception of his cockroach-like survival instinct. Although readers are unlikely to fall in love with Mark Spitz, he provides an amusing lens for this story.

77 of 101 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Whitehead's Best Book Since "The Intuitionist" August 27, 2011

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Where to begin? I suppose I should start by saying that while I come from that tribe of geeks that love all things zombie-related (films, comics, videogames, boardgames, etc.), I ran out of enthusiasm for the genre a few years ago. The template for the zombie story is just too confining, there's not that much new or different to be done with it. However, despite this weariness for the genre, I immediately picked this up because it was a Colson Whitehead book. He's one of the few authors whom I will actually rush out to buy (others include Michael Chabon, Nick Hornby, and George Pelecanos, just to name a few -- Jonathan Lethem used to be on the list, but no longer). That said, my experience with his books has been a slow slide of diminishing returns: I loved (and still love) his debut The Intuitionist, his second book (John Henry Days) is flawed but still fully engaging, the third book (Apex Hides the Hurt) felt like a slight trifle, and his most recent book (Sag Harbor) was just too personal for me to connect with. However, this is an excellent book in which Whitehead combines his controlled freestyling prose with the unforgiving, bleak tone of Cormac McCarthy's The Road or No Country for Old Men, in order to document the downfall of his beloved Manhattan, and indeed, the American empire.... Many people (including the publicist who wrote the back cover copy) seem to be mistakenly using the word "satire" to describe the book -- it's not a satire, it's a scathing, raging critique of modern America.

Don't pick this up expecting a literary "take" on the zombie action thriller, a few scenes aside, there isn't much action. The bulk of the book takes place inside the protagonist's head, as he trudges around a mostly-safe part of Manhattan as part of a three-person militia unit "sweeping" the blocks for stray zombies the Marines missed when they secured this part of the island. As they clear Manhattan for the impending resettlement, he mentally documents the pre-"Last Night" world and its ridiculous concerns, ranging from consumer items to real estate to sitcoms, and so on. There are plenty of flashbacks to his year on the run in the wilderness, and we get plenty of stories from other characters about where they were when it all came crashing down. These provide the necessary "what would I do" moments which are integral to the zombie genre (and many other horror genres for that matter), but make no mistake, this book is only headed to one place. There's only three ways a zombie story can end, good, bad, or setup for the sequel, and I'm not spoiling anything by telling you that Whitehead is not interested in building any suspense, because every so often he'll slip in a direct statement that tells you it's not going to end well. The book is told from the perspective of a Sunday, and the "action" mainly unfolds over the previous two days, with lots of flashbacks to earlier times. I suppose this flashback within a flashback chronology might be confusing to some people, but I never had a problem with it.

It's nothing new to use genre forms to tell allegorical tales, and American materialism has been skewered by the zombie-maestro himself, George Romero, in Dawn of the Dead. But the sheer skill at work here makes this well worth reading, whether you're a zombie enthusiast, a fan of Whitehead's, or just a lover of interesting fiction. Read more ›

46 of 60 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A Zombie Masterpiece That Could Have Been August 2, 2011

By Timothy J. Mccarthy VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

By some unexplained, simultaneously occurring global event, random people suffer an infection that turns them into the undead. As they bite and infect others, the infection rapidly spreads, and the living must survive any way that they can. So far, so good: your basic Zombie 101 stuff, with the undead obeying the obligatory Romero rules.

Mark Spitz, the "hero" in "Zone One", spends his days on Omega Team, cleaning zombies out of abandoned buildings in Manhattan so the living can safely re-inhabit the island. It's a fascinating premise, but the writing makes slogging through this book a ponderous chore. Mark opens a door and three zombies attack. Rather than getting the blow-by-blow of their battle, we have to wade through page after page of flashbacks and reminiscing. One zombie reminds Mark of an old teacher, who gets described in pointless detail. Only after skimming through paragraphs of droning verbiage do we find out who another zombie reminds him of. It's like watching one minute of an action movie, then five minutes of commercials, then just one more minute of a different movie before returning to the commercials. With certain genres, like light comedy or romance, you might get away with this. But zombie novels need a more straight-ahead, focused approach or you'll lose your audience.

It's difficult to reach the end of this book. You suffer page after page of randomly chosen anecdotes providing glimpses of characters who appear and then vanish like so many will-o'-the-wisps. As you trudge through the endless rabbit holes it's easy to lose track of whether you're in the main story, a flashback, a reminiscence during a flashback, or just some of the random, meaningless thoughts that cycle endlessly through Spitz's head.... Events and phrases are used as if you should know what they mean, only to finally be explained many pages later. I kept looking back to see if I'd missed what "pheenie" means, only to finally discover, about halfway through the book, it's slang for "Phoenix" (as in, "rising like a Phoenix"). The writing borders on pretentious, with a pseudo-intellectual tone; a failed attempt to raise zombie-lit to the level of classical literature.

The back cover suggests this is a satire, but instead it proves to be unremittingly dreary and humourless. There probably is some sort of poignant social commentary bubbling beneath the surface, but the prose is too tiresome to bother trying to parse it out.

There is the kernel of a brilliant story here, and when the author sticks to the present for more than a paragraph, he can create some riveting, edge-of-your-seat writing. In a tale of the undead, we mourn the stillborn story. Sadly, "Zone One" is just another festering corpse to heap atop the pile of bad zombie books. Read more ›