Survivors, alone or in small bands, have spent a few desperate years evading the surging, sleepless army of living dead that hasten to eat them. The usual inexplicable plague has struck the world, causing all of society to collapse on 'Last Night'. He's written serious historical and contemporary fiction, but in a surprising move, he has now turned his hand to that most ubiquitous of modern phenomena: zombies. A MacArthur grant recipient, he's been shortlisted for both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. Idea versus performance, though, can be a useful way of overcoming reading prejudices, particularly in a book as boundary-blurring as Zone One by Colson Whitehead.īy nearly any definition, Whitehead is a literary writer of impeccable credentials. And not every literary novel disappears up its own arse, but oh, yes, some definitely do. Not every detective or fantasy novel is brilliantly written, no, but some certainly are.

Lower Manhattan, known as Zone One, is the first section of New York to be prepared for eventual resettlement, and Mark and his team are tasked with killing and bagging any remaining zombies, or “skels,” still lurking in the high-rises, along with the nonviolent zombies known as “stragglers,” who are doomed to repeat an action from life over and over again.At their extremes, both arguments are hogwash, of course. Zone One’s narrator, nicknamed “Mark Spitz,” is one of them once a marketing cog and law-school applicant, he ran for his life after seeing his parents infected, and wound up hiding out in toy stores and in trees before being assigned to “sweeper” duty in New York City. has brought survivors into refugee camps, encouraging them to help rebuilding efforts under the banner of the “American Phoenix” nevertheless, suicides are rampant, and 75 percent of Americans suffer from Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. With the initial zombie infestation, an event known as “Last Night,” having subsided, the northeastern U.S.

He’s a morose guard of the new world order. Even with bloodthirsty zombies lurking around every corner, Whitehead’s chosen mouthpiece for plague-ridden America dwells on the crushing inevitability of his situation. Zone One, the fifth novel from Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Sag Harbor) takes place after the apocalypse, but its plot is formed from puzzle, not pursuit.

Zone one whitehead