Book Review: Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

Zombies are in.

From AMC’s smash hit television series The Walking Dead, to the movie Zombieland (and the upcoming film version of Max Brooks’ World War Z), flesheaters are everywhere. In fact, they’re so much everywhere that I have started worrying that zombies were reaching that too-much-of-a-good-thing spot that vampires reached right around the second Twilight book.

So, it was with some curiosity and a fair bit of skepticism that I read Colson Whitehead’s most recent book, Zone One. The story follows three days in the life of Mark Spitz (no, not that Mark Spitz), a survivor of a zombie apocalypse, who is working to help the government re-establish an outpost of civilization in lower Manhattan.

Spitz is employed as a “sweeper”, part of a team whose job it is to clean out straggler zombies from buildings in the Zone. Over the course of the novel, Spitz reflects on how he came to be there, his relationships with his teammates, the fall of modern civilization, and its prospects for rebirth.

There are two types of zombies in Whitehead’s world: the vast majority are the mindless, ravenous hordes that we all know and love and the other are a rare type of “malfunctioning” undead. These poor creatures spend endless days repeating a single task from the fallen world: standing at a copy machine, pushing a broom around a room, holding a skillet in a long-unused kitchen. They don’t attack people and never even seem to notice them. It is these stragglers that Spitz is most interested in and curious about.

Whitehead is no hack “genre” writer either – his literary novels over the past decade have been critically well received and have even been finalists for prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. And, boy, can the man put a sentence together. (Of the sort that makes me despair as a writer, knowing that I’ll probably never write sentences that good.) Using power metaphors and allusions, Whitehead transforms the day-to-day drudgery of Spitz’s Zone One existence into something beyond a horror story. It is, in a way, horror literature.

In Zone One, Whitehead turns the view of the post-apocalyptic world back onto the trappings of our world and civilization – the technologies we take for granted, our attachment to material goods, and our societal preoccupations – and plays on our own desire to “chuck it all away and start over”. The scenes with the malfunctioning zombies, stuck in the pointless, repetitive lives are particularly well done. And through it, Spitz becomes sort of a 21^st century everyman who sheds the modern world, but doesn’t particularly mourn it.

The book is an engaging societal and human commentary, masterfully written against (and within) a now-familiar zombie apocalypse backdrop that manages something remarkable: a fresh take on a genre that I thought was getting stale.

Four stars out of five.

ANOKS: Zombie-time

Vampires have been the “it” undead for a while now – and why not? They’re smart. They’re really long-lived and mysterious. Needless to say, they’re dangerous – ninja-sneaky and super-strong all in one package. And in recent incarnations they ooze all sorts of sexual attraction as evidenced by so many victims going through the whole “No, no, no – yes, yes, yes!” arc while being exsanguinated.

But let’s move down the undead foodchain a bit. Actually, let’s move all the way to the bottom of it. To zombies. You’ve really lost the undead lottery if you end up as a zombie. Why? Because zombies are like the anti-vampire. They’re stupid. They’re clumsy. They’re slow. And zombies probably test the limit of Rule 34.

But I will say that zombies get an “A” for effort. I mean, the thing about zombies is that they are relentless. You can’t talk a zombie out of what it wants to do. And you’re going to tire and need to sleep, but they don’t. And unlike vampires, they don’t stop shambling when the sun rises, so no break there.

And if you’re not careful, there can end up being a lot of them – which is where zombies end up getting really dangerous. I mean anyone with an axe can take out one zombie, but 10? 100? 1000? Man, you got a problem.

Which brings us to the latest installment for A Nightmare on Kel’s Street: Night of the Living Dead and Zombieland.

Night of the Living Dead is THE seminal zombie movie. Made in the late-60s on a shoestring budget, it tells the story of a group of people that attempt to survive the initial appearance of “ghouls” – the recently dead come back to life, or unlife, such as it is. Being filmed in black-and-white with no real known actors gives it a sense of realism and the movie, which starts off seeming like a pseudo-comedy gets pretty ugly, pretty fast with some really gruesome scenes and some gut-turning “gnaw-gnaw-gnaw” sound effects. Despite all the remakes and sequels, it still works. 8 stars.

Zombieland, which came out a couple of years ago, is on the other end of the zombie-apocalypse – after the zombies have toppled civilization. In this send up, a nerd, a mercenary (wonderfully played by Woody Harrelson) and two sisters are survivors trying to make their way to some sort of safety in a zombie apocalypse. Poking fun and both people and the entire zombie-genre, these guys get it right – and with really one of the best surprise cameos in a long time. A lot of goofy fun. 8 stars.

So, maybe zombies are getting a little bit of due after all this vampire-love. In fact, AMC is producing an adaption of “The Walking Dead” – a series which will take place in a not-nearly-so-funny post zombie-apocalypse America.

Hmmm… now I’m hungry.