I don't want to get into a 'literary fiction' vs.

It is slow, confusing, and lacking action.AND it is funny as hell and breathtakingly beautiful. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.īoth spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One brilliantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.Įverything they say about this book is true. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams working in lower Manhattan. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety - the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street - aka Zone One - but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuilding civilization under orders from the provisional government based in Buffalo.

The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. It's been a long time since I've bailed on a book.In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. I'm now 2/3rds of the way through this book and have reborrowed the ebook. I struggled with the ebook so long that it expired, and then I couldn't check it out again so I downloaded the audiobook, which also ended up expiring. I don't necessarily need a traditional plot, but when every single bit of action or story is told in passive-voiced flashback and the book lacks even a single compelling or memorable character, I have a hard time. But he seriously cannot figure out the voice of his narrator. I know he's considered an amazing literary novelist. And it's so poorly written! I know Whitehead has won the McArthur genius grant. It's not even just boring for a zombie novel, it's boring for a novel. Holy shit, this might be the most boring book I have ever read. I could already tell this wasn't going to be a book with a plot, but hey. I finally borrowed the ebook, and from about ten pages in began having a tough time. I'm a big fan of the zombie genre and spent the last five years writing my own zombie novel. I'd been looking forward to reading this book ever since hearing Whitehead on Fresh Air with Terry Gross back when the book was first published.

Zone one colson whitehead review