A fairly large section of the book is structured around Mark Spitz’s three versions of his “Last Night story,” describing encounters with different survivors and what might prompt him to tell them a specific variation of the events on the last night he spent before running from the skels. In a world where “the dead came to scrub the Earth of capitalism and the vast bourgeois superstructure, with its doilies, helicopter parenting, and streaming video,” Zone One eloquently investigates the psychological effects of a sudden catastrophic fall in world order that, while it may have felt distantly conceivable in 2011 and only too plausible today, perhaps says more about the priorities of our current societal structure than about any impending apocalypse.Ī zombie novel that subverts all expectations, delivered in Whitehead’s quintessentially lush sentence-level craft and incisive social critique, Zone One considers the act of storytelling itself, such as in its focus on how we narrate ourselves to others in times of crisis. Most of the novel follows his flashbacks and reflections on his Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD) as he moves with his three-person sweeper unit through the Manhattan he used to dream of living in as a child, painting a portrait of a fallen society, the workings of gentrification before and after the plague, and the struggle to resist the onslaught of the zombies-who are not actually called zombies in the book, but are rather split into two categories: the skels, who resemble the ravaging living dead stopping at nothing to devour human flesh, and the stragglers, who are eternally stuck in a mundane action, and who cause Mark Spitz to contemplate the meaning of life and what draws us to certain jobs, places, and people.

An over-300-page book depicting only three days of real-time action, Zone One focuses much less on the traditional zombie novel gore and suspense and much more on the extended introspection of its central character, Mark Spitz. After an unidentified plague sweeps the globe and turns those infected into zombies, civilian sweeper units are tasked with eradicating the remaining zombies in Manhattan, or Zone One, after the military’s larger-scale operation. Although it was published almost a decade ago, Colson Whitehead’s 2011 Zone One feels like a novel born out of our current pandemic.

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