This spring, word that Colson Whitehead was working on a zombie story spread through literary circles faster than a flesh-eating super virus. It sounded like another gift from the gods of Halloween, right up there with Justin Cronin’s decision to stop writing lovely, unread novels and give us a bang-up vampire saga.
Of course, we should have known that Whitehead, the 41-year-old MacArthur Foundation “genius,” wouldn’t do the zombie walk in lock step with George Romero, but what’s most surprising about “Zone One” is how subtly he reanimates those old body parts for a post-9/11 world. Although the ambling, rotting hordes are still here, this is a night of the living dead lit by melancholy and nostalgia rather than violence and terror. Horror fans hungry for new thrills may find too little meat on these bones — stick with AMC’s “The Walking Dead” for that — but now that zombies have infected everyone from Jane Austen to the above-average folks at Lake Wobegon, perhaps quieter reflection is in order. (Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has posted helpful advice for fighting zombie infection.) Readers who wouldn’t ordinarily creep into a novel festooned with putrid flesh might be lured by this certifiably hip writer who can spin gore into macabre poetry.
(Doubleday) - “Zone One: A Novel” by Colson Whitehead.
The story takes place over a weekend in Manhattan; indeed, “Zone One,” a dark paean to the Big Apple, is an undead version of Whitehead’s elegant essay collection, “The Colossus of New York.” It starts, appropriately, with a young man’s fond memory of going into the city with his family to visit an uncle who had all the hottest tech and all the hottest girls. Staring out a high-rise window, the boy used to watch churning buildings rise and collide, wave upon wave: “In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel into steel.”
But now that vibrant commercial world is a ghost of itself, the future looks like a bloodstain and “hope is a gateway drug.” About a year before the novel opens, a plague ravaged the planet, turning almost everyone into inexorable, flesh-starved monsters whom Whitehead describes evocatively as “the angry dead, the ruthless chaos of existence made flesh.” Our hero is a survivor nicknamed Mark Spitz, who works on a cleanup crew in a portion of the city — Zone One — recently pacified and sealed off by the Marines. As part of the reconstruction initiative, Mark and his buddies — “completely inured to the agenda of catastrophe” — are assigned to move through New York office buildings shooting the heads off “stragglers.” These are nonviolent zombies, more poignant than scary, caught in some pathetic loop of their former lives: waiting for the phone to ring, restocking a shelf, lifting and closing the hood of a photocopier. In rare moments of grandiosity, Mark thinks of himself as “an angel of death ushering these things on their stalled journey from this sphere.” Other times, as when he shoots a “brain-wiped wretch standing at the fry station of a big hamburger chain,” he’s disgusted that anyone, “out of the abundance of a life, would choose fry duty.”
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