Patrick Brown's Reviews > Zone One

Does it ever seem to you like everything sucks? Not just your own life -- with its minor setbacks and Pyrrhic victories -- but the entire existence of mankind. You know, all of humanity? I think that sometimes. When I'm filling up my car with gas, for instance, and I see a guy wearing scarves as shoes. And then later that day, the person in front of me orders a coffee drink with more than two modifiers (half-caff and no foam and part-skim). Or whenever I accidentally listen to sports talk radio for more than ten minutes. I'll sit there in my car, listening to that ad for Dockers and think, "When all of this is over, when the world comes apart and we're back in the streets chucking rocks, I'll throw a freakin' party."

But there are also moments -- tiny triumphs or glimpses of beauty -- that make me think I'll really miss this life when I'm grilling a squirrel in the bombed-out husk of an Albertson's. I'll miss my family, of course, if they don't make it through The Troubles, that should go without saying. But I'll also long for Google Maps and continuously-hopped IPAs and raw denim jeans and all the other accoutrements of modern American life.

Which brings me to Zone One. Zone One is a novel about zombie-like creatures called 'Skels,' a plague of which has destroyed human civilization at some point in the near future. As the plague goes into remission, the survivors begin putting the pieces back together, starting with lower Manhattan, where the military has walled off a segment of the island. Sweeper teams -- civilians with assault rifles -- comb through the city killing any remaining skels and stragglers (half-skel creatures that lurk about the world in a frozen state of unconsciousness). Our hero, Marc Spitz, works with one such sweeper team, and it's through his eyes that we learn about the end of the world and its potential rebirth.

But Zone One is really an elegy for the modern world. Marc Spitz and his comrades reminisce frequently about the good old days, the days before "Last Night," the night when all hell broke loose, literally. Marc Spitz says he misses all the same things that everyone missed -- "the free wifi" and whatnot -- and there's the sense that this is what he misses, the conveniences of life. But its in the moments when he makes a fleeting connection with another person that the book really delivers. In a world where 95% of the people are dead (or worse), finding another person you can love is a rare and precious moment. Of course, the same is true in a world without zombies. And that's sort of the point of Zone One.

Zone One is both achingly, heartbreakingly sad, but also laugh out loud funny (LOL, as they used to say, before the fall). Its sentences will carry you along more than its story, and you can't miss the subtle longing that seeps through every page. It seems to be saying "This place we're living now? This life? It could be so much worse." This is the rare novel that simultaneously critiques the world as we know it today and reaffirms its existence. That it does so while inhabiting the body of a zombie novel is, I think, just another of its many miracles.