Kemper's Reviews > Zone One

When the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers and undead cannibals trying to eat your brains will definitely suck, but I always figured that the trade-off was that at least there’d be no more paying bills, standing in line at the DMV or having to tolerate corporate buzz words and slogans.

But in Zone One not only are there plenty of zombies, there’s still silly bureaucratic rules and paperwork as well as a government more concerned with public perception than in actually accomplishing anything. It’s like the worst of everything.

Mark Spitz (a nickname explained late in the book) was completely average and his only real talent seemed to be a knack for coasting through life with a minimum of fuss. Once the zombie apocalypse comes, Mark Spitz’s ability to get by served him well and allowed him to escape the initial zombie outbreak and survive in the aftermath.

Now Mark Spitz is one of the sweepers assigned to clean-up Manhattan. The surviving government in Buffalo sent the Marines through to kill the most vicious zombies, but there’s a remaining element of ‘stragglers’, about 1% of the undead who just return to old homes or jobs and seem vapor locked there as they mindlessly watch blank tv screens or punch buttons on dead copy machines.

Buffalo has rebranded the refugee camps of survivors with names like Happy Acres and has a plan to clear and repopulate New York. As Mark Spitz spends his days popping and dropping stragglers, he reflects on his aimless days before the zombie outbreak on Last Night and his time as a wandering refugee before he was found by Buffalo’s army.

This is the first book I’m aware of that tries to do the zombie genre as Very Serious Literature. (No, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies doesn’t count.) Overall, it succeeds remarkably well. Mark Spitz’s reflections on pre and post zombie life are intriguing and his melancholy drifting through his days cleaning out Manhattan have the feel of a guy eulogizing an entire world. My only complaint is that the memories and current events sometimes get so tangled that it made it a tad confusing at times to figure out where we were in the story of Mark Spitz.

On the zombie front, Whitehead delivers some tense and horrific action in the encounters with the undead. (In fact, Whitehead delivered more zombie fightin’ action and detailed descriptions of the walking dead in 240 pages than Mira Grant has in her two 500+ page horror genre novels. Read this and take notes, Mira.)

I especially liked the idea that the government in Buffalo has started doing asinine things like issuing orders against the sweepers doing more property damage than necessary while clearing buildings and prohibiting looting while also issuing pamphlets about the dangers of zombie post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems kind of insane at first but after thinking about it a while, I came to the conclusion that it was highly likely that the political image consultants and corporate marketing whizzes would probably, like cockroaches, be the ones to survive a zombie apocalypse and promptly start trying to rebuild the world the only way they know how, conning people into doing shit even if it flies in the face of common sense.

Great book that elevates the entire horror genre. It doesn’t take the #1 spot from my favorite zombie novel, World War Z but I think it’s got a lock on the #2 spot for now.