Scott Rhee's Reviews > Zone One

“We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.” ---Colson Whitehead (p. 214)

Zombies have become, in this 21st-century post-modern zeitgeist, a template for our collective fears of cultural complacency, apathy, and indifference. These shuffling, wayward hordes of lifeless creatures devoted solely to consumption are, essentially, our own worst selves. Zombies are us.

This perhaps explains the popularity of the genre. Vampires are cool, but they’ve always been a bit snooty, high-falutin’. You have to really work at being a vampire, and, if you do succeed in attracting a vampire’s attention, there’s no telling if he/she is going to turn you or merely exsanguinate you. Vampires are like their own strict country club, with membership qualifications that are always elusive. That’s why zombies are more popular: anybody---everybody---can be a zombie.

It’s this egalitarian nature of zombiehood that Colson Whitehead both celebrates and laments in his brilliant 2011 novel “Zone One”, a post-apocalyptic literary novel that both pays homage to the genre while defying it.

The protagonist of “Zone One” is a young New Yorker named Mark Spitz (not his real name) who survived the initial onslaught of the zombie apocalypse. After the military rolled in and created safe zones throughout the country, some semblance of normality has returned. Survivors have jobs, some businesses are up and running, TV and radio are operational again, a hierarchy has been established in which some people seem to be in control of the situation.

Mark, however, has his doubts. For him, pessimism is a survival mechanism. He sees it happen all the time: someone gets too optimistic, he lets his guard down, and that’s when the zombie lurking in the alleyway leaps out and rips his throat out. Better to be always thinking the worst and prepared for that surprise attack.

Mark is one of a team of civilian clean-up crews whose job is to go into buildings, after an area has been cleared by the Marines, to find “stragglers”. These are relatively harmless zombies who have gotten stuck in a former memory of a forgotten life: zombie janitors who push mops over the same stretch of floor for eternity, zombie office workers who sit in a cubicle waiting for paperwork that will never reach their desk; zombie secretaries waiting for phone calls that will never come. Floor by floor, Mark and his crew clean out buildings that will probably never be renovated.

Cracks start appearing in the new post-zombie world: reports of other human outposts going dark, i.e. communications are mysteriously down; a noticeable increase in zombie hordes on the outskirts of the safe zones; civilian crews noticing more hostile behavior from the supposedly docile stragglers.

Then, of course, shit gets real. As it always does in zombie apocalypse stories. And as it should.

Among Whitehead’s rather lengthy sections of beautiful prose and scathing satirical social commentary (some may say these sections drag, but whatevs) is a great balls-to-the-wall zombie apocalypse novel, one that may appeal to both the John Updike/David Foster Wallace literati as well as the fans of grindhouse movies by George Romero and Lucio Fulci. Or not. Those two types rarely cross over, so Whitehead is writing to a pretty small niche audience.

If you happen to fall into that cross-over audience, however, “Zone One” may be your cup of blood and guts. I mean “tea”.