Mark Spitz tells the tale as a long internal monologue, with various stories about adjusting to a new normal. My brain struggled to absorb the dissonant combination. Whitehead mixes gorgeous prose with biting social commentary in the context of world destruction. The question is should it exist, just like the zombies themselves. Zone One proves that a literary zombie novel is possible. Mark Spitz and his two teammates are assigned a quadrant each week and must clear the buildings of uptown Manhattan. Others stand motionless at the bottom of escalators. Some make copies even though the machine long ago lost power. In the book’s present day, he’s a “sweeper” in Manhattan, looking for “stragglers.” Rather than going on rampages, these skels find a familiar spot and just hang out there. Mark Spitz is a young man capable of fitting into many situations. And along the way he tells us of a man on the run, finding places to hide out, and gaining useful survival skills. But it takes Whitehead time to tease out the story. Mark Spitz is in fact named for the Olympic Swimmer of my 1970s childhood. But apparently no one in the book ever refers to him as any shortened sub-nickname. It’s annoying because both names appear multiple times on most pages. And Whitehead uses the entire name every time he refers to the main character. This man goes only by his nickname, Mark Spitz. And our main character is a grunt in the army against skel-or zombie-incursion. (Yes, I read another pandemic book.) This world has a fledgling new government called American Phoenix, risen from the ashes.

What Whitehead does is show us the mind of one man in his post-pandemic world. Not that I’m a regular reader of the genre. Zone One from Colson Whitehead isn’t your typical zombie novel.

Colson whitehead zombie novel