Read Me! ZONE ONE by Colson Whitehead – Recommended Reading

As promised last week, I am featuring Colson Whitehead’s newest, Zone One, in bookstores and online today.  Arriving on the heals of season two of The Walking Dead (AMC), Zone One is a Zombie Novel, one I am very excited to read. Yes folks, zombies are everywhere.  The trend is alive and well and not slowing down that I can see, and I’m glad.  Despite the fact that I watch The Walking Dead with one hand over my eyes, I love zombies.  Zone One has been described as “a zombie novel with brains” (Justin Cronin), and I don’t think he’s talking about the gooey kind. The story starts out with a typical post-apocalyptic premise: a plague has struck, and the population is either affected (and has become the living dead) or not.  The narrative takes place over the course of three days, as Mark Spitz (yes, that’s his name!), an unaffected civilian worker, helps reclaim an area in Manhattan known as Zone One.  His story moves back and forth from the present to the beginning days of the plague when he was fighting for his life.

Here are some great reviews:

“The kind of smart, funny, pop culture-filled tale that would make George Romero proud…[Whitehead] succeeds brilliantly with a fresh take on survival, grief, 9/11, AIDS, global warming, nuclear holocaust, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Pol Pot’s Year Zero, Missouri tornadoes, and the many other disasters both natural and not that keep a stranglehold on our fears.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This diabolically smart, covertly sensitive, ruminative, and witty zombie nightmare prods us to think about how we dehumanize others, how society tramples and consumes individuals, how flimsy our notions of law and order are, and how easily deluded and profoundly vulnerable humankind is. A deft, wily, and unnerving blend of pulse-elevating action and sniper-precise satire.”
—Booklist, starred review

“[Whitehead] sinks his teeth into a popular format and emerges with a literary feast, producing his most compulsively readable work to date…Whitehead transforms the zombie novel into an allegory of contemporary Manhattan (and, by extension, America).”
—Kirkus, starred review

As we get closer to Halloween, I have more zombie recommendations to share, so keep reading…