Whitehead's plague creates a social class cohered by trauma, which again speaks to our present. Mark Spitz can't forget a woman called Mim, and I couldn't either. In places it's sharply funny - Mark Spitz gets into a spot of bother with the zombies in the Human Resources department of an office he is clearing as part of his job with the recovery effort.

This slow narrative is punctuated by powerful shocks however, as he recalls the old world - our world - through the lense of the post-apocalypse. He provides a mournful, meandering account of how the world has changed. He is a mediocrity by his own admission who has paradoxically flourished in the era of the 'skels', as the zombies are called. The main character is nicknamed Mark Spitz. Whitehead's sentences are up there with the greatest writers the US has ever produced. But it uses these to craft what is almost a prose-poem. It does not skimp on the familiar elements - there's the first day of the outbreak, the lone survivor on the run, the satisfying violence against the (denatured) human form, the post-apocalytic society. I thought if that's a typical zombie novel I might as well not bother! The genre is well and truly catered for.Īfter I'd done with my book I finally read Zone One all the way through, and one thing became clear - it is not a typical zombie novel. I nearly closed my computer and gave up there and then. The exception was Colson Whitehead's Zone One - I just couldn't resist reading the first few pages. When I first set out to write a zombie novel I decided not to read any to avoid accidentally copying them.

Colson whitehead zone one review