The faint residue of humanity still stuck to the sides of the world. He wasn’t like the rest of them, the other sweepers, the soldiers up the island, or those haggard clans in the camps and caves, all the far-flung remnants behind their barricades, wherever people struggled and waited for victory or oblivion. Mark Spitz believed he had successfully banished thoughts of the future.

Nevertheless, optimism isn’t his strong suit:

Being as Mark is a sufferer like many others of PASD (Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder), he needs to stay busy.

It’s ugly work, wiping out the “stragglers” and “skels” (who sometimes keep just enough humanity about them to make their extermination disturbing) but something to do. They move through office buildings, occasionally coming across knots of zombies who were locked into offices months before when the pandemic first hit and their surviving co-workers fled. He works as a “sweeper”, civilian teams one rung down from the actual military, who move into zones that have been swept of the more energetic zombies and clean out the stragglers.Īt the novel’s open, Spitz’s team is working on Zone One, the pocket of Manhattan south of the massive containing wall built along Canal Street. His narrator, Mark Spitz (nicknamed for a particularly daring aquatic escape), is almost as zombified as the victims of the world-spanning pandemic that turned most of humanity into flesh-craving automatons. Though imbued with the jarring frights that bring the undead lunging out at its characters from unseen corners, Zone One digs deeply into the horrors of the slow-motion nightmare, where collapse starts to seem not just a possibility but a certainty. If nothing else, Colson Whitehead’s new novel – a zombie fiction that manages to be both unabashedly immersed in the genre while still tenaciously clinging (for better and for worse) to his usual traits and interests – understands and appreciates the fast-then-slow creep of the zombie menace which threatens the tattered shreds of society. You might escape this attack, but what about the next? Or the next? Pods and nests and gangs and legions of them are waiting around corners and in darkened houses, flooding across the land like a darkling plague.

Even in newer iterations of the myth, films like 28 Days Later where the flesheaters move with feral speed, it’s not the quickness of their attack which terrifies so, it’s the totality. The zombie apocalypse is the slow-motion nightmare.

Zone one book