Zone One

A Novel

By: Colson Whitehead

Narrated by: Beresford Bennett

In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street - aka Zone One - but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety - the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.

And then things start to go wrong.

Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril­liantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.

©2011 Colson Whitehead (P)2011 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"A satirist so playful that you often don't even feel his scalpel, Whitehead toys with the shards of contemporary culture with an infectious glee. Here he upends the tropes of the zombie story in the canyons of lower Manhattan. Horror has rarely been so unsettling, and never so grimly funny." ( The Daily Beast)

"Highbrow novelist Colson Whitehead plunges into the unstoppable zombie genre in this subtle meditation on loss and love in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, which has become the city that never dies." ( USA Today)

"For-real literary - gory, lyrical, human, precise." ( GQ)

Not the next great american author I was hoping

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

If I knew that I'd be a bestselling author.

What was most disappointing about Colson Whitehead’s story?

The sly, insightful evisceration of american culture was just tired. Seemed as if he was writing with a thesaurus next to his computer.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Struggled with pacing and incorrect emphasis of words endlessly. Hard to follow

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Hey, it had zombies, at least.

Any additional comments?

Sorry, Colson's no Franzen, and Beresford's no Simon Vance.

Couldn't keep track of what was going on

Any additional comments?

I couldn't past the first 15 minutes of the book, and I tried twice. It was too difficult to keep track of what was going on with the excessive descriptions of the most mundane things. I might try it in print form, but listening while driving was too confusing.

Narration Makes It A Chore

I am struggling to get through this narration.

The reader sounds like he's reading a novel he's unfamiliar with rather than conveying a story.

Ineffective stress and pauses as well as more than a handful of botched pronunciations are making this a chore to get through.

I do enjoy the story itself- maybe I'll do the hard copy instead.

Stream of conciousness in the interregnum

I am a fan of the post apocalyptic, zombie, last man on Earth genres. It was that interest and the numerous positive Audible reviews which led me to purchase this book.
On a positive note, the story is set in a time which is not typically featured in stories in this genre, i.e., after the zombie apocalypse has run it's course and a previously collapsed human society has revived enough to be organized to support a zombie clean-up effort and restoration of organized human society with bureaucracies and institutions. This period known as "the interregnum" is a word that the author introduced me to, over and over again.
I listened to roughly 2/3 of the book before I finally gave-up,... why? Well, I really had difficulty staying focused on the story (something which is not common for me) because the stream of consciousness nature of the story. It jumps from the present to the past and back again all in a few minutes of listening while at the same time using literary illusions that constantly took me out of the story and made me suspect that the author was showing-off his vast vocabulary. After hours of listening I didn't feel like I knew the characters and worse... I didn't care to. Perhaps my experience was doomed in the telling? The reader had a way of reading that really grated on me (a lilt at the end of his sentences perhaps?). Listen to a sample before you purchase!
Wait for the "Zone One" movie featuring Brad Pitt, I suspect the movie will be more entertaining than the book.

Kinda boring

I get that the book is some sort of satire on modern society but the story is just so goddamn boring.

Not what I expected...

When I buy a zombie novel, I expect plenty of gratuitous violence and absolutely no redeeming "literary" qualities. This book seemed more like a grad student's commentary on society with zombies thrown in to make it palatable. If you want to read something that your post-modern lit teacher would approve of that just happens to have zombies, this book might work for you. But if you want to read something for pure entertainment value, skip it.

Couldn't even get past the first 2 chapters

Drawn out and not enough of an interest to hold me attention. Might be a good story, I just am not able to get through the first part to tell.

Thinking persons super-gory postapocolyptic zombie

David Rackoff (in Don't Get Too Comfortable) said people are "great sloshing superating bags of wet, prone to rupture, mortal messes just waiting to happen... and who wants to be reminded of that?" Well, Colson Whitehead is reminding us.

What differentiates human beings from other things? From, for instance, the oozing gut-splashing flesh-devouring walking dead? Is it our selfishness, our flashes of empathy, our betrayals, our moments of courage, or maybe our ceaseless craving for the familiar to deaden what we can of ourselves while we’re still alive? This book doesn’t answer any of those questions, but it raises them. If you read only one zombie book this lifetime, I recommend this one. But not while you’re eating.

Mislead by reviews

I was expecting more from this book. After reading the reviews, I thought I would enjoy it more. I found myself being forced to finish. The story was interesting, but the way it was read and the feel of it didn't move me along with the story.

Just my thoughts.

Well written, but no plot. Otherwise boring.

No plot driving the story along. Goes out of its way to explain how ordinary and mundane the protagonist is and that's good, because there is no antagonist or major problem for him to overcome.