One year after the end of the world, the remains of humanity are banding back together and the era of reconstruction is about to begin. Rebranded as the American Phoenix (pheenies, for short), earth’s remaining survivors of the plague that brought on the zombie apocalypse are taking advantage of the lull in attacks and stitching together what’s left of society. Lured by the idea that, “[i]f you can bring back New York City, you can bring back the world” (121), the shadow of a government sprouting from Buffalo have commissioned a wall, a barricade against the chaos of the apocalypse. Piece by piece they intend to take back the island: America’s most treasured symbol of hope, and reinvention. Step one? Zone One.
New York City in death was very much like New York city in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example (80).
Ranging from Battery Park to Canal Street, the southern tip of Manhattan has been cleared of active skels (a.k.a. zombies) by a mass military effort. With the Zone cleared, the Marines leave, the army takes its place and the engineers arrive—blueprints and schematics in hand. Among the city’s new population are the Sweepers. Tasked with clearing the last of the dead, the Sweepers’ days are filled the routine removal and disposal of stragglers (i.e. not-moving zombies). The plague’s mistake, this harmless one percent of the
Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it (222).
“Mark Spitz” is a Sweeper with the Omega unit. Buoyed by a prodigious mediocracy—a preternatural ability skate by—Mark Spitz’s is a man of the new era. Like, every survivor, he suffers from his own personal PASD (Post Apocalypse Stress Disorder). A play on the word “past,” this particular disorder is more than just the aftermath of extreme trauma. It is also the psychological effects of an inability to
Then as now, they believed the magic of the island would cure them of their sickness (315).
In many ways, Zone One is a meditation on the nature of the city. Manhattan, a mythic monument to America, croons like a siren. The perfect site for the apocalypse, the city calls to the living as loud as to the dead, and Mark Spitz did always want to live in the city, anyway. Interestingly, it is only in its fall that he comes to truly understand it. His love for the streets, buildings, and memories the city holds now exists in a realm of ambivalence. On the one hand, the island is a symbol of possibility and a space of reinvention—in other words, the emblem of the American Dream—on the other, it is the long-established wasteland of our modernist literary heroes (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘valley of ashes’ in The Great Gatsby, for instance). In the end, Whitehead’s novel lands on the synonymous nature of urbanity and destruction. In Zone One, the city and the plague are one and the same: illusive, indiscriminate, and irrepressible. Both run on human lives. What’s interesting about Whitehead presentation of this notion is not it’s originality—for,
If ever a novelist could prove that genre fiction can be literary fiction, too, then it’s Colson Whitehead. Zone One is more than just a darkly humorous tale of a
Looking for more from Colson Whitehead? See our previous post about his hit novel, The Underground Railroad. It doesn’t have zombies, but it is certainly horrific in its own special way.
In case the zombies didn’t give it away, today’s book pick for October was in honor of Horrorween. Do you have a favorite horror book? What are you planning to read this October? Let me know in the comments below, or if you’re feeling up to it, follow @ofjoythatkills on social media.
Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Anchor Books, 2012.
