Published by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.“They had been young and old, natives and newcomers. In spite of having thought-provoking passages and an interesting depiction of a world overrun by zombies, this book was too much of a downer for me. Like the air in New York City, always bleak in this book, so is the tone. I really felt that Duncan’s use of the werewolf as a metaphor in The Last Werewolf was a much more skillful foray of the literary into the world of “genre fiction,” and in spite of a less than happy ending, it was much less depressing than this book. He challenges you to think about how long it would take you to crack, or if you could live on the drug of hope, in spite of everything that tells you hope is chimeric.Įvaluation: Whitehead’s writing is lovely in parts, but nothing much happens, which was my criticism of his previous book Sag Harbor (which I didn’t even finish). He asks you to consider what you would miss, and how you would adjust to the constant fear and loss and loneliness. He wants to see what people would miss in a world in which the only thing left is survival strategies. But Whitehead is more interested in the living than the dead: he wants to look at those who are uninfected, and see how they cope, and what kind of people the plague exposes them to be. Whitehead doesn’t focus on the zombies much at all, except to comment, in various ways, how much the zombies resemble the mindless, sometimes blood-sucking masses of people before they were so overtly flesh-eating.

The goal, according to the provisional government in Buffalo, is to show the world that New York could once again be a great city: American Phoenix Rising, as the slogan said: if America can bring back New York City from the dead, it can do anything. “Mark Spitz” is the nickname of the protagonist, a civilian zombie “sweeper” who works for the military at Fort Wonton in Chinatown, helping to clear out “skels” (short for skeletons, which is what they call the walking dead) in an increasingly widened area. Zone One is a walled-off portion of New York City that has been swept free of post-apocalyptic plague-infected flesh-eaters, and which serves as a base for the eventual restoration of Manhattan.

However, when Glen Duncan, author of The Last Werewolf, wrote in “The New York Times Book Review” that this book was worth reading, I gave in to the pressure and let the zombies over the wall. Zombies have massed behind the last remaining barrier I erected of “subjects about which I do not want to read.” The other barriers have toppled over recent years, largely because of the influence of bloggers, but I have, for the most part, held out against zombies.

Zone one colson whitehead review