Most of the infected have been killed off, always brutally and usually by some kind of para-military operation, and Americans have begun to push out their safe “zones” to try to bring back some part of their past way of life. Zone One takes place mainly in Manhattan after some kind of disease has left America with, basically, two classes of individuals, the infected and the uninfected. I was intrigued to see that he had trained his eye on this genre of fiction and, having heard plenty of positive feedback, decided to make this one of my fall reads. His five previous novels have all won praise and one was shortlisted for the Pulitzer. Whitehead was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and graduated from Harvard. Were we to bring the end upon ourselves, rather than having it inflicted upon us from some outside enemy, would strike many as ironic while others would probably not get the joke.Īdd to this mix the latest novel from Colson Whitehead, Zone One. It is hard not to strike the fancy of many Americans nowadays with visions of the end times. The last two iterations of zom-fic have an added element to them that might be part of their draw the conjunction of apocalyptic visions of America with the monster infestations that bring about said apocalypses. From the monster movies of the 50’s to the Sam Raimi classic of 1981, Evil Dead, to the Woody Harrelson film Zombieland to the recent bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or the latest runaway AMC TV show The Walking Dead there is just something about zombies that seems to resonate in our blood. Zombie fiction has been experiencing something of a, ahem, rebirth in the last few years… if it was ever really dead at all.

Colson whitehead zombie novel