![]() ![]() ![]() Most of the novel follows his flashbacks and reflections on his Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD) as he moves with his three-person sweeper unit through the Manhattan he used to dream of living in as a child, painting a portrait of a fallen society, the workings of gentrification before and after the plague, and the struggle to resist the onslaught of the zombies-who are not actually called zombies in the book, but are rather split into two categories: the skels, who resemble the ravaging living dead stopping at nothing to devour human flesh, and the stragglers, who are eternally stuck in a mundane action, and who cause Mark Spitz to contemplate the meaning of life and what draws us to certain jobs, places, and people. ![]() An over-300-page book depicting only three days of real-time action, Zone One focuses much less on the traditional zombie novel gore and suspense and much more on the extended introspection of its central character, Mark Spitz. After an unidentified plague sweeps the globe and turns those infected into zombies, civilian sweeper units are tasked with eradicating the remaining zombies in Manhattan, or Zone One, after the military’s larger-scale operation. Although it was published almost a decade ago, Colson Whitehead’s 2011 Zone One feels like a novel born out of our current pandemic. ![]()
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