10/20/2011: Book Review: Zone One by Colson Whitehead - NPR
Always known by that full name (not his real one, but a post-plague moniker bestowed upon him after a disastrous battle on a bridge), Mark Spitz travels with the rest of Team Omega across Zone One — Manhattan below Canal Street — which is protected from the swarming undead by a concrete retaining wall. In each building, Omega kills off the “skels,” hungry active zombies, and the “stragglers,” brain-dead victims stuck in place who waste away to nothing in a haunting echo of their former lives. (The copy boy, for example, stares blankly at a Xerox machine until he’s put down with a shot to the head.) Collection gathers the bagged corpses; Disposal burns them in enormous incinerators next to the wall. The 24-hour ashfall that results is just one of this disquieting novel’s canny echoes of post-Sept. 11 New York. After all, Zone One itself both includes, and seems like the natural descendant of, ground zero. - Dan Kois
Ooooo zombie book. Excellent.
