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    Zone One: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Zone One: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Zone One: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Zone One: A Novel

    Written by Colson Whitehead

    Narrated by Beresford Bennett

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

    Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street-aka Zone One-but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety-the "malfunctioning" stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

    Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz's desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.

    And then things start to go wrong.

    Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril­liantly subverts the genre's conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 18, 2011
    ISBN9780307940933
    Unavailable
    Zone One: A Novel
    Author

    Colson Whitehead

    Colson Whitehead was born in New York City in 1969 and graduated from Harvard College in 1991. He has written four novels, including the Pulitzer-Prize-nominated ‘John Henry Days.’ He has written for, amongst others, The New York Times, Salon and The Village Voice.

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    Reviews for Zone One

    3.5/5

    602 ratings75 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Set in the terrifying aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, Whitehead's novel follows Mark Spitz, a member of a team charged with clearing the dead bodies from a small section of New York. Whitehead parcels out background details slowly, so the reader slowly begins to understand what's gone on and just how bad things are. And then ...
    • 5/5
      In "Zone One", Colson Whitehead has given us one of the best literary treatments of the Post-Apocalypse ever written, perhaps the finest since Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend". As a zombie novel, it is the best of that sub-genre of horror fiction. Much of its excellence derives from Whitehead's skill as a satirist. He has a deft touch for turning a phrase and a power of description that elevates "Zone One" into the realm of "serious" works that study and comment upon the American mass psychology.We never learn the true name of Mark Spitz, the protagonist of the novel. We only discover the source of his nickname, a reference to him supposedly not being a good swimmer, late in the story. We learn enough about him in flashback to know that he has lost everyone he loves in the pandemic that has divided the world into the tormented living and the animate, cannibalistic dead. He refers to the universality of PASD (Post-Apocalypse Stress Disorder) among the living, such that he and every other survivor of the plague is coping, or not, with the lingering effects of shock, intense fear, and crippling levels of grief and guilt.Mark Spitz is a member of a team that is assigned to search and remove the "stragglers" from a section of Manhattan below Canal Street, Zone One, after the Marines have retaken the southern part of the island in a massive search and destroy campaign against the "skels". Stragglers are apparently passive plague victims, unlike the more numerous and dangerous un-dead who are constantly on the prowl for human flesh. The stragglers, activated by some latent memory in their otherwise plague-befuddled brains, return to the places that appear to have some emotional resonance for them. Once there, they remain frozen in position in their catatonic state. But it is extremely foolish to assume that a straggler is harmless, as a member of Spitz' team learns in a scene of true horror.The government in "Zone One", unlike Robert Kirkman's libertarian fantasy in "The Walking Dead", does not collapse. It manages to rally and restore a center of order in Buffalo, the new U.S. capital, from which it wages a war to slowly reclaim the nation from the infected hordes. Whitehead gets in some especially funny commentary about military bureaucracy and the neurotic themes of our perpetual War on Terror and our efforts to create friendly regimes in foreign lands where we Americans are not welcome. The government works with the corporate world to create official sponsors for the war effort against the "skels". Mark Spitz and his comrades carry "No-No" cards which specify which branded products they are allowed to loot as they clear their way through Manhattan, and which are off-limits. Spitz and his fellow sweepers share stories of "Last Night" (before all hell broke loose) and their lives before and after that great, terrible, dividing event in time. We are told, repeatedly, that Connecticut is the most loathsome place on Earth, but are given no details as to how it acquires its reputation. That's an example of Whitehead's quirky humor and how he blends it so well with the horror of "Zone One" to suggest that Zombie America is not that different from the violent, fearful and materialistic nation in which we live before the Apocalypse.
    • 4/5
      I wasn't sure about this book at first, not being a huge Zombie fan. But Whitehead really knows his way around a sentence, and he sucked me in pretty fast. There is just so much here; politics, family dynamics, humor. The hero "Mark Spitz," as he calls himself, is trying to help rebuild after a zombie pandemic, and suffering from PASD (Post Apocalypse Stress Disorder). Here is a favorite sentence:"Josh didn't have the bearing of one who was going to make it to the other side; there was something taffy to him, despite the fact he'd survived this long, and to tell him the story would be like pouring coffee into a broken saucer."
    • 4/5
      Very slow, very cerebral, very not a typical horror novel. I'm the only person I know who enjoyed this. I lent it to my husband with a glowing review, and he hated it. Random guy at the airport hated it so much, when he saw my husband reading it, he felt compelled to comment. They spent an entertaining 20 minutes enumerating all the reasons they hated it and coming up with new ways to describe how much they hated it.
    • 2/5
      A little bit too pretentious for my tastes.

      This book just felt like Whitehead was trying too hard to write a capital N Novel as opposed to a story that was actually engaging and/or substantial.
    • 3/5
      There’s isn’t really a plot. It’s more the main characters observations and comparisons to the world before the zombies came.
    • 5/5
      This zombie book is a real gem, written by an author who’s got great sentences and (as we know from his celebrated later writing) is a masterful author. While other Zombie books are typically sophomoric- this stands out, as does World War Z , as smart, well written and multilayered.
    • 5/5
      Wow! I've heard mixed reviews about the novel, but the audiobook is fantastic. I was fully engaged from start to finish. Fantastic!
    • 3/5
      Several people in the group abandoned the book after a few pages due to the author’s dense writing style. This is one place where an audiobook can help; it can move you on through the difficult parts so you don’t get too bogged down.

      That said, though, the author does have a pretty dense writing style. Zone One is pretty much a zombie book, but at least half of it must be taken up with philosophical observations of life in twenty-first century America. The main character, who we know only by the nickname his fellow citizens in the effort to clean up after the zombie plague and re-establish civilization have given him – Mark Spitz, has proclaimed himself a mediocre citizen, and has decided he this is the perfect persona for the times. He has derogatory thoughts about most of the brain-dead individuals he is called on to eliminate in the course of his present job. Maybe this is the only way he can keep himself a reasonable facsimile of sane.

      The team he is assigned to is part of a larger group whose mission is to rid the southern tip (I think) of Manhattan of the remaining victims of the zombie plague and make it once again fit for habitation by those still-living people who are left in the world. This is the Zone One of the title. The action in the book’s present time occurs over the space of only three days, but the flood of flashback memories going back to the beginning of the plague (a time referred to as ‘last night’) and extending over the intervening five years, comes so thick and fast that it is often difficult to keep up with what is present and what is past.

      Little is explained about the actual plague, or about how it is that the myriad undead manage to keep wandering about without eating anything, except of course to spread the plague (which is what the virus programs them to do – a trait they share with the ‘hungries’ of The Girl with All the Gifts). But these un-people have mostly been this way for about five years and for much of that time they haven’t had even any other people to eat. Yet they don’t give up walking and attacking until their heads are shot off. The narrator seems to have the impression that the plague was caused primarily by all the things that are wrong with modern society.

      For most of the length of this book, it seems more hopeful than the other spooky reads of the season. A government of sorts has been re-established. There are safe camps, and progress is being made in clearing out the infected. However, in the end, it doesn’t appear to end well.
    • 3/5
      A slow-moving but beautifully written zombie tale. Could have used more action and less existential contemplation. Three stars for the writing; zero stars for the underlying story.
    • 4/5
      Very slow, very cerebral, very not a typical horror novel. I'm the only person I know who enjoyed this. I lent it to my husband with a glowing review, and he hated it. Random guy at the airport hated it so much, when he saw my husband reading it, he felt compelled to comment. They spent an entertaining 20 minutes enumerating all the reasons they hated it and coming up with new ways to describe how much they hated it.
    • 1/5
      Surprisingly boring for a novel about the zombie apocalypse. I got through the first two parts of the audiobook and realized that even if I kept going, really, nothing was going to happen. Some nice language in parts, but other parts feel over-written. Perhaps this is a "literary" zombie novel. Not my cup of tea.
    • 2/5
      I get it, you own a thesaurus. The underlying story was engaging, but the prose was frustrating. I'm not sure imitating Tim O'Brien is always a good choice.
    • 3/5
      This is a typical zombie apocalypse story. Set in the deserted waste of New York City, the main charter is Mark Spitz, a man who has been running ever since the epidemic surfaced. Mark is part of a sweeper team based in Chinatown. The propaganda suggests that mankind is on the verge of turning things around. This novel is somber, poetic, and haunting, if a tad predictable.
    • 3/5
      adult fiction. I'm fairly certain that a sharper, more intelligent novel about the zombie apocalypse has never been written--unfortunately, CW drones on for a good 100-200 pages longer than I've got the time or patience for. If you enjoy reading elegant prose just for the sake of reading elegant prose, by all means, devour this from cover to cover--if however, you'd just as soon move on to the next book in your to-read stack, read the first 100 pages or so, then skip ahead to the ending.
    • 3/5
      Good, but the end (though somewhat ambiguous) is extremely bleak. I enjoyed the play with expectations about Mark Spitz's race, though I personally know little about the Olympian (sports is not my bag), and I've never heard the ridiculous idea that people of African descent cannot swim. I had already pegged Mark Spitz as different from me, since he was male and I am not, so I suppose he was already othered in my head.

      Another note: I listened to the audio version of this. The reader sounded like he was struggling. I don't know why this would have been a good idea, but the words did not roll off his tongue as I generally expect of audiobooks. This is one of the reasons I ranked the book lower than I might have otherwise, though I certainly appreciated many of the word choices made.
    • 2/5
      I have to say i had problem to follow the story. Pieces were really interesting, i can agree that sometimes wording was more complex (almost artificial) than needed, but i lost whole story line and never really caught on it. That never happened to me before. I will give it time and try it again. hopefully it will work out.
    • 3/5
      I fell asleep multiple times trying to read this novel
    • 2/5
      Too clever by half. A dense frustrating read that was tough to get through.

      Not recommended.
    • 4/5
      Zone one set me a little off balance while reading it. It was a book of false expectations. It read like an long epoch but lacked the cumbersome length the style suggested. I think most people picking up the book know the general premise, post apocalyptic zombie ridden New York. What impressed me however, was the author's delivery and craft. The novel was beautifully written, the language and style was superb, especially toward the end of the novel. And I was surprised to find character development playing a stronger role in the momentum in this book than action, I didn't feel that I knew the main character to the very end, and my desire to know more is what drove me forward.
    • 4/5
      A good setup and some good characters, but this didn't really click with me. I would prefer my zombie apocalypse, literary or otherwise, to not sacrifice characterization for flowery language.It seemed to me that the characters, while interesting, mostly existed in the narrative descriptions and didn't actually interact much. For all that she is talked about, we barely see anything of Mim. Yes, the main character avoids long term connections as part of his survival policy, but we don't even really see him ditching people. We are just told that he ditches others, and characters vanish from the narrative.The atmosphere and imagery were very well done, bleak with shots of grim humor, but sometimes there were so many images and metaphors on each page that they got in each others' way and none of them really landed. I don't know how else to describe it. This book tells (with many, many adjectives) what it could be showing (with character interaction or action).
    • 4/5
      Zone One is lower Manhattan. The inevitable zombie apocalypse has overtaken the planet. The provisional government in Buffalo is trying to rebuild and they want Zone One to show it can be done.How do you like your zombie books? If the answer is moody, atmospheric, and oozing with metaphors then you will enjoy Colson Whitehead's depiction of the lower Manhattan cleanup.
    • 4/5
      Well who doesn't love a book about a survivor who found his niche in the zombie apocalypse? Good plot, characters were a bit one dimensional as expected in a book set in the zombie apocalypse. Set in Manhattan because who wouldn't want to make the cesspool of NYC into the utopian zombie free settlement? I don't want to give much away because well it's a zombie book and they are pretty much all the same. Zombie outbreak leads to apocalypse. Survivors fight the undead. Lots of blood and gore ensue.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful writing. If you only read one zombie novel, then this is the one. A squad of volunteers is assigned to Zone One in New York City to finish the sweeping job of ridding the city of the zombie stragglers not destroyed by the Army. Set over three days, it flows backwards and forwards in time to give a clear picture of Last Night.
    • 4/5
      A wordsmith writes a gritty novel with a new spin on the zombie apocalypse genre. Filled with a certain wit and talent for turning a phrase. The author searched for synonyms on google a bit too often, undermining the literary quality he was shooting for. Overall, an enjoyable read.
    • 4/5
      Mark Spitz is a survivor. When the Last Night happened and the dead started chowing down on his neighbors, he took to the wilds and lived via a combination of insight and insurmountable luck. Now humanity is beginning to regain small footholds, fragments of civilization amid the chaos, even if everyone is diagnosed with PASD (post apocalyptic stress disorder). Mark Spitz is working as a sweeper in Zone One (Manhattan island), going from building to building in search of any stragglers the marines left behind. It looks like the world might return to a new normal, with higher ups to repopulate Zone One, once it's cleared.This book is a vivid, literary and contemplative zombie novel, one that explores what it means to be human in a world of monsters that look like a more decrepit versions of yourself. As Mark Spitz explores the empty streets of Zone One, he flashes back both to the time before Last Night and his time as a survivor in the wild. This has to be one of the most intelligent zombie novels I've ever read, and while it meanders through the past in poetic nostalgia and metaphoric interpretations of the apocalyptic landscape, it need looses sight of Mark Spitz as a character or the thread of the story. It remains compelling and I found myself caught up in the people he meets, in their own little madnesses. It's at times gross (dead goo and fluids well described) and at times frightening, but always fascinating.
    • 5/5
      Highest quality literary zombie-fiction. I'm reminded of all the things Bret Easton Ellis said in "Less Than Zero" only here, the loss of words to describe the separation becomes the metaphor of the zombie apocalypse. Some of the phrasing here is utterly devastating. This novel was a real surprise to me--I didn't know that zombie fiction could get this good unless it was Kirkman. The scathing examination of late capitalism is precise and good in a way that "Shaun of the Dead" approaches but never quite achieves. HIGHLY recommended.
    • 3/5
      I nearly abandoned this after about 50 pages, but I decided to press on.

      I'm all done, and I can't decide if I want to give this a Single Star or Five Stars. I'm settling for an average. At times, I thought this was an amazing book, and at others, I couldn't figure out why I was bothering. And don't get me started about the ending.

      There was a lot of "whoa" moments, with interesting turns of phrases or pokes at the way people live their lives. It was definitely a very different take on the zombie novel than anything else I've ever read.

      Overall, I'm glad I read it, but I don't know that I'm in a hurry to read something else by Whitehead.
    • 2/5
      eh, i really wanted to like it but it is rather wordy and rambling and hard to flow with the story line. i am not interested in the main character and like 30 pages in and i still am not sure if he is the main character. also if i had not read the reviews i would have no idea they were hunting zombies or people affected by a virus of some sort that turned the world upside down. so i may or may not finish it.
    • 3/5
      This was an interesting read and I think I'll need to digest it a bit. It is one of those books that begs you to reread the ending. I know a lot of people like this book and it's attempt to bridge or mesh Literary Fiction and Horror. I applaud the effort, but it didn't really work for me. Perhaps I needed to know more about this book going into it so my expectations were different.