Saturday, October 22, 2011

2011 book 268

Colson Whitehead's Zone One
I know I swore off zombie-related stuff a while back (zombies give me nightmares), but Whitehead's book has gotten a lot of positive buzz, and I always like when literary authors throw a little genre into their works. Zone One is the story of Mark Spitz (not his real name) in the days after a zombie apocalypse; he's part of a team hunting down the last few zombies in a certain part of NYC in an effort to make the city livable again. Though the action takes place over three days, Whitehead weaves in Mark Spitz's story and the bigger-picture story of the zombies. The writing here is outstanding, and for the most part the plot moves along at a nice clip. And it avoids overt horror (though I am still pretty creeped out, and will henceforth go back to avoiding zombie-related media). B+.

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