Zone One

A Novel

De: Colson Whitehead

Narrado por: Beresford Bennett

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.

why would a writer of his talent write a zombie novel?

another zombie fiction, an exhausted subject. I don't know why he wrote this and I don't know why I read it.

Not the next great american author I was hoping

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

If I knew that I'd be a bestselling author.

What was most disappointing about Colson Whitehead’s story?

The sly, insightful evisceration of american culture was just tired. Seemed as if he was writing with a thesaurus next to his computer.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Struggled with pacing and incorrect emphasis of words endlessly. Hard to follow

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Hey, it had zombies, at least.

Any additional comments?

Sorry, Colson's no Franzen, and Beresford's no Simon Vance.

Narration Makes It A Chore

I am struggling to get through this narration.

The reader sounds like he's reading a novel he's unfamiliar with rather than conveying a story.

Ineffective stress and pauses as well as more than a handful of botched pronunciations are making this a chore to get through.

I do enjoy the story itself- maybe I'll do the hard copy instead.

Couldn't keep track of what was going on

Any additional comments?

I couldn't past the first 15 minutes of the book, and I tried twice. It was too difficult to keep track of what was going on with the excessive descriptions of the most mundane things. I might try it in print form, but listening while driving was too confusing.

Stream of conciousness in the interregnum

I am a fan of the post apocalyptic, zombie, last man on Earth genres. It was that interest and the numerous positive Audible reviews which led me to purchase this book.
On a positive note, the story is set in a time which is not typically featured in stories in this genre, i.e., after the zombie apocalypse has run it's course and a previously collapsed human society has revived enough to be organized to support a zombie clean-up effort and restoration of organized human society with bureaucracies and institutions. This period known as "the interregnum" is a word that the author introduced me to, over and over again.
I listened to roughly 2/3 of the book before I finally gave-up,... why? Well, I really had difficulty staying focused on the story (something which is not common for me) because the stream of consciousness nature of the story. It jumps from the present to the past and back again all in a few minutes of listening while at the same time using literary illusions that constantly took me out of the story and made me suspect that the author was showing-off his vast vocabulary. After hours of listening I didn't feel like I knew the characters and worse... I didn't care to. Perhaps my experience was doomed in the telling? The reader had a way of reading that really grated on me (a lilt at the end of his sentences perhaps?). Listen to a sample before you purchase!
Wait for the "Zone One" movie featuring Brad Pitt, I suspect the movie will be more entertaining than the book.