Zone One

A Novel

By: Colson Whitehead

Narrated by: 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.

©2011 Colson Whitehead (P)2011 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"A satirist so playful that you often don't even feel his scalpel, Whitehead toys with the shards of contemporary culture with an infectious glee. Here he upends the tropes of the zombie story in the canyons of lower Manhattan. Horror has rarely been so unsettling, and never so grimly funny." ( The Daily Beast)

"Highbrow novelist Colson Whitehead plunges into the unstoppable zombie genre in this subtle meditation on loss and love in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, which has become the city that never dies." ( USA Today)

"For-real literary - gory, lyrical, human, precise." ( GQ)

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.

Kinda boring

I get that the book is some sort of satire on modern society but the story is just so goddamn boring.

A Bit of a Headscratcher

I, unlike other people, don't think Colson Whitehead was "slumming it" in zombie lit, and there are a few things he added to the genre. However, having read the vastly superior World War Z (Max Brooks) and listened to the amazing audiobook as well, I couldn't help but draw a comparison in which unfortunately Z1 did not come out ahead.
Whitehead can be incredibly sparse and succinct with words and sentences that will really surprise and delight you. But when he isn't, get ready. The whole first preamble almost turned me off to the whole thing. At times, I struggled to follow which moments were the present and which were distant or recent flashbacks, an issue which seemed to plague (pun very intended) many readers/listeners.
All in all, it was fine. The performance was mostly great, with the voice actor doing several different male voices with their own cadence and pitch. However his take on the female voices was over the top and stereotypical. Just got high pitched and vapid sounding. It was a turnoff.
If you want slightly more literary flourish and love New York A LOT, choose this book. Otherwise I would strongly recommend you read WWZ instead. Both the content and the audiobook performances are much, much better.

Good writing, bad reading

Between the searching aloof reading and the constant mispronunciations the reading missed the mark.

Writing is good. Will look for others titles from this author.

Purple Prose and Bad Narrative Direction

The narration and writing style are both bad enough on their own, but together they make this audiobook unlistenable. I found the prose to be bloated and prolix, made all the worse by the bizarre tone of childlike wonder the narrator brings to the reading. Bailed out a little over halfway through.

Too boring and choppy to have good action and too amused by itself and banal to intrigue as post-apocalypse philosophy, for me this was a waste of my hard earned money.

Poor

Author spent half the time explaining his lead character's mediocrity. Shame the story the character inhabits couldn't rise even to that low bar. Typical genre story poorly executed. Refuses to trust the reader to pick up any of its message without a prolonged bludgeoning. Look elsewhere.