Zone One

My latest book from the library is Zone One: A Novel by Colson Whitehead. Here's the beginning of the review on the Amazon page written by Justin Cronin ...

The phrase “the thinking person’s [something]” may be terminally overused, but surely that’s what Colson Whitehead has accomplished in Zone One--a savvy zombie classic, the best addition to the genre since George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. In a nutshell: Zone One is a story of three days in the life of one Mark Spitz and his squad of three “sweepers” moving through the eponymous Zone One of lower Manhattan, a walled-off enclave scheduled for resettlement in the aftermath of a zombie plague. The great masses of the undead, known as “skels” for their skeleton-like appearance, have been violently dispatched by a Marine detachment. It falls to Spitz and his fellows to take care of the handful that remain, as well as a second-tier of the infected known as “stragglers”: zombies who have bypassed the cannibalistic urges of their more lethal fellows in favor of a hollow-eyed, eerily nostalgic repetition of some mundane act. Surfing a vanished web. Switching the channels of a dead remote. Filling helium balloons in a ransacked party supply store. Running a photocopy machine, presumably for all eternity ....

Whitehead is a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Princeton University so I guess it's no surprise that the story is heavy on description - I'm just at the beginning, but while I appreciate the well-written-ness of it, I'm getting a little restless waiting for the zombies to make the scene ;)

You can read an excerpt from the beginning of the book at Esquire.