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Title details for Zone One by Colson Whitehead - Available

Zone One

A Novel

by Colson Whitehead
Beresford Bennett
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 18, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307940957
      • File size: 286954 KB
      • Duration: 09:57:49

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In a novel being hailed as the "thinking person's zombie novel," Mark Spitz patrols Zone One of post-apocalyptic Manhattan, searching for skels (zombies) of both varieties--the violent and the catatonic. He's part of a patrol responsible for clearing the way for surviving humans to return. Narrator Beresford Bennett delivers Spitz's account of events as the character's memory is inspired by found relics. Bennett adopts the existential mood of this novel as Spitz examines the evidence of the former city with deliberate, unsensationalized observations. Bennett's subtly ironic tone controls the narrow range of emotion that reflects the monotony of life on patrol in a civilization that is no longer. J.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 20, 2011
      While the revolution will not be televised, the apocalypse and what comes after, at least according to Whitehead (Sag Harbor), will have sponsors. It will even have an anthem, the brilliantly self-referential "Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar?" (theme from Reconstruction). As we follow New Yorker and perpetual B-student "Mark Spitz" over three harrowing days, Whitehead dumpster dives genre tropes, using what he wants and leaving the rest to rot, turning what could have been another zombie-pocalypse gore-fest into the kind of smart, funny, pop cultureâfilled tale that would make George Romero proud. While many stories in this genre are set in a devastated nowheresville, Whitehead plants his narrative firmly in New York City, penning a love letter to a Manhattan still recognizable after the event referred to only as "Last Night." Far from the solemn affair so often imagined, the apocalypse in Whitehead's hands is filled with the kind of dark humor one imagines actual survivors adopting in order to stave off madness. The author sometimes lets the set pieces he's so good at run long, but otherwise succeeds brilliantly with a fresh take on survival, grief, 9/11, AIDS, global warming, nuclear holocaust, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Pol Pot's Year Zero, Missouri tornadoes, and the many other disasters both natural and not that keep a stranglehold on our fears and dreams.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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