Day 1,528, Quasi-Quarantine: Gripping "Zone One" Brings Poignancy To The Challenging Zombie-Apocalypse Genre

“Fuck it, he thought. You have to learn how to swim sometime. He opened the door and walked into the sea of the dead.”

One of world's most accomplished novelists took a swing at the zombie-apocalypse genre, and the result is an intense, emotional, and thoughtful look at who we are and who we become when it matters most. "Zone One" shows Colson Whitehead having legitimate fun in putting his trademark twists on a well-worn genre.

“The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained the same and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn't anyplace else. It was New York City.”

“The city as ghost ship on the last ocean at the rim of the world. It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature.”

The novel moves at a dizzying pace, with the resulting jumps in chronology being difficult to follow. However, this feels intentional, as Whitehead may be trying to represent the manic rhythms of life in a new reality through these jumps.

“He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.”

“Everything was either a weapon or a wall, to be quantified and sorted in its utility as such.”

The author certainly likes complicated words -- and he has clearly earned the right to use them, whether he is referencing Raleigh (!) or portraying Mim in (for this reader) bittersweet and nostalgic ways. Overall, I felt the novel shared some similarities with Richard Matheson's iconic "I Am Legend."

“Affront was a luxury, like shampoo and affection.”

“The faint residue of humanity stuck to the sides of the world.”

“This is what he had learned: If you weren’t concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you wouldn’t survive them.”

While "Zone One" is not likely to rank among Whitehead's most important works, his ability to ascribe meaning and deep insights in the midst of an apocalypse serves to reinforce and prove his far-reaching talents.

“Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.”