To aid matters, a wall has been built around the area, preventing further entry by any members of the poor, huddled, and plague-ridden masses that yearn to feast freely. Among its many strategies of a societal reboot, Buffalo has begun recruiting survival-hardened civilians into teams that will sweep through the island of Manhattan, searching for any "skels" that the initial wave of Marines might have missed. Mark Spitz, our hero, has joined with other survivors in venturing to Manhattan as part of a Buffalo-based operation dubbed "The American Phoenix" ("pheenies" being the term applied to true believers by some, such as Mark Spitz, who are more ambivalent about the project's long-term prospects). It has been some time since "Last Night"-the night when the plague struck in full and split humanity into the living and the living dead. Whitehead-a native New Yorker, avid tweeter, and MacArthur "genius"-sets his apocalyptic proceedings, as have so many novelists, within the toothsome jungle of Manhattan. Into this perhaps overpopulated landscape comes Zone One, a precise, somber, and elegiac zombie novel by Colson Whitehead. Our world, for better or worse, belongs now to the dead and to those that love them. Popular culture has arrived at a point where it craves a monster both overwhelming in number and completely devoid of spirit. After wizards, vampires, and a brief fling with the possibility of werewolves, the results are in.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |