Zone One

I hit the halfway mark and gave up. Is the zombie genre itself a kind of zombie, continuing to go through the motions of life while having nothing going on between the ears? Admittedly, I skipped World War Z (both book and film), but the first season of The Walking Dead is my last memory of a zombie tale rising above tolerable.

My first foray into the Zombie genre. Reminds me a lot of Vietnam and World War II historical fiction that I've read in the past, with soldiers longing for a return to normal (though they know it will never arrive). The narrative style jumps back and forth a lot, which was actually a really great way to tell this story, but it did make it difficult at times to pick back up and remember where you had left off. Overall, great read, and definitely good for baby's first Zombie book. I suppose World War Z is next

Zombie apocalypse novel about humanity's attempts at reconstructing society in NYC, from the viewpoint of one Mark Spitz, a young man who managed to survive Last Night and ends up a Sweeper for the military, dispensing with the straggler zombies who seem to be no active threat. But maybe they are.

There is a lot of naval-gazing and flashbacking. Though this takes place ostensibly over three days, the story is nonlinear in how the tale of Mark Spitz (not his real name; we never know that) experienced the apocalypse. There were moments where I had to concentrate on when things were happening, because it felt as though the story jumped around incoherently sometimes. And just when the excrement really starts hitting the air conditioning, getting really exciting–the book ends.

This is unendingly frustrating for me.

The prose is beautifully written. It's clever, intelligent, and even I had to whip out my dictionary upon occasion. Colson proves he's obviously a talented, intelligent writer with a wry wit.

That being said, this is primarily a novel for litfic lovers. I firmly believe horror can be a beautiful, intelligent, well-written genre. But this wasn't really horror as much as it was litfic using horror tropes. And litfic is always iffy for me, but I liked this more than I usually would like litfic.

Its zombies in NYC. How can that be bad? Well...as it turns out, it can be. Very very slow. The story of an everyman survivor named Mark Spitz after the zombie plague. Mark Spitz was hard to care about. Not good. Did manage to get all the way to the end. But barely. I felt like I was reading Wuthering Heights, in that I wanted everyone to just die by the end of the novel.