But even at the time, Whitehead transcended the genre, using zombies as “ rhetorical props” to unpack paranoia and misanthropy. Though the novel feels insightful, and even prescient, today, we must remember that it was published during a time in which paranormal and supernatural horror were having a cultural resurgence, with zombies and monsters fading into banal tropes. Everyone suffers from post-apocalyptic stress disorder (PASD), yet everyone tries to find ways to make meaning of their world, even as Mark Spitz, a self-avowed mediocre man, believes the only way forward is by thinking only of how one is to survive the next five minutes. We follow protagonist Mark Spitz over the course of three days-Friday, Saturday, and Sunday-as he works with two other comrades in an Omega unit to clear the remaining zombies from the Manhattan area, in what is called Zone One. After all, the novel is about a zombie apocalypse, which emerges from a novel virus. It is no surprise to find Zone One on such a list. I began with Albert Camus’ The Plague in the spring, read Ling Ma’s Severance in the summer, and only started Zone One during the stormy days of early August. For reasons I probably don’t need to explain, I took my time working my way through the list.

I was a teenager when the novel was released, and only got around to opening the book a few months ago, as I tried to read my way through the New York Times’ list of pandemic novels for quarantine, which was published in early March, back when everyone’s reality was taking an extraordinary turn. Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One was published nine years ago today, on what I imagine to have been a chilly and sweeping October day in 2011.

Zone one book review