Whitehead
Tom Perrotta isn’t the only literary writer putting his spin on the post-apocalyptic novel this fall. We just heard that Colson Whitehead (Sag Harbor, John Henry Days) has finished Zone One, a novel that takes place in a world where a pandemic has decimated the population and created hordes of undead. The book will be published October 18.
If “Zone One” were three songs that came out between 1977-1992, it would be Wire’s “Reuters,” Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” and Joy Division’s “Decades.”
In the wake of the plague, Mark Spitz is working to clear Manhattan of the infected ones—though the only zombies left in the area are not the dangerous kind but the “malfunctioning” sort who are basically catatonic and mourning their former lives. Then it all starts to go wrong. Doubleday calls the novel “brilliant,” saying it “deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.”
Will you read it?
author photo by Erin Patrice O’Brien
Wait, what — Mark Spitz is in charge of clearing the undead from Manhattan? Does he wear his Olympic medals? His star-spangled swim trunks?
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