Coleson Whitehead's Zone One is a zombie novel unlike any I have read before. Books on zombies, or zombie literature I suppose, have never really been my preferred horror sub-genre. I enjoy the existential dilemma that, as a rule, occurs in every zombie book and movie out there. The appeal of the zombie as a monster is that it reflects the monster within ourselves.
It was discussed in class that zombies reflect who we are afraid of becoming. We fear death, but more importantly, we fear stagnation. If we were to compare zombies to the living, breathing zombies found in our own daily lives, we find the juxtaposition easily recognizable. In other words, we see zombies, or lack of life, in our own routines. However, the horror of the zombie goes beyond the simple correlation between the live ones and the dead.
When faced with the zombie, we are forced to make a choice. To see that zombie as the person they once were, or to see them as the walking dead. Or, in Mark Spitz case, one sees them as both of these things in one. The necessity to preserve life requires that zombies be exterminated. That simple fact can easily haunt the minds of the exterminators, as anyone could be among the ranks of the living dead. I find this particular aspect of zombies very interesting, in that no one can talk themselves out of admitting that they could become a zombie as well. Of course, when one imagines the zombie apocalypse, one always imagines oneself as the hero, or at least one of the surviving few. When we think of the horrors of such an existence, we think of ourselves as still existing, as being alive and willing to kill off those who are not. However, the coin flips both ways, and anyone can become a shell of what they once were, reduced to the basest of desires: the need to feed.
In this way I enjoy the premise of zombie movies and books, but Coleson Whitehead wasn't a favorite of mine. I felt that it took away the appeal of what made a zombie book in the first place: the struggle between life and death. The main character, Mark Spitz, reads as very bland to me. The author purposefully does this to allow the greatest number of people to be appealed to and be able to relate to the character. I like this aspect in the sense that it reflects the idea that everyone can be a zombie, even the living, though it made for a difficult and rather uneventful read. I always expected the character to have more life to him, to have some aspect that was his own that people cold still relate to, but I found none.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed the story simply because it was different from other zombie novels.
