Zone One

[MiketheangrydrunkenCUfan]

Got this in the mail yesterday after using a B&N gift card I got for Xmas. I'm about halfway through it. Never read any Colson Whitehead before, so I can't really compare it to his other work, but as far as zombie lit goes, it's fairly entertaining. I was initially put off by his apparent infatuation with his own immense vocabulary (turns out there's a reason the word "literary" pops up a lot in discussions of Whitehead's work), but if you can get past the whole "big words for big words' sake" thing, there's a pretty compelling story underneath.

For all his multisyllabic prose, Whitehead's premise seems to be pretty straightforward: we all already were zombies in some sense, shuffling through our daily lives without much thought for anything beyond the next meal. There are some pretty astute observations on the narcissism of the postmodern "Information Age," along with some satisfyingly gory zombie carnage.

Probably not for everyone, but if you're looking for a zombie novel that at least attempts to transcend the genre, it's worth a look. I'll post more thoughts after I finish it...