Another "art" writer tackling a pop culture theme, similar to what happened with The Last Wherewolf. This is a very well written book. A little slow in the first two thirds, it picks momentum as it moves towards the end. Whitehead makes this more than a standard "shoot'em in the head" zombie story by turning it into a metaphor of 21st century life in New York City. It also invites the reader to decide who are the real monsters: the zombies, the equally carnivorous (and also cynical) government, or the zombie hunters. In the end, zombies and humans are just trying to survive. The book's contribution to the zombie fauna is the "straggler": the zombie who has become immobilized, mysteriously frozen into repeating one single gesture of his or her previous life. Very haunting.
This invites comparison with the other zombie book i read recently: World War Z. They both try to deal realistically with the impossible problem of how to dispose of the enormous amount of leftover zombie "biomass" after a zombie calamity, but Zone One is shorter, better written, and it refreshingly avoids indulging on the American military fetish.
Quotes:
Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.
PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder.
New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example. The main difference was that there were fewer people.
Bring out your dead.
That’s the way we’ve always done it. It’s what this country was built on. The plague merely made it more literal, spelled it out in case you didn’t get it before.
“Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction),”
At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running.
He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.
He’d never met anyone in the camps or the great out there who had made it out of the city after the first couple of days. They left the doors unlocked.
Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety.
Mustn’t humanize them. The whole thing breaks down unless you are fundamentally sure that they are not you.
He’d always seen himself in them, the robots who roved the galaxy in search of the emotion chip, the tentacled things that were, beneath their mottled, puckered membranes, more human than the murderous villagers who hunted them for their difference.
She’d become partial to cachaça after a six-month thing with a Brazilian guy whose constant referencing of his nationality was a cornerstone of his personality,
We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
“You know why they walk around? They walk around because they’re too stupid to know they’re dead.”
No comments:
Post a Comment