Image of Zone OneThanks to the random and unpredictable nature of library holds, there’s a feast-or-famine aspect to my stack of to-read books. If a half-dozen of them get dumped into my lap at once — all with the same due date — some difficult choices must be made. Fortunately/unfortunately, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is making the decision easier for me, with his “thinking man’s zombie novel” that clearly proves I am not a thinking man.

Sample sentence: “The youngest

[zombie] wore its hair in a style popularized by a sitcom that took as its subject three roommates of seemingly immiscible temperaments and their attempts to make their fortune in this contusing city.”

You’ve got to be kidding! I had to look up at least two words just to make sense of that sentence. Nobody should ever have to look up anything while reading a zombie story. And every single sentence is equally opaque and verbose. Whoops, I meant “diabolically smart,” “funny,” and “absorbing.”

Critics fell all over themselves trying to outdo each other with extravagant praise for this book, but I’m finding it completely unreadable. Any minute now, I’m going to invoke the 50-page rule and bail out of this one, and I won’t look back. I’ve got a pretty lady named Catherine the Great waiting for me, and I have a feeling her life will be much more page-turning than this tedious dystopian non-starter. It’s a rare feat to make a zombie apocalypse novel sleep-inducingly dull, but at least it’s simplifying my library-book triage.

Stephanie Perry
Latest posts by Stephanie Perry (see all)