Zone One cover art

Zone One

A Novel

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 Months Free

$8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.
Get this deal
Offer ends on July 15, 2026 at 11:59 PT.
More purchase options

Zone One

Written by: Colson Whitehead
Narrated by: Beresford Bennett
Get this deal

$8.99/mo. after 3 months. Cancel anytime. Offer ends July 15, 2026 at 11:59pm PT.

Buy Now for $21.97

Buy Now for $21.97

In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One—but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety—the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.

And then things start to go wrong.

Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril­liantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century. Fiction Genre Fiction Horror Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Science Fiction Scary Comedy New York Zombie
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
All stars
Most Relevant
Unique. Whitehead captures the feeling of being in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Not just the terror… moreso the boredom and monotony of carrying out ones duties.

Apocalypse in Beautiful Prose

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a book you have to listen to in its entirety. I have listened to it 3 times and get something different every time. It is not linear, and you have to watch for when the time changes.

It is excellent, not your average end of the world story. More creeping dread, and how you (average person) might feel, watching the world crumble.

Brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.