Zombies

Zone One: Part Two

| ruthpelletier

The Part About the Book

By Colson Whitehead

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

It was probably clear last week that I’m really excited about zombies. And the book that prompted my enthusiastic screed was ‘Zone One’, by Colson Whitehead.

I love Colson Whitehead. Whitehead is doing what I would want to do, if I were a novelist: using fantastical premises to ask moral questions. He loves alternative histories, weird metaphors (racism explored via elevator repair philosophies), apolocalypse dramas. And he’s incredibly smart – his novels are fast-paced and unsparing. He revels in complexity, never reducing or simplifying the problem or the prose. You need to pay attention, because Whitehead isn’t going to do you any favors.

If you had asked me to pick a writer to write a zombie-apocalypse novel, Whitehead would have been in the top five easily. He’s an author who marries a very vivid novelist imagination with a love for moral exploration. So, when I learned that he actually had already written a zombie novel, I jumped on it.

‘Zone One’ lived up to my expectations, all of them. It is exactly what I wanted a zombie novel to be: vivid, bleak, brutal, hopeless, specific, convincing. It’s the kind of book you want to read all the way through in one go, but you have to take breaks because you keep getting upset.

‘Zone One’ takes place in New York City several years after the zombie apocalypse. After a near-total collapse of civilization, survivors have begun to rebuild. There are emerging population centers, headed by a new capital in Buffalo. Now, the new American authorities have decided to clear New York City of all the undead. To do this, survivors have established Zone One,at the southern-most tip of Manhattan as a jumping-off point for the clean-up operations. The marines have already been through; now it is up to small, three-man crews to go in and take care of any straggler zombies. Mark Spitz is on one of these crews, working his way, block by block, through the dead city, finding and tagging bodies, and putting down any zombies missed in the first pass.

Most zombie stories take place up close. The drama of zombie stories usually lies in devastating choices forced on the individual: Dad has been exposed – do I kill him now, as he is begging me to, or wait, and risk his turning and killing us all? Most zombie stories are intimate – they dwell on personal love, familial bonds.

‘Zone One’ doesn’t really dwell in this space (or, very little). Rather, it takes that intimacy for granted, and then widens the scope. I loved ‘Zone One’ so much because it exploited the full brutality of the zombie story on a societal level. It is a novel not about the impossible decisions of individuals, but about the effect of the total collapse of civilization on the human psyche.

There are moments of individual poignancy, of course, but Whitehead deploys them not for direct emotional effect, but rather to show how, in the case of total social destruction, such choices are commonplace. All survivors will have a horror story; trauma no longer makes you special. In fact, the ubiquity of trauma, the fatigue of it, is one of the most affecting parts of ‘Zone One’: how can you build a civilization when everyone in it has experienced the stuff of nightmares? When the nightmares are reality?

Every person still alive at the time of ‘Zone One’ has watched unthinkable things happen to someone they love. Mark Spitz, for example, came home one night to find his mother eating his father. However, instead of leaning into this kind of personal tragedy in the normal, zombie-story mode, Whitehead imagines this sort of pain on a large scale. He imagines what it would be like if everyone felt the same pain – personal, but the same.

OK, you might be asking, but how is that any different from normal post-apocalyptica? I’ve read ‘The Road’ – does ‘Zone One’ have anything to add?

The answer is: yes, two things.

First of all, unlike other apocalypses (plagues, nuclear blasts), zombies are active. Not only do they destroy civilization, they literally chase you around afterwards. You may survive the initial event, but you will never be able to let down your guard. You will never be really safe again.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead is less interested in communicating the relentlessness of the threat than in showing its effect, but he does this extremely well. ‘Zone One’ isn’t about the initial panic – it’s about the debilitating effect of constant panic over years. The characters in ‘Zone One’ aren’t scared to die. On the contrary, they have been scared to die for so long that they almost welcome it. The tone is more of defeat, of irreparable loss, of how chronic fear can shrink a human spirit into dull nothingness.

Second of all, Whitehead is a better, funnier writer than most people attracted to the genre of civilizational-collapse. He’s exactly who you want thinking about zombies. One of Whitehead’s strengths has always been his attachment to specifics. He is a wildly inventive writer, and he imagines not just on the grand, moral scale, but also in the details.

‘Zone One’ is rich in detail, dense and complicated without ever feeling like a slog. And it’s scary, but not the way zombie stories normally are. It doesn’t elicit the fear of pursuit, the sort of fear you might feel if you were being chased by an actual zombie. Rather, ‘Zone One’ caused me to feel a vague panic, a general feeling that everything I love in this world is vulnerable. While I was reading ‘Zone One’, I kept imagining how I would feel, wandering this empty landscape alone, my family destroyed, my loved ones eaten (or worse).

Now, I am not a particularly imaginative or empathic reader – it is not normal for me to suffer emotional discomfort while reading about the suffering of fictional characters. That I did in this case is entirely a testament to Whitehead’s skill as a world builder, to how convincing his imagination is. I loved ‘Zone One’, but, more than that, I was badly rattled by ‘Zone One’. It made me feel small and overwhelmed and unsteady. It gave me a taste of loss on a scale I hope never to experience. It scared me.

Zone One: Part One

| ruthpelletier

The Part About Zombies in General

By Colson Whitehead

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

I spend a lot of time thinking about monsters.

It’s probably not difficult to understand why: 1) they are so cool and 2) they are everywhere these days. We have a monster glut. We’ve always been obsessed with them, I think, but monsters are particularly culturally abundant right now: vampires, sexy vampires, vampires fighting werewolves, sexy werewolves, werewolves playing sports, vampires in love with people, vampires in love with vampire slayers, vampires in the American South, zombies in the American South, zombies in love, zombies fighting Mila Jovovich. It’s a lot.

It’s market-driven, clearly; people love monsters. I love monsters (always have), so I’m fine with it, but certain aspects of the monster ecosystem confuse me. To be specific, I am puzzled by the relative super-abundance of vampires.

All monsters are metaphors: they are scenarios dreamed up to interrogate existential problems. They are one of the ways that we ask certain questions, about life, death, humanity, brutality.

Vampires are absurdly popular, which is confusing to me because vampires are so shallow, metaphorically speaking. They are about immortality: what would you give up to live forever? Would you give up your very humanity if you could avoid death?

It’s not a bad question, but it is simplistic. First of all, it supposes that everyone wants to live forever, which, of course, we don’t. Second, it can be answered simply: yes or no. There is no philosophical meat. Either you would, or you would not, depending on how scared you are to die. There’s not a lot more there.

(I’m being a little reductive here, I know: there is actually a slightly interesting wrinkle in the vampire mythos: in order to live forever, you have to literally drain the life out of other people – is that worth it? But, of course, even that question assumes you want to live forever, which, again, isn’t universal.)

I’m not just shitting on vampires and their fans: werewolves are barely more interesting. They’re just a heavy-handed metaphor for human savagery, asking, “Are we responsible for our own capacity for violence if it’s innate?” It could be interesting question, but it does not deserve the creation of entire monster-type to address it.

Zombies, though, zombies are different. Zombies are deep. They are complex, multi-faceted, the most metaphorically rich of all the major monsters. Zombies are powerful.

Werewolves and vampires ask questions which make assumptions about what people want. They assume that everyone longs for immortality, that everyone has a brutal streak which can be interrogated in canine metaphor. I don’t think that this is true, actually – I think there are plenty of non-brutal people who prefer a natural lifespan – but, either way, these questions only address facets of ourselves.

Zombies, though, ask universal questions, questions with global scope: what makes us who we are? Are we our bodies, or are we our minds? If you had to choose between your life and the lives of your loved ones, which would you choose? Would you kill them to survive?

There comes a moment in every zombie story when a protagonist sees their loved one infected. It might be a parent, a child, a spouse, a sibling, the story is the same. The loved one is infected, but change isn’t instant: they will suffer a period of doomed lucidity, waiting to turn.

Zombie protocol is clear: once bitten, a person must be destroyed, lest they turn and spread the infection. This is the one inviolable Zombie Law, universal and non-negotiable. Our protagonist knows it, but, at this, the crucial moment, as they stare into the eyes of their most cherished person, they will falter.

This is what zombies are about: could you stare into the face of the ones you love and destroy them for the betterment of all? Even if you knew they were doomed, even if they begged you to put them out of their misery, could you?

(As an aside, this is why I think zombies canonically require headshots. This killing, this destruction of the loved one, must be brutal. You cannot ease them into a painless death, put them gently to sleep: violence is required. A bullet to the brain, head chopped off, a knife to the top of the spinal column – there will be no mistaking that you killed them)

This is the kind of metaphor I can get behind. This is a wrenching, terrible question that speaks to one of the few truly universal human experiences: the love of another.

Vampires and werewolves are narcissistic creations: they are about what we want (immortality, the ability to vent our rage without consequence). Zombies, on the other hand, are about what we are, especially in relation to other people. They ask us whether or not it is possible to be truly safe while loving someone else.

This problem, known in real life to everyone who has ever been scared of rejection, is made literal in all zombie stories: is being alone the only way to be safe? The instinct of our zombie-story protagonists (as with humans in general) is to band together, to forms tribes and then colonies of survivors, to huddle for protection. But more people means more risk: more chances to get bitten, more vectors to bring the contagion home. Someone will eventually fail to latch the door tightly, forget to close the blackout curtain, will sneeze at the wrong moment: the more people, the more likely this becomes. More than that, if you love someone, your judgment may be compromised – you are more likely to make bad, emotionally-driven decisions if you are attached to your fellow travelers. Is the comfort and help of other human beings worth it? Or are you better off alone?

Zombies are brainless on only the most literal level; metaphorically, they are complex, and literarily, they are far and away the most emotionally effective monster. The vampire story has not yet been written which can compare to the visceral impact of imagining your loved one – your child, your spouse, your sibling – changing, becoming less and less human, and wondering if you will have to kill them to save yourself. Would you be capable? How could you ever convince yourself, sufficiently and truly, that you could never have cured them, that they were truly lost? It is the impossible choice.

Why am I talking about this?

I’m talking about this because I just finished reading the zombie novel I’ve been waiting for my whole life and got really excited about the whole topic. I originally meant this to be a one paragraph intro, but I got carried away. I’ll talk about the book next week.

World War Z

| ruthpelletier

An Oral History of the Zombie War

Max Brooks

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Any reader of books knows that the books you love, the books you proselytize, the books you recommend to people at parties and display proudly on your shelves, say almost as much about you as you might about them.  And, of course, some kinds of books are more rewarding, in terms of what they say about you, than others.

Masterpieces make for lousy social accessories.  These are the Books Everyone Thinks Are Great.  No matter how much you may love a classic, no one will think better of you for it, for the simple reason that they all also believe that they love the classics.  Loving these books is no feat, because it requires no personal judgement at all.  You won’t ever impress anyone by loving ‘Hamlet’.

Some books, it’s fun to love them because everyone knows that they ought to love them, but no one has actually read them.  We can think of these as the Books You Love So That You Can Show You’ve Read Them.  This is how people who actually like Proust get to feel all the time*.

*I’m not one of these people.

And then there are the books which no one expects anyone to enjoy, because they aren’t fun at all.  These are Books Which Show Character.  It’s really fun to love these books, because then people think that you have unexplored depths, that you must know something that they don’t know, or that you possess a tortured, artistic soul.  Imagine how fun it would be to announce that your favorite book was, oh, ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’.

But my own personal favorite category, in terms of social accessorizing via reading list, is Secretly Great Books Everyone Else Thinks Are Trash.  I’m a little contrarian, so it gives me enormous (and, yes, extremely juvenile) pleasure to go to bat for books which everyone else thinks are Beach Reading, to argue that these books are, instead, Great Art.

World War ZSo here I go:  I think that ‘World War Z‘ is Great Art.

I’m not exaggerating for effect – I love this book.  I think it’s magnificent.  I’ve now read it three times, and I like it better every time I read it.  No, I love it better every time I read it, and I refuse to be ashamed of this fact.

‘World War Z‘ is, as advertised, the oral history of the Zombie War.  It is a collection of the personal reminiscences of the survivors, from all over the world, from the ordinary citizens who witnessed it to the presidents and generals who prosecuted it.  It covers the entire war, from the first few cases, the handling (or mishandling) of the outbreak by various nations, the desperate flight of millions of people from the cities, the overwhelming and near extinction of the human race, and the eventual beating back, the destruction, of the zombie menace.

I love this book.  I love this book because it is so smart.  It’s smart and it’s thorough, thought-out and careful and precise and imagined down to the last detail.

I’m going to land on this point with a little more emphasis, because I am sure that most people unfamiliar with this work (or, heaven forfend, people who saw the movie) would be surprised, perhaps, to hear ‘smart’ as the primary description of a book about, uh, zombies.  Literal zombies.

But that’s the thing about smart – it can work with anything, can make something brilliant out of starting material which is, well, stupid.

ZombieZombies have never been my favorite metaphor.  All the ghouls and goblins have their metaphorical purpose, the existential conundrum they were written to pose to us.  Vampires are about the price of immortality; werewolves are about our inner beasts.  Ghosts are about death (obviously).  Zombies are about humanity, what makes us human, whether it’s our bodies or our minds.  Zombies (usually) ask the essential question: when do our loved ones stop being themselves?  When can we let them go?  When are we willing to destroy them?  Could you shoot your mother in the face, to save yourself?  Your child?  Your spouse?

But that’s not what ‘World War Z‘ asks, not exactly.  ‘World War Z’ is a novel of geopolitics; it is a novel of logistics.  Its nearest analog, to my mind, is Asimov’s ‘Foundation‘ trilogy.  It’s a novel about how societies cope with unimagined and unmanageable threats, threats that come from within.  Arational threats.

I recognize that this is not ‘Walking Dead’-sexy, but it’s a lot smarter.  And it’s more interesting, more fun to read.  There aren’t any hand-to-hand battles with zombies here, no slow, wrenching transformations of loved ones.  This isn’t a book about people as individuals; it’s a book about people as nations, people as animals.

And it’s plausible, super plausible.  It’s the kind of the book that makes you feel as though, if a zombie apocalypse happens, it’ll look a lot like this.  Not the way it will look to you (or to a bunch of people way better-looking or tougher than you), but how it will look from above, how it will look on a grand scale.

Max Brooks
Max Brooks

This is so much more interesting than watching a bunch of grubby people scramble around in the woods.  Zombies just aren’t that interesting as an interpersonal problem, but as a logistical problem, they are fascinating.  They are both a disease and an enemy, a contagion and an infiltration.  And ‘World War Z‘ captures this so well, holding the problem up to the light and holding it this way and that, so that you can admire facets of it that you’ve never noticed before.

I’ll give you an example, perhaps my favorite example, of a really great tweak to the old zombie problem.  It comes in the middle of the book, as the tide begins to turn.

(Remember that the book is structured as a series of interviews)

“The biggest problem were quislings.

Quislings?

Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.

Could you elaborate?

Well, as I understand it, there’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation.  They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of.  Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it…But you couldn’t do it in this war.  You couldn’t just throw up your hands and say, ‘Hey, don’t kill me, I’m on your side.’  There was no gray area in this fight, no in between.  I guess some people just couldn’t accept that.  It put them right over the edge.  They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking, trying to eat other people…Do you know that quislings were the reason some people used to think they were immune?…I think the saddest thing about them is that they gave up so much and in the end lost anyway.

Why is that?

‘Cause even though we can’t tell the difference between them, the real zombies can.  Remember early in the war, when everybody was trying to work on a way to turn the living dead against one another?  There was all this ‘documented proof’ about infighting – eyewitness accounts and even footage of one zombie attacking another.  Stupid.  It was zombies attacking quislings, but you never would have known that to look at it.  Quislings don’t scream.  They just lie there, not even trying to fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by the very creatures they’re trying to be. (p. 198)

You have to admit, that is brilliant.  It’s better than brilliant: it’s correct.  It is a true observation about humans, but placed in an entirely fictional, terrifying, absurd context.  Or, to be more precise, it is an entirely fictional, terrifying, absurd context which draws your attention to a true observation about humans you had already made, but had never really understood.

That’s what science fiction is for.  That’s what it does: reteaches you things you already knew, or should have known.  This is also, by the way, what Great Art does.  And I will defend as Great Art any book which takes something you thought you knew, no matter how stupid, and then twists and turns it back around on you, so that you discover that you were looking at yourself all along.