Zone One is three stultifying days in the life of Mark Spitz Zombie-hunter. Only he doesn't really hunt the Zombies from your favorite Zombie movie. He hunts what Whitehead calls Stragglers. Humans that have been infected but weren't quite fully turned. They don't desire human flesh, but rather they desire the doldrums of every day life: the psychiatrist sitting in her chair ever waiting for the patient to show up; the office worker standing forever next to the copy machine waiting for it to warm up; or the mom waiting for her kids to come home from school. These Stragglers were perpetually looped into one task and Spitz' job along with his co-workers was to take them down one at a time as they prowled through the office buildings and homes of Zone One - a walled off area of New York City.
The problem is that Mark Spitz is bored and for three days the reader is trapped in Spitz' random inner thoughts as he thinks about how the outbreak started, how and where he lived and how he ended up with a job killing Stragglers. His thoughts are so random though that you often can't keep up with him and you get lost when he stops telling one story and starts telling another.
---Spoiler Alert---
I was never so thrilled on Day Three when the wall fell around New York City and jump-started Spitz' heart and got him thinking about doing some real Zombie killing! The problem here? The wall fell and that was the end of the book.
--- Spoiler Alert Over---
Unfortunately, just like the Stragglers in the book, this book will straggle behind all of the other great Zombie books.
Rating: 6/ 10
ISBN: 9780385528078
Publisher: Doubleday
Edition: 1st Edition