![]() ![]() At the center of the mess is Mark Spitz, an oddly named individual of “unrivaled mediocrity’’ whose exposure to the plague begins when he walks in on his mother gnawing her husband’s intestines. Those infected turn into one of two kinds of monster: catatonic souls (“stragglers’’) who drift about in stages of advanced rot but pose no threat to humans, and traditional gore-oozing, flesh-eating zombies. A plague has swept the world and extinguished nearly all life from the island only pockets of soldiers and the odd survivor remain. “Zone One’’ is a zombie novel set over the course of three days in a dystopian Manhattan. ![]() ![]() He knows that he must, among other things, spin a gripping yarn. When a novelist like Colson Whitehead tries on genre fiction for size, he knows exactly what he is getting into. This is not a judgment about it in either direction it’s simply an observation that those best at it tend not to be dabblers. Dabbling in genre fiction is a dangerous thing for a writer to do. Great literary fiction can be great for a number of reasons, but every work of great genre fiction is great for one: a killer story. The difference between genre and literary fiction is easy to define. ![]()
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