Zone One

This book is terribly slow, with unneeded vocabulary to I guess make it sound more intelligent? The plot seems good but I feel like I'm back in school trying to make it through a book from the 1700s for no reason.

DNF

I hit the halfway mark and gave up. Is the zombie genre itself a kind of zombie, continuing to go through the motions of life while having nothing going on between the ears? Admittedly, I skipped World War Z (both book and film), but the first season of The Walking Dead is my last memory of a zombie tale rising above tolerable.

A well-written zombie apocalypse novel that is almost perfectly-crafted, but also kind of unmemorable, with few original things to add to the genre. It ends so abruptly and with so many plot points left unresolved that I had to look up whether there was a sequel. Also, and maybe this is just me, but like so many stories in this genre, I found it very depressing overall. The author seems to work hard to construct an utterly gray and hopeless world and make you feel that nothing will ever be redeemed. It was a very compelling airplane read, and I stayed up late to finish it, but the ending left me feeling very deflated.

Zombie apocalypse novel about humanity's attempts at reconstructing society in NYC, from the viewpoint of one Mark Spitz, a young man who managed to survive Last Night and ends up a Sweeper for the military, dispensing with the straggler zombies who seem to be no active threat. But maybe they are.

There is a lot of naval-gazing and flashbacking. Though this takes place ostensibly over three days, the story is nonlinear in how the tale of Mark Spitz (not his real name; we never know that) experienced the apocalypse. There were moments where I had to concentrate on when things were happening, because it felt as though the story jumped around incoherently sometimes. And just when the excrement really starts hitting the air conditioning, getting really exciting–the book ends.

This is unendingly frustrating for me.

The prose is beautifully written. It's clever, intelligent, and even I had to whip out my dictionary upon occasion. Colson proves he's obviously a talented, intelligent writer with a wry wit.

That being said, this is primarily a novel for litfic lovers. I firmly believe horror can be a beautiful, intelligent, well-written genre. But this wasn't really horror as much as it was litfic using horror tropes. And litfic is always iffy for me, but I liked this more than I usually would like litfic.

Zombies!! Whitehead gives much more than the first blush zombie survival chase, and the writing is really delightful. Slooooow down. I loved the ending (rare).

A literary zombie novel. Yes, you read me right. I'm 100 pages from being done. And this is about as far as I'm going to go with it. It wasn't... bad, per se. It had some really interesting ideas and interesting world building but the convoluted language and unnecessary jumping around in timeline meant I slogged through most of it.
There is one line, though, that made the book almost worth getting through. I laughed so hard.

“They wore ponchos, and what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.”

There. Now you don't have to read Zone One unless you really, really want to.

Couldn't finish. Too prosy and not enough action. Also, the style of writing made it hard to follow the narrative...if there was a narrative.

My first foray into the Zombie genre. Reminds me a lot of Vietnam and World War II historical fiction that I've read in the past, with soldiers longing for a return to normal (though they know it will never arrive). The narrative style jumps back and forth a lot, which was actually a really great way to tell this story, but it did make it difficult at times to pick back up and remember where you had left off. Overall, great read, and definitely good for baby's first Zombie book. I suppose World War Z is next

Never thought that a zombie novel could read like literature. Not much of a plot, but the writing is fantastic.

couldn' t finish it there was no excitement. Reminded me of the walking dead tv show,which i stopped watching.

I wish I could hate this book to death.

Meh...not that great. The story jumps around way to much from pre incident to post incident, then into dreamland. You are just not very sure where you are in the story a lot of the time.

Its zombies in NYC. How can that be bad? Well...as it turns out, it can be. Very very slow. The story of an everyman survivor named Mark Spitz after the zombie plague. Mark Spitz was hard to care about. Not good. Did manage to get all the way to the end. But barely. I felt like I was reading Wuthering Heights, in that I wanted everyone to just die by the end of the novel.

An incredibly introspective and thoughtful zombie apocalypse novel, although it does get a little too introspective and thoughtful at times. In much of the first third of the novel, there's not much in the way of zombie action, or any action. If I hadn't been for the relatively short length of the novel (~250 pages), I very well may have given up on the book. But I'm glad I didn't. As the characters begin to share their stories about the apocalypse and how they survived, the book becomes addictively readable.

An incredibly introspective and thoughtful zombie apocalypse novel, although it does get a little too introspective and thoughtful at times. In much of the first third of the novel, there's not much in the way of zombie action, or any action. If I hadn't been for the relatively short length of the novel (~250 pages), I very well may have given up on the book. But I'm glad I didn't. As the characters begin to share their stories about the apocalypse and how they survived, the book becomes addictively readable.