But there’s no actual mention of the word zombie in your book … I’m glad to finally pay tribute to it all! And I Am Legend? Even though that’s technically about vampires, it spawned the whole zombie apocalypse genre, including Night of the Living Dead. Lovecraft, all of that and whatever my brother and I could rent from Crazy Eddie: splatter movies, Hammer horror, Dario Argento, George Romero … anything with a societal breakdown. Pretty much! The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Clive Barker, H.P.

Your main character, Mark Spitz, grew up on monster movies and classic horror. Once it had gotten into hunting for the kid, I was upset. I thought the premiere was a good start, though - the first half-hour was very good. They probably were only thinking in general, the horrific-ness of the month, people dressing up and going trick-or-treating or going on zombie walks. The glacial pace of putting out a book forbids that kind of planning, and I don’t think those sorts of things are on publisher timetables. I think my publisher was just glad to have it in time for Halloween. But back to those zombiesĭid you time the release of Zone One so you’d be in the middle of zombie fever, what with The Walking Dead season two premiere and Comic-Con over the weekend? We spoke to the author and learned that he actually is a huge horror-movie fan, has very mixed feelings about Hollywood book options, and his vision of a crumbling city under siege was fed by his memories of Manhattan in the seventies. With a résumé that includes a Harvard degree, a MacArthur Fellowship, and five seriously well-received previous books, native New Yorker Colson Whitehead has now delivered a zombie novel? Yes, he has - although, being a Whitehead work, Zone One is not what you might expect.

Colson whitehead zombie novel