The story takes place over a weekend in Manhattan indeed, “Zone One,” a dark paean to the Big Apple, is an undead version of Whitehead’s elegant essay collection, “ The Colossus of New York.” It starts, appropriately, with a young man’s fond memory of going into the city with his family to visit an uncle who had all the hottest tech and all the hottest girls. (Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has posted helpful advice for fighting zombie infection.) Readers who wouldn’t ordinarily creep into a novel festooned with putrid flesh might be lured by this certifiably hip writer who can spin gore into macabre poetry. Horror fans hungry for new thrills may find too little meat on these bones - stick with AMC’s “ The Walking Dead” for that - but now that zombies have infected everyone from Jane Austen to the above-average folks at Lake Wobegon, perhaps quieter reflection is in order. Although the ambling, rotting hordes are still here, this is a night of the living dead lit by melancholy and nostalgia rather than violence and terror. Of course, we should have known that Whitehead, the 41-year-old MacArthur Foundation “genius,” wouldn’t do the zombie walk in lock step with George Romero, but what’s most surprising about “ Zone One” is how subtly he reanimates those old body parts for a post-9/11 world. It sounded like another gift from the gods of Halloween, right up there with Justin Cronin’s decision to stop writing lovely, unread novels and give us a bang-up vampire saga. T his spring, word that Colson Whitehead was working on a zombie story spread through literary circles faster than a flesh-eating super virus.

Colson whitehead zombie