At the risk of turning Boyle’s innovations into a rule, what, then, are Zone One ’s distinct contributions to the zombie genre and its symptomatic reflections of our lived historical present? Early reviews of Zone One treated Whitehead’s foray into zombie fiction as a kind of literary slumming Glen Duncan compared it to “an intellectual dating a porn star” and predicted that horror fans would dismiss the novel for its high-minded digressions in lieu of blood-and-guts action. 1 I recognize that, for genre purists, to call the infected horde of Boyle’s film “zombies” is incorr (.)ġ If, as Maitland McDonagh wrote of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… (2002), “Every generation gets the zombies it deserves,” then what are we to make of Colson Whitehead’s 2011 novel Zone One, which Andrew Hoberek has unironically described as “the greatest American novel of the twenty-first century” (“Living” 406)? Boyle’s film was lauded both for breathing new life into a decaying genre by introducing fast-moving zombies 1 (Osmond 39) and for seizing upon, with the Rage virus, the cultural zeitgeist of “demagoguery and terrorism, intolerance and road rage” (Kaltenbach).
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