Another Zombie Apocalypse in Suck City

I had a four-hour stretch in front of me, a beautiful spring day to squander beneath the sleek silver cover of Zone One. I ended up taking a three-and-a-half hour nap. Even with the concrete steps pressed against my back and the wind lashing my hair across my face, Whitehead’s words still lulled me into a near-catatonic state. It seems strange that a book imbued with suspense could have this effect. We’re dealing with zombies, after all, and though Whitehead goes to great lengths to describe “the dead” in stunning detail and to construct impenetrable sentences, still... so sleepy.

Whitehead shows his skill for poetic cadence, but because the sentences give the reader little information about the characters, they end up feeling hollow. For example: “[O]n Gary the weight loss registered not as the result of scarcity but as the slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing.” The slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing. Beautifully rendered, but what does this sentence tell us about Gary or the narrator, Mark Spitz? The dominant presence here is Whitehead, not the characters or the effect they have on one another.

Another example: “What impotent rebellion they enacted, feebly tapping the leather facsimile of their horns and spitting the top-shelf profanities.” Spitting the top-shelf profanities. Lovely, but can we hear the profanities, please? Can we see Spitz interacting with his surroundings? I kept waiting for Spitz to lose control, to dissolve into the chaos that spawned his new-found identity. Instead we get Whitehead’s measured prose, his bloated language and heartless characters.

I continued to read. Each night I would open the book and let lifeless sentence after sentence wash over me. I felt apathy toward the characters and their fate. And yet when I fell asleep, I would dream exclusively of the dead. For weeks after I finished the book, they haunted my dreams, invading my apartment, crashing into windshields, dodging shotgun bullets. I would awaken, sweat-drenched and afraid, and fall right back into the same dream. I lost hours of restful sleep in breathless flight.

At the same time that I was reading Zone One, I was finishing Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn’s memoir about becoming and not becoming his father. Surprisingly, I noticed many congruences. As Spitz sweeps Manhattan’s high-rises, searching for dead to eliminate, Flynn navigates Boston’s streets, plucking the homeless from park benches. Both Spitz and Flynn work for government agencies, both voluntarily confront that which others would prefer to ignore.

I used these parallels to trace a path to the underlying cause of my nightmares. Like the protagonists in these stories, my dream-self was caught in a running loop, motivated by fear. In one of the latter nightmares, I dreamed the dead approached my apartment, and I had to make a split decision, leave or die. I wedged one cat beneath each armpit, confident of our escape, and looked down only to discover my lovelies had slipped into the realm of the undead. Heartbroken, horrified, I watched my life transform into something unrecognizable, something that I could not maneuver into a recognizable place, and so I ran.


As Spitz and Flynn confront the city’s dead weight, they also run from their past lives, resurrecting their worst memories at every turn, refusing to live in the present. They work for government agencies so they can maintain positions slightly above the population they service, confronting it without dissecting its presence in their own lives. They live on the outskirts of their fear, hovering above that which they seek to control. As Flynn notes in the beginning of his memoir, “[I] sensed he was circling close, that we were circling each other, like planets unmoored.”

The nightmares continued, and I began to wonder how long one could circle. How long could Spitz, Flynn, and I maintain the illusion of control? Even as the walls of Spitz’s encampment buckle under the weight of the dead, Spitz remains euphoric, smiling because “he hadn’t felt this alive in months.” Likewise, after Flynn finally accepts an invitation to his father’s apartment, he gives orders, asking only “that he not appear at the shelter, that he not fuck up my job,” attempting to steer his father’s life away from his own.

In Zone One, Whitehead never yields his command of language. It’s because of this precision that Spitz’s final acquiescence feels false. The final sentences of the novel show the narrator walking into “the sea of the dead,” confronting the present reality and relinquishing control, but we never get the sense that Whitehead follows him there. We see Flynn, however, approach his father and recoil. We see the city swallow him and spit him back out. By the end of the memoir, when Flynn meets with his father and remains peaceful, we know his struggle and find solace in the fact that he was finally able to let go.

I had another zombie dream a few weeks after reading Zone One. It started out like the rest: trembling hands loading bullets into a shotgun as the dead approached the back of my motorcycle. But then something strange happened. I was bitten. I became a zombie. I stood among my fellow zombies, shotgun lowered, no longer running. The fear subsided, and I began to consider my new identity. “I’m a zombie now,” I said in the dream, “but it’s okay.” And I haven’t had a nightmare since.