04 July 2012

Zone One ~ Colson Whitehead

 X NO NO NO X

How to turn yourself into a Zombie
Bore yourself stupid reading this!

I think this may have turned me off zombies for a while (not matter, there are always werewolves and vampires).

One line of thought could be that this more literary author was attempting a more literary style of zombie narrative ... another is that he was just "taking the mickey" out of the reader.  And personally, I lean towards the second.  I think it was a shameful poke at readers of dystopian futures where he swathed his premise in higher order gobbledy-gook and pretended that he has written a deep-and meaningful literary work for them.

This was so poorly written.  I have not read any of his "serious" fiction - and am totally disinclined to do so! There were repeated lists. Lists of who did what, who was there, what they were doing, what they were wearing, what they had done.  And then just a page later you would have another long string lazy writing with background information provided by yet another list.  He achieved the amazing feat of overwriting and underwriting at the same time!

Maybe it is just "author jealousy" and he was trying to emulate the amazing Margaret Atwood who does powerful "literary" and "dystopian".  Give up Mr Whitehead!!!