Author of the week: Colson Whitehead

last updated 8 January 2015

Colson Whitehead is most likely the first MacArthur genius who’s published a zombie novel, said Rohan Preston in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The author of John Henry Days and The Intuitionist possesses serious literary credentials, but he always knew that one day he’d take on the undead. Whitehead’s Zone One, which chronicles a zombie invasion of New York, was inspired by a dream he’s been having since he was 12. “Some people have anxiety dreams about talking to an assembly and they’re naked or they forgot the big presentation,” he says. “I’ve had zombie dreams for the last 30 years, where it’s the underworld, I’m with people or not, they’re fast or slow, they talk, they don’t, I escape or don’t.”

Zone One owes a debt to the movies Whitehead grew up with, both about zombies and about his New York hometown, said Jennifer Vineyard in New York. “Whatever my brother and I could rent—splatter movies, Hammer horror, Dario Argento, George Romero,” he says. And then there were dystopian flicks like Escape From New York, which captured Whitehead’s own sense that his city was crumbling. “I thought they were documentaries for a long time,” he says. A mass crisis set in New York instantly evokes 9/11. “That’s in there, for sure,” he says. But Whitehead also just sees New York as a zombie kind of town—a place where it’s not unreasonable to fear that an innocuous-looking crowd could suddenly turn against you. “There’s a herd of zombies in Grand Central right now,” he says.