Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Zombie narratives tend to fall into two camps:  depressing and ironically funny.  Some are both.  Colson Whitehead's Zone One is both, at times, but it is also beautiful and rich and occasionally profound.  

Zombies tend to be fairly transparent metaphors -- they began as the enslaved workers of Haitian sugar plantations, but then came to be stand-ins for any and all disempowered worked drones.  For Whitehead, though, they reflect all of us.  There are two varieties of "skels" to be fought: the active, hungering type, lumbering around and tearing off hunks of the flesh of the temporarily-still-living; and the "stragglers," who are frozen in a moment, arrested in inscrutable trances.  They stand at copy machines, or gaze blankly at shuttered boutique windows, as apparently oblivious to the ruin within the shops and to the ruin within themselves:  

Why this particular juice joint and not another, why this neighborhood greasy spoon, synagogue, bookstore, 99 cent store? … The window-shopper bewitched before a boarded up department-store window, taking in a long-removed display that nonetheless unfurled its exquisitely arranged baubles behind the plywood.

The protagonist, ironically dubbed "Mark Spitz," after the great Olympic Swimmer, reflects on the stragglers:

They were safe in their houses.  In front of the televisions, of course, a host of this type biding their time until the electricity came back on, the problem was solved, and the program resumed where it had stopped.  All the time in the world.  Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment...

And later, on the plague's impact on his own emotional state:

The world stalled out at his edges.  Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.  He was not alone. 'Survivors are slow or incapable of forming new attachments,' or so the latest diagnosis droned, although a cynic might identify this as a feature of modern life merely intensified or fine-tuned with the introduction of the plague.

"Mark Spitz" succeeds in this impossible situation.  He is a survivor not because he is exceptional -- he isn't -- not because is he particularly brave or strong or smart or noble.  He succeeds because the zombie plague reduces everyone to total mediocrity.  The skels staggering around are pathetic.  They are weak and slow and dumb, only dangerous because they are so infectious and so very, very numerous.

There are moments of gore, but they are not the point.  This is not disaster-porn, not horror for the sake of conjuring disgust and revulsion.  It is a cerebral novel, with a great deal to say about us and our condition.