I have read and seen a lot of zombie fiction and like the Walking Dead, this book managed to make the over played out material seem fresh and relevant. This is the story of Mark Spitz, a New Yorker, who one night comes home after being out all night with his friend to find his mother killed his father and then tries to kill him. 
 The story is told in a stream of consciousness that at times can drone on and on, but it glitters with what is some incredible literary talent from the author. I think the approach he took in writing this book made it feel absolutely realistic, almost documentary, without being an actual documentary style like "World War Z". It read like you were inside Mark Spitz's head the whole time. 
 Mark tells the story of how he ended up where he is, a part of an organization of makeshift soldiers trying to take back New York City one building at a time. His vivid descriptions of NYC after a zombie invasion makes it feel like its something that actually happened days before. Colson Whitehead's talent is not lost on me in the crafting of this book. But for all the beauty of his dialogue and observations of the world he created for Mark Spitz, this was a difficult book to get through. 
 While I liked the stream of consciousness in the majority of the book, sometimes it began to read as the ramblings of a madman, which is perhaps purposeful as Mark was losing his grip on his humanity as more and more people died around him. His story is so intriguing and the little scenes that are constructed throughout the book, each featuring some curiosity I may have had at one point or another of how a zombie apocalypse would actually affect say a office building, or a toy store. How would the survivors survive? Unfortunately I can only take so much writings from a madman and sometimes I couldn't tell if he was talking about the present or the past. The story merged with no transition and while the book's micro-stories of specific instances in Mark's path to where he was were brilliant and fun reads, the transitions were always a jarring thing to get through. 
 Perhaps the most fascinating thing to me about this book was how it made me realize that society has shaped my mind to assume that the narrator of a book or the protagonist is by default White. But in a small line more than halfway through the book Mark describes the way people always assume he can't swim because he's Black and suddenly I realize that the main character was not what I imagined at all and it made me wonder why I assumed he was White at all. 
 The story concludes with no real ending as Mark is forced to run again and hopes to survive once more. Its not a satisfying ending, but it stays true to the spirit of the book and difficult as it may be to read, I would say its definitely one of my favorite Zombie stories to date.