“I believe the dead are at peace, but it is not right to speak of them with levity.” ― Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights

"Yes, A Questionable Shape is that zombie novel you’ve been hearing about, but don’t believe the publicity: Bennett Sims, the book’s author, is barely interested in genre at all. This isn’t even The Keep or Motherless Brooklyn—something that stokes the intellect while still delivering generic thrills. I get no sense Bennett Sims loves zombies.

     Mostly, this book is concerned with memory. The undead 'return to the familiar,' wandering 'to nostalgically charged sites from their former lives.' Do they understand why they remember what they remember? Do any of us? For all the talk about the undead, Sims uses very few tropes from zombie narratives—not even to subvert them. He demonstrates little affection for genre….
     Over and over again, Sims demonstrates astonishing skill with image. Shadows sweep 'back and forth, like a massive phantasmal broom.' The wax at the base of a candlestick looks 'as if a congregation of gnarled ghosts was kneeling in prayer before the flame.' These similes transform the familiar world into surreal gems, so concrete that I can feel each in my hand."
— Benjamin Rybeck, ElectricLiterature
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"Quirk Books’s spring catalog [2009] features at least one title I’d like to get my hands on: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Like a DVD loaded with extras, the book includes the original text of the Regency classic, juiced up with 'all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.'”

— Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times
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Genre-slumming

"A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star. It invites forgivable prurience: What is that relationship like? Granted the intellectual’s hit hanky-panky pay dirt, but what’s in it for the porn star? Conversation? Ideas? Deconstruction?
With the human odd couples, the answer stays behind closed doors (until divorce yields the tremulous interview or hemorrhaging memoir), but with their novelistic analogues, it’s all ours for less than $30.
     [...] The novel is set chiefly in Manhattan, some time after a plague has turned a majority of the world’s population into zombies (or, as Whitehead calls them, 'skels,' short for 'skeletons'). Skels are of two kinds. They’re either dozily rabid predators reduced to a monolithic imperative — eat living flesh — or they’re 'stragglers,' harmless catatonics piteously stuck at their former posts.
    Geographically, 'Zone One' is everything south of Canal Street, a barriered region largely cleared of the undead by the military. Local authority is the brass at 'Fort 'Wonton' in Chinatown, while national administrative power lies with the new provisional government in Buffalo. Civilization is attempting a comeback. According to propaganda, the 'American Phoenix' is rising, thanks to frail corporate sponsorship and therapy for those suffering from P.A.S.D. (post-apocalyptic stress disorder). There’s an Orwellian slogan, 'We Make Tomorrow!' (which I heartily wish didn’t remind me of 'Yes We Can') and a new morale-boosting anthem: “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme From ‘Reconstruction’).” There are also 'sweepers' teams of quasi-military volunteers who go in after the Marines to pick off any stragglers the primary purge might have missed.
     [...] There will be grumbling from self-appointed aficionados of the undead (Sir, I think the author will find that zombies actually . . .) and we’ll have to listen for another season or two to critics batting around the notion that genre-slumming is a recent trend, but none of that will hurt Zone One, which is a cool, thoughtful and, for all its ludic violence, strangely tender novel, a celebration of modernity and a pre-emptive wake for its demise. If this is the intellectual and the porn star, they look pretty good together. For my money, they have a long and happy life ahead of them."
— Glen Duncan, The New York Times (Sunday Book Review)

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