“I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before”

Colson Whitehead talks about his forthcoming novel, Zone One:

1. The premise of Zone One is that a plague has struck the world, forming legions of “skels” — zombies, essentially, though you never use the word. This would seem to be a substantial departure from the introspective and personal terrain you covered in your previous novel, Sag Harbor, which focused on a black teenager living in the Hamptons during the 1980s. What was the appeal of a zombie plague as a literary subject?

I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before. The expansive stage, diverse cast, and loose structure of John Henry Days was a refreshing change from the linear, hermetic narrative of The Intuitionist; the intimacy of the voice in Sag Harbor was a pleasant diversion from the detached, morose narrator of Apex Hides the Hurt. The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well. Until I got to college, I only read horror and science fiction; tales of the fantastic made me love books and want to be a writer. The Intuitionist was my first stab at trying to repurpose a known genre — the detective novel — for my own purposes. It was only a matter of time before I tried my hand at something with monsters and ray guns.

I honestly have no clue what to make of that.

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