Zone One
Colson Whitehead
Harvill Secker, 272pp, £14.99

In the replacement genealogies of futuristic noir, the zombie seems to have come up trumps, an oozing, flesh-eating cipher that stands at once for our terror of being trapped in an­d evicted from an unpredictable world. The zombie apocalypse, as played out in Night of the Living Dead, I Am Legend and 28 Days Later, yokes together survivalist fantasies of a depopulated urban setting with gleeful fetishisation of bodies in a state of anatomical undress. Rich territory for a novelist who wants to examine contemporary America through the lens of its destruction.

In keeping with tradition, a global pandemic has converted much of humanity into gruesome, plague-blind zombies, a lumbering army hell-bent on eating their former neighbours. After this Last Night, society had rapidly unravelled. Now, a few years on, the army has managed to secure downtown Manhattan by building a wall between "skel" and human zones. However, before the flagship city of the American Phoenix, as the nation has been jazzily rebranded, can be colonised, Mark Spitz and his fellow "sweepers" must finish mopping up the last of the undead still lurking in office blocks and subway stations.

Spitz, whose real name has long since been lost and whose Last Night narrative involved watching his mother chow down on his father's intestines, seems destined, by virtue of his unstinting mediocrity, to survive the crashing down of civilisation. At first, Whitehead seems to be using this Newfoundland of devastation as a way of riffing prettily on the mores of consumer culture. Mark is an ardent archae­ologist of the dead world, wistfully logging the furnishings of late capitalism between exterminations: "the particle-board media centres laden with layaway plasma, limited-issue replicas of Danish-modern wardrobes, the beloved go-to recliners grimed at the armrests from summers of sweat".

Nor, for that matter, are the zombies immune to the blandishments of nostalgia. One per cent of the plague's victims have turned into "stragglers", apparently harmless, static figures, compelled to repeat a single loved or otherwise significant activity, be it flying a kite or loading a photocopier: "Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment."

Though the landscape of the book is every bit as dark, this combination of dreamy inventiveness and modish irony saves Zone One from the portentous grimness of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. As Mark's troubling flashbacks reveal, the wilderness of the "interregnum" - a term prompted more by hope than reality - is populated by mobs of bandits whose (offstage) acts of rape and torture threaten to rival the zombies in their inventive horror. Faced with the annihilation of "the indulgence of democracy", the survivors cling to their increasingly murky humour. When Mark encounters a bereaved mother sheltering in a toyshop, she shows him her weapon of choice, a fire axe, and then adds perkily: "But I prefer running wherever possible. The cardio."

The stylistic exuberance on display would be overwhelming if it weren't so well controlled, shifting weightlessly from M*A*S*H-style battle narrative to a melancholic, Blade Runner-like vision of urban devastation. (In Mark's recurring delusion, caused by post-apocalyptic stress disorder, the ash of the dead falls in a soiling rain over the ruined city.) The smallest of details is marked by originality of language.

For instance, Gary, the sole survivor of triplets, speaks in a near-perpetual first person plural, an enriching linguistic quirk. By superimposing the geography of hell on to that of Manhattan, Whitehead plays with the idea that the consumption of the individual is part of the eternal narrative of New York, a bastardised riff on the Statue of Liberty's promise. Mark recalls his childhood terror of the city's greedy maw, chomping down on its hapless inhabitants. At other moments, it is human patterns of behaviour that are parodied by the plague. The dead throng the streets like commuters, "still proudly indicating, despite their grime and wounds and panoply of leaking orifices, the tribes to which they had belonged, in gray pinstriped suits, classic rock T-shirts, cowboy boots, dashikis, striped cashmere cardigans, fringed suede vests".

As such scenes suggest, this profoundly thoughtful novel is above all visual, creating its topography of the future with meticulous care. Among the many weirdly beautiful images, one stands out, both historically resonant and appropriate to the cobbled aesthetic of the end times. The cart used to collect zombie corpses is drawn by the last surviving horse from the Central Park tourist trade. Its presence is heralded by the cheerful tinkling of a bell attached to the cart, in a bathetic, period-locating flourish, with a shower rail. Zone One is a dark mirror, to be sure, but there is no doubt it is our own age that is being scrutinised here.

Olivia Laing is the author of "To the River" (Canongate, £16.99)