Introduction
Rarely in our world, in what we believe to be “modern,” “civilized” society, is chaos considered desirable. Order is what we strive for instead: it gives us our government, the social systems upon which we rely, and shapes the structure of our daily lives. While in the abstract, chaos can seem like an exciting, even desirable departure from the status quo, in the context of a global pandemic (like the one through which we are currently living), disorder and uncertainty often prove more terrifying than the virus itself. Which stores will close, and for how long? Who exactly is at risk of infection? When will we be allowed to see our friends again? Chaos, in this context, becomes the enemy of societal survival, threatening humanity’s civilized self-image and testing communal ideals. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts both use the pandemic setting to investigate ideas about chaos and its relationship to civilization, but their pathogen of choice is no ordinary infective. In both books, a zombie crisis is responsible for the destruction of humanity as we know it, making tangible anxieties about how we define ourselves in opposition to one another, and what it really means to be “civilized.”