This chapter will discuss two separate approaches to the zombie novel from Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011), and Percival Everett, The Trees (2021). Whitehead’s novel has been read on occasion as deploying the framework of a fantasy novel in order to discuss the legacy of a number of different contemporary momentous events in mind (e.g., September 11, 2001), but given that Whitehead has openly stated in interview that he “wasn’t directly writing about 9/11 in Zone One” (Naiman 2015), then the focus will be on the different ways in which the zombie motif comes to function as a metaphor for anxieties and trauma inflicted upon both the individual and the city which they come to inhabit. By contrast, Everett’s mordant satire, The Trees (2021), is set in the town of Money, Mississippi, where a series of murders lead to two African American detectives being brought in to investigate what are assumed to be retributive acts but turn out to be connected with the historic practice of lynching. Alongside each body is a beaten and bloody black corpse which bears a striking resemblance to Emmett Till and what begins as a hunt for a serial killer turns into a mass movement threatening the lives of white people across the United States of America.