War is devastating. To the land where the fighting takes place, to the frail bodies and minds of the combatants. The Red Zone (aka Zone Rouge) is a region of north eastern France so environmentally damaged by the First World War that the area was restricted from permanent settlement. As the years have gone by, bodies have been gathered and buried, shrapnel, explosives, gas shells and the detritus of war rework their way to the surface, known as the iron harvest. Michael Jerome Plunkett's Zone Rouge is a dual fictional narrative, with choral interludes about lives lived in this zone.

At opening, we are shown the difficulties of life in the zone, as it details a farmer using magnets to remove metal shards from the stomachs of his cows. From their we meet the group of Demineurs (de-miners) whose lives are spent disarming and gathering the century old explosives. They are lead by Ferrand Martin, a figure with a tragic past whose health is failing. The other 'main' character is Hugo LaFleur, the 'mayor' (an honorary title), seeking to revitalize the area through connections and growth of business, he is also a serial philanderer, seemingly unable to meet a women without pursuing her. And he is married with two children. These two stories are inter cut with short entries about the work of the Demineurs narrated by the collective 'we' and entries from academics or researchers.

Philosophically it offers much in consideration of the effects of war, the struggle to rebuild what was lost or destroyed. Ferrand's narrative is very depressed, considering the value of life and how a day to day job can at least provide a sense of momentum, but the loss of it leaves one unmoored. His tragic past is hinted at, and eventually revealed, but seems surprisingly clumsy. Would one really be so careless, especially knowing full well the risks?

Hugo's narrative, which at best serves as a contrast to Ferrand, seems purposefully stereo typically male. A striver out to gain the most, selfish of his time and forever seeking conquests. He does not respond well to no, and perhaps this reflects his inner dithering and weak feelings when confronted with more traditionally robust male figures, like the demienurs. Hugo is very much the weakest part of Zone Rouge .

A book that could leave one thoughtful to consider their own legacy, the main plot ably serves to make one consider the weight of history and how that time lingers in both the body and mind.

Recommended to readers of historical fiction, psychological effects of war or the male in fiction.

“Zone Rouge” isn’t a story of battles fought, but of what war leaves behind. In Verdun, where the earth still bleeds shrapnel and gas a century later, Plunkett follows the démineurs tasked with clearing the land. Each shell unearthed is a reminder that the war never really ended; it only shifted underground, seeping into soil, bodies, and memory.

Through Martin and his team, the novel lingers on exhaustion that no sleep can cure, the endless math of shells still waiting to be found, and the knowledge that their work may take centuries and never truly be finished. Verdun itself becomes a ghost: streets like funeral homes, craters like broken teeth, a landscape smiling grimly at the living.

Plunkett avoids any trace of romanticism. He writes of cancer born from toxins, of grief that clings like residue, of men who shoulder both explosives and memory. The book moves between the grit of daily labor and the haunting presence of ghosts, silence, and life forcing its way through scarred ground.

What makes “Zone Rouge” powerful is its refusal to offer closure. It shows how the past is never fully buried, how trauma is absorbed by land and people alike, and how the smallest acts such as a calm word, a steady hand, even a piece of shrapnel turned into jewelry can resist erasure.

This is a haunting, unflinching novel about history’s echo. Not war stories, but aftermath. Not monuments, but residue. And in that residue, the truth that memory is work, slow, dangerous, and necessary.

-SemperRead

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for the ARC. I enjoyed the premise and found the writing engaging overall. Some parts didn’t fully land for me, but it was still an interesting and thoughtful read. I think many readers of this genre will enjoy it.

The Battle of Verdun ended on December 18, 1916. Millions of artillery and gas shells had been fired over the course of the nine-month battle. We don’t know how many people were killed during the battle because so many of the dead were never found and recovered. Estimates of wounded and dead are in the hundreds of thousands. One hundred and nine years later, land around Verdun and other World War I battle sites still contains unexploded ordnance, human remains, and poison. Historian Christina Holstein estimates that it will take at least 300 years to clean up just the Verdun battle site. In Zone Rouge, Michael Jerome Plunkett creates dueling portraits of two men who live in Verdun, whose lives metaphorically explode for good and ill.

Ferrand Martin has been a démineur—a minesweeper—for decades by the time we meet him at the beginning of Zone Rouge. He’s known for his steadiness. His calmness reassures new recruits to the de-mining department of Verdun; his hands are renowned for the way they smoothly defuse century-old ordnance. Like the other members of the crew, Ferrand goes where he has been called: farms where bombs have been ploughed up, old houses where people have found gas canisters while gardening. The crew gathers everything up and takes it away to be safely destroyed. The only thing that breaks the routine is when they uncover human bones. When that happens, academics and forensic experts have to be called in to recover the dead. Sometimes, though rarely, they can find out who the person was in life.

Ferrand’s quiet heroism contrasts sharply against our other protagonist, Hugo LaFleur. Hugo is the (symbolic) mayor of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, one of the “towns that died for France.” Not only is Hugo the kind of person always angling to make money, he’s also the kind who chases every woman who might give him the time of day. It doesn’t matter that he has a wife and child, or that he has a comfortable living, or that no one is all that enthusiastic about his schemes; Hugo just can’t seem to help himself.

Plunkett switches back and forth from Ferrand to Hugo to show us what each man is made of when the mud and merde start to fly. Plunkett also muses on the futility of World War I and its semi-forgotten dead and the possibility of ever restoring the land of the Zone Rouge. Can the land ever be restored? Fleury and the other dead towns will never be what they were, but maybe someday children will be able to run through the woods without fear and the livestock will be able to graze without having to have their stomachs inspected for old shrapnel. Maybe, someday, arsenic, chlorine, and other toxic substances will be cleansed from the soil and water. And whose job will it be to do the cleaning, now that more than a century has passed and everyone involved in causing or fighting the war is long gone?

Zone Rouge is often melancholy but I very much appreciated its emotional and intellectual depth.

I really enjoyed this gently sad tale of the destruction left behind after WW1. As the demineurs work endlessly to clear the area around Verdun of artillery and explosives left buried, the community still suffers the consequences of the pollution and desecration of their lands, and the local (unlikeable) mayor works to capitalize wheresoever he can. A human story unfolds as we follow Martin at the end of his career and his illness, but ultimately this story resonates with the echoes of long spent conflict.

Zone Rouge by Michael Jerome Plunkett is a stark and evocative meditation on the haunting legacy of war. Set in the contaminated battlefields of Verdun, the novel follows Ferrand Martin and his team of démineurs—men tasked with defusing the unexploded ordnance still buried beneath French soil over a century after World War I.

Plunkett’s prose is quiet yet powerful, much like the landscape he depicts: scarred, silenced, and poisoned, but never truly at rest. The discovery of a perfectly preserved skeleton deep in the zone serves as the novel’s chilling axis, reminding readers that history does not die—it waits. Through Ferrand’s weary gaze and failing body, the novel explores themes of memory, futility, ecological ruin, and the Sisyphean weight of inherited violence.

What makes Zone Rouge so compelling isn’t just its historical setting, but its philosophical undercurrent—the sense that the ground beneath us holds more than earth. It's a novel of buried grief and the ghosts of a century, told with restraint, precision, and poetic depth.

A profound and timely work for readers who value literary fiction with historical and existential weight.

The novel follows various characters involved in the clean-up of the Zone Rouge, an area in France contaminated by ordnance from WWI.

The book opens with a chapter told in the collective voice of the démineurs as they describe their work. A man uses a magnet to remove steel from the stomachs of his cattle. I thought this chapter was easily the strongest part of the novel. The voice it developed was really eerie and striking, and I was looking forward to more. However, the novel moves into a more conventional narrative, split between various characters.

Mostly, we follow the mayor and a single démineur, Martin, as the full skeleton of someone who may be a WWI soldier is discovered in the Zone. This discovery seems to be the focal point of the novel. However, I felt like the chapters became a series of alternating, loosely connected short-stories that were just about linked by this. I suppose the discovery of the skeleton and the subsequent attempts to identify it are meant to show an attempt to impose order on chaos. Having so many voices seems to be a way to depict life in teeming, expansive confusion, countered with the indifference and silence of death and history. To be honest, though, so many voices in a relatively short book makes the narrative feel undercooked at times. And they spend a lot of their chapters monologuing about the effects of war. So much so that at times I wondered if the author even trusted the reader to get the point. Less of that and more time spent in their actual lives would have been great.

The writing was far stronger during Martin’s chapters. Behind the first second-person chapter, these were my favourite. I think the novel would have been much stronger had it focused on him. I sensed that the author had a real affection for him, and this came through in the prose. His story feels resonant with what’s happening in the book and I would have liked to read more from him.

Overall, I found the themes of environmental destruction leaching into the lives of the people who live there, and the imbrication of history into the present, interesting. I just think the plot and characters needed a bit more weight.

While not exuding literariness exactly, I found the novel fascinating for its depiction of war ecologies. I recently attended a workshop on political ecology, where one presenter discussed the durational effects of "blasted landscapes" produced by war. Interestingly, the presenter discussed the war in Bosnia and its minefields. The novel's themes overlapped in an incredible feat of synchronicity. Furthermore, I learned that Bosnia actually exports demining knowledge, which resonates with the narrative. In terms of war ecologies, the novel effectively depicts the effects on not only humans, but also the non-human and more-than-human environments. The novel opens with a cow dying from eating too much shrapnel. There are also pertinent passages about trees and forests related to the more-than-human turn in the humanities. I certainly plan to return to the novel for a paper or two that I intend to write.