Z For Zachariah

Z for Zachariah (1974) by Robert C. O’Brien is a young adult dystopian novel. It tells the story of Ann Burden, who survives a nuclear war that destroys the world thanks to a natural phenomenon that keeps her valley safe from radiation. After over a year alone, she awakes one morning to a column of smoke, and John Loomis—a scientist who has traveled for weeks in a protective suit—arrives and disrupts her life of solitude. Through these two characters, the novel explores themes of The Desire for Power, The Tension Between Community and Autonomy, and The Conflict Between Technology and Nature.

Although O’Brien died in 1973, his wife and daughter completed Z for Zachariah based on his notes and then published it posthumously. The novel received critical praise for its psychological exploration of Ann’s fear, isolation, and struggle to survive and has since become a seminal work in the dystopian genre. It was nominated for the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award and won the Edgar Award for mystery fiction.

This guide refers to the Aladdin Paperbacks first edition of the novel, published in 1987.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of sexual violence, illness, death, and animal death.

Plot Summary

Ann Burden lives in a valley somewhere in the United States after a nuclear war has annihilated most life on earth. As far as she knows, she is the last living human. She has been alone for over a year, after her family left to search for survivors and never returned. Due to a geographic anomaly, she is protected from radiation in the valley. She has a farm, a garden, cows, hens, and a general store nearby for supplies.

Over several days, Ann watches as a column of smoke—indicating the presence of another person—gradually moves closer to the valley. As the man comes into view, she decides to watch him and see if it is safe before revealing her presence. He stops at her home—where she has destroyed all signs of her presence— and then explores the valley. He swims in Burden Creek—which Ann has determined is radioactive—and then stumbles back to his tent and vomits violently, collapsing inside for hours.

Ann makes the decision to check on the man in his tent. He is delirious and calls her “Edward,” so she fetches him water and helps him regain consciousness. He tells her that his name is John Loomis. He was a scientist who worked to develop material that could resist nuclear radiation. From this material, he built a suit that he has worn into the valley and a protective cover for his wagon and supplies. He walked for weeks to the valley without seeing anyone alive. Ann asks him about Edward, and Loomis becomes visibly uncomfortable, but he insists that he was just another man who worked in the lab.

Loomis recovers from his fever and acts normal for the next several days. Although he insists that his sickness will return and be much worse, they take advantage of his period of lucidity. He explains to Ann how to access the gasoline at the general store using a handpump, which allows her to plow the field with a tractor. After a week, as Loomis predicted, his fever returns much worse than before.

Ann spends the next several days caring for Loomis. She regularly works to keep him warm and get him water, and she even reads to him and plays the piano, hoping that it will comfort him. However, each time she leaves the house to work on her chores, Loomis grows frantic and delirious in her absence. One day, she comes home to find him outside his tent, and she watches as he gets out his gun and shoots two bullets into the upstairs. She calms him down, as he claims that Edward was in the house. Later, she overhears him reliving an argument with Edward in his delirium. The two fought over the safe-suit, as Edward wanted it to go check on his family. She hears Loomis threaten him with a gun and then checks the safe-suit and finds that there are three patched-over bullet holes in the chest. She rationalizes Loomis’s actions, telling herself that he acted in self-defense—to save both himself and possibly humanity—and decides that even though he is likely a murderer, she wants him to survive.

When Loomis finally recovers, Ann continues to support him by bringing food to his room and helping him walk. She hears him practicing walking a few times on his own, but when she checks on him, he reacts in anger out of embarrassment, so she decides to let him work on it on alone. The two discuss the field and her garden, and Loomis gets angry at her when he learns that she neglected her work while he was sick. She tries to explain how much care he needed but decides that he is only annoyed because he is passionate about her work, as now both of their survivals depend on the ability to grow food. 

As Ann and Loomis live together, she slowly becomes more uneasy about the things he does. While sitting on the porch one day, she tries to find out about his history by asking if he was ever married. He reacts by aggressively grabbing her hand and pulling her out of her chair, forcing her to lean uncomfortably while he demands to know why she is asking. She tries to explain that she was just curious, and he pulls harder on her, causing her to accidentally strike him in the face. He angrily informs her that she should not have done that, and she awkwardly goes into the kitchen to cook, telling herself that she misread the situation.

Loomis starts watching her in the field while she works, making her feel as though he has taken control of her. He forces her to read at night, and when she skips several pages, she realizes that he is not even listening to her. The next night, he forces her to play the piano while she grows increasingly uncomfortable about sitting with her back to him. Then, one night when Ann goes to sleep, her cousin’s dog, Faro, wakes her up in the middle of the night, and she realizes that Loomis is in her bedroom. She pretends to sleep as he approaches the bed and then touches her shoulders, trying to pin her to the bed. She jumps up and fights him off as he scratches her back and tears her shirt. She flees into the forest and back to the cave where she was when he first came to the valley.

Realizing that Loomis will never be happy until he has total control of her, Ann stays in the cave, watching as Loomis trains Faro to track her to her hiding place. Desperate to keep human contact and survive in the valley, Ann tells Loomis that she will continue to come down each day to work the farm, get him supplies, and help him survive—but then go back into hiding each night. Loomis agrees, and they live this way for nearly two weeks.

However, Loomis continues to try to control Ann. He continues to search for her hiding place, hides the key to the tractor so that she needs to ask for it to do her work, and then places a padlock on the store so that she cannot get her own supplies. Ann goes to the house to confront him about it, but Loomis shoots at her from the window, hitting her in the leg in an attempt to incapacitate her. She flees back into the forest, hiding while she cares for her wound and attempts to recover.

Loomis manages to find her by the pond while she cleans her wound and then chases her back to her cave. She gets there first and hides above it, deciding that she needs to shoot Faro so that she can no longer be tracked. However, when Faro approaches, she decides that she can’t do it, instead fleeing while Loomis burns all her belongings at the cave.

For over a month, Ann stays constantly on the move, hiding in the forest. She watches Loomis occasionally as he learns how to use the tractor and tend the field. She begins having a dream of children in a classroom, waiting for their teacher, and she realizes that she needs to find them.

Loomis sets a trap for Ann, luring her to the store by keeping it unlocked. She watches it for hours and then decides that it is safe to approach it; however, Loomis shoots at her from the window, and she flees into the field. She decides to set a trap for Loomis, hiding on the other side of the radioactive Burden Creek. When Loomis comes out into the open, she shoots at him, and he flees into the brush and lets go of Faro. Faro tries to get to Ann, swimming through the creek. He dies later that night, which makes Ann realize that she needs to steal Loomis’s safe-suit and leave the valley for good.

Ann leaves Loomis a note on his porch, telling him to meet her at the south end of the valley. When he heads there, she steals his safe-suit, wagon, and supplies and then takes them out into the waste and leaves the wagon and supplies behind. She returns with only her gun, the safe-suit, and her journal and waits for Loomis to come to her.

Ann decides that she needs to try to speak with Loomis one more time before leaving him forever. He comes toward her angrily with his tractor, waving his gun. She tries to speak with him from her hiding place, and he wildly shoots in her direction. She pulls out her own gun and aims it at him, telling him that he will need to kill her as he did Edward. The mention of Edward’s name upsets Loomis, and he turns his back to her. She thinks she sees him begin to sob as he explains that he had no choice but to kill Edward because he was going to leave him alone. He begs Ann not to leave him, but Ann insists that she is going to leave the valley. She tells him that if she finds anyone, she will send them back to the valley. Surprising Ann, Loomis lets her go.

As Ann walks out into the waste, she hears Loomis yelling to her. She turns back, and he tells her that he saw birds to the west. After walking west for a day, Ann sleeps, and her dream of the children returns. When she wakes up, she sees a stream heading west and decides to follow it, hopeful that she will find a new home.