Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

My first exposure to Warm Bodies came in movie form some years back. It's an enjoyably cheesy paranormal rom-com loosely tying Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with Max Brooks' World War Z. In other words, rather than eating her flesh, a zombie by the name of R falls in love with the beautiful, living girl named Julie (R and Julie… I did say loosely) and takes her home. Naturally, I love it.

I just recently finished the first of the three volume series by Isaac Marion--on which the movie was based--and it absolutely blew me away. It is written from the perspective of the undead twenty-something year old zombie, who thinks his name started with an R in his previous life, and holy crap is he funny. R's outlook on life is so raw, well-spoken, and much more highly complex than one would expect from a zombie. For example, when struggling to speak in more than two syllables he thinks to himself, "I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses"(59). In fact, he is self-aware of his intellect, thinking to himself "In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses"(18).

He does not particularly care one way or the other about being undead, until he meets Julie in a group of humans his posse is trying to eat. (In fact, R literally eats Julie's boyfriend… how's that for romance!) He saves her life, cloaking her lively scent under the stink of his rotten blood, and takes her back home to an abandoned airport. Once she's convinced that he is, in fact, NOT going to eat her in her sleep, they bond, co-existing in R's abandoned 747, listening to Sinatra records and going on dates in the abandoned food courts. As fluffy and comedic as these events are, there is a much deeper commentary at work. R is changing and he can feel it. Julie's life and sense of hope inspires him to protect her, and when she sneaks away, to follow her into the deadly human civilization (cue romantic balcony scene…). And not only have they sparked change in R, but in the other undead as well.

Yes, it is a horror, paranormal, romantic comedy. Yes, it is Shakespearean zombies. But it is also an incredibly smart commentary on life in the modern era. Simplified in are view like this, the correlation of life and death with how engaged a person is in their surroundings sounds like a cliché in the same way that a paranormal twist on a classic sounds like a cliché. The concepts of life and death and the (literal and metaphorical) gray area in-between are beautifully warped to Marion's plot and underlying messages. This novel is the exception.