Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion is a young-adult zombie novel published by Atria books in April of 2011.
Back Bookcover Copy
R is having a no-life crisis–he is a zombie. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse, but he is a little different from his fellow Dead. He may occasionally eat people, but he’d rather be riding abandoned airport escalators, listening to Sinatra in the cozy 747 he calls home, or collecting souvenirs from the ruins of civilization. And then he meets a girl. First as his captive, then as his reluctant house guest, Julie is a blast of living color in R’s gray landscape and something inside him begins to bloom. He doesn’t want to eat this girl–although she looks delicious–he wants to protect her. But their unlikely bond will cause ripples they can’t imagine, and their hopeless world won’t change without a fight.
Overview
This book takes place in a grim future where society has collapsed and somehow zombies have become real. The local zombies inhabit a defunct airport while the humans reside in an abandoned sports stadium turned shanty town. There are fleshy zombies and ‘bonies’ that are two distinct groups with very different attitudes and goals.
This is the story of the zombie R (which is all he can remember of his name) and the human girl, Julie, who become friends. On a food hunting trip with R and his fellow zombies, we find that zombies love to eat brains because it allows them to temporarily relive the memories of the person whose brains they eat. This is appealing as they have no memories of their own.
R & Julie meet just after he eats the brain of her friend Perry and acquires memories of her. He decides to protect & bring her home rather than eating her. The story proceeds as the friendship between these two grows and R begins to feel less zombielike and slightly more human. We follow the two as they encounter Julie’s friend Nora and Julie’s father who has definite opinions on zombies and how they must be treated.
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Likeable Characters
R is very appealing in his awkward attempt to communicate and relate to Julie, and while I liked Julie, I found her a slightly less realistic character because she wasn’t as fearful of the zombies as I thought she should have been. Yes, I know it’s odd that I felt the zombie was a more realistic character than the human. Julie’s best friend, Nora, is wonderful in the way she goes along with Julie’s wishes regardless of the reservations she has. This is true friendship.
Scary and Funny?
The book manages to be dark & grim and light & comic much at the same time. It is not a rip-roaring fast-paced adventure story which is what I expected, but a thoughtful tale of human/non-human relationships and explores what exactly makes us human as we follow R on his existential journey.
The story leaves us with hope for the future without tying things up in an unrealistic package with a pretty bow on top as a less well written YA story would. It leaves us asking, did the people in this book, as a society, bring zombie-ism upon themselves by their actions, values and behaviors? And it makes one think about how we can keep from making those same mistakes and make our world a better place in general.
Movie Connections
A Film version of this book is being released nationwide on February 1, 2013, starring Nicholas Hoult, who recently played Hank McCoy/Beast in X-Men: First Class, as R and Teresa Palmer, who was Number 6 in I Am Number Four, as Julie.
What’s Next?
Isaac Marion has a prequel novella entitled The New Hunger available for download as an e-book through Zolabooks.com. The New Hunger fills us in on how R & Julie’s world got to be the frightening way it is in Warm Bodies.
