Last week my sister and I took a road trip to go shopping. She needed a bathing suit for her trip to Mexico this weekend, and I had a Barnes & Noble giftcard from Christmas burning a hole in my pocket. Unfortunately, I walked into Barnes & Noble with no idea what book I wanted. I wandered around a little, waiting for something to jump out at me, but nothing really did. I passed endless tables of romance books, but I'm fairly anti-V-day, so for the most part I ignored them. I wasn't in the mood for non-fiction (as I'm still currently reading "The Geography of Bliss") so I stopped at the "Popular in Fiction" table. There was a Chuck Palahniuk book that I hadn't read yet, an Anne Rice erotic Sleeping Beauty story, a couple others that didn't interest me at all, and this one - "Warm Bodies" by Isaac Marion.
Normally, I wouldn't have even picked it up,since Im not big into the whole zombie thing - though I do love Zombieland and The Walking Dead - but my sister asked if I'd read it. I had never even heard of it or seen the movie trailer, since that's apparently how she knew about it, so I asked what it was about. She said simply, "It's a zombie romance." Let that sink in... a zombie romance. As in necrophilia with flowers. Gross... but intrigueing. I figured that since it was really down to either her suggestion (she asked if she could borrow it when I was done) or "50 Shades of Grey", I decided to give it a shot. It's short. Worse case scenario, if I didn't like it, it would be over quickly.
Well, I need not have feared not liking it. "Warm Bodies" is GREAT. Isaac Marion is an amazing storyteller, and the book manages to be both gruesome and poetic. The protagonist, "R" is a zombie who, upon meeting (and kidnapping) a living girl, Julie, realizes that he wants more out of his eternal existance than the blank day-to-day shuffling about and eating of brains that comprises the zombie lifestyle. Once he realizes that he wants more, he starts to change, to become little by little, less undead.
In one of my favorite passages from the book, "R" is trying to explain to Julie - as you know, zombie diction isn't the best - what life as the undead is like. Even though he talks at a two year-old level, his inner monologues are always beautiful. In this particular instance, he thinks "How to explain it to her in words? The slow death of Quixote. The abandoning of quests, the surrendering of desires, the settling down and settling in that is the inevitable fate of Death." The whole book is is like that. Poetry without pretense. I just loved it.
The story is clever, though borderline cheesy at times, but the writing is where it really shines. It's a brilliant look at the human condition through the eyes of a civilization that has thrown it all away. I'm looking forward to reading Isaac Marion's other two books, but this is a masterful debut novel.
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