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Warm Bodies: A Novel (Warm Bodies Series, The) Paperback – December 25, 2012
| Isaac Marion (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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“Gruesome yet poetic…highly original.” —The Seattle Times
“Dark and funny.” —Wired
“A mesmerizing evolution of a classic contemporary myth.” —Simon Pegg
“A strange and unexpected treat…elegantly written, touching, and fun.” —Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife
“Has there been a more sympathetic monster since Frankenstein’s?” —Financial Times
In Warm Bodies, Isaac Marion’s New York Times bestselling novel that inspired a major film, a zombie returns to humanity through an unlikely encounter with love.
“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 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.
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateDecember 25, 2012
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.64 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-10147671746X
- ISBN-13978-1476717463
- Lexile measureHL740L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Dark and funny.” ― Wired
“Warm Bodies is a terrific zombook. Whether you're warm-bodied or cold-bodied, snuggle up to it with the lights low and enjoy a dead-lightful combination of horror and romance.” ― Examiner.com
“The writing is lively, the characters intriguing, and the creative reinvention of popular themes is thought-provoking.” ― Commonsensemedia.org
“Compulsively readable.” ― Thereadinggate.com
“A masterfully crafted retelling of Romeo & Juliet.” ― Goodereads.com
“Remarkable. From the very first page you are hooked on protagonist R’s story. You actually care about R. Yes, you find yourself really caring about a zombie.” ― Teenlitrocks.com
“Fun and entertaining.” ― Gliterarygirl.com
“Marion’s novel is even better [than the movie], digging deep into sardonic observations about humanity, comic takes on zombie behavior and stirring reflections on what it really means to be alive or dead.” ― Seattle Times
“Artful.” ― The Onion A.V. Club
“Highly original.” ― Seattletimes.com
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
None of us are particularly attractive, but death has been kinder to me than some. I’m still in the early stages of decay. Just the gray skin, the unpleasant smell, the dark circles under my eyes. I could almost pass for a Living man in need of a vacation. Before I became a zombie I must have been a businessman, a banker or broker or some young temp learning the ropes, because I’m wearing fairly nice clothes. Black slacks, gray shirt, red tie. M makes fun of me sometimes. He points at my tie and tries to laugh, a choked, gurgling rumble deep in his gut. His clothes are holey jeans and a plain white T-shirt. The shirt is looking pretty macabre by now. He should have picked a darker color.
We like to joke and speculate about our clothes, since these final fashion choices are the only indication of who we were before we became no one. Some are less obvious than mine: shorts and a sweater, skirt and a blouse. So we make random guesses.
You were a waitress. You were a student. Ring any bells?
It never does.
No one I know has any specific memories. Just a vague, vestigial knowledge of a world long gone. Faint impressions of past lives that linger like phantom limbs. We recognize civilization—buildings, cars, a general overview—but we have no personal role in it. No history. We are just here. We do what we do, time passes, and no one asks questions. But like I’ve said, it’s not so bad. We may appear mindless, but we aren’t. The rusty cogs of cogency still spin, just geared down and down till the outer motion is barely visible. We grunt and groan, we shrug and nod, and sometimes a few words slip out. It’s not that different from before.
But it does make me sad that we’ve forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else’s, because I’d like to love them, but I don’t know who they are.
• • •
There are hundreds of us living in an abandoned airport outside some large city. We don’t need shelter or warmth, obviously, but we like having the walls and roofs over our heads. Otherwise we’d just be wandering in an open field of dust somewhere, and that would be horrifying. To have nothing at all around us, nothing to touch or look at, no hard lines whatsoever, just us and the gaping maw of the sky. I imagine that’s what being full-dead is like. An emptiness vast and absolute.
I think we’ve been here a long time. I still have all my flesh, but there are elders who are little more than skeletons with clinging bits of muscle, dry as jerky. Somehow it still extends and contracts, and they keep moving. I have never seen any of us “die” of old age. Left alone with plenty of food, maybe we’d “live” forever, I don’t know. The future is as blurry to me as the past. I can’t seem to make myself care about anything to the right or left of the present, and the present isn’t exactly urgent. You might say death has relaxed me.
• • •
I am riding the escalators when M finds me. I ride the escalators several times a day, whenever they move. It’s become a ritual. The airport is derelict, but the power still flickers on sometimes, maybe flowing from emergency generators stuttering deep underground. Lights flash and screens blink, machines jolt into motion. I cherish these moments. The feeling of things coming to life. I stand on the steps and ascend like a soul into Heaven, that sugary dream of our childhoods, now a tasteless joke.
After maybe thirty repetitions, I rise to find M waiting for me at the top. He is hundreds of pounds of muscle and fat draped on a six-foot-five frame. Bearded, bald, bruised and rotten, his grisly visage slides into view as I crest the staircase summit. Is he the angel that greets me at the gates? His ragged mouth is oozing black drool.
He points in a vague direction and grunts, “City.”
I nod and follow him.
We are going out to find food. A hunting party forms around us as we shuffle toward town. It’s not hard to find recruits for these expeditions, even if no one is hungry. Focused thought is a rare occurrence here, and we all follow it when it manifests. Otherwise we’d just be standing around and groaning all day. We do a lot of standing around and groaning. Years pass this way. The flesh withers on our bones and we stand here, waiting for it to go. I often wonder how old I am.
• • •
The city where we do our hunting is conveniently close. We arrive around noon the next day and start looking for flesh. The new hunger is a strange feeling. We don’t feel it in our stomachs—some of us don’t even have those. We feel it everywhere equally, a sinking, sagging sensation, as if our cells are deflating. Last winter, when so many Living joined the Dead and our prey became scarce, I watched some of my friends become full-dead. The transition was undramatic. They just slowed down, then stopped, and after a while I realized they were corpses. It disquieted me at first, but it’s against etiquette to notice when one of us dies. I distracted myself with some groaning.
I think the world has mostly ended, because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered, and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. I don’t know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it’s not so important. Once you’ve arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.
We start to smell the Living as we approach a dilapidated apartment building. The smell is not the musk of sweat and skin, it’s the effervescence of life energy, like the ionized tang of lightning and lavender. We don’t smell it in our noses. It hits us deeper inside, near our brains, like wasabi. We converge on the building and crash our way inside.
We find them huddled in a small studio unit with the windows boarded up. They are dressed worse than we are, wrapped in filthy tatters and rags, all of them badly in need of a shave. M will be saddled with a short blond beard for the rest of his Fleshy existence, but everyone else in our party is cleanshaven. It’s one of the perks of being dead, another thing we don’t have to worry about anymore. Beards, hair, toenails… no more fighting biology. Our wild bodies have finally been tamed.
Slow and clumsy but with unswerving commitment, we launch ourselves at the Living. Shotgun blasts fill the dusty air with gunpowder and gore. Black blood spatters the walls. The loss of an arm, a leg, a portion of torso, this is disregarded, shrugged off. A minor cosmetic issue. But some of us take shots to our brains, and we drop. Apparently there’s still something of value in that withered gray sponge because if we lose it, we are corpses. The zombies to my left and right hit the ground with moist thuds. But there are plenty of us. We are overwhelming. We set upon the Living, and we eat.
Eating is not a pleasant business. I chew off a man’s arm, and I hate it. I hate his screams, because I don’t like pain, I don’t like hurting people, but this is the world now. This is what we do. Of course if I don’t eat all of him, if I spare his brain, he’ll rise up and follow me back to the airport, and that might make me feel better. I’ll introduce him to everyone, and maybe we’ll stand around and groan for a while. It’s hard to say what “friends” are anymore, but that might be close. If I restrain myself, if I leave enough…
But I don’t. I can’t. As always I go straight for the good part, the part that makes my head light up like a picture tube. I eat the brain, and for about thirty seconds, I have memories. Flashes of parades, perfume, music… life. Then it fades, and I get up, and we all stumble out of the city, still cold and gray, but feeling a little better. Not “good,” exactly, not “happy,” certainly not “alive,” but… a little less dead. This is the best we can do.
I trail behind the group as the city disappears behind us. My steps plod a little heavier than the others’. When I pause at a rain-filled pothole to scrub gore off my face and clothes, M drops back and slaps a hand on my shoulder. He knows my distaste for some of our routines. He knows I’m a little more sensitive than most. Sometimes he teases me, twirls my messy black hair into pigtails and says, “Girl. Such… girl.” But he knows when to take my gloom seriously. He pats my shoulder and just looks at me. His face isn’t capable of much expressive nuance anymore, but I know what he wants to say. I nod, and we keep walking.
I don’t know why we have to kill people. I don’t know what chewing through a man’s neck accomplishes. I steal what he has to replace what I lack. He disappears, and I stay. It’s simple but senseless, arbitrary laws from some lunatic legislator in the sky. But following those laws keeps me walking, so I follow them to the letter. I eat until I stop eating, then I eat again.
How did this start? How did we become what we are? Was it some mysterious virus? Gamma rays? An ancient curse? Or something even more absurd? No one talks about it much. We are here, and this is the way it is. We don’t complain. We don’t ask questions. We go about our business.
There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can’t cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.
• • •
At the Arrivals gate, we are greeted by a small crowd, watching us with hungry eyes or eyesockets. We drop our cargo on the floor: two mostly intact men, a few meaty legs, and a dismembered torso, all still warm. Call it leftovers. Call it takeout. Our fellow Dead fall on them and feast right there on the floor like animals. The life remaining in those cells will keep them from full-dying, but the Dead who don’t hunt will never quite be satisfied. Like men at sea deprived of fresh fruit, they will wither in their deficiencies, weak and perpetually empty, because the new hunger is a lonely monster. It grudgingly accepts the brown meat and lukewarm blood, but what it craves is closeness, that grim sense of connection that courses between their eyes and ours in those final moments, like some dark negative of love.
I wave to M and then break free from the crowd. I have long since acclimated to the Dead’s pervasive stench, but the reek rising off them today feels especially fetid. Breathing is optional, but I need some air.
I wander out into the connecting hallways and ride the conveyors. I stand on the belt and watch the scenery scroll by through the window wall. Not much to see. The runways are turning green, overrun with grass and brush. Jets lie motionless on the concrete like beached whales, white and monumental. Moby Dick, conquered at last.
Before, when I was alive, I could never have done this. Standing still, watching the world pass by me, thinking about nearly nothing. I remember effort. I remember targets and deadlines, goals and ambitions. I remember being purposeful, always everywhere all the time. Now I’m just standing here on the conveyor, along for the ride. I reach the end, turn around, and go back the other way. The world has been distilled. Being dead is easy.
After a few hours of this, I notice a female on the opposite conveyor. She doesn’t lurch or groan like most of us; her head just lolls from side to side. I like that about her, that she doesn’t lurch or groan. I catch her eye and stare at her as we approach. For a brief moment we are side by side, only a few feet away. We pass, then travel on to opposite ends of the hall. We turn around and look at each other. We get back on the conveyors. We pass each other again. I grimace and she grimaces back. On our third pass, the airport power dies, and we come to a halt perfectly aligned. I wheeze hello, and she responds with a hunch of her shoulder.
I like her. I reach out and touch her hair. Like me, her decomposition is at an early stage. Her skin is pale and her eyes are sunken, but she has no exposed bones or organs. Her irises are an especially light shade of that strange pewter gray all the Dead share. Her graveclothes are a black skirt and a snug white buttonup. I suspect she used to be a receptionist.
Pinned to her chest is a silver nametag.
She has a name.
I stare hard at the tag; I lean in close, putting my face inches from her breasts, but it doesn’t help. The letters spin and reverse in my vision; I can’t hold them down. As always, they elude me, just a series of meaningless lines and blots.
Another of M’s undead ironies—from nametags to newspapers, the answers to our questions are written all around us, and we don’t know how to read.
I point at the tag and look her in the eyes. “Your… name?”
She looks at me blankly.
I point at myself and pronounce the remaining fragment of my own name. “Rrr.” Then I point at her again.
Her eyes drop to the floor. She shakes her head. She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t even have syllable one, like M and I do. She is no one. But don’t I always expect too much? I reach out and take her hand. We walk off the conveyers with our arms stretched across the divider.
This female and I have fallen in love. Or what’s left of it.
I think I remember what love was like before. There were complex emotional and biological factors. We had elaborate tests to pass, connections to forge, ups and downs and tears and whirlwinds. It was an ordeal, an exercise in agony, but it was alive. The new love is simpler. Easier. But small.
My girlfriend doesn’t talk much. We walk through the echoing corridors of the airport, occasionally passing someone staring out a window or at a wall. I try to think of things to say but nothing comes, and if something did come I probably couldn’t say it. This is my great obstacle, the biggest of all the boulders littering my path. 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, it all collapses. So far my personal record is four rolling syllables before some… thing… jams. And I may be the most loquacious zombie in this airport.
I don’t know why we don’t speak. I can’t explain the suffocating silence that hangs over our world, cutting us off from each other like prison-visit Plexiglas. Prepositions are painful, articles are arduous, adjectives are wild overachievements. Is this muteness a real physical handicap? One of the many symptoms of being Dead? Or do we just have nothing left to say?
I attempt conversation with my girlfriend, testing out a few awkward phrases and shallow questions, trying to get a reaction out of her, any twitch of wit. But she just looks at me like I’m weird.
We wander for a few hours, directionless, then she grips my hand and starts leading me somewhere. We stumble our way down the halted escalators and out onto the tarmac. I sigh wearily.
She is taking me to church.
The Dead have built a sanctuary on the runway. At some point in the distant past, someone pushed all the stair trucks together into a circle, forming a kind of amphitheater. We gather here, we stand here, we lift our arms and moan. The ancient Boneys wave their skeletal limbs in the center circle, rasping out dry, wordless sermons through toothy grins. I don’t understand what this is. I don’t think any of us do. But it’s the only time we willingly gather under the open sky. That vast cosmic mouth, distant mountains like teeth in the skull of God, yawning wide to devour us. To swallow us down to where we probably belong.
My girlfriend appears to be more devout than I am. She closes her eyes and waves her arms in a way that looks almost heartfelt. I stand next to her and hold my hands in the air stiffly. At some unknown cue, maybe drawn by her fervor, the Boneys stop their preaching and stare at us. One of them comes forward, climbs our stairs, and takes us both by the wrists. It leads us down into the circle and raises our hands in its clawed grip. It lets out a kind of roar, an unearthly sound like a blast of air through a broken hunting horn, shockingly loud, frightening birds out of trees.
The congregation murmurs in response, and it’s done. We are married.
We step back onto the stair seats. The service resumes. My new wife closes her eyes and waves her arms.
The day after our wedding, we have children. A small group of Boneys stops us in the hall and presents them to us. A boy and a girl, both around six years old. The boy is curly blond, with gray skin and gray eyes, perhaps once Caucasian. The girl is darker, with black hair and ashy brown skin, deeply shadowed around her steely eyes. She may have been Arab. The Boneys nudge them forward and they give us tentative smiles, hug our legs. I pat them on their heads and ask their names, but they don’t have any. I sigh, and my wife and I keep walking, hand in hand with our new children.
I wasn’t exactly expecting this. This is a big responsibility. The young Dead don’t have the natural feeding instincts the adults do. They have to be tended and trained, and they will never grow up. Stunted by our curse, they will stay small and rot, then become little skeletons, animate but empty, their brains rattling stiff in their skulls, repeating their routines and rituals until one day, I can only assume, the bones themselves will disintegrate, and they’ll just be gone.
Look at them. Watch them as my wife and I release their hands and they wander outside to play. They tease each other and grin. They play with things that aren’t even toys: staplers and mugs and calculators. They giggle and laugh, though it sounds choked through their dry throats. We’ve bleached their brains, robbed them of breath, but they still cling to the cliff edge. They resist our curse for as long as they possibly can.
I watch them disappear into the pale daylight at the end of the hall. Deep inside me, in some dark and cobwebbed chamber, I feel something twitch.
© 2011 Isaac Marion
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Product details
- Publisher : Emily Bestler Books; Media Tie-In edition (December 25, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 147671746X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1476717463
- Lexile measure : HL740L
- Item Weight : 7.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.64 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #130,914 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,405 in TV, Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction
- #2,176 in Espionage Thrillers (Books)
- #2,639 in Supernatural Thrillers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Isaac Marion grew up in small towns around the Pacific Northwest, pursuing careers in writing, painting, and music all throughout his youth. One of these finally sparked in 2010 with the publication of his debut novel, WARM BODIES, which become a New York Times Bestseller, inspired a major film, and was translated into 25 languages. He spent the next eight years writing the rest of the story over the course of four books, now concluded with THE LIVING. He lives and writes on Orcas Island and plays music in Seattle with his band, Thing Quartet.
The conclusion of the Warm Bodies Series, THE LIVING, is available now in hardcover from
www.isaacmarion.com
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on December 6, 2018
Top reviews from the United States
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Long story short, a plague has created a world where the "dead" kill the living to survive, and the living stay clear of them. Or try to at least. Being that the resources are scarce, encountering the dead would happen sooner or later. The whole concept behind this epidemic satisfied my need for a deliciously, enticing zombie story.
Oh R. Sighs. Only Isaac Marion can create a dreamy zombie that's boyfriend material. I don't know how he does it, but he won my heart the moment I met him. I became his biggest cheerleader and praised his great strides into the future with Julie. I don't want to spoil anything for new readers, so I'll leave it as that.
It's been a while since a supernatural being intrigued me so, I am quite happy with the start of this series. The ending left me wanting more, and luckily for my sake on to part two! Something dangerous and unknown is brewing, yet hope isn't that far away....intrigued yet?
This one is kind of like Romeo & Juliet, except R is a zombie guy and Julie is still alive. We get the story through his eyes. R does not remember his name or his age, or anything really before he died. In a world where the dead walk and the living are trying to stay alive, R comes across Julie one day while out looking for food.
Julie is running with a group of others when they are overcome by zombies hunting. When R sees Julie he knows he cannot kill her so he saves her instead. He takes her home to his zombie community, an abandoned airport.
What happens to R is that he begins to change as he falls in love with Julie. He finds himself becoming more human-like and apparently, this change is contagious. Zombies and the living have never fallen in love with one another, so theirs is a one of a kind romance and one that really turns heads.
The storyline was unique, the writing flowed smoothly and I enjoyed the romance and humor. I did not find any dull spots. The characters are well written and likeable, R made me laugh throughout and he is a sweet hero.
I also liked Julie’s character. She is no damsel in distress. She is smart, sassy and she sticks up for what she believes in. I liked that these two share a love of good music, like Frank Sinatra.
Overall, a fun, quirky, sweet story about how love can change people for the better. All you need is love right?
Disclaimer: This review is my honest opinion. I did not receive any kind of compensation for reading and reviewing this book. I am under no obligation to write a positive review. I purchased my copy of Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion.
Top reviews from other countries
Mr Marion is a very skilled wordsmith as Burton has illustrated and if I can be forgiven for copying his method just read the author's description of sleep: 'Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below'. How profound and poetic is that? Remember it next time you wake from a bad dream.
This story is so complete that I suspect the author may not return to the wonderful but awful world that he created but I for one can't wait to read what he writes next.
In this book, everything bad that could have happened, happened - the dead are rising, all the food's going down, everything's in drought or in a flood etc. - and humanity is not hiding wherever they can and, in this area, even in stadiums. I know about The Walking Dead - both the video game and the TV program - and I can honestly say that I see nothing about those Zombies and the Zombies in this book. Most of these Zombies are emotionless, nameless and brainless, but some of them seem to have an idea of what's going on around them and how things are changing and some of them want to be a part of it. I liked the idea about how that when a Zombie eats the brains of a living person they sort of absorb the memories of that person so they have a sort of vision of that person's life. I found the Bony's - those skeleton-like creatures that are basically in charge of this whole thing - to be really creepy and I really liked having them there as some sort of opposition besides the humans (sorry, Living, as R calls them). There is quite a lot of gore in this book, but I managed to gloss over or skip some of those parts and still get the general idea about it, but I do think that if you don't like gore that this might not be suitable for you. I've seen the trailer for the Warm Bodies movie and R doesn't look how he's described in the book. In the movie, R is dressed like a teenager - red hoody, grey T-shirt, jeans - while in the book, R is described as wearing a red tie and a (used to be white) grey shirt and is supposed to be dressed like a business man, so you get the general idea that R is supposed to be around about early to mid twenties, at the least, so I found that kind of hard to picture since my picture of R kept going back and forth between the two images. I thought that the world in which this was set in was really cool (wouldn't want to be there though) and I liked how the story was written in this "present tense" mode where he describes everything as if he's there in that moment - I thought that was a really good writing style for this kind of a story. R is my favourite leading male protagonist in any book I have read so far; he's funny, he's sweet, he's kind, (he can rip you to shreds but that's okay), he's thoughtful and hopeful and I just cannot put it into worlds how much he makes me smile both as a character and as a narrator. Julie is awesome and I love how she's not too much of a miserable character or that she's got no reason to do dangerous things in that she has a reason; she's not a damsel in distress, she's feisty and she can take care of herself pretty well and I love how she doesn't fall in love with R straight away (him being a Zombie and all) and I kind of like her resistance towards R. M is really funny and I find the fact that he can't remember the rest of his name but can remember how and when to say f*** or s***; I like how he's R's friend and how he, unlike other Zombies, actually helps and seems to care about R and I like it when R calls out for M's help and he comes. Nora was a fun, but kind of forgettable character, but I like how she response well to R when she first meets him. Perry was annoying; I found that sometimes I just wanted him to go away sooner and it kind of came to the point where I was screaming at the book 'Why are you even here, Perry?'; I understand that Perry, and his memories, are important in the book, but I didn't get why he had to be such a big part and why it sometimes snapped over to some of his memories - though I did find it both funny and cool at the part where he breaks threw and talks to R as a person. I didn't, at some points, why Julie's Dad was there to be anything else but an annoyance and something to get in between Julie and R (not spoiling anything here!); however, I do feel sorry for him in that he's a man who simply wants to survive. I think R and Julie have, by far, one of the best romantic relationships ever; there's something Beauty and the Beast about it where they're not sure about each other at first but then form a small team by the end of the book. One of my favourite parts of the book was the first time Julie hugs R - she's grossed out and a bit repulsed by the hug at first, but then she gives in and hugs him like a normal person. Some parts of this book are very deep and meaningful in which it questions about life and death and humanity and how what it takes to be human.
Sweet, fun and kind of horrifying, I'm not even sure what category this book is set in. It has action, romance, horror and a slight twinge of humour sprinkled in; I could barely put it down.
The core relationship is between a young zombie R who lives in an old plane and rendered unable to communicate beyond grunts at first gets kicks from eating brains with his friend M; and a livelier, scatty girl called Julie who comes from a safe compound made out of an old stadium. The first encounter between zombies and humans occurs relatively early in the novel, and is a graphic scene of blood, guts and gore which is very vivid and believable in a comic kind of style. Along with scientific illustrations of parts of the body from Gray's Anatomy, the goriness, foul scenes and mindless, zombie detachment juxtapose well with and help the reader to understand the warmth of the blossoming relationship, particularly from the perspective of R.
The couple find holding down their relationship hard not only due to physical barriers implemented by their elders, but also space time barriers they and society have constructed. However they feel compelled to strive to overcome the odds and inspire a cure for mankind. Their aim like that of many lead characters in works of a similar theme is to stop evil and save the world.
There's an underlying sadness to the novel, I couldn't help but feel sad for R and the guilt he felt when he met Julie. I also felt bad for the zombies' dead victims who seemed to haunt and guide R. However it is a novel about new starts, fresh outlooks and forgiving. Human survival dominates the need to mourn and post modern romance will hopefully prevail.
By the end of Warm Bodies most parents are dead and children fostered. Emphasis is made upon the desire parents have to protect and almost hold back their children. I feel the elders are all regarded as a little out of touch. Was this part of the cause of the dystopian society in the first place? I believe an important message Marion conveys, is in an ever changing world it is important now more than ever that people work together, not against one another. That they live and let live.
Really funny in parts, very tongue in cheek so none of the disturbing issues come across too scary, a good read for adults and teenagers alike I reckon. I could relate to both the zombies and the humans. I can definitely see why it's been adapted to a film.
Warm Bodies has been a resounding success for Marion, he originally self published it, but it took off by word of mouth to such a degree it has received a physical publication both here and in America and this year the movie adaptation starring British actor Nicholas Hoult in the lead will be released. This book was mentioned in passing (just author and title) to me on Twitter, but after looking it up and seeing it was a zombie novel and a romance at that, it took me mere seconds to buy it, and I'm not in the least ashamed of this!
Warm Bodies begins with the line :
I'm dead but it's not so bad. I've learned to live with it.
so right there in the opening line it gets you as all good novels are supposed to do, and thus begins the absorbing and slightly melancholic tale of R, a zombie living among a hive of fellow soulless beings at an airport. He doesn't have much of a vocabulary nor much of a thought process, but he has a wife, sort of, and kids, sort of.
One day he goes hunting with his friend of sorts M. Zombies savour the brains of their victims because they see their memories as they consume them giving them a fleeting remembrance of what it was like to be human once. Having done this to one man R recognises his next potential victim as his previous victim's girlfriend, deciding not to kill her, he drags her home to his unusual lodgings and our romance develops from there.
Warm Bodies is in many ways inherently flawed not least because a zombie by definition cannot have the feelings and behaviours which R exhibits, but neither realistically can a vampire. So you have to let that canon slide if you want to enjoy this book. It has some other mild issues it lacks a level of profundity at times despite good quality prose, is a little episodic in nature as opposed to a steady ongoing plot flow and I was torn over whether it's homage to the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet was utterly genius or utterly corny. I did read it in one sitting though, will watch the movie and would read other novels by Marion.
It is an endearing novel and certainly an original concept. It hasn't got much in terms of actual literary merit but is extremely entertaining. 9/10







![Warm Bodies A Novel by Marion, Isaac [Atria/Emily Bestler Books,2011] (Paperback) Reprint Edition](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Mcthsx1UL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
![Warm Bodies [Blu-ray]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81iAxjndxVL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)


