Warm Bodies
by Isaac Marion
Read by Kevin Kenerly

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Fantasy horror (and romance, I guess)

R is a zombie with no memory of his life before he died or even how long he’s been dead. Consuming the brain of a living person allows him and his fellow zombies to experience flashes of memories of the brain’s original owner. During one particular raid on a group of the living, the memories R receives compel him to spare the life of a young woman in the group, disguise her from his fellow zombies, and take her back to the undead society where he lives, all to protect her. R is already a little different from the other zombies, but the more time he spends with Julie, the more he notices further changes.

I had a difficult time focusing my thoughts for this review and deciding how to rate the book. It’s kind of stupid in a lot of ways, and yet I enjoyed it overall. It’s a loose retelling of Romeo and Juliet, and not terribly subtle about it, but I can’t really call it romantic. R’s initial connection with Julie comes through the memories he receives from eating the brain of Perry, her long-time lover. I expected a relationship between R and Julie to develop in its own right from there, but really, he just keeps getting more from Perry somehow. I couldn’t really tell you what makes Julie so special, either to Perry or to R, as she’s fairly bland overall. I certainly don’t see why the connection between her and R is the catalyst it is for the rest of the story.

My favorite thing about the book is the worldbuilding regarding the zombies. If you’re a zombie purist and want your zombies completely mindless undead monsters with no capacity for reason or thought beyond survival instincts, caused by some kind of dystopian plague, you might not like this book. The cause for the zombiism is never explicitly stated, but it is implied, and it’s definitely not the normal cliché. Plus, R, at least, in his role as our narrator, has quite a bit of mental capacity. He has thoughts, feelings, wishes, and sentimentality. He lives in a community with other zombies, and they can even talk to each other, though in a very halting, monosyllabic way. Another way this is not your typical zombie story is that it’s far more fantasy than sci-fi. It may be set in a dystopian future, but the progression of R’s mental “interactions” with Perry and then the way the connection between R and Julie affects the rest of zombiekind are more like magic than science.

Ultimately, I was more interested in R himself and the zombie side of things (which is pretty crazy, considering my aversion to zombie fiction) than anything to do with R and Julie. Whether or not others will enjoy this book might depend a lot on their thoughts on zombie traditions and borrowed romance. I personally enjoyed listening to the book narrated by Kevin Kenerly, who did a great job with the halting zombie speech (which sounds like it must have been annoying in the text version).

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