As soon as I’d pierced the flesh of this thing, I was powerless to resist devouring every last morsel from its bones, then for good measure, I went back and sucked the marrow from them.
My memory of how I stumbled upon this meaty treat has long since vanished but its horror and its beauty is ever-fresh in my mind as I've recommended this to friend and foe alike repeatedly since I put it down.
Take everything you know about this genre; mindless groaning, dripping entrails, shuffley ambling and outstretched arms and a 30 year old ‘high-school’ sweetheart complete with boob job and tight-fitting vest who outlives her unfathomably handsome, captain-of-the-cool-team boyfriend by mere minutes…and shove it all out into the background. Allow then, for a re-write of the genre, an angle and style that makes this whole idea more believable and horrific than ever before. Whatever you were expecting or may have heard about this story or this writer is only a drop in the vat of awesome that’s been poured all over this book.
This soon-to-be Hollywood smash hit movie is not born of the usual author’s backstory. Marion has not been bashing out novels for a decade, he hasn’t written these books ‘for this children’, he didn’t win prizes at school, college or Uni for his writing and for this, I am glad. I don’t think that such a heartbreakingly honest, raw and beautiful story could have been written by a person who had lived such a life. Rather, the book is dedicated to “the foster kids I've met” when Marion was employed to ‘supervise parental visits for foster-kids’.
Before I even opened the book and saw that little preface that outlined Marion’s complete lack of formal training or awards for his talent, a few lines piqued my interest beyond the pleasing aesthetics of the cover: Warm Bodies. This raised a few questions for me; warm because they’re still warm when the dead are reanimated? Also, pop-horror True Blood’s author Stephanie Meyer said ‘This story stayed with me long after I finished it’ (and since reading it twice, I concur) and finally SIMON PEGG described this book as ‘a mesmerising evolution of a classic contemporary myth’. Pegg’s in, I’m in. Simple.
These wee sketches head the chapters and are penned by Marion himself. I imagine these as flashing images of surgery or mirco-cam blood flow like on an episode of House, in the movie.
This is a zombie book and the first line tells me that this is the first zombie book ever to be written in first-person (or at least certainly the first I've heard of) and already I feel like I’m someone special at the start of something really special.
The conversational and personal monologue that we begin with as we start to nibble at Warm Bodies coupled with the everyday references and a refreshing honesty are what triggered my obsession with this book. I consumed it in three sittings, the final was a desert so bitter-sweet.
What happens when life loses all meaning, purpose and direction? When you’re forced to wonder the world and it’s remnants of a former life and yet alive, you are not? You’ll ride escalators just because, you’ll begin collecting items that maybe kinda remind you of something you think you perhaps once had. When you are only a fragment of what you once were but are faced with the fact that almost everyone around you has been left with even less – it’s lonely. This book explores those days when all of your housemates have gone away for the weekend but you couldn't afford it, the shopping at midnight for milk and bread because you've been working all day and you get to the supermarket to find they've run out of milk and eggs. Not directly, you understand. These items aren’t included as points of discussion in the book, but they introduce and dissect the feelings that these types of circumstances evoke; that everyone else is not here and you’re your only company and the simple things you want are beyond your reach.
In my opinion, this is how this book made me feel. I didn’t just empathise with our protagonist ‘R’s loneliness or lack of purpose, Marion’s words made me feel both. I more than understood what R was going through, with no knowledge of this person, no backstory, not even a proper name, I felt it with him.
Some of the zombie myth of olde remains; ‘Apparently there’s still something of value in that withered grey sponge, because if we lose it, we are corpses’. By and large the other zombies mentioned in this tale are exactly the kind you would expect; ‘Slow and clumsy but with unanswering commitment, we launch ourselves at the Living. Black blood spatters the walls. The loss of an arm, a leg, a portion of torso, this is disregarded, shrugged off’. It’s the beauty of the juxtaposition between what we know to be a ‘zombie’ and what R turns out to be. This forced me to question and inquire into the whole set-up, as I thought I knew it to be. Are zombies the simple gut-guzzling, creepy droolers that will ever be typecast with ‘BRAAAIIINZZZZZ!’, clothes torn to shreds and half a scalp missing? As I began to sift through these queries, Marion throws something into the broth to really get things boiling: he gets R to answer me, he lets R speak for himself and tells us “Eating is not a pleasant business. 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, he’ll rise up and follow me back to the airport, and that might make me feel better”.
See that? Our zombie protagonist is thinking and feeling. He’s going through the motions in that he’s eating the Living, but with a very human purpose; the drive to survive. He even identifies what separates him from the Living and in the same bite, expresses his uniqueness from the rest of his brain-munching buddies.
So far, this book had proved that the genre is not as predictable as 40 years of groaning movies would lead us to believe and I’d proved myself to be right; this is something special.
With post-apocalyptic survival stories getting backing from the big wigs to adapt to the big-screen from solitary tales like I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and the on-going series featuring various zombie-slaying teams on the slight smaller screen, The Walking Dead comics written by Robert Kirkman – this, latest adaptation has received some unfavourable press. Everyone’s chatting about this, all over the internet but I was especially irritated by one of the first features I read on it in the middle of last year which described the book as ‘zombie Twilight’. I stand by my tweets of fury aimed ‘@’ the author of these comments by my opinion that when reading this book, they did so with a fetid and rank love for over-romantic, teen vamp porn that reads like it was written by a lusty 14 year old with posters of Evanescence on their walls, and didn’t take from the book what it so willingly and intelligently offers. I can’t stress enough that despite what you may have heard or read, this book is wonderfully written, deeply emotive, shocking and unique…and none of the guys in it wear body glitter. Bonus.
If you are a horror fan: read this book.
If you are a fan of raw and honest storytelling: read this book.
If you’re sick of hearing about Twishite and wish someone would do something intelligent with popular, interesting topics: read this book.
I could go on.
Find Isaac Marion on the Twitters and at his blog that I find to hold many a treasure on a regular basis.
