( #warmbodies )
Hollywood is full of clever bastards. The Walking Dead is an extremely popular television show and comic book. It is also Feburary and a few weeks away from Valentines Day. What is a crafty movie executive to do? A romantic zombie movie or a romzom of course. I have been bombarded by ads for “Warm Bodies” for a few months and then I happened to read that it was based on a book…
… and said book was said to be considerably darker and deeper than the romzom version. So I downloaded it.
Warm Bodies is a short and enjoyable novel. It took me a few hours to read it and I liked it. The book is an obvious riff on “Romeo and Juliet”. The zombie’s name is “R” and the lead female is “Julie”. Her dad is in charge of the human survivors and clearly would not approve of his daughter’s necrophilia. Both characters have to buck their social norms to be together.
I suppose my only issue with the book is that the zombies have a society. If you see the commercial for the movie, you get the impression that “R” eating Julie’s boyfriend makes him start thinking and living again. The book also pushes this idea, but the zombies are clearly organized before “R’s” encounter with Julie. The zombies can sort of talk and there is a hierarchy to their society. They have strategy to eat humans. So they are not the typical zombies from the movies even before the main plot thread starts to happen.
The book tries to make “R” the zombie messiah and a romantic lead and those two thread compete for room in the book, but since this isn’t “War and Peace” you get over that problem pretty quickly. One thing I really appreciated about Marion’s writing is that he did not use the same terrible cliched words that every zombie writer uses – gore, guts, meat, disemboweled, and of course braaaaaiiins.
Bottom line: Fun and quick read – I recommend it.
