Less flesh, more substance in Warm Bodies

      I thought I was “done” with the zombie genre (literature, movies, books, you name it) after I’d watched one too many Undead thrillers that played out more like high-definition gore-porn than entertaining (if disturbing) stories with actual substance (or creativity). Once you’d seen the modern remake of Dawn of the Dead,  I felt like you’d basically partaken of every zombie-apocalypse scenario (aside from some gems like 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead) imagined in the last decade or so. Given my past experiences, I actually found the nature of, and the motivation behind the actions of the Undead as they are written in Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies a refreshing surprise. Here “zombies” aren’t simply walking carcasses with a taste for other, fresher carcasses but semi-sentient relics of the people they once were, munching on brains so that they might live vicariously through the fleeting memories of others. These are zombies looking for enlightenment, not food. I found that tangent, combined with the first-person narrative of an actual Zombie (R.) quite demonstrative of the need of humans to “feed off” the drama/interests/achievements/experiences/ideas of others to escape from the monotonous routine of their own lives and grasp for some kind of “purpose.” I’ll take the philosophical Undead over rabid CGI drones any day…