Book Review | Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Title: Warm Bodies
Author: Isaac Marion
Release Date: October 28th 2010
Publisher: Vintage
Genre: Adult, Horror
Pages: 240
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Summary
"A zombie who yearns for a better life ends up falling in love—with a human—in this astonishingly original debut novel.

 R is a zombie. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He doesn't enjoy killing people; he enjoys riding escalators and listening to Frank Sinatra. He is a little different from his fellow Dead."

My Thoughts

I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately it just didn't push all the buttons for me. I'd seen this title on goodreads a while back but never took any interest as I don't read much 'horror' novels, then when I saw the trailer for the film it really changed my mind about it as it looked very different from normal zombie books. With this story I had the kind of 'saw the movie first and expected the book to be similar' complex, much like I did with Stardust, but in this case I haven't even saw the film?! I think this was because based on the trailer it looks more like a light hearted zombie film that has serious elements, but I found the book to be a lot darker than the portrayal of the film. It's as though I was constantly waiting for this love story to happen that never really does. I think maybe if I'd read this book before seeing any trailers I may have enjoyed it more, as the writing was really amazing in it, but it was the plot that really didn't take off.

R, our narrator, is a character that you really do come to love and start to forget he is a 'zombie'. You can see the growth that he has throughout the novel, with both his speech and thoughts, and its really nicely done. There isn't a great big rush all at once of him totally changing, but it's a lot more gradual and realistic. The other main character in the book Julie was a little bit hit and miss for me, at the start I really loved her, she was so kick ass and it fit well with the life she lives. However towards the end of the book when she returns to the stadium I found that she got a bit soft and seems to just have been made soft and vulnerable and everyone kept comenting how shes 'been through a lot' but I didn't think there was enough background to it to make you feel that sorry for her.

Other than the on-off feelings I had for Julie, the other thing that irritated me about this book was the flashbacks, it wasn't the flashbacks themselves but it was how confusing they were. Sometimes the start of a new chapter would be a flashback and it would take until character names were mentioned to realise that we were in the mind of Perry and not R. I found this was a bit distracting when reading as when parts like this happened it took a while to focus back onto what was happening, as when I read if I get confused I tend to stop paying so much attention or start to skim read.

Overall it's an enjoyable read, I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. I gave it 3.5/5 due to the fact I probably would have liked it better if I'd read it without any comparisons to the trailer.

Rating