In this year's sequel, The Burning World, R discovers that recovering from being a corpse for so many years is not so straightforward or easy. If you've seen Hollywood's oversimplified film adaptation of Warm Bodies, which transforms an amusing and disgusting yet rather poignant and poetic novel of self-discovery into a zombie rom-com for young adults, you know how the rest of the story plays out: Boy saves girl from zombie horde, boy helps girl get home, boy misses girl and sets out to find her, boy spreads gift of consciousness to other zombies on his journey, and then, finally, boy and girl find love that transforms him from zombie to living being. But then he has an attack of conscience that blooms into a sense of responsibility, and eventually love, for the human girl whose boyfriend he devours head first. He feels shame when his primal instinct drives him to hunt and kill the living, though he does achieve glimpses of enlightenment and a flash of what it means to be alive when he eats his victims' brains and gains their memories. He lives among his grunting and shuffling brethren, yet also apart in a 747 where he collects mementos of the living and listens to Frank Sinatra records. R is certainly not your typical zombie lit protagonist. Unlike the narratives you typically find in the genre-humans trying to survive a zombie apocalypse-this one is told from the perspective of an undead dude who experiences an existential crisis. In his best-selling debut novel, Warm Bodies, Seattle author Isaac Marion offers a new take on zombie lit.

Isaac marion