Isaac Marion’s darkly humorous debut novel, Warm Bodies, stays with the reader long after he or she finishes it.

R is a zombie, but he is different from the others. He is a deep thinker and can speak 5 syllables at a time. R meets the very human Julie after eating her former boyfriend brains. R saves her from the other zombies by hiding her in plain sight. Julie learns to see past R’s deadness, and together they seek to change the world. 

Warm Bodies does have some gore, but with sentences like, "Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses," the novel’s lyric prose demands for the reader to consider the age-old philosophical question: what does it mean to be human?

A film adaptation of Warm Bodies will be released on February 1, 2013.