Eight zombie novels to feast on

Lorna Wallace has a PhD in English Literature and is a lover of all things science fiction and horror. She lives in Scotland with her rescue greyhound, Misty.

At Mental Floss Wallace tagged eight of the best zombie novels, including:

Warm Bodies (2010) // Isaac Marion

Warm Bodies is often billed as a zombie romance, but there’s still plenty of feasting on brains to be found throughout the book. The story is told from the perspective of a zombie—known only as R (he can’t remember his name)—who isn’t as brain-dead as the rest of the infected. While hunting humans one day, he becomes enamored with a young woman called Julie and impulsively decides to save her from his hungry friends.

Although Warm Bodies eventually became so popular that it was turned into a movie in 2013—starring Nicholas Hoult as R and Teresa Palmer as Julie—it was originally self-published. “I printed out a couple hundred copies and I just sold them on my website,” Isaac Marion told Wired. The novel was then picked up by Atria Books, but the version they published was “dramatically different” from Marion’s first printing, being about 80 pages longer in order to fully flesh out the story.

Read about another entry on the list.

Warm Bodies is among Michael J. Seidlinger's six novels that invert horror tropes, Lois Leveen's five notable novels that riff on—and rip off—Shakespeare, Rachel Aukes's five top books that take zombies in a new direction, Ceridwen Christensen's seven top books with thinking zombies, Jeff Somers's eight best speculative works with dead narrators, Sarah Skilton's six most unusual YA narrators, Rachel Paxton-Gillilan's five funniest YA zombie novels, Nick Harkaway's six favorite holiday books, and Nicole Hill's seven favorite literary oddballs.

The Page 69 Test: Warm Bodies.

My Book, The Movie: Warm Bodies.

--Marshal Zeringue