A good friend of mine, Isaac Marion, recently published his first novel, and now I am going to pimp it. Warm Bodies (Atria, $24) chronicles an ill-fated romance between a teenage girl and an undead boy. Stephenie Meyer is already a vigorous supporter of the book, and comparisons to Twilight stop there. For one thing, said boy is not a vampirehes a zombie named R. And the 29-year-old Marion didnt write the book with Twi-hards in mind, he explains: There are some themes that young people will relate to, but it’s definitely not aimed at kids. It has sex, violence, and bad words. There’s no high-school drama. It’s a post-apocalyptic eulogy for civilization. I’ll say. In the collapsed and diseased world of Warm Bodies, R meets his beloved, Julie, shortly after he devours her boyfriends brain, something Im certain Robert Pattinson would never do. Regardless, the two fall in love. As a sensitive female, I had to ask myself how one could be attracted to moldering body, but Marion says R is in the early stages of decay, so all Julie really has to deal with is the bad complexion, a slight odor, and the fact that they met a few seconds after he murdered all her friends. And guess what? Warm Bodies is is being made into a movie by the same studio that made released Twilight (Ill allow that one more similarity). Jonathan Levine (The Wackness) will direct, and Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy, A Single Man) has signed on to play R. Marion once did a reading in the voice of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and he says says tonights vocal effects will depend entirely on how much whiskey I’m provided. ERIN K. THOMPSON
Mon., Aug. 29, 7 p.m., 2011
