All you need is love

"I'm Just a Girl, Standing in front of a Boy, Asking Him for BRAAAAAAAAAAINNNNNS"

Okay – so perhaps not your typical love story opening but believe it or not it there is a growing market out there for zombie romances. The success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has paved the way for a number of cross-genre titles. It would seem that zombies have feelings too!

Vintage have bought Warm Bodies by Seattle-based writer Isaac Marion, a zombie love story where the undead hero R falls in love with a very living young woman. The editor Frances Macmillan has described the book as a “brilliant modern day Romeo and Juliet with zombies” and the film rights have already been sold to Twilight producers Summit Films. Read more about Warm Bodies here.

The people at the Zombie Romance website are actively looking for submissions and have issued an open challenge to authors to send in their stories. We thought we’d have a go at our own and have reworked a chicklit classic – see if you can guess what it is! Can I apologise to Helen Fielding now!

Friday 26th February

3 stone 2 (v.good!); alcohol units 0 (v.v.v.good!); brains eaten 37 (v.bad particularly since first day of giving up)

The zombie diet is working a treat! Lost a stone (and an arm!) overnight. Who knows - might not need grey granny control pants after all. Anyway. Mark Darcy's asked me to marry him. Was originally for five-year fixed term with option to renew after four, but he got all soppy and extended it to LIFE with minimum term served of 25 years. Now no longer panicked at inevitability of dying (again) alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. These days much more likely that I’ve eaten the Alsatian instead. And Mark Darcy.

We first saw this on brilliant website Boing Boing. What do you get when you put zombies and Disney together? Zombie Disney of course! Personal favourites? Tinkerbell (or should we say Stinkerbell...) and Jasmine!

Crap joke of the day (a.k.a. all roads lead to shopping)

Crap but topical joke of the day, spotted in April's Empire magazine:

Q. What do bees come back as when they die?

A. Zom-bees!

Which seamlessly paves the way to David and Goliath's zombee merchandise.

Like those? Then lets take it a step further (if you'll pardon the pun) with the ultimate in geek-chic, a pair of killer heels. Loving the bow-detail - Jimmy Choo eat your still-beating heart out!

Add your own zombie-related jokes to the comments and, of course, any interesting zombie merch that floats your boat...

Welcome to the realm of The Living Dead

Since the news got out about the acquisition of legendary director George A Romero’s first novel there has been an outbreak of zombie mania at Headline. Not surprisingly, it is contagious.

Patient Zero was acquiring editor and associate publisher Vicki Mellor, and her undead enthusiasm quickly spread to Jess Fawcett, Claire Morrison and Sam Eades. Together we are the Headline Zombies and this is our brand spanking new blog!

We wanted to share our excitement at the forthcoming release of the definitive zombie novel The Living Dead (July 2010) and our love for anything and everything zombie.

We will bring you exclusive book news, videos, excerpts, giveaways as well as reviews of our favourite zombie films, books and merchandise (zombie slippers anyone?!).

Each Friday we will also feature posts from Romero's biggest fans - who we have affectionately named our ‘guest geeks’! Get ready for guest posts from influential bloggers RobAroundBooks, BookChickCity and the Speculative Scotsman as well as the Headline Zombies' other halves!

Zombie book club - World War Z

Max Brooks – World War Z

What better place to start our undead reading than Max Brooks’s World War Z, recommended to the Headline Zombies by fellow book lover RobAroundBooks. After all, this is a book that was described as “like George Romero’s Dead trilogy… another milestone in the zombie mythos”. This review does contain a summary of the plot - so spoiler alert!

World War Z is not your typical novel. It has no overarching narrative and is instead multi-voiced – a collection of interviews with different characters that follow a rough chronological order. This is docu-fiction and reads scarily like real life reports from a warzone. These disparate individual accounts document the worldwide reaction to a decade long zombie war, from the initial outbreak to the devastating aftermath.

We hear about the start of the outbreak through an account by a Chinese scientist, as he encounters an infected child in a remote village in The United Federation of China. The government quickly try and conceal this incident and subsequent isolated outbreaks amongst its population. The virus spreads through infected refugees and infected organs on the black market, spreading to Africa (where it is mistaken for African Rabies) and South America.

Through these accounts from a wide variety of individuals including military officials, soldiers and intelligence officers, as well as smugglers and traffickers we see a culture of denial from world leaders particularly in the US. By the time the threat to humanity is fully comprehended by the politicians, it is of course too late and a global zombie pandemic is the result.

It is terrifying to witnesses how governments, militaries and other institutions fail to deal with this worst-case scenario and to see civilisation brought to its knees. The battle to survive that follows is desperate, dirty and degrading and rendered with disturbing yet effective detail – we see mass suicides, cannibalism, a feral generation of lost children and those that simply give up the fight to survive and imitate the zombies.

At the end of the novel, the world’s political, environmental and religious landscape has completely changed - Cuba is the thriving economic capital of the world whilst Russia has become a religious dictatorship, harkening back to the Soviet era. Zombies still walk the ocean floor and every winter, they thaw from the ice and descend on Iceland and the Northern territories.

This is frightening stuff – and frightening in part due to its plausibility. A film is currently in production, and I will mostly be watching it from behind the sofa!

Thanks to the lovely RobAroundBooks again for the recommendation - check out his brilliant blog post on his personal zombie infatuation (what you thought it was just us?!). Like us, he is very much looking forward to the release of The Living Dead this July.