Warm Bodies Summary

Welcome to the world of the Dead. Our zombie narrator, R, shambles around, groans a lot, and rides escalators all day long, just like your typical teenage mall rat. One day, while hunting for brains, he eats the brain of Perry Kelvin. Eating brains allows zombies to see the recently-devoured's memories, and R sees that Perry really loves this girl, Julie. Plus, she's a babe.

R decides to save Julie and take her back to the airport where he lives. Even though he's a flesh-eating zombie, he's the hottest zombie Julie's ever seen, so she starts warming up to him. It helps that they have similar taste in music.

The Living girl doesn't quite sit well with the Boneys, who are like the governing body of the Dead. R refuses to kowtow to them, though, and decides to escort Julie back to the stadium where she lives with the rest of the Living. With the help of R's friend, M, they escape the airport.

After staying the night in an abandoned house, Julie ditches R and heads for the stadium by herself. R reluctantly heads back to the airport but is intercepted by M. It seems that the old fogey Boneys ran all the "changing" zombies out of town, including M. They've started having dreams and want to live! How dare they. They're pretty sure it's all because of Julie, so R decides to go after her.

He sneaks into the stadium and reunites with Julie. With her friend Nora, Julie shows R the stadium and what daily life there is like. It's almost as drab as groaning in an airport all day. 

Julie shows R her mother's grave then they all get drunk. R gets into a bar fight defending Julie's honor and decides to shuffle home by himself. Bad idea. He comes across a guard who thinks he's a zombie... so he eats him. Determined not to cave in to his zombie nature, he doesn't eat all of him, though. So this guy comes back as a zombie later, raising a stadium-wide alert.

Julie decides she has to get R the heck out of the stadium before her dad—who is the General—finds out. Outside, they run into M who has amassed a whole army of changing Dead. What do they need an army for? Well to fight off the hundreds of walking skeletons that have started to take over. Yipes.

R and Julie then run back to the stadium where they think the armed guards can take care of the skeletons. They can't; they're outnumbered. So as all these innocent people are getting killed, R, Julie, and Nora decide to go chill on top of the stadium. They're just hanging out, you know, like you do when walking skeletons are killing all your friends, when Julie's dad shows up and totally ruins everything, walking in on R and Julie kissing. Ugh, parents.

Thinking Julie's now a zombie, her dad decides to shoot her. Julie's adult friend, Colonel Rosso, stabs dad in the ankle and he falls off the stadium. Clutching to an overhang for dear life, Julie's dad almost survives, but then a skeleton comes along and eats him. So he turns into a skeleton, too.

And then everything's kind of over. The skeletons stop attacking and go home. R and Julie are pretty sure it's because they started smooching, and their necrophiliac love story cured death. R even regains his pulse and starts bleeding again. With his newfound life, R vows to find a cure for death and live forever. The End.