• Paperback: 192 pages
• Robin Becker’s Website
• Publisher:Eos (May 25, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061974056
• ISBN-13: 978-0061974052

Buy Brains on it’s release date May 25, 2010 at:

• Chapters/Indigo
• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble

Forget contemporary American literature–former college professor Jack Barnes has a new passion: Brains. It’s in his nature…he’s a zombie. But he’s not your normal, vacant-eyed, undead idiot. No, Jack Barnes has something most other victims of the zombie apocalypse don’t have: sentience. In fact, he can even write. And the story he has to tell is a truly disturbing–yet strangely heartwarming–one.

Convinced he’ll bring about a peaceful coexistence between zombies and humans if he can demonstrate his unique condition to the man responsible for the zombie virus, Howard Stein, Barnes sets off on a grueling cross-country journey to meet his maker. Along the way he meets more like him, rotting brain-eaters who have retained some sort of cognitive ability, and soon forms a small army that will stop at nothing to reach their goal. There’s Guts, the agile, dread-locked boy who can run like the wind; Joan, the matronly nurse adept at re-attaching rotting appendages; Annie, the young girl with a fierce quick-draw; and Ros, who can actually speak coherent sentences. Together they make their way through an eerie new world of roving zombie hunters, empty McMansions, and clogged highways on a quest to attain what all men, women–and apparently zombies–yearn for: equality.

Brains: A Zombie Memoir is a hilarious look at what happens when a scientist Mr. Stein (ha) tries to create the perfect person and of course everything goes to hell aka zombies are created. The zombies take over the entire USA, infecting or eating all humans in their paths.

Most of the zombies are slobbering morons, but not Professor Jack Barnes. Sadly Jack cannot speak, but his brains are still functioning enough for him to write a memoir of his experience. Jack had been locked up hiding in his basement with his wife when the zombies broke in and bit him, thus turning him into one of them….then he ate his wife. The whole premise behind Brains: A Zombie Memoir,  is Jack and a band of zombies like him, functioning, and their trip to Chicago to find Stein.

Along the way Jack picks up other functioning zombies from a kid nicknamed Guts who can still run, a Nurse named Joan who still remembers her nursing though its newly “improved”, a pregnant girl that Jack bites who ends up giving birth to a zomboy & my favorite Ros a US Military member that gets bit but still can talk. There is also an appearance by the Queen of All Media (ahem O) who’s now a slobbering zombie.

Written in the first person, Robin Becker’s writing is full of all sorts of surprises. There were parts of the book that I just had to sticky note for quotes** My favorite being:

It took zombiedom to give me a soul, death to make me “human”

Or one that made me cackle out loud:

But I didn’t want to eat Green Cap Sniper. Allow me to rephrase that: I very much wanted to eat Green Cap Sniper. I was horny for his brains.

Robin Becker’s writing makes you root for the zombies, while they eat people. Thought a short read of only 192 pages, Brains is full of well…um..brain eating goodness. The way the zombies, lead by Jack, are written you really want them to keep going on their quest to Chicago. Nor do you want the book to end. But the ending is left kind of open ended, so you don’t know if there’s going to be a book 2. Please Ms. Becker, MORE. Brains had me laughing one minute and contemplating human existence the next. An absolutely amazing debut!

**Quotes may change in the finished book. This is an uncorrected proof.**