June 25

Beautiful Dead: Jonas by Eden Maguire

Source Books, 2010

ISBN: 9781402239441

Available: New

Darina thinks she’s going crazy. She’s seeing her dead boyfriend everywhere and having visions of beating wings and death’s head masks. If she’s off, though, the whole town is too. Four teens have died suspiciously in the past year, and the most recent was her boyfriend, Phoenix, who was stabbed during a fight. While the teens have died, though, they haven’t left. Instead, they’ve returned to a strange house in the woods as the Beautiful Dead. The Beautiful Dead have come back for answers to their untimely deaths and Darina, trying to get as much time with Phoenix as possible, has agreed to help them. First is Jonas, who died in a motorcycle accident that also paralyzed his girlfriend, Zoey. With only a few days until Jonas’ time on earth is done for good, Darina must find out what exactly happened to Jonas and Zoey on the road.

Beautiful Dead is more like J. O’ Barr’s The Crow series than a traditional zombie tale. It is full of beautiful prose, has a good mystery, plenty of emotion and a rather intense love story. The zombies are as far removed from the Romero classics as Edward Cullen is from Dracula.

In fact, between the intensity of the love story and the juxtaposition of the morbid and dark with a lovely setting and the lovely writing it bears a semblance to the Twilight world and is very likely to catch the interest of Twilight fans. Recommended for YA collections, librarians should keep in mind that with the high number of mystical powers and lack of appetite of the book’s zombies it’s more appropriate for lovers of dark fantasy and paranormal romance than hardcore horror fans.

Posted June 25, 2010 by Michele Lee in category "monsterlibrarian