Hello! So last week I missed my deadline because I went to see World War Z and then came home and went to sleep or, more accurately, went to bed and stared into that one weird corner of our bedroom because the previews before the movie scared the daylights out of me. Isn't that weird? Like, I love zombies. I'm thinking about dressing up as Shaun from Shaun of the Dead because, hello, still haven't gotten that cricket bat and Mr. J will thank me when the zombie apocalypse comes. I love-love-love World War Z the book and enjoyed the movie, even outside of making fun of Brad Pitt's epic ‘90s hair. Anyway, it's a little silly but I can do zombies all day long. Throw a ghost at me and I kind of lose my shit. So this week's book is fairly timely, as it turns out.

 

Zombillenium, originally released in Europe via a weekly comics magazine and getting a fabulous translation and US release courtesy of NBM Publishing, is the story of an amusement park staffed by the damned.

 

(And that sentence, nerdlings, is the pinnacle of my Lovefoolery and I should just pack it in.)

 

Anyway, Zombillenium is indeed an amusement park owned by the devil, staffed by the undead and managed by a harried vampire named Francis. We meet mummies, zombies, and Bill, the ghostly head of security, right off the bat. Bill is a bit sketchy, as it turns out, as one would expect from a ghost, but keeps things under control. The term of employment is for life, or the afterlife, or until Francis is unable to handle things, at which point...well. It turns out that you can get rid of the otherworldly fairly easily, provided you're one of them.

 

We also meet Gretchen, a young-ish witch employed to hand out balloons who is doing...triple? I feel comfortable saying she's doing triple-duty at the park, her other two roles being very, very quiet ones. She's in a bar one day when a man comes in intending to rob the place and ends up holding a banana that was once a gun and shouting about his wife cheating on him with her Tai Chi instructor. Gretchen sends him along on his way and...well, he ends up working for Zombillenium in fairly short order. Love, and the loss thereof, can change things quite a bit.

 

Aurelian Zahner, our jilted sir, gets recruited by being bitten by Francis and then taken to the park, where the werewolf director of HR thinks that they have too many vampires and bites him again. Francis takes exception to this and bites him again to transform him to a vampire. HR disagrees and...it's a little silly but Zahner ends up chomped about 85 times and no one is quite sure what that does until he gets pissed off, at which point he grows about six feet and turns red. He is, as it turns out, a demon with some anger management issues and still pretty angry at his wife and her Tai Chi instructor, which turns into the plot that the rest of the book hinges around.

 

In the meantime, he flirts with Gretchen, Gretchen flirts back. He gets one over on his wife and the instructor. A couple bad apple zombies get...umm, terminated. It's very European casual, the way it all works out. It's amazing how Arthur de Pins, Zombillenium's creator, manages to make the scenes with Aurelian and Gretchen spark off the page. It's just ink on paper but it's also...a bit sexy, in a very modern witch-meets-demon way. It's got this vibe, this very new-ish vibe that I recognize from bars and book clubs and workplaces and pretty much any place where people are quietly hooking up that is pretty impossible to resist. And while Gretchen's personality is pretty much who she is right off the bat, Aurelian's transformation from cuckolded husband to confident, sexy demon is pretty stunningly executed. Like, it just happens. On the page. And you're just like “...huh.” And the Gretchen gets busted by her surprising father for her crush. Awkward. But we've all been there.

 

So, yeah, whew. Stephenie Meyer could take lessons from de Pins, who is a master at languid, hip, supernatural courtships in funnybook form and I'd have to wonder if Aurelian is a demon in the sack as well… | Erin Jameson