Brains Brains Brains - ZOMBIE HAIKU

Anyone can write haiku, right? It's so simple that schoolchildren learn it. In fact, it's so simple that even zombies can write it.

ZOMBIE HAIKU by Ryan Mecum tells the story of a zombie plague. It is presented as a journal full of poetry by some guy. At first, he's just a guy writing haiku (a lot of which are parodies of other people's poems, including those of Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats), but he continues to write haiku as he becomes a zombie and starts hunting for brains. However, right at the start, in the margins around the poems, there's some blue handwriting by a human guy who has been bitten by a zombie, but has grabbed the journal. So he sets up the scene (zombie plague, some people hiding out at the airport, all of them dying one way or another), and then he gets out of the way so you can read the story of the zombie plague straight through. The note-making guy comes back in at the end, with rather tragi-comic consequences.

Here, some samples of what you can expect from ZOMBIE HAIKU:

Little old ladies
speed away in their wheelchairs,
frightened meals on wheels.

Wheelchair pile-up!
Five old women on the ground,
helpless as babies.

That's from an episode where our zombie poet is in nursing home. From a bit later, here's this tidbit:

Blood is really warm.
It's like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.

Here's another general observation:

Brains are less squishy
and a tad bit more squeaky
that someone might guess.

And another, which appears inside the book with a "his skull", but is on the cover as follows:

Biting into heads
is much harder than it looks.
The skull is feisty.

A general warning: This book is full of zombie murders and mayhem, including descriptions of zombies decomposing, maggot infestations, and gruesome injuries. Interestingly enough, Ryan Mecum, zombie haiku-writer extraordinaire, worked as a youth pastor at a Presbyterian church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Gotta love a youth pastor who writes about zombies. Coming this summer, Ryan's next opus: VAMPIRE HAIKU.