When it comes to romanticizing the undead, vampires are winning. There’s something implicitly sexual about a bite on the neck — cf. Edward Cullen — but it’s hard to play up the seductiveness of a crowd of rotting corpses that want to eat your flesh. With little hope of zombies ever being sexy, UCA writing professor Robin Becker has picked up on the next best thing — smart zombies.

The hero of her debut novel, “Brains: A Zombie Memoir” ($13.99, paperback, HarperCollins), which hit shelves May 25, is a college professor named Jack Barnes who doesn’t fare so well when the zombie apocalypse comes around. Once undead, however, he discovers that he has retained all his previous knowledge and can control (somewhat) his craving for brains, unlike the rest of his mindless ilk. He decides to make a pilgrimage to Chicago, where the creator of the zombie virus lives, to prove his sentience and beg for a cure. Along the way he rounds up a crew of similarly gifted ghouls, and his mission becomes hinged on the need to demonstrate that the living dead are people too, especially the ones who can still think for themselves.

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