Erika asked Isaac Marion:

Hello Isaac. I am a huge fan of Warm Bodies and I love that you used zombies to investigate some really deep, meaningful themes about apathy and opening yourself up to feeling. To me, the book was a somewhat indirect discussion of mental illness, anxiety in particular. Did you want to investigate anxiety through your writing? Do you think that the unfeeling world R lives in is a reality that we also live in?

Isaac Marion One of the things I find so interesting about zombies is how the condition of being undead can relate to so many different real life issues. People have told me R made them think of depression, autism, social anxiety, and many other things. I like that people get these things out of it and I don't think they're misguided. Throughout this series I've tried to avoid too much specificity in the themes because I like the broad range of things undeath can represent. The plague isn't just Apathy or Depression or any other single issue; it's all the darker elements of the human condition and it reveals different aspects in different moments. So I think these books are less about a specific malady than the ways we respond to all the struggles of being alive.

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