With S.G. Browne's phenomenally fantastic debut novel, zombies have finally broken through the glass ceiling that kept them bumbling around as mindless idiots for far too long.

Life still goes on, even for those unlucky enough to die and then suddenly reanimate a couple of days later. It's not easy being a zombie, you know. You never know when some piece of you might accidentally fall off (quite the social faux pas), you don't smell very good and you know it, children tend to run away screaming at the very sight of you, you're constantly pelted with garbage and curses by the living (or "Breathers," in zombie parlance), you have to maintain a decent supply of formaldehyde in your system through various means to keep yourself from melting away, you can't get a job to help support your undead self, and the list just goes on and on.

What bothers newly undead Andy Warner, though, is the fact that he and his fellow zombies are treated even worse than second-class citizens. Break curfew or try to go where you don't belong, and you soon find yourself stuck in a cage at the SPCA -- and if you don't have a Breather family member willing to bail you out, you can find yourself stuck in a zombie zoo or tied to a slab and dissected by a group of young medical students. Perhaps worst of all, Andy is forbidden from ever seeing his young living child again.

Consigned to the wine cellar of his parents' house, Andy would have been the loneliest, most miserable zombie in the world (especially since the car accident that killed him left him with an almost-useless left leg and damaged his vocal cords to the point that he can't actually speak) were it not for his local Undead Anonymous chapter. There, he is able to connect with other zombies like himself, develop friendships and even rediscover romance with a pretty young suicide victim.

Then he and his zombie friends meet Ray, a zombie who basically lives by his own rules and isn't about to let the Breathers push him around. When some dumb frat boy ambushes you and steals your arm, Ray's the kind of guy who will lead the raid to reclaim it. With the influence of Ray -- and his incredibly delicious "venison" jerky -- Andy's self-confidence begins to grow, and he and his undead compatriots start to take control of their undead lives.

Don't get too caught up in the "zombie comedy romance" tag pinned on this novel, and don't look upon this book as a dark comedy and nothing more. While the story is overflowing with crazy zombie (mis)adventures and serves up more laughs than you're likely to find outside of a Terry Pratchett fantasy novel, it also has a few genuinely tragic moments and features several sublayers of a serious nature. For example, one can easily draw a number of parallels between the treatment of zombies in the novel and the extent of prejudice and second-class treatment shown to certain minorities in the real world.

If there has ever been a zombie novel that those with no interest in the zombie genre can appreciate and enjoy, it is this one. That being said, though, zombies will be zombies -- and some readers will undoubtedly be turned off by some of the things zombies do (no matter how stylishly Browne describes them).