There, in the last days of the living's long dominion over the dead, a young doctor named Gary acts on his theory that simple oxygen deprivation is responsible for turning zombies' brains to mush. Unable to bear the thought of becoming one of the mindless shuffling monsters, he uses hospital equipment to keep his heart beating and his blood flowing and oxygenated throughout the process of death and rebirth. The result: "the smartest dead man in the world."

That Dekalb and Gary will run into each other is a foregone conclusion, but what happens next will surprise even zombie aficionados. Suffice it to say that Gary's intellect allows him access to certain abilities that make zombies far more dangerous than heretofore depicted in film and fiction, turning him into a kind of supervillain. Nor is he necessarily the smartest dead man after all. That distinction may belong to one of another group of resurrected dead: the mummies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The strands of Wellington's compulsive plot lead to Central Park, where a temple is being raised by an undead army. There Dekalb and his schoolgirl soldiers will confront an evil that cannot die.

Welcoming a Web wonder

Monster Island was originally posted by the author in online installments, as were its forthcoming sequels. Far from ruining his chances at print publication, this strategy has paid off handsomely for Wellington. It's hard to imagine, after reading just the first chapter, that he had such a hard time finding a publisher. Kudos to Thunder's Mouth Press for recognizing a good thing when they saw it.

Wellington's idea of how to make a smart zombie is truly inspired, as is his notion of zombie mummies. Zombie mummies. It's a stroke of genius. These may be the most noticeable of Wellington's innovations, but they are far from the only ones.

But innovations alone aren't responsible for making Monster Island an instant classic. Wellington is a damn good writer. Here he is describing, from Dekalb's point of view, the approach to Manhattan and the sight of a certain famous statue: "Give me your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse, my brain repeated over and over, a mantra. My brain wouldn't stop. Give me your huddled masses. Huddled masses yearning to breathe." It's not only a perfect ironic deconstruction of the famous poem by Emma Lazarus (Lazarus!), it communicates Dekalb's mordant sensibilities with economy and punch.

In the end, it's the strong characterizations of Dekalb, Gary and others—especially one of the young schoolgirls, Ayaan, a sort of surrogate daughter to Dekalb, and Jack, a no-nonsense soldier responsible for the safety of the last group of living humans on the island—that make the novel so gripping and, finally, affecting. Like I said, brains and heart.