In July Warm Bodies author Isaac Marion announced he’d finished the long-awaited sequel, The Living. Today he’s revealed the book has been split into two.
The author also revealed the release date for book 2 in the Warm Bodies series, which is no longer titled The Living.
Marion said in a blog post on Monday that after he announced The Living and went back into editing, he realized the book was actually two entirely separate stories. “This wasn’t the single mammoth tome I thought I’d written,” he said. “In structure, rhythm, and theme, it was actually two books.”
“This is why it took me three years of obsessive 7-days-a-week work, why I withdrew from life and lost friendships and grew a white patch in my beard. I knew it was a big story, but it wasn’t until it was complete that I could see its real shape: two arcs, two endings, 900 pages…”
“Sometimes the baby comes out twins,” he added.
Now the Warm Bodies sequel is titled The Burning World and is scheduled for a release on July 5, 2016. The threequel, titled The Living, will arrive sometime in 2017.
The author also addressed inevitable accusations concerning why he would turn this book into two. “And to anyone worried I’m pulling a Hollywood and trying to stretch a small story across several installments: nope. This is a huge story. It was always a huge story. It’s about people discovering who they are across multiple eras of their lives, it’s about isolation and love and the many kinds of death, it’s about the animal fears that rule civilization and what it might take to overcome them, a doomsday church and an undead corporation and an infinite ladder to the future of all life. Two books should just barely contain it,” he wrote.
The original Warm Bodies was published in 2011 and was adapted into a movie starring Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer two years later.
Fan of our book coverage? Why not join our Hypable Books Facebook group!
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.