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Horror
Warm Bodies
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Here is my verdict up front, because it will save you some time: if you are on the fence about NOS4A2 because the nineteen-and-a-half-hour runtime looks intimidating, the length is not the obstacle. Kate Mulgrew's narration is not an obstacle either, it is the reason to choose this over the print edition entirely. This is one of those audiobooks where the performance doesn't just support the story, it becomes the primary reason to pick audio over the page.
The scoring:
Joe Hill's novel follows Victoria McQueen, a woman with the ability to find things by riding her bicycle over impossible bridges, and Charles Manx, a predator who lures children into his 1938 Rolls-Royce and drives them to a nightmare amusement park called Christmasland, where they are transformed into something no longer quite human. Mulgrew, best known to most listeners as Star Trek: Voyager's Captain Janeway, takes on both characters and the enormous supporting cast across decades of plot, and what stands out most is how fearlessly she commits to Manx specifically. Her voice for him is gravelly, almost gleeful, genuinely unsettling in a way that several listener reviews describe as scenery-chewing in the most complimentary sense possible. She never lets it tip into cartoon villainy, though, which is the harder trick. The dread stays real even as the performance gets big.
Who this is for: listeners who want a horror audiobook where the narrator performance is genuinely one of the primary reasons to pick the format, and fans of Joe Hill or Stephen King looking for something that spans a huge canvas without losing narrative control.
Who this is not for: listeners who prefer tighter, shorter horror novels. This is a maximalist book in both story and performance, and the length is part of the experience rather than a flaw to push through.
It exists in the same broader universe as Hill's other work and shares some thematic DNA with his father Stephen King's novels, but NOS4A2 can be read and enjoyed as a standalone story.
Kate Mulgrew, known for playing Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager and Red on Orange Is the New Black, narrates the entire novel solo.
Yes, AMC produced a television adaptation starring Zachary Quinto as Charlie Manx and Ashleigh Cummings as Vic McQueen.
Written by Joe Hill. Narrated by Kate Mulgrew. Browse more Horror audiobooks and ebooks.
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