The uprising of zombie popularity has been building for years now, since the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days Later ruled the box office while Kelly Link wrote an excellent run of zombie-focused short stories. Just as the irony of Shaun of the Dead followed, this spring publishing turns to the zombie as comic relief with books like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and S.G. Browne’s Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament. Such caricatures are inevitable, but will they leave us prepared for the zombie apocalypse?

It’s a relief, then, to witness Carrie Ryan’s debut novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth live up to the spooky of its title, turning the shambling, hungry dead back into frightening creatures. The novel depicts the grim reality of teenage Mary, whose world ends at the borders of her village, hemmed in by the fences that stand between the villagers and the Unconsecrated–code for zombies–that inhabit the forest beyond.

This village is the kind of place where any small mistake can lead to disaster. Witness the result when Mary spends a bit too long getting water, getting asked on a date to the Harvest Celebration by Harry, the brother of the boy she’s really in love with, Travis. While she dallies, her mother is lured to the fence and bitten, likely having spotted her dead husband among the Unconsecrated. A bite means infection, a fate far worse than natural death. Mary stays with her mother until she turns, listening to her stories one last time, stories that Mary dreams indicate a bigger world beyond the village’s borders–stories of the ocean, vast and empty of the nightmares that haunt their reality. Mary doesn’t just lose her mother, but her faith in the village’s strictures and the religion that supports them: “In the moment between my mother’s death and her Return, I stop believing in God.”

Ironically, the now-faithless Mary chooses to go to the Cathedral, intending to join the Sisterhood, the commanding force of the village. Nursing a wounded Travis back to health, Mary gets her first hint that the ocean might not be a dream. She witnesses a young woman, Gabrielle, secretly enter the village from outside. Soon enough, Gabrielle ends up in the forest, a zombie faster than the others. And on the day when Mary will be forced to wed Travis’ brother Harry, Gabrielle and a host of other Unconsecrated finally overtake the fences. Mary escapes with a small band of survivors, who follow a forbidden, fenced path through the forest.

What results is a brutal journey–loved ones killed and saved, hopes dashed again and again, and always, always the gripping hands and moans of the Unconsecrated along the fence. In Mary, Ryan has created a memorable, complex teenager ruled by her wants. At first, she believes she would be happy with Travis, but once she has him, it becomes clear to the other characters, and finally to herself, that she will only be happy when she sees the ocean. It’s a poignant desire, if not always a sympathetic one. Again and again, Mary’s need places Travis, her brother, and her friends in reach of the Unconsecrated.

We may not sympathize, but we do understand her actions. The lush gothic flavor of Mary’s voice reflects the depth of the character’s interior life, in contrast to the desolation of her environment: “I think about how we are so focused on the peril presented by the Forest that we forget that the rest of life can be just as dangerous. I think about how fragile we are here–like fish in a glass bowl with darkness pressing in on every side.” The prose’s casual formality evokes a sense of the past, leaving little room to hope for her future.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth never shrinks from exploring the brutal darkness of the zombie wasteland Mary has been confined to. Selfish or not, the reader can hardly blame Mary in her quest for escape. Though the novel is published as young adult fiction, it will be equally welcome to adult readers interested in inventive gothic horror, dystopian fiction–and, of course, zombies.