When a trio of academics research documents that point to a class of beings they classify as zombies for want of a better word, Nancy Palmer meets Basil who turns out to be 144 years old. As the evidence mounts that there actually are such "living dead," Nancy and her colleagues struggle with the difficulty of making that knowledge public. Nancy's relationship to Basil brings her into mortal danger in the form of Exiter, a serious criminal zombie. Nancy's brief affair with Basil ends when he disappears. A female zombie who befriends Nancy volunteers to be used as a demonstration to invited scientists in order to prove that zombies exist but not as they are usually portrayed. The Naked Zombie strips away all the mystery and misinformation about them in a similar way Anne Rice revealed real vampires in Interview With a Vampire.