I was on Team Unicorn at the hilarious, wall-shaking, shouting match/debate/ at DragonCon 2010 and will be in Baltimore next weekend at the city book festival to represent Team Unicorn discussing (if that’s the right word) the upcoming anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns.
Unicorns have a long tradition in many cultures. In some stories they are horse-like and pure white. In others they are brightly colored and have deer’s heads, horses’ hooves, boars’ tales, and single horns of various sizes and shapes. The horns were worth fortunes to kings and churchmen alike. Almost every story confirms the healing power and protection of unicorn horns. So unicorns are almost eternal and truly magical, conquerable only by virgin girls used as bait by hunters waiting in the trees--hunters who want to saw off the treasured horn.
So for me, the question was: How does any living creature survive immortality, an endless, solitary life forever sought out by people in terrible need and/or with murderous intent. My story in the anthology is an attempt to answer it.
But I think Zombies have huge literary potential. The zombie stories in Z v. U are really, REALLY good. There are so many amazing voodoo legends of “the walking dead”, “tranced” soldiers, re-animated corpses being controlled by zombie masters…and then there are the Hollywood zombies, the hoards of the un-dead extras.
I love their inability to think, feel, their stench and their random, constant, persistence. And I love the Zombie Song.
At Dragoncon, in the middle of the debate, I got an idea for a zombie book. So as much as I love unicorns....we’ll just see.
Check out Kathleen's website here!
No comments:
Post a Comment