Zombies vs Unicorns

Unicorns are fascinating. They are mysterious, shy, rare, and beautiful.  Many of the of the old stories say they had the ability to heal, which has always fascinated me. They are in the folk tales and mythology of almost every part of the world–and so are Zombies. 

When Holly Black contacted me about writing a short story for the anthology she and Justine Larbalestier were planning :  http://pages.simonandschuster.com/zombiesvsunicorns ..... I was thrilled to be included. I was team unicorn, of course! I had written stories about unicorns for young readers, and I was excited to write the darker side of unicorns for teens and YA readers.  Once I started the story, it dragged me into deeper and darker explanations of how the ability to heal might shape a unicorn’s life, his ethics, his needs. It became far darker than I could have imagined. 

It is the possibility of both darkness and light that make unicorns awesome.  As much as I love zombies (and I DO) they are always more or less the same. How people deal with them, survive them, escape/hide/destroy—mourn the friends who become zombies—all of that is interesting and exciting, yes. It can make for great books and films and TV shows about how human beings react when zombies stumble into their towns and cities.  But unicorns aren’t that simple. If you saw one leaping across an intersection, or hiding in the woods, you wouldn’t know how to react, whether to be scared or astonished or grateful or crazy or...?. The old  tales are vague and varied and ancient. There are just so many things we don’t know about unicorns...