Title Zombies vs Unicorns Series --- Editor Holly Black & Justine Larbalestier Cover Art Josh Cochran Publisher Margaret K. McElderry Books - 2010 First Printing Margaret K. McElderry Books - 2010 Category Anthology Warnings None Main Characters See below Main Elements Unicorns, Zombies

• "The Highest Justice" - Garth Nix
• "Love Will Tear Us Apart" - Alaya Dawn Johnson
• "Purity Test" - Naomi Novik
• "Bougainvillea" - Carrie Ryan
• "A Thousand Flowers" - Margo Lanagan
• "The Children of the Revolution" - Maureen Johnson
• "The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn" - Diana Peterfreund
• "Inoculata" - Scott Westerfeld
• "Princess Prettypants" - Meg Cabot
• "Cold Hands" - Cassandra Clare
• "The Third Virgin" - Kathleen Duey
• "Prom Night" - Libba Bray

It's a question as old as time itself: which is better, the zombie or the unicorn? In this anthology, edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier (unicorn and zombie, respectively), strong arguments are made for both sides in the form of short stories. Half of the stories portray the strengths--for good and evil--of unicorns and half show the good (and really, really bad-ass) side of zombies. Contributors include many bestselling teen authors, including Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Maureen Johnson, Meg Cabot, Scott Westerfeld, and Margo Lanagan. This anthology will have everyone asking: Team Zombie or Team Unicorn?

Team Unicorn all the way! If they were up against vampires I'd have to think about it a bit, but since my interest in zombies in near non-existant (and I'm not a fan of post-apocalyptic stories that usually go hand-in-hand with zombie stories), unicorns with hands down for me. I mean, I've never understood the interest in zombies, brainless creatures that shuffle about mindlessly, drop body parts wherever they go and smell bad. And no, when you give a zombie a few functioning brain cells and a personality so he can pass for human? Besides, a zombie romance is necrophilia! You can only push a creature to a certain limit before it isn't that creature anymore. The same is true for unicorns of course, but read some lore books, not storybooks, because the unicorn legend had various sources, the unicorn itself had various incarnations, from a creature big enough to lift an elephant on it's horn, to something so small it could curl up in a maiden's lap. In fact, about the only thing a unicorn is not, is the white horse that sparkles and farts rainbows, basically the one that Team Zombie doesn't like...well, that just showed how ignorant they were of the dark and dangerous history of the real unicorn! In fact the original unicorn had no magic at all, it was as real as the rhinocerous or the giraffe, and any horn was useful against disease and poison, it was just believed that a single horn must concentrate that power so simply made it better. Anyway, that said, on to the reviews of the each stories:

"The Highest Justice" - this one was an interesting meld of both unicorn and zombie, and while it was placed under team unicorn, since the unicorn was actually functional and the zombie was, well, a zombie so could do nothing but be strapped to a horse and moan, the core of the story was actually about the zombie. Interesting, dark, but I didn't love it.

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" - nope, a zombie that passes for human, can go to school, and fall in love? Not a zombie, not really. And I didn't really feel the love between them either. It's basically a story of a serial killer, and the boy who keeps him out of the clutches of the police. Yeah, you can try to hope your love is so strong that you can change the killer's ways...but you know eventually it won't work, the guy has serious psychological issues, and your protecting him will simply result in someone else dying. That's not love, that's selfishness.

"Purity Test" - this one takes the maiden story and twists it about. In our day and age, hard to find a maiden over 13 years old right? But what if you need one of them to help rescue some young unicorns from a wizard? So one unicorn decides to ignore tradition and look for someone useful, you know, like a U.S. Marine, even if she isn't quite as pure a custom requires her to be.

"Bougainvillea" - ok, there are real zombies, and possibly this story is supposed to fit into the world of The Forest of Hands and Teeth. A post-apocalyptic tale. A story that flips back and forth between "Before" and "Now", about a girl whose father becomes a dictator of a small island to protect it from the "murdo", the infectious walking dead. To protect your own you have to be cold and unsympathetic, a lesson the girl learns when she is faced with having to take her father's place, or submit to a pirate using murdos to take over the island (I didn't quite get why they kept zombies strapped to their boats, I don't see them as effective weapons since if you let them loose they just make more of the same and then you have to clean them up when you're done?)

"A Thousand Flowers" - ok, this is a unicorn story that was kind of gross, I mean it was a love story, but it was also a beastiality story. A drunken man stumbles through the woods and encounters a unicorn that leads him to an unconcious girl that has seemingly been raped. We then find ourselves viewing things through the POV of a girl who is an assistant midwife, for that girl has become pregnant and births a very unusual stillborn child. Finally we end with the POV of the midwife who sees the girl leap from her tower window and runs off into the night in the embrace of her unicorn lover. Certainly different, and one can't argue that the maiden capture story is an erotic ones (if you go back to the original legends, the woman is, you know, skilled at her art when the unicorn comes to her, other times the unicorn suckles from her breast) but still, the mechanics of it...ick.

"The Children of the Revolution" - this one is seriously disturbing, a fanatical actress wanting to avoid death adopts "re-an" children, children reanimated by advanced techonology and medicine. A girl is hired to babysit these unusual offspring, and not understanding what makes these kids so weird, let's them out of their enclosure and surprise, surprise, she gets bitten, then bites the actress, and...well guess this is the ground zero of a zombie apocalypse (pre-apocalypse?). Cheating death is usually unwise...

"The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn" - ok, I've read two of Peterfreund's killer unicorn books before so I'm well familiar with this world of venomous, carnivorous unicorns. This one apparently got slight approval from Team Zombie even! In this world, female virgin descendants of Alexander the Great are immune to the unicorn's venom and can kill the near invincible creatures (unicorns in legend were were impossible to capture and very hard to kill, her unicorns also cover the range of different kinds of unicorn's from the elephant killing Karkadan's to the lap snuggling goat like unicorns that is the focus of this tale). But even these women cannot tame the unicorns...or can they?

"Inoculata" - one of those post-apocalyptic stories that seem more or less the same to me. Group of kids find out they can infect themselves with a less zombie-fying strain and can then leave the compound to the adults. Meh.

"Princess Prettypants" - this was funny (though a serious underlying topic), taking a literally rainbow farting unicorn and turning it into a demonic familiar.

"Cold Hands" - Ok, I'll admit, I really liked this one, maybe my favorite out of all the stories. We have a town cursed to have their dead come back to live among them. The living can't leave since the dead will follow them and no one else wants them in their towns. So people get used to having the dead around, even giving them simple jobs like sweeping the streets so they don't just sit around and moan. And yeah, this is definitely a necrophilia story, as there is a romance, but if I ignore that bit, the rest was something enjoyable. Could make an interesting basis for a movie, a kind of Halloween Town (although big flaw in the logic, the dead seem fairly inarticulate but for some reason the protagonist can not just string a whole sentence together but appears human in just about every sense except being cold, how convenient only the main character is "alive" enough to be considered a potential love interest).

"The Third Virgin" - this one's dark, really dark. This unicorn doesn't fart rainbows. He can however heal, but healing actually involves consuming part of the remaining life span of the human. And the unicorn finds that it's like a drug (in fact he's a unicorn vampire!) and the younger the human, the more lifespan available to take, so babies give him the biggest rush, especially if he takes everything they have. He hates himself for it, but he can't help himself. So he tries to kill himself, but his body is near indestructible so no matter what he does, he lives on. A murdering drug addict, who even as he tries to get someone to kill him, is also considering how to drain her in return. This is a huge contrast to the other Duey unicorn stories I read! I didn't like it, but after all those repetitive, boring post-apocalyptic zombie tales, this one stands out as something I've not read before.

"Prom Night" - a post apocalyptic tale, adults get infected and are either killed or forced out of the compound which is now populated with just teenagers and kids. I liked the fact that a couple teenagers stepped up to be cops to maintain the peace. But in the end, it's just another bunch of people stuck in a cage while monsters rave outside (dragging my way through The Stand, then through the Passage, I've see enough)