Pedal Zombies
4 words… Pedal Zombies is awesome.
Oh, wait. That’s not a proper review? Okay, then… imagine the huge grins on our faces when a copy of Pedal Zombies fell into our mooky editorial laps yesterday morning. A eureka moment! Yep, all our lives needed to be complete was a bunch of YA feminist stories featuring badass heroines, zombies and bicycles!
Pedal Zombies is the result of a successful Kickstarter by writer, publisher, and bicycle activist Elly Blue. Over two hundred backers pledged more than $6,500 to bring it to life, and this anthology is so smart and sassy that (a) it doesn’t need training wheels and (b) the only thing it requires is your brainnnnssss (uh-oh, that joke happened and we’re sorry)…
What else is so great about Pedal Zombies, aside from the title? Well, each story forms an unbreakable spoke in the anthology’s front-lockable wheel…
The antho opens with the sharp, cool and knowing Notes On Zombie Special Edition Catalog by Jessie Kwak, a series of marketing memos between company staff trying to push an anti-zombie bike model into production while there are still people left to buy it. The Breeders by Emily June Street (a nod to the grrrl band?) takes a post-apocalyptic look at who gets to control whose body, with homeopathic shades of A Handmaid’s Tale delivered with pithy YA punch. Pedaling Square by David J. Fielding is the tale of a girl who thinks she might have been bitten, but knows her only chance at salvation is to get on her bike and keep going. In all, you’ll find nine other gems to make you punch the air and either (a) buy yourself a bike or (b) think about customising the one you’ve got some more. That quick-fire VeNom system described by Jessie Kwak sounds pretty nifty…
The stories in Pedal Zombies aren’t all text, text, text, either. Ink comes in many forms – a bit like feminists, bicycles and zombs (hey, it’s not just walking-pace and fast). That’s why you’ll find a cute little zombie comic strip by Maddy Spencer nestled in the book’s pages…
So… it’s all very cute, right? Well, kind of. We may have painted a pretty picture, and the tales in Pedal Zombies are on the whole uplifting (and scary, and spooky, and hilarious), but let’s keep it real for a moment: there’s nothing cute about zombies. Not really. In her introduction, Elly Blue nails it:
“The original zombie stories were powerful tales of witchcraft and colonial control of people’s bodies. In the last decade, it’s the colonisers who have become obssessed with zombie stories, and we have given them new, disturbing meanings. Sometimes they seem to be violent, unthoughtful parables of some sort of class or racial division gone very wrong. Other times, they read like true stories of city life…”
Pedal Zombies is badass, big-hearted and battle-ready. Whether you’re bugging in or bugging out, keep this awesome collection of stories to hand and fear nothing.
Where to buy: You can get Pedal Zombies in paperback or Kindle from Amazon.