Highway Bodies is a unique zombie apocalypse story featuring a range of queer and gender non-conforming teens who have lost their families and friends and can only rely upon each other, written by Alison Evans, published by Echo.

The Australian, young adult novel begins with bodies on the TV, explosions, barriers, and people fleeing. No access to social media. And a dad who’ll suddenly bite your head off – literally. The teens have to learn a new resilience… Members of a band wield weapons instead of instruments. A pair of siblings find there’s only so much you can joke about, when the menace is this strong. And a couple find depth among the chaos.

It is an articulate, intelligent and eloquent story of difference, that takes genre and uses it as a vehicle to explore gender, or nongender, informed by queer theory, and it’s place in the horror tradition. Highway Bodies is a horror story that takes the ‘menace’ of zombies, the roaming gangs of thugs and puts them up against genderqueer teens on the run. As a result the classic ‘us and them’ paradigm takes on a whole new meaning as they band together and have to wage a whole new fight. The horror narrative explores the non-binary, gender-fluid, sexually grey spectrum that we inhabit and throws the characters into the maw of zombies.

Alison is a nonbinary author from Melbourne, Australia, a regular speaker at festivals, schools and events, on writing, gender and sexuality, they are co-editor of Concrete Queers, a maker of zines and a lover of bad movies. Their work has been published in various Australian and international magazines, lit journals and zines, and their novel, Ida (Echo), was the winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

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