Arma-garden is a light-hearted, fun take on the popular zombie apocalypse trend of horror stories.
As the name suggests, the story follows the diary of Susie, a young woman who keeps an allotment to grow fruit and veg as a way to escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Except that one day, she sees an old woman attacked by a youth. Not just attacked, but thrown to the ground and having her face gnawed off. Immediately, Susie knows something’s wrong, but she’s lost her keys to the gate and can’t get out to help the old woman – the metal fence surrounding the entire perimeter of the allotment is too high, and spiked to boot. However, as soon as realizes the reason for this attack, that the youth is actually a zombie, she’s quite grateful for that impenetrable fence. To her luck, the allotment happens to have all the supplies to survive – fresh food, running water, and a few sheds for shelter, and, in the form of the old woman’s dog, who squeezed through the fence in sheer terror, a companion.
As the story progresses, we’re introduced to more characters who add a lot of humour and I really did laugh aloud several times while reading this piece. There’s a mysterious jogger always running past listening to several on point songs (really, one of them is ‘Thriller’) despite the crowd of zombies, a vegan zombie, the girlfriend of the vegan zombie, Susie’s boyfriend, a cat, and a 100 year old bed bound woman who always asks for sweet food to eat.
I really, really enjoyed this story and would heartily recommend it to anyone who likes ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and other tongue-in-cheek zombie tales. It’s well written, well thought out, the main character is likeable and witty (despite her desperate survival situation)
Treeshallow Musings 