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Charlie Higson |
Charlie’s licence to scare the kids
Young Bond author Charlie Higson is among the attractions at the Holloway Arts Festival, writes Josh Loeb
IN the post-apocalyptic near future, a mystery illness has wiped out all adult humans.
Zombies stalk Holloway Road in search of fresh blood. Gangs of children have holed up inside Waitrose, while others have plumped for Morrisons.
Immune to the sickness, they hope for a better life, their dreams finally leading them to embark on a perilous quest to a place far from their supermarket hideouts.
Equipped with cover line “They’ll chase you, they’ll rip you open, they’ll feed on you,” The Enemy is the work of Charlie Higson, who is already famous among young readers as the author of the popular Young Bond series, which explores the life of 007 during his Eton schooldays shortly before the Second World War.
His kids vs zombies fantasy novel, which will be released later this year, taps into preoccupations with epidemics (“swine flu has been lucky for me”, he admits) and the salivating undead.
“The book is very much in the vein of 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead and I Am Legend,” says Higson. “My youngest child is obsessed with zombies so I sort of wrote it for him. I tried parts out on him by reading them as bedtime stories and I kept trying to scare him, but I think because it was me reading it to him, he found it strangely comforting. I did eventually manage to give him a nightmare though, so I knew I was onto a winner.”
One of the best things about writing the book, he says, was whiling away countless hours with his children, debating the goriest way to kill off characters.
“One of the reasons I was interested in writing a book like this was that a lot of people have said at events I’ve done, ‘Oh, the Young Bond books were really exciting but I always knew James Bond would be all right in the end because he grows up to be a secret agent.’ The good thing about starting off with a big cast of characters is you can kill lots of them off and really scare the s*** out of the kids.”
Higson has lived around the corner from the Holloway Waitrose for the past 12 years. He shops there and was taken on a special “behind the scenes” tour by staff who were interested in his zombie idea. “It’s a good place”, he reports. “If there ever is a zombie outbreak, I can think of a lot of worse places to hole up in.”
In the 1990s, Higson co-created and starred in hit BBC sketch series The Fast Show alongside his friend Paul Whitehouse. More recently he has directed the award-winning Radio 4 spoof phone-in Down the Line, and he is in the process of editing a TV spin-off called Bellamy’s Britain.
But first and foremost he sees himself as a writer. “In the days when you used to put your profession in your passport, mine was writer,” he says. “Everything I do has always started with writing.
“I wrote four adult thrillers in the early 1990s and when I came to write books for kids, I wrote them in exactly the same way. Obviously you have to be careful with language and sexual content, but I refused to go down the Famous Five route where it is all a bit safe. Kids don’t like to be patronised. I set out to write thrillers in which the central character is a child – rather than children’s thrillers.”
Tomorrow (Friday), Higson takes centre stage at the Holloway Arts Festival, where he will address his child (and adult) fans on the subject of young James Bond. The event is one of more than 40, which include big names such as Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and the poet John Hegley.
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