Today we’re going to be talking about the new Young Adult
zombie novel, The Fury. In The Fury, our heroes discover that, whenever people are
within a certain range of them, they’re overwhelmed by the desire to murder
them horribly. It’s like a zombie move, but after the zombies kill you they go
back to making the tea, washing the car, delivering papers, etc.
I arranged to meet up with Alexander Gordon Smith to discuss
how he wrote the book, where he got his inspiration from, and what he thought
about exposing children to such horrible and violent stories. Because I know
Gordon from a while back (his middle name is actually his “first” name, because
he likes to be awkward like that) we ended up having quite a few drinks first.
Surprisingly the recording came out as pretty listenable.
Download Part One of the Interview Here: In the first part of our interview (which you can also read
below) we talked about where Gordon steals his ideas from, and why he decided
upon the premise of The Fury, as well as writing horror for children, and the
really quite terrifying real life genesis of the idea behind The Fury.
Then I bought another round.
Download Part Two of the Interview Here: In the second part of our interview I ask Gordon about his Fury
survival strategy (I once again make an impassioned argument for the shovel), we
talk about our favourite zombie movies and paranormal versus scientific zombies
and the importance of rules in horror, all while we become steadily more inebriated.
If listening to drunk people talk about horror fiction doesn't sound like your idea of fun, I've transcribed the first part of the interview below:
Gordon, you’re a
massive plagiarist. Who’ve you been stealing from?
Everybody I can. I think as we were chatting about earlier
being a writer you tend to plagiarise pretty much as many people as you can.
Everything I like you try and recycle in some fashion. But as The Fury is a
zombie book I’ve taken every single zombie think that I loved which is pretty
much every single zombie thing ever, and used it somewhere in the story.
I’ve tried to put my own spin on it but I feel like when
you’re writing in a genre you love you’re standing on the shoulders of the
people who came before you. I’d like to think one of these days someone will
stand on my shoulders or my face and write something else.
I noticed that
through the course of the book a lot of children die. Why do you hate children?
Oh well, that’s an interesting point. A lot of children do
die. And a lot die in my previous series as well. I don’t know, maybe this is
some weird subconscious thing? I was bullied a lot as a child... maybe I should
see someone about this? I’m not sure...
It is worrying...
I think, I’m a big fan of death in literature and when
you’re writing young adult books the percentage of younger characters to older
characters is higher than in an adult series so I guess proportionally you’re
going to end up killing more kids and teenagers, I guess maybe that’s why!
One of the great
things about zombie stories is that you can kill a load of people without it
having any consequences legally or morally because they’re zombies.
That’s very true.
In The Fury when you
kill the zombies, if you hadn’t killed them and left them alone they would have
gone back to being normal people.
Yes.
Why do you want to
take the fun out of murdering zombies?
Well I wanted to throw a new twist on it. I spent ages and
ages and ages trying to think of a new way of telling the zombie story because
obviously the zombie story has been told so well by so many people and I guess
this is why it took me such a long time to write a zombie book because I wanted
that twist, I wanted something unique and I don’t know whether this is
completely unique, probably not completely unique but the idea that people....
I was thinking about how there’s so many zombie triggers out there, there’s the
chemical trigger, the possession trigger, an infinite number of zombie triggers
and I just suddenly thought “What if the trigger, the thing that made people
zombies was you? And only you. Every time you went near someone they became
feral, they became a zombie. That was the thing that drove the book. When you
go near people they become zombies but as soon as you go away or they kill you
they go back to normal.
This is why I loved writing the book so much because usually
in a zombie story it’s the apocalypse, the world is over, but with this one
nobody is experiencing it apart from the characters in the book. Everyone else
is going about their life as normal. So these characters don’t have anything to
fall back on, they can’t say “It’s the apocalypse, let’s just roll with it.” As
far as they can see everyone in the world is going about their business, but
soon as they go near them, they are the ones who are in effect ruining
everything. They’re the spanner in the works. They’re the ones who turn
everyone around them into zombies.
I don’t know if I took the fun out of it... well hopefully I
didn’t take the fun out of it! But I think it’s quite fun where... everyone’s
seen that thing where your mum is a zombie, y’know, Shaun of the Dead kind of
thing and this is really interesting because when you kill your mum when she’s
a zombie you’re not really killing your mum. But if you kill your mum in The
Fury you’re actually killing your mum! People will go to her funeral! It’s a
weird... I wanted to add something else to it, but it was horrible. I did particularly
enjoy writing those bits because it felt more real than, I guess, a zombie
story. I felt the whole of The Fury felt more real than a typical zombie book
because of this kind of background that people are people, they’re not zombies.
It was a really weird story to write.
GP Taylor has said
that young adult books should have some sort age certification on them because
they’re getting too scary. Do you agree with him wholeheartedly because your
books are so horrible?
Thank you I’ll take that as a complement! The only thing age
certificates will do in books is make younger readers want to read the books
for older readers. If my books had a 15 certificate I’d get more 12, 13, 14
year old readers, so yes I think it’s a great idea!
But you know, I think this is the thing about horror. It is
a horrible book, the prologue of the book is one of the most distressing things
I’ve ever written, because it was quite shocking when I was writing it, but
y’know, I like to think that the core of the books, the same as with the
Furnace books, the core of the book is heroism, the core of the book is hope,
the core of the book is humanity. That’s what I love about horror, horror
brings out those things. You never see heroism like you do in a horror story.
I think the worse things get the more good you see in
people. I honestly think that about The Fury, that if a 12, 13 year old boy or
girl reads The Fury then yes, horrible things happen but I hope they’ll learn
something about themselves, something about their own strengths.
It’s the same as Bettelheim’s argument that fairy tales
really do make very young children feel more confident about their abilities. I
think horror as the same effect on teenagers, because being a teenager is
incredibly difficult. I remember being a teenager and I remember hating it, and
I read a lot of horror. Horror made me think- You know what? There are worse
things out there. I can do this. I have strength. I’ve seen people defeat
greater evils. I’ve totally forgotten what the question was... I’m just ranting
now!
Whether children
ought to be protected from the horrible things you inflict on them.
I think no. I think booksellers, librarians (especially
librarians), teachers, parents will be a guiding force. There are children’s
and young adult books that have very adult themes. I don’t put anything rude in
my books there’s hardly any swearing, I think there’s different levels of
danger in young adult books... I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to answer
this question but I think with horror there’s not much of a need to censor
books. I think we were talking about this earlier, if a younger reader comes
across something in a book that they’re not too sure about I think their
default setting is to stop or skip, and that’s a strong impulse in a child. I
know I was like that as a kid.
Aside from my general
tone of trying to accuse you of being a terrible person, honestly, when you’re
writing how much do you think about holding back because of the target
audience?
That’s really tricky. I’m not consciously aware of holding
back anything. Because with horror the main thing you’re worried about is
violence. I don’t really hold back on that at all. Maybe there’s times when you
think you’ve gone too far. But the default setting is to leave it in.
There’s been a few times where my editor has said “Let’s get
rid of this. Let’s just tone this down a bit” and I’ll always go along with it
because you know the editors job is they know the audience better than I do,
they know what levels people will expect...
Okay, is there any
really disgusting violent gory act that’s been cut out that you can tell us
about?
Let me think, with the Fury... No! I think at one point
there’s a dead baby in there somewhere, but I think that got left in. I don’t
know how that dead baby got in there... she just gate crashed the party...
Any children
listening to this, he didn’t write the dead bay, he just crawled in there and
it might be under your bed right now...
In the sequel, the Storm, there’s another dead baby...
Spoilers!
With the Furnace, my previous series, the violence was
almost Tom and Jerry violence. It was very real in the context of the story but
in terms of real life you’d never be in a situation like that. Whereas I think
The Fury is a bit more visceral, it felt more real when I was writing it.
In the prologue, and
even the first few chapters, the thing that gets through is that is so familiar
to anyone who’s been to high school, you make that work to the point where when
everyone starts trying to kill you it seems like a fairly natural
progression...
I was a bit of a loner in high school, found it very
difficult to make friends in high school...
But you’re such a
jock now Gordon!
I feel I’m a better person now for not trying to fit in the
crowd, but that’s a whole different argument, but I have very vivid memories of
things, like cycling down the street with the guy who was my best friend at the
time and suddenly a bunch of teenagers who were slightly older than us appeared
at the end of the road and he cycled up to join them, and as soon as I cycled
up he was taking the mickey, pointing... and I think you never feel so alone as
you do at high school.
At that age that’s
survival technique at the same time...
That’s true, it really is. You learn how to deal with that
kind of emotion.
I think the actual inspiration for this book, although I
didn’t consciously remember it while writing it, or maybe I did, I don’t know.
It’s weird how the brain works.
But when I was in high school... I’m in amazing shape now,
obviously...
He’s a golden Adonis!
It’s hard to believe when I was at school I was a bit
overweight, and I was in the bottom set at PE, as were most of my friends, and
we had this sadistic P.E. teacher called Mr Wren. So if you’re out there Mr
Wren thank you for inspiring this book! And his idea of a laugh was this game
called Murder Ball.
There’d be thirty kids in this class and we’d be outside in
the driving rain or the sleet or the snow or whatever and he’d give the slowest
kid in the class (usually me) a rugby ball and everyone would have a turn at
doing this, he’d give you a five second head start, and so you’d start running
and five seconds later he’d blow the whistle. Now you were pelting across the
field as fast as your legs would go, which for me obviously wasn’t very fast,
and you’d throw the ball away because it was just slowing you down. After five
seconds he’d blow the whistle and every person in that class would come after
you. Now their goal was the get the ball back, they wanted the rugby ball, but
they’d ignore it, it was forgotten. They wanted you.
They’d be coming across the field after you, you’d feel the
ground shake, and these were your friends, the people you hung out with at
lunchtime and you’d look over your shoulder and they would have faces like
demons, they wanted to kill you. I could never outrun them so after a few
seconds I’d be on the floor, 30 people on top of me punching me, biting me,
kicking me, putting grass in your mouth so you couldn’t breathe and mud up your
nose. I’ve in my life never felt so much like I was going to die as I did when
playing murder ball.
And the really weird thing is, it was horrible, I hated it,
but as soon as it was someone else’s turn to run with the ball you were there.
You would run after them, as soon as they were on the floor you were punching
them, you were kicking them... It was weird.
And this is what I love about zombies. You cannot fail to be
pulled into a mob like that. It’s amazing how quickly it happens. It’s like a
totally different part of your brain takes over.
And I think that, years and years later, that’s what
inspired the book.
