Charlie Higson is the author of the YA zombie novel The Enemy and its just-released prequel The Dead, which was released on June 14 in hardcover here in the United States (if you live in the UK, it’s been out there for many months already). Here at MonsterLibrarian.com we are lucky enough to be part of a blog tour for The Dead, and I’d like to share with you what Charlie Higson wrote for us in a guest post on the “cosy apocalypse” and YA fiction. The part I really enjoyed is this:

As the father of three boys I try to encourage my children’s wild urges (within reason of course), and help them find harmless outlets for their fascination with violence. Boys want to grab spears and paint their faces and run around shouting. We all stifle those urges as we grow older, we repress ourselves, so is it any wonder we fantasise about things blowing up and falling apart?

Why would anyone read horror fiction, dystopian fiction, fiction about the end of the world? These are questions I’m asked all the time (frequently by relatives), and it’s great to see a writer as talented as Charlie Higson put it right out there on the page.  And now I’ll stop writing, and you can read it all for yourself below. It is absolutely worth it to take the time.

Charlie Higson Guest Post: The ‘Cosy Apocalypse’

I’m always getting very erudite e-mails from kids in America talking about ‘dystopian fiction’. It used to make me think that, to be bandying around such highfaluting phrases, American kids must somehow be a lot more intellectual than British kids, but then I found out that ‘dystopian fiction’ is being taught in many US schools.

And there is no shortage of dystopian fiction on the bookshelves, from The Hunger Games, to Maze Runner, Gone, Matched… and of course my own Enemy series. The description ‘Dystopian Fiction’ makes it all sound terribly heavy and gloomy and pessimistic, and I prefer another phrase that has also been bandied around a great deal recently – ‘The Cosy Apocalypse’. Because, let’s face it, the appeal of dystopian fiction is not that we‘re all terrified of the Apocalypse, it’s not that we’re dreading the subsequent process of running around some barren wasteland filled with the remnants and relics of our society, picking up weapons and blasting away at each other. The appeal is that we would all secretly love it to happen. Come on, it’d be FUN!

It’s like all those American survivalists hiding out in the wilderness, armed to the teeth and priming their mantraps. They claim they’re merely getting ready in case the worst happens and society falls apart. But we all know that every night they pray that it will happen. They would like nothing better. They want society to fall apart, so that they can go out and shoot people just like in the wild west, or Mad Max, or all those violent computer games. The Worst? No, it’d be THE BEST!

We love the idea of the apocalypse. People wondered recently why so many idiots followed that crackpot American preacher who predicted the end of the world. It’s simple. They really, really wanted it to happen. Apocalypse stories are at the heart of every major religion. The Greeks had a series of golden ages that all ended badly, Vikings had Ragnarok, the Bible is full of them, from the flood, to the plagues to Revelations. Our endless appetite for movies like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow show that we like nothing more than a good old-fashioned apocalypse.

There is a strong self-destructive (or even just destructive streak) in human beings. The more we are forced into cities and complex societies, rubbing up against each other, having to obey a complex set of written and unwritten rules and laws, having to pay our taxes, and keep up with the latest trends, and get our kids through school and negotiate dinner parties, moody partners, tricky relatives and troublesome neighbours, the more we have to worry about the environment, the global financial crisis, how computers and technology are taking over our lives… the more we want to throw all our clothes off and run down the street dressed only in a leather loin cloth, screaming. We just want things to be SIMPLER. If only a nice cosy apocalypse would come along and sort everything out, wipe the slate clean, we could start again.

I saw a fantastic production of Lord Of The Flies in London last week at the beautiful open-air theatre in Regents Park. With its tall trees and dense shrubbery surrounding the stage area it was a magical and very apt setting for the play, enhanced by a set that included half a wrecked aeroplane. It was interesting to watch William Golding’s story unfold. His original version of the book started with a nuclear explosion and was about the end of the world, and the message that we are teetering on the brink of disaster comes across very strongly. We human beings are messing everything up. The theme of the book/play is the split between sensible Ralph and Piggy and their friends trying to impose some sense of law and order, and Jack and his choirboys descending into savagery. I know whose side we’re supposed to be on, nice Ralph and gentle Piggy, but I must say Jack’s lot looked like they were having a lot more fun. I think William Golding hated children. He was fairly uninterested in his own and as a teacher in a boy’s school he was much more interested in being a writer than teaching his pupils, who I reckon intimidated him. He was freaked out by the boys’ wild urges. As the father of three boys I try to encourage my children’s wild urges (within reason of course), and help them find harmless outlets for their fascination with violence. Boys want to grab spears and paint their faces and run around shouting. We all stifle those urges as we grow older, we repress ourselves, so is it any wonder we fantasise about things blowing up and falling apart?

That is the appeal of dystopian fiction. A simpler life in a nice blasted wasteland somewhere. In all these cosy apocalypse stories 99% of the world’s population is wiped out, thus giving a lot more room and freedom to the 1% who survive, and in our fantasies we are part of that 1%, not part of the 99% who have been turned into compost. We will make it through and find ourselves a bazooka and we will be all right. That’s the cosy part. We won’t all die, and those of us who survive can rebuild a better world.

My Enemy series started with a fantasy that I had when I was a kid – wouldn’t it be fantastic if all the adults in the world simply disappeared? I wrote a couple of stories along those lines when I was younger and even wrote a long experimental (unreadable) science fiction book in which characters end up living in the Natural History Museum in London (just as they do in my new series). It’s always been a fantasy of mine to be allowed to go into all those places that are closed off to us and play. To go into the museums and dress up in the clothes, and use the weapons, and drive the vehicles. To live in Buckingham Palace, or the Tower of London. I figured it was a good background for a kids’ series. All I had to do was work out how to get rid of the pesky adult in such a way that I would leave the structures intact (a quandary that weapons designers have been working on for some time now!) A disease that only affects people over a certain age was the obvious solution.

My series is only superficially grim and pessimistic; at its heart it is a fantasy, a glorious optimistic piece of escapism (in which, admittedly, a lot of nice kids do get killed and eaten). I think kids like to read about coping in a world without adults (which is surely the appeal of boarding school books like Harry Potter). My books have been compared to Lord of the Flies but I think in the end my message is very different. Unlike Golding, I happen to like kids. I like teenagers. I like their wildness and sense of life and I feel that deep down most of them are fundamentally decent. I believe that, left to cope for themselves (and we’ve seen this happen with street kids in the Third World) children are actually pretty good at looking after themselves and don’t revert to mindless savagery. That’s what I want to get across in my books. I want to empower kids.

That was the starting point for the series, but I then decided I wanted to liven things up a little. So I didn’t kill off all the adults. I kept some as basic cannibal zombies. I seem to have caught a wave of the undead, and added my germs to the zombie plague that is taking over Western culture and the minds of our young people. In my next blog I will look at the appeal of zombies and try and figure out why they are everywhere at the moment.