Zombies and flesh-eaters

British author Charlie Higson. Photo / Supplied

After spanning the globe in the best-selling Young Bond series, Charlie Higson explores territory closer to home in his latest young adult novel, The Enemy. Mostly set around the north London suburbs where the writer lives, The Enemy is set in a devastated near-future London where all the adults have either died or been transformed into terrifying flesh-eating zombies.

"Why not? It certainly saves spending hours researching somewhere else," laughs Higson, sitting in a cafe just down the road from the Holloway supermarket in which the novel's main protagonists hold siege against the undead hordes.

"But I like to be specific about the places I write about, which is why I like writing about London."

At first glance, The Enemy's gritty urban horror couldn't be more different to the Young James Bond's high adventures. However, Higson insists they have much in common.

"They've both got a strong action element," he says. "I knew I had to do something that didn't just seem like more of the same under a different title, like more spy stories or something set in the 1930s. But I still wanted to write genre fiction, so after doing thrillers, I thought I'd do horror. Those kinds of decisions make themselves, really. At the core of it, I have a kind of default mode, as I basically enjoy writing about kids going out and engaging with the world, physically doing things and fighting and killing."

Before the publication of the first Young Bond volume, Silverfin, in 2005, Higson, now 51, was better known for starring alongside Paul Whitehouse in the popular BBC comedy The Fast Show.

"To be allowed to play in the world of James Bond and for kids to actually like the books was really fantastic," says Higson who, despite penning several adult crime novels in the early 1990s, was happy to continue writing for a more youthful audience.

"I've now got an established name in the world of kids' books and while the adult books did okay, it's not something I'm known for. My publishers, Puffin, were very keen to commission me to do a new series and you stick with what's doing well."

Despite Young Bond coming to a natural conclusion with 2008's By Royal Command, Higson doesn't rule out an eventual return to the popular franchise.

"I always had a storyline that would run over five books and work as a complete series," he says. "But as the books became more successful, both the Fleming Estate and Puffin were very keen for me to extend it beyond that. I wanted to take a break at that point, not least of all because it would require thinking up a whole new storyline with James growing up and moving to a new school. It's always difficult to move on from something that's done really well. I haven't said I'm never going to do another one but I wanted to establish my own, entirely new series first."

After focusing on the seemingly invincible teenage 007, Higson enjoyed assembling an ensemble cast of characters in The Enemy, any of whom could perish at a given moment.

"Some kids who have read it have been surprised that some of the major characters have died, but that was the whole point," he says. "The problem with Young Bond is that you know he's going to grow up to be the adult James Bond, so you know he's not going to die. I really wanted to write about a gang of kids. That's what I loved about '70s horror films before they became big budget and mainstream. They had actors in them that you'd never seen before, so you couldn't make assumptions about who was going to live or die, which made them much more unsettling."

With the children left to fend for themselves, The Enemy has been compared to William Golding's Lord of the Flies. However, Higson actually drew inspiration from another 1950s literary classic.

"The Lord of the Rings was much more of a model for me," he says. "Hobbits are kind of children in disguise. Kids reading Tolkien's books react to them as if they are kids they can relate to but they are not actually children, so they can have adult adventures.

"The books also have a kind of epic quality, which I'm trying to evoke with The Enemy. In the first book, they kind of go on their quest and because of what has happened, they're moving into an increasingly medieval world; a pre-technological world where the electricity is dead and all the adults that understand the technology are dead. They end up fighting with swords and whatever else hobbits would use."

The next instalment in the series, The Dead, will be published this year and, according to Higson, it will progress in an unanticipated direction.

"A lot of people picking it up will expect it to begin five minutes later but actually it starts a year before the beginning of the first book. It also follows a different group of kids, seeing how they survive and, as the book goes on, we will see how the two stories come together."

Charlie Higson will appear at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 12-16. www.writersfestival.co.nz