SATA
ENTRY TYPE:
WORK TITLE: The Boy on the Bridge
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Carey, M.R.; Lake, A.J.
BIRTHDATE: 1959
WEBSITE: http://www.mike-carey.co.uk/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: SATA 272
The A.J. Lake joint pseudonym is incorrect. His wife, Linda Carey, writes by herself under this pseudonym – Jennifer Stock 7/10/18
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly Mar. 27, 2017, review of The Boy on the Bridge. p. 84+.
Kirkus Reviews Mar. 15, 2017, , “Carey, M.R.: THE BOY ON THE BRIDGE.”.
Library Journal Mar. 15, 2016, Kapraun, Portia. , “Carey, M.R.: Fellside.”. p. 99.
Booklist Mar. 1, 2016, Alesi, Stacy. , “Fellside.”. p. 56.
Kirkus Reviews Feb. 1, 2016, , “Carey, M.R.: FELLSIDE.”.
Voice of Youth Advocates Dec., 2014. Sisson, Amy. , “Carey, M. R. The Girl with All the Gifts.”. p. 74.
Kirkus Reviews Apr. 15, 2014, , “Carey, M.R.: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS.”.
Publishers Weekly Apr. 14, 2014, , “The Girl with All the Gifts.”. p. 39.
Xpress Reviews May 12, 2017, Doshi, Michelle Gilbert. , “Carey, M.R. The Boy on the Bridge.”.
Mike Carey (writer)
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Mike Carey
Carey at the New York Comic Con in Manhattan, 10 October 2010.
Born
Michael James Carey
1959 (age 58–59)
Liverpool, England
Nationality
British
Area(s)
Writer
Notable works
Lucifer
Hellblazer
X-Men
Crossing Midnight
The Unwritten
X-Men: Legacy
The Girl With All The Gifts
mikeandpeter.com
Mike Carey (born 1959), also known by his pen name M. R. Carey, is a British writer of comic books, novels, and films. He is best known for writing the novel The Girl with All the Gifts, as well as its subsequent film adaptation.
Contents
1
Early life and career
2
Writing career
3
Bibliography
3.1
Comics
3.1.1
Early work
3.1.2
DC Comics/Vertigo
3.1.3
2000 AD
3.1.4
Marvel Comics
3.1.5
Other publishers
3.2
Novels
3.3
Short stories
3.4
Poems
3.5
Films
4
References
5
External links
5.1
Interviews
Early life and career[edit]
Carey was born in Liverpool, England, in 1959 – describing his young self as "one of those ominously quiet kids... [who] lived so much inside my own head I only had vestigial limbs". As a child, he maintained an interest in comics, writing and drawing primitive stories to entertain his younger brother.[1] He studied English at St Peter's College, Oxford,[2] before becoming a teacher. He continued to teach for 15 years before moving on to writing comics.
Writing career[edit]
After a series of one-off jobs for independent comics companies, including a biographical comic of Ozzy Osbourne and a fantasy about the band Pantera, Carey gained regular employment at 2000 AD, where he created the original series Th1rt3en and Carver Hale.
For the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics Carey went on to write the entire run of the Eisner Award-nominated comic book Lucifer,[3] and issues 175 to 215 of Hellblazer, a run on that title only exceeded in length by Garth Ennis and Peter Milligan.[4] He also wrote the original graphic novels The Sandman Presents: The Furies with John Bolton and Hellblazer: All His Engines with Leonardo Manco.[5]
He is the ongoing writer of X-Men: Legacy working with artist Scot Eaton,[6] plus Ultimate Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics.
He also had three recent Vertigo series that have wrapped up: Faker a six-part mini-series with art by Jock;[7][8] a second graphic novel, God Save the Queen, with John Bolton, featuring Queen Titania, Oberon, Puck, Nuala and Cluracan from the Sandman and Books of Magic comics; and Crossing Midnight with Jim Fern.[9][10] September 2006 saw the long-delayed debut of Wetworks: Worldstorm with Whilce Portacio for Wildstorm Comics.[11] He is also one of the first authors on DC's Minx imprint for teenaged girls, his second Minx title being co-written with his daughter, Louise.[12] The Unwritten[13] premiered in May 2009, with art by Peter Gross and covers by Yuko Shimizu.
Carey at the DC Comics booth at the New York Comic Con, 10 October 2010.
In 2008 Carey worked on a number of different titles, including tie-ins to the "Secret Invasion" crossover storyline, that included an eight-page story in the one-shot anthology Secret Invasion: Who Do You Trust?, which features Abigail Brand of S.W.O.R.D., and a four-issue mini-series, Secret Invasion: X-Men.[14][15] That same year he began writing Queen's Rook, the first of Virgin Comics' Coalition Comix on MySpace, where users could suggest ideas for a comic which would then get made.[16][17] He also wrote "Dark Deception", a crossover story arc that appeared across X-Men: Legacy and Wolverine: Origins,[18] and tied into X-Men: Original Sin,[19] he retold the Beast's origin story in X-Men: Origins,[20] wrote an Iceman story in X-Men: Manifest Destiny,[19][21] a comic book adaptation of Ender's Shadow,[22] and the Vertigo Comics series The Unwritten.[23]
Carey's first prose novel, The Devil You Know, was released in the UK by Orbit books in April 2006, and as a hardcover in the US in July 2007. Its sequel, Vicious Circle, was published in October 2006, and the following three novels in the series, Dead Men's Boots, Thicker Than Water, and The Naming of the Beasts, followed in September 2007, March 2009 and September 2009, respectively.
Carey's first feature film, the erotic ghost story Frost Flowers, was reported in June 2006 to be in pre-production, with filming to begin that September under the direction of Andrea Vecchiato, but the project collapsed before production began and the script is in limbo.[24] Carey is also working on the TV series The Stranded, the first co-production between Virgin Comics and the Syfy network.[25]
In 2011 he wrote a crossover between X-Men Legacy and New Mutants titled Age of X.[26] In August 2011, Marvel announced Mike Carey's final X-Men-Legacy arc.[27]
In January 2014, he had another prose novel published which was titled The Girl With All The Gifts. It was released to critical acclaim and was later that year announced to be made into a film. Filming began in May 2015, with newcomer Sennia Nanua in the lead role of Melanie, Gemma Arterton as Helen Justineau, Glenn Close as Caroline Caldwell, and Paddy Considine as Sergeant Parks. TV veteran Colm McCarthy directed the movie.
Bibliography[edit]
This article contains embedded lists that may be poorly defined, unverified or indiscriminate. Please help to clean it up to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Where appropriate, incorporate items into the main body of the article. (August 2014)
Comics[edit]
Early work[edit]
Titles published by various British and American publishers include:
Apocalypse:
Toxic! #30–31: "Aquarius: Promised Lands" (with Ken V. Meyer, Jr., 1991)
Malibu:
Ozzy Osbourne: "The Comeback" (with Tom Kyffin, one-shot, 1993)
Pantera: "Power in the Darkness" (with Trevor Goring, one-shot, 1994)
Caliber:
Inferno #1–5 (with Michael Gaydos, 1995–1996) collected as Inferno (tpb, 144 pages, Titan, 2003, ISBN 1-84023-764-3)
Negative Burn #49: "Suicide Kings" (with Paul J. Holden, 1997)
Dr. Faustus (with Mike Perkins, one-shot, 1997)
DC Comics/Vertigo[edit]
Titles published by DC Comics and its Vertigo imprint include:
Lucifer:
Devil in the Gateway (tpb, 160 pages, 2001, ISBN 1-56389-733-4) includes:
The Sandman Presents: Lucifer #1–3 (with Scott Hampton, 1999)
"A Six-Card Spread" (with Chris Weston, in #1–3, 2000)
"Born with the Dead" (with Warren Pleece, in No. 4, 2000)
Children and Monsters (tpb, 208 pages, 2002, ISBN 1-56389-800-4) collects:
"The House of Windowless Rooms" (with Peter Gross, in #5–8, 2000–2001)
"Children & Monsters" (with Dean Ormston and Peter Gross, in #9–13, 2001)
A Dalliance with the Damned (tpb, 160 pages, 2002, ISBN 1-56389-892-6) collects:
"Triptych" (with Dean Ormston and Peter Gross, in #14–16, 2001)
"A Dalliance with the Damned" (with Peter Gross and Dean Ormston, in #17–19, 2001)
"The Thunder Sermon" (with Dean Ormston, in #20, 2002)
The Divine Comedy (tpb, 192 pages, 2003, ISBN 1-4012-0009-5) collects:
"Paradiso" (with Peter Gross, in #21–23, 2002)
"The Writing on the Wall" (with Dean Ormston, in #24, 2002)
"Purgatorio" (with Peter Gross, in #25–27, 2002)
"Breaking & Entering" (with Dean Ormston, in #28, 2002)
Inferno (tpb, 168 pages, 2004, ISBN 1-4012-0210-1) collects:
"Inferno" (with Peter Gross, in #29–32, 2002–2003)
"Bearing Gifts" (with Dean Ormston, in #33, 2003)
"Come to Judgment" (with Peter Gross, in #34–35, 2003)
Mansions of the Silence (tpb, 144 pages, 2004, ISBN 1-4012-0249-7) collects:
"Naglfar" (with Peter Gross and Dean Ormston, in #36–40, 2003)
"Sisters of Mercy" (with David Hahn, in No. 41, 2003)
Exodus (tpb, 168 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-4012-0491-0) collects:
"Brothers in Arms" (with Peter Gross, in #42–44, 2003–2004)
"Stitchglass Slide, Part 1: The Weaving" (with Peter Gross, in #46, 2004)
"Wire, Briar, Limber Lock, Part 1: The Winnowing" (with Peter Gross, in #47, 2004)
"Stitchglass Slide, Part 2: The War" (with Peter Gross, in #48, 2004)
"Wire, Briar, Limber Lock, Part 2: The Widow" (with Peter Gross, in #49, 2004)
The Wolf Beneath the Tree (tpb, 160 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-4012-0502-X) collects:
"Neutral Ground" (with Ted Naifeh, in No. 45, 2004)
"Lilith" (with P. Craig Russell, in No. 50, 2004)
"The Wolf Beneath the Tree" (with Peter Gross, in #51–54, 2004)
Crux (tpb, 168 pages, 2006, ISBN 1-4012-1005-8) collects:
"The Eighth Sin" (with Marc Hempel, in No. 55, 2004)
"Crux" (with Peter Gross, in #56–57, 2005)
"The Yahweh Dance" (with Ronald Wimberly, in No. 58, 2005)
"The Breach" (with Peter Gross, in #59–61, 2005)
Morningstar (tpb, 192 pages, 2006, ISBN 1-4012-1006-6) collects:
"The Wheels of God" (with Colleen Doran, in No. 62, 2005)
"Morningstar 1" (with Peter Gross, in #63–65, 2005)
"The Beast Can't Take Your Call Right Now" (with Michael Kaluta, in No. 66, 2005)
"Morningstar 2" (with Peter Gross, in #67–69, 2005–2006)
Evensong (tpb, 216 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1200-X) collects:
"Fireside Tales" (with Zander Cannon, in No. 70, 2006)
"Evensong" (with Peter Gross, in No. 71, 2006)
"Untitled" (with Peter Gross, in No. 72, 2006)
"The Gaudium Option" (with Dean Ormston, in No. 73, 2006)
"Eve" (with Peter Gross, in No. 74, 2006)
"All We Need of Hell" (with Peter Gross, in No. 75, 2006)
Lucifer: Nirvana (with Jon J Muth, one-shot, 2002)
The Sandman Presents: Petrefax #1–4 (with Steve Leialoha, 2000)
Flinch #16: "The Wedding Breakfast" (with Craig T. Hamilton, 2001)
Hellblazer:
9-11 Volume 2: "Exposed" (with Marcelo Frusin, 2002, graphic novel, tpb, 224 pages, ISBN 1-56389-878-0)
Hellblazer:
Red Sepulchre (tpb, 144 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-4012-0485-6) collects:
"High on Life" (with Steve Dillon and Marcelo Frusin, in #175–176, 2002)
"Red Sepulchre" (with Marcelo Frusin, in #177–180, 2002–2003)
Black Flowers (tpb, 144 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-4012-0499-6) collects:
"The Game of Cat and Mouse" (with Jock, in No. 181, 2003)
"Black Flowers" (with Lee Bermejo, in #182–183, 2003)
"Third Worlds" (with Marcelo Frusin, in #184–186, 2003)
Staring at the Wall (tpb, 168 pages, 2006, ISBN 1-4012-0929-7) collects:
"Bred in the Bone" (with Doug Alexander Gregory, in #187–188, 2003)
"Staring at the Wall" (with Marcelo Frusin, in #189–193, 2003–2004)
Stations of the Cross (tpb, 192 pages, 2006, ISBN 1-4012-1002-3) collects:
"Ward 24" (with Leonardo Manco, in No. 194, 2004)
"Out of Season" (with Leonardo Manco and Chris Brunner, in #195–196, 2004)
"Stations of the Cross" (with Marcelo Frusin, in #197–199, 2004)
"Happy Families" (with Steve Dillon, Marcelo Frusin and Leonardo Manco, in No. 200, 2004)
Reasons to be Cheerful (tpb, 144 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1251-4) collects:
"Event Horizon" (with Leonardo Manco, in #201, 2004)
"Reasons to be Cheerful" (with Leonardo Manco, in #202–205, 2005)
"Cross Purpose" (with Giuseppe Camuncoli, in No. 206, 2005)
The Gift (collects #207–215, tpb, 224 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1453-3) collects:
"Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go" (with Leonardo Manco, in #207–212, 2005)
"The Gift" (with Frazer Irving, in No. 213, 2005)
"R.S.V.P." (with Leonardo Manco, in #214–215, 2006)
"With a Little Help for my Friend" (with John Paul Leon, in No. 229, 2007)
Hellblazer: All His Engines (with Leonardo Manco, graphic novel, hc, 128 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-4012-0316-7)
The Sandman Presents: The Furies (with John Bolton, graphic novel, hc, 96 pages, 2002, ISBN 1-56389-935-3)
Batman:
Batman: Gotham Knights #37: "Fear is the Key" (with Steve Mannion, 2003)
Detective Comics #801–804: "The Barker: When You're Strange" (with John Lucas, co-feature, 2005)
My Faith in Frankie #1–4 (with Sonny Liew, 2004) collected as My Faith in Frankie (tpb, 112 pages, 2004, ISBN 1-4012-0390-6)
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere #1–9 (with Glenn Fabry, 2005–2006) collected as Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (tpb, 224 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1007-4)
Crossing Midnight (with Jim Fern and Eric Nguyen, 2006–2008) collected as:
Cut Here (collects #1–5, tpb, 128 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1341-3)
A Map of Midnight (collects #6–12, tpb, 168 pages, 2008, ISBN 1-4012-1645-5)
The Sword in the Soul (collects #13–19, tpb, 168 pages, 2008, ISBN 1-4012-1966-7)
God Save the Queen (with John Bolton, graphic novel, hc, 96 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-0303-5)
Re-Gifters (with Sonny Liew, graphic novel, tpb, 176 pages, Minx, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-0371-X)
Faker #1–6 (with Jock, 2007–2008) collected as Faker (tpb, 160 pages, 2008, ISBN 1-4012-1663-3)
Confessions of a Blabbermouth (with Louise Carey and Aaron Alexovich, graphic novel, 176 pages, Minx, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1148-8)
The Unwritten (with Peter Gross, 2009–2015) collected as:
Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity (collects #1–5, tpb, 144 pages, 2010, ISBN 1-4012-2565-9)
Inside Man (collects #6–12, tpb, 168 pages, 2010, ISBN 1-4012-2873-9)
Dead Man's Knock (collects #13–18, tpb, 160 pages, 2011, ISBN 1-4012-3046-6)
Leviathan (collects #19–24, tpb, 144 pages, 2011, ISBN 1-4012-3292-2)
On to Genesis (collects #25–30, tpb, 144 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3359-7)
Tommy Taylor and the War of Words (collects #31-35, tpb, 240 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3560-3)
The Wound (collects #36-41, tpb, 144 pages, 2013, ISBN 1-4012-3806-8)
Orpheus in the Underworlds (collects #42-49, tpb, 176 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4301-0)
The Unwritten Fables (collects #50-54, tpb, 144 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4694-X)
War Stories (collects The Unwritten: Apocalypse #1-5, tpb, 128 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-5055-6)
Apocalypse (collects The Unwritten: Apocalypse #6-12, tpb, 176 pages, 2015, ISBN 1-4012-5348-2)
House of Mystery Halloween Annual #2: "Infernal Bargains: Just Say No!" (with Peter Gross, 2010)
2000 AD[edit]
Works published in the British science fiction-oriented comic 2000 AD include:
Pulp Sci-fi:
"Eggs is Eggs" (with Cliff Robinson, in #1145, 1999)
"Doin' Time" (with Ben McCloud, in #1147, 1999)
Tharg's Future Shocks:
"Inside Job" (with John Charles, in #1230, 2001)
"Right Back at Ya" (with John Charles, in #1287, 2002)
Carver Hale (with Mike Perkins, in #1236–1240 and 1247–1249, 2001) collected as CH: Twisting the Knife (hc, 44 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-904265-62-6)
Thirteen (with Andy Clarke, in #1289–1299, 2002) collected as Th1rt3en (tpb, 96 pages, 2005, ISBN 1-904265-36-7)
Marvel Comics[edit]
Titles published by Marvel include:
Ultimate Elektra: Devil's Due #1–5 (with Salvador Larroca, 2004–2005) collected as UE-DD (tpb, 120 pages, 2005, ISBN 0-7851-1504-8)
Spellbinders #1–6 (with Mike Perkins, 2005) collected as Spellbinders: Signs and Wonders (tpb, 144 pages, 2005, ISBN 0-7851-1756-3)
Fantastic Four:
Ultimate Fantastic Four:
Volume 2 (hc, 240 pages, 2006, ISBN 0-7851-2058-0) includes:
"Think Tank" (with Jae Lee, in #19–20, 2005)
Volume 4 (hc, 320 pages, 2007, ISBN 0-7851-2872-7) collects:
Ultimate X4 #1–2 (with Pasqual Ferry and Leinil Francis Yu, 2006)
"God War" (with Pasqual Ferry, in #33–38, 2006–2007)
"Untitled" (with Stuart Immonen and Frazer Irving, in Annual No. 2, 2006)
"Devils" (with Mark Brooks and Scott Kolins, in #39–41, 2007)
Volume 5 (hc, 288 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-3082-9) collects:
"Silver Surfer" (with Pasqual Ferry, in #42–46, 2007)
"Ghosts" (with Mark Brooks, in #47–49, 2007–2008)
"Four Cubed" (with Tyler Kirkham, in #50–53, 2008)
Volume 6 (hc, 256 pages, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-3781-5) includes:
"Salem's Seven" (with Tyler Kirkham and Eric Basaldua, in #54–57, 2008)
Fantastic Four: The Movie (with Dan Jurgens, one-shot, 2005)
Marvel Holiday Special:
"Christmas Day in Manhattan" (with Mike Perkins, in '05, 2006)
"A is for Annihilus" (with Mike Perkins, in '06, 2007)
"The Meaning of Christmas" (with Nelson DeCastro, in '07, 2008)
What If?.. featuring FF (with Marshall Rogers, one-shot, 2006) collected in What If: Mirror Mirror (tpb, 152 pages, 2006, ISBN 0-7851-1902-7)
X-Men:
X-Men (with Chris Bachalo, Clayton Henry, Humberto Ramos, Mark Brooks and Mike Choi, 2006–2007) collected as:
Supernovas (collects #188–199 and Annual #1, hc, 336 pages, 2007, ISBN 0-7851-2514-0; tpb, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-2319-9)
Blinded by the Light (collects #200–204, tpb, 144 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-2544-2)
Endangered Species (hc, 192 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-3012-8; tpb, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-2820-4) includes:
X-Men: Endangered Species (with Scot Eaton, one-shot, 2007)
"Chapter 1" (with Scot Eaton, in No. 200, 2007)
"Chapter 2" (with Mark Bagley, in Uncanny X-Men No. 488, 2007)
"Chapter 3" (with Mark Bagley, in X-Factor No. 21, 2007)
"Chapter 6" (with Mike Perkins, in Uncanny X-Men No. 489, 2007)
"Chapter 7" (with Mike Perkins, in X-Factor No. 22, 2007)
"Chapter 12" (with Mike Perkins, in New X-Men No. 42, 2007)
"Chapter 13" (with Mike Perkins, in No. 203, 2007)
"Chapters 16 and 17" (with Scot Eaton, in No. 204, 2007)
Messiah Complex (includes #205–207, hc, 352 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-2899-9; tpb, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-2320-2)
Wolverine: Firebreak (with Scott Kolins, one-shot, 2008) collected in Wolverine: Dangerous Games (hc, 144 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-3471-9)
X-Men: Divided We Stand (tpb, 136 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-3265-1) includes:
"Danger Room" (with Brandon Peterson, in #1, 2008)
"Lights Out" (with Scot Eaton, in #2, 2008)
X-Men: Legacy (with Scot Eaton, John Romita, Jr., Billy Tan, Greg Land, Brandon Peterson, Mike Deodato, Jr., Ken Lashley, Marco Checchetto, Phil Briones, Dustin Weaver, Daniel Acuña, Laurence Campbell, Clay Mann, Yanick Paquette, Paul Davidson, Harvey Tolibao, Jorge Molina, Rafa Sandoval, Khoi Pham and Steve Kurth, 2008–2012) collected as:
Divided He Stands (collects #208–212, hc, 120 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-3000-4; tpb, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-3001-2)
Sins of the Father (collects #213–216, hc, 168 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-3002-0; tpb, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-3003-9)
Original Sin (collects #217–218 and X-Men: Original Sin one-shot, hc, 144 pages, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-3038-1; tpb, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-2956-1)
Salvage (collects #219–225, hc, 168 pages, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-4173-1; tpb, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-3876-5)
Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia (includes #226–227, hc, 368 pages, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-4233-9; tpb, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-4234-7)
Emplate (collects #228–230 and Annual No. 1, hc, 112 pages, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-4020-4; tpb, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-4115-4)
X-Necrosha (collects #231–234 and X-Necrosha one-shot, hc, 448 pages, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-4674-1; tpb, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-4675-X)
Second Coming (includes #235–237 and Prepare one-shot, hc, 392 pages, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-4678-4; tpb, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-5705-0)
Collision (includes #238–241, hc, 168 pages, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-4668-7; tpb, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-4669-5)
Age of X (collects #245–247, New Mutants #22–24 and Alpha one-shot, hc, 256 pages, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-5289-X; tpb, 2012, ISBN 0-7851-5290-3)
Aftermath (collects #242–244 and 248–249, hc, 120 pages, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-5635-6; tpb, 2012, ISBN 0-7851-5636-4)
Lost Legions (collects #250–253, hc, 112 pages, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-5291-1; tpb, 2012, ISBN 0-7851-5292-X)
Five Miles South of the Universe (collects #254–260, hc, 160 pages, 2012, ISBN 0-7851-6067-1; tpb, 2012, ISBN 0-7851-6068-X)
X-Men: Manifest Destiny (hc, 208 pages, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-3817-X; tpb, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-2451-9) includes:
"Pixies and Demons" (with Greg Land, in Free Comic Book Day '08: X-Men, 2008)
"Kill or Cure" (with Michael Ryan, in X-Men: MD #1–5, 2008)
Secret Invasion: X-Men #1–4 (with Cary Nord, 2008) collected in SI: X-men (tpb, 136 pages, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-3343-7)
X-Men Origins (hc, 192 pages, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-3451-4; tpb, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-3452-2) includes:
Beast (with J. K. Woodward, one-shot, 2008)
Gambit (with David Yardin, one-shot, 2009)
Ultimate Vision #1–5 (with Brandon Peterson, 2007–2008) collected as Ultimate Vision (tpb, 160 pages, 2008, ISBN 0-7851-2173-0)
Legion of Monsters: Werewolf by Night: "Smalltown Girl" (with Greg Land, one-shot, 2007) collected in LoM (hc, 280 pages, 2007, ISBN 0-7851-2754-2)
Secret Invasion: Who Do You Trust?: "Agent Brand: In Plain Sight" (with Timothy Green II, one-shot, 2008)
Ender's Shadow (with Sebastian Fiumara, 2008–2010) collected as:
Battle School (collects #1–5, hc, 128 pages, 2009, ISBN 0-7851-3596-0)
Command School (collects #1–5, hc, 128 pages, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-3598-7)
Ultimate Collection (collects Battle School #1–5 and Command School #1–5, tpb, 256 pages, 2012, ISBN 0-7851-6338-7)
The Torch #1–8 (with Alex Ross, Jim Krueger and Patrick Berkenkotter, 2009–2010) collected as The Torch (hc, 200 pages, 2010, ISBN 0-7851-4631-8)
Breaking into Comics the Marvel Way! #2: "Butterfly Blade" (with Shaun Turnbull, 2010)
The Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange: "Duel in the Dark Dimension" (with Marcos Martín, one-shot, 2010)
Thor: Wolves of the North (with Mike Perkins, one-shot, 2011)
Sigil #1–4 (with Leonard Kirk, 2011) collected as Sigil: Out of Time (tpb, 96 pages, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-5622-4)
Other publishers[edit]
Titles published by various British and American publishers include:
Boom! Studios:
Rowans Ruin (with Mike Perkins)
Suicide Risk (with Elena Casagrande, #1-25, 2013–15) collected as:
Volume 1 (collects #1–4, tpb, 128 pages, 2013, ISBN 1608863328)
Volume 2 (collects #5-8, tpb, 128 pages, 2014, ISBN 1608863603)
Volume 3 (collects #9-12, tpb, 128 pages, 2014, ISBN 1608863999)
Volume 4 (collects #13-16, tpb, 128 pages, 2015, ISBN 1608864618)
Volume 5 (collects #17-20, tpb, 128 pages, 2015, ISBN 1608867218)
Volume 6 (collects #21-25, tpb, 160 pages, 2016, ISBN 1608868141)
Dark Horse:
9-11 Volume 1: "In the House of Light" (with Mike Collins, graphic novel, tpb, 196 pages, 2002, ISBN 1-563898-81-0)
Desperado Publishing:
Negative Burn #14: "Red Shift" (with David Windett, 2007)
Dynamite:
Red Sonja #0–6 (with Michael Avon Oeming and Mel Rubi, 2005) collected as RS: She-Devil with a Sword (hc, 150 pages, 2006, ISBN 1-933305-36-3)
Untouchable (with Samit Basu and Ashok Bhadana, one-shot, 2010)
Harris:
Vampirella: Revelations #0–3 (with Mike Lilly, 2005) collected as Vampirella: Revelations (tpb, 88 pages, 2006, ISBN 0-910692-92-0)
Image:
Thought Bubble Anthology: "The Timeless Genius of Leonardo" (with M.D. Penman, one-shot, 2011)
Virgin:
Voodoo Child #1–6 (with Nicolas Cage, Weston Cage and Dean Hyrapiet, 2007) collected as Voodoo Child (tpb, 144 pages, 2008, ISBN 1-934413-13-5)
The Stranded #1–5 (with Siddharth Kotian, 2007–2008) collected as The Stranded (tpb, 144 pages, 2008, ISBN 1-934413-25-9)
Wildstorm:
Wetworks: Worldstorm (with Whilce Portacio, 2006–2008) collected as:
Volume 1 (collects #1–5, 136 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-4012-1375-8)
Volume 2 (includes #6–9, tpb, 160 pages, 2008, ISBN 1-4012-1639-0)
Novels[edit]
Felix Castor series:
The Devil You Know (UK: 6 April 2006 & US: 10 July 2007)
Vicious Circle (UK: 5 October 2006 & US: 28 July 2008)
Dead Men's Boots (UK: 26 September 2007 & US: 23 July 2009)
Thicker Than Water (UK: 1 March 2009)
The Naming of the Beasts (UK: 3 September 2009)
The City of Silk and Steel (US title: The Steel Seraglio) (co-written with Linda Carey and Louise Carey; US/CAN: March 2012)[28]
The Girl With All The Gifts (UK: January 2014)[29]
The House of War and Witness (UK: 19 June 2014) (co-written with Linda Carey and Louise Carey)[30]
Fellside (UK: 7 April 2016 & US: April 5, 2016)[31]
The Boy on the Bridge (UK/US: 2 May 2017)
Short stories[edit]
now! and then! (an incomplete piece published in Murky Depths Issue 10 Winter 2009)
Poems[edit]
In Thule with Jessica (in Xconnect vol. 6 #2)
Films[edit]
Carey's screenplay for “She Who Brings Gifts” appeared on the Brit List in 2014[32] The film is a British post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller film directed by Colm McCarthy.[33] The screenplay was written by Carey adapted from his own novel The Girl with All the Gifts. The film stars Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine. The plot depicts a dystopian future following a breakdown of society after most of humanity is wiped out by a fungal infection and focuses upon the struggle of a scientist, a teacher and two soldiers who embark on a journey of survival with a special young girl named Melanie.[34]
Mike Carey
Credited as: Writer, Introduction
Mike Carey is a British comic book writer who began his career writing for U.S. independent publisher Caliber Press, where he created the original series Inferno and produced the graphic novel Dr. Faustus with artist Mike Perkins. He went on to write a number of projects for DC Comics' Vertigo imprint including the Eisner Award-nominated series LUCIFER, an extended run on HELLBLAZER and the original graphic novels THE SANDMAN PRESENTS: THE FURIES with John Bolton and HELLBLAZER: ALL HIS ENGINES with Leonardo Manco. He is currently the writer of Vertigo's acclaimed series THE UNWRITTEN, which he co-created with his LUCIFER collaborator, artist Peter Gross. Carey is also known for his work on WETWORKS for DC Comics as well as X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics. As a novelist, he has penned five supernatural thrillers in the Felix Castor series and co-wrote The Steel Seraglio (UK title City of Silk and Steel) along with his wife, Linda, and their daughter Louise.
You may know Mike Carey from his record-breaking run on Hellblazer, or from the impressive Sandman spin-off title Lucifer. In fact, a fair portion of his output has been concerned with either Hellblazer- or Sandman-related stories; throw in the work that he’s done with various X-Men titles, and you get a fair picture of what to expect from this writer.
However, the unexpected diversions and twists in his bibliography reveal that there may be even more to Mike Carey than one of the better ‘Gaiman- Moore’-style writers, of which there seems to be an endless supply.
He happens to have a cousin who is a well known maritime lawyer. Maritime lawyers practice what for many of us land based folks would consider a niche law specialty. But after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, we know much more about what maritime lawyers do. For a quick course about maritime law and those who practice it: Maritime attorneys primarily focus on issues pertaining not only to maritime law, often referred to as admiralty law, but also to the Jones Act. Admiralty law refers to the longstanding US laws and regulations, including international agreements and treaties that govern the activities in any US navigable waters whether its inland waterways (the big rivers where barges transport all sorts of products) or the open sea. Admiralty law formalizes the long-standing maritime maintenance and cure traditions, which have been recognized for centuries. I would not be at all surprised if Carey has pumped his cousin for details about the BP oil disaster, what happened on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and its ecological consequences of the actual spill. I’m sure we’ll see some influence of his insider knowledge sometime in his future writing.
You might think that Mr. Carey’s long tenure on Hellblazer would have drained the author on ways to make the ‘supernatural detective’ premise fresh over and over again. Yes, his “Felix Castor” series of books will certainly satisfy any Hellblazer fan, and the comparisons to John Constantine are unavoidable. However, whether you love Hellblazer and are just looking for “more”, or simply want to see what Carey can do with the premise when unburdened by established canon, The Devil You Know and its sequels will satisfy all of your questions.
I can attest to that. I enjoyed the book over the past summer while longing on the deck of my back yard pool. I had long wanted a pool so the whole family would have a great place to hang out during the hot summer months in New York. I had done a search online for hudson valley pools, wanting to have a local pool company so if I ever need help with maintenance or getting pool supplies, they would be nearby. Boy, did I luck out with Royal Pools & Spas. They were great at installing the pool and recommending a company that built the deck. I’m considering getting a spa set up for the winter. Anyway, there’s something about all detective novels that provide a very nice pace for the prospective reader, a gentle lulling between beatings and the solving of murders, and this is only enhanced by the inclusion of ghosts and Succubi. Mike Carey knows what he is doing. Felix Castor gets added to my roster of male lead urban fantasy go-to characters. He is a cynical, flawed, morally unpredictable man who somehow shows a deep sense of right and wrong. I am looking forward to reading more Mike Carey books by my pool next summer.
Most recently, the buzz is beginning over the upcoming feature film Frost Flowers, in which an actor (Rupert Holmes) becomes romantically obsessed with a ghost — pursuing her to the point of sending strange, yet luxurious gift baskets filled with diaphanous fabrics, bunches of sweet smelling flowers, pearls and other precious stones dangling from gold necklaces, succulent fruit, and paper and colored pens (with the hope she could communicate via writing him messages. She returns the gift baskets to him that now are filled all sorts of strange supernatural objects ranging from crystals, stones, tiny ornate vases filled with exotic oils, old broken pieces of jewelry, burned playing cards, a stuffed blue parrot, shells, poems on old parchment, and dried flowers. The gift baskets were a most unusual devise for the author to use, but also most effective. Eventually she becomes pregnant with his child. Yikes! We’ll see how well Mr. Carey can explain that one. I’m a pretty big fan here, so I’m thinking of sending Carey a gift basket, but I’ll fill it with sweet and savory goodies and maybe a few bottles of wine.
Personally, I think his most impressive work to date has been The Unwritten, a Vertigo series that deals with issues such as child celebrities and mentally-unbalanced fandom. Not so much about online blackjack, but the series hasn’t finished yet!
Okay, so once again any reasonable reader will be unable to make certain obvious comparisons (the plot revolves around a bestselling young adult series starring a boy wizard and his two companions, a boy and a girl his own age…gee, we hope a certain lawsuit-happy writer doesn’t get herself a copy!) . However, the combination of wild creativity and authentic human experience makes this series something truly special.
M.R. Carey, a writer with all the gifts
By Karen Hardy
23 March 2016 — 11:42am
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Try telling anyone that one of the best books you've ever read is about zombies. Highly likely you'll be shunned like one of the walking dead. Zombies? At least it wasn't about vampires. Their eyes glaze over.
I picked up a copy of M.R. Carey's 2014 hit The Girl with All the Gifts in an airport bookstore last year, its bright yellow cover catching my eye. Sometimes you do judge a book by its cover and there was no mention of zombies anywhere. Indeed you're a good way into the story before you actually work out what is going on. And by then you realise that this isn't a zombie story at all.
Mike Carey says he has shied away from writing about addiction, but with Fellside felt ready to go there.
Photo: Supplied
Sometimes the best books are the ones you can't pin down with a neat summary or description. And Carey's done it to me twice now. I've been selling his latest book, Fellside, as Orange is the New Black with a supernatural twist. I'm getting those looks again.
But Carey doesn't seem to mind at all that his stories take place somewhat outside the everyday because essentially they are everyday stories. Stories about love and loss and family and the strength of the human spirit.
Fellside, by M.R. Carey. Hachette. $29.99.
Photo: Supplied
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"In the end I think both these books are about relationships," says Carey.
"If I want to portray heaven or hell in a story I do it in terms of family. The greatest good is having a family where everyone loves everyone else, supports each other. The most awful situation in the world is being in a dysfunctional family where people are bringing each other down."
Carey's had experience with the stories of family dynamics before. He writes comics for both DC and Marvel, among others, and has worked on the X Men series since 2006.
"The X Men series is all about family, these creatures have been exiled from society but have found a loving home with Professor Xavier as some kind of patriarch."
As well as writing novels and comic books – other titles include Fantastic Four, Hellblazer and Lucifer – Carey has also written screenplays, including the one for The Girl with All the Gifts. The film, which is in post production, is directed by Colm McCarthy and stars Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine. It's due for release later this year.
"They are all very different processes," says Carey. "Every medium has its own toolbox and there is no way to learn how to use them other than doing some botch jobs, getting the feel of them, and then hopefully doing it right.
"Going from comics to novels was an easy transition. With comics you're working to a template … and because you've only got that fixed canvas you count the cost of every scene, it makes you hyper aware of structure.
"But with writing novels the canvas is as big as you want it to be, the freedom was amazing, I got drunk on power a couple of times I think."
Fellside is the story of Jess Moulson, in Fellside, a maximum security women's prison on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, for a murder she may or may not have committed. In between dealing with fellow inmates, recovering from horrific burns, and coping with visitations from a ghostly young boy, Jess has her hands full.
"With Fellside, there were two things that obsessed me for a while," says Carey.
"I'm fascinated by confined environments where people are forced to interact for long periods of time, like the army base in Girl, the prison in Fellside.
"The other strand was addiction. I know a lot about it, a woman I loved very much was killed by addiction, it's a theme that's important to me but it's one I've shied away from. But with Fellside I felt I was ready to go there."
The 57-year-old married father of three adult children, who lives just outside London in the leafy suburb of Barnet, started writing his first books in his late teens.
"I wrote these huge epic fantasies, highly imitative of Ursula Le Guin and Michael Moorcock. They were awful. I'd write chapter after chapter and then eventually I'd write 'The End' and that was about it."
He has always loved books.
"I love books as physical objects, I much prefer to read an actual physical book and I love the smell of them, the feel of them.
"There's a certain serendipity in wandering into a bookshop and something catching your eye, you pick it up and try it, and I love that."
A bookshop, or an airport, I love that too.
Fellside, by M.R. Carey. Hachette. $29.99.
Mike Carey
Mike Carey started out as a comics writer (Lucifer. Hellblazer, X-Men, The Unwritten) before branching out into prose fiction with the Felix Castor series. He has since written nine novels, including two mainstream thrillers under the pseudonym of Adam Blake. His movie, screenplay Dominion, is in development with Slingshot Studios and Intrepid Pictures.
What first attracted you to horror writing?
I came to it late. I was never a horror fan, growing up – sci-fi and fantasy were my thing. I watched monster movies, but I saw them as an offshoot of fantasy more than anything else. Then I saw The Shining, when I was already way into my twenties, and it was an epiphany for me. I suddenly realised that horror could be rich and resonant and powerful, and go to places that were really worth visiting.
I’m still very choosy about horror novels. I watch horror movies voraciously and I enjoy most of them on one level or another. With novels, I look for stylistic chewiness as well as cool concepts.
What is your most notable work?
In comics, that would be Lucifer – a series that follows the exploits of the Devil after he renounces the throne of Hell and goes to live in Los Angeles. Then, after a certain point in the series, he sort of gets to be God as he initiates his own Creation and climbs into the driving seat. It’s a cosmic epic with extensive horror underpinnings.
In prose fiction, it’s the Felix Castor novels (The Devil You Know, Vicious Circle, Dead Men’s Boots, Thicker than Water and The Naming of the Beasts). These are noirish supernatural thrillers following an exorcist-for-hire as he makes his precarious living in the mean streets of London – but a London that’s basically being inundated by the risen dead. Castor has the power to bind and banish ghosts, demons and other supernatural manifestations, but he’s more and more preoccupied with the question of where they came from and what they’re doing here on Earth – the big mystery that informs the whole series.
What are you working on now?
I just delivered a project for Orbit which I’m very happy with – a post-apocalyptic horror novel with a unique flavour, very different from Castor and from everything else I’ve done before. The working title is The Girl with All the Gifts, which is a literal translation of the name Pandora. The point-of-view character, most of the time, is a ten-year-old girl who might or might not be fully human.
I’m also working on my second collaboration with my wife, Linda, and our daughter Louise. We co-wrote The Steel Seraglio (in the UK, City of Silk and Steel, to be published by Victor Gollancz in March), which was a fantasy in the style of the Arabian Nights. Now we’re working on a second novel, House of War and Witness, which is set in eighteenth century Silesia. The heroine, Drozde, is a camp follower with the Austrian army just before the start of the War of the Austrian Succession, and the story starts when the regiment bivouacs in the grounds of a rotting mansion full of ghosts – all of whom seem to take an unhealthy interest in Drozde’s doings.
On top of this, I’m still working on various things connected to my movie screenplay, Dominion, which is going into production early next year. And still writing The Unwritten for DC Vertigo, which is about to host a shared event with Fables. And writing a superhero book for BOOM! Studios. I try to keep busy.
Who do you admire in the horror world?
Joe Hill would have to be top of the list. His novels are magnificent, and so is his monthly comic book, Locke and Key. He always gets character and emotional beats spot-on, which is a difficult trick to pull off in horror. He makes you care about his protagonists, and fear for them. And then he tears them to pieces in front of your eyes – and sometimes, if you’re lucky, puts them back together again. Wonderful stuff. The high concept in Locke and Key is nothing short of genius.
Do you prefer all out gore or psychological chills?
There’s a place for both. But the difference, for me, is that gore can’t sustain a narrative by itself – psychological horror definitely can. I guess at the end of the day I need a compelling story. I’ll make an exception for Far Eastern masterpieces like The Grudge and A Tale of Two Sisters, where narrative takes a second place to the supremely-realised horror moment. But usually I want there to be a narrative through-line with an actual pay-off. I loved Cabin In the Woods, for example. And The Ring, in both versions. And The Shining.
Why should people read your work?
I’ll starve if they don’t. Who needs that on their conscience?
Recommend a book.
Okay. I mentioned Joe Hill earlier. I’d recommend Heart-Shaped Box to anyone who loves horror. It’s got everything – a great hook, vividly realised characters, amazing atmosphere and a spectacular pay-off.
And if you’re into comics, check out Locke and Key. You will not be sorry.
I should say at this point – I never met Joe, or spoke to him, or was even in the same room as him. This is an unsolicited testimonial.
—
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Mike Carey fiction (UK)
Mike Carey fiction (US)
Interview with M. R. Carey, Author of The Girl With All the Gifts
Published on October 17, 2014 by danecobain+ in Author Interviews
Today, we continue our author interview series by speaking to M. R. Carey, the author of The Girl With All the Gifts, a zombie apocalypse novel with a twist – the protagonist is a young, infected girl called Melanie.
You can find out more about M. R. Carey on his website, or you can follow him on Twitter to see what else he’s up to. Listen to what we talked about below, or read on to find out more…
“I think my chances of surviving in a zombie apocalypse are zero.“
We speak to author M. R. Carey
It’s a nice change to speak to Carey, an author who’s based in the same country as me – the United Kingdom, or more specifically, England. Carey, whose first name is Mike, has worked with all kinds of different people over the years, on projects as diverse as comics and films – “I have a few favourite artists to work with,” he explains. “Whenever I work with them, I tend to bring my A-game. As for organisations, it doesn’t come down to them – it comes down to personal relationships and whether those relationships work.”
Working with an illustrator can give an author an additional edge, because they’re able to see their characters come to life in the form of sketches and drawings. “It’s a very different process,” says Mike. “You’re relying on the artist to do an awful lot of the work and an awful lot of the defining of the characters. In many cases, your dialogue changes as they do the character design.”
With a strong background behind him in the world of graphic novels, Carey decided to turn his attention towards a novel and The Girl With All the Gifts was born. “It actually had a very strange genesis,” he says. “Because I was invited to contribute to an anthology of supernatural stories, horror stories and so on. The theme is always something really banal and ordinary and reassuring – one year it was ‘family holidays’, and another year it was ‘schooldays’.”
M. R. Carey – The Girl With All the Gifts
“I thought I’d write a story for it,” Mike continues. “And I sat there for literally months doing other work with no inspiration, nothing came – at least, nothing that wasn’t a really, really bad rip-off of Harry Potter. And then one day I just woke up with this idea of a little girl in a classroom writing an essay, and the essay was ‘what I want to do when I grow up’, which was actually the original title of the story.”
There’s a twist to the tale, though – “We’re looking over her head and we can see what she can’t,” Mike explains. “Which is that she’s already dead – she’s never going to grow up. Obviously that’s not the way that the story turned out, but that was the seed of it. It did very, very well, but I had the sense that it was unfinished, that there was more to Melanie than that. And really, everything came from Melanie.”
But if it ever did come to a zombie apocalypse situation, Mike would be screwed – “I wouldn’t have a survival strategy – I’d hide under the table,” he says. “I suspect that I’d be the guy at the start who goes back to the house or back to the car and gets eaten straight away. I think my chances of surviving in a zombie apocalypse are zero.”
M. R. Carey
Of course, there’s a whole gamut of zombie fiction on the market, from movies and video games to graphic novels and TV shows. “I love both The Walking Dead and Land of the Dead, for similar reasons,” Mike reveals. “They’re both great at showing the human inside the monster, like in The Walking Dead when the wife keeps walking back to the front door and staring at it for hours and hours, and the husband is inside and can’t open up to her. And in Land of the Dead, when the zombies are in the band stand and they can’t remember how to play their instruments. I also loved Warm Bodies, which I hadn’t expected to love – a zombie romantic comedy, which reinvented the genre by doing something that nobody else had ever done before. It was charming, really entertaining.”
As for the use of his initials – Mike published The Girl With All the Gifts as ‘M. R. Carey’ – there’s no deep thinking involved – “It was marketing,” he explains. “The idea was to put a little bit of a Chinese wall between this book and the previous book so that the buyers, especially the chain buyers, would see it as a freestanding thing and not as the latest Mike Carey.”
“The British proofs went out as ‘M. J. Carey’, because my middle name is ‘James’,” Mike continues. “And on the day that the British proofs were released, we realised that there was already an ‘M. J. Carey’ and that she writes bondage porn. My Goodreads page was linking directly from The Girl With All the Gifts to these very explicit porno books.” Luckily, they caught in time to change the name and set it as ‘M. R. Carey’ for publication.
M. R. Carey Quote
As far as his writing goes, he’s not done yet – “a big part of my work this year has been the screenplay for The Girl With all the Gifts,” Carey reveals. “I was writing it at the same time as doing the novel, but I’ve been doing rewrites. I’ve also been doing some TV work for Touchpaper, the company that does Being Human, and the next novel. I finished writing it at the end of July and I’m just editing it now – it’s a ghost story set in a village.”
But for Carey, writing to a routine doesn’t come naturally – “My days are chaos,” he admits. “I start early and finish late, but I’d be lying if I said I was working all of that time. I work for an hour or a couple of hours, and then I get distracted and do something completely trivial – very often I play retro games, like Sonic the Hedgehog and old Sega Megadrive games from the 1980s. Or I’ll get distracted by the mess around me and so I’ll tidy up or make myself a coffee and end up staring out of the window.”
“So I literally ricochet through the day,” he continues. “Work, distraction, work, distraction. I have really good days where it seems like I get an awful lot done, and I have absolutely terrible days where at the end of the day I’ve only done 500 words. I used to feel desperately ashamed at the end of a day like that, because I’d feel like I hadn’t done enough to justify my place in the world, but I’ve slowly come around to the conclusion that you need to have that kind of day so that you can have the other days.”
The Girl With All the Gifts
In fact, Mike often finds that his least productive days in terms of words written are his most productive when it comes to working on a problem. “When my mind is switching off, it’s not really switching off,” he says. “It’s thinking about some problem, and when I come back out, I’ll have answered that problem. It’s amazing, the way the mind works – it really does subdivide and we’re thinking of things that we’re not aware of all of the time.””
And like all of the authors we’ve spoken to, Mike is also a keen reader – “The last book I read was Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, the winner of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke award, and I loved it. She did some lovely, original things with the ideas of artificial intelligence and ultimately explored the nature of human identity. I found it really moving and a totally compelling read.” Perhaps not as compelling as The Girl With All the Gifts, though.
M. R. Carey
M. R. Carey is the author of The Girl With All the Gifts, a zombie apocalypse novel with a twist – the protagonist is a young, infected girl called Melanie.
Know a writer who we should interview? Let us know on our forums! Alternatively, submit your questions for our next interview. We’ll see you soon!
Monsters with Heart: Interview with M.R. Carey
August 31, 2014 | By: Michael Rene D. Kanoy Meaningful Life
Monsters with Heart: An Interview with M. R. Carey
Reach-unlimited.com had the chance to interview prolific British author, Mike Carey, whose comic book work on VertigoComics: Neverwhere, Lucifer, the Unwritten, and his horror noir Felix Castor series have marked him as one of the best storytellers of scary and strange for all ages
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Mike Carey's scary new YA novel
Mike has a new YA horror book out, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS, under the new pen name, M. R. Carey. Previously he had a collaboration with his daughter and wife, a YA book called The Steel Seraglio, a collection of stories within a story not unlike the Arabian Nights.
Horror as story is huge everywhere especially in the Philippines and othe Asian countries, each of which have their own supernatural mythology that is as entertaining as it is blood-curdling. One local writer, has written an interesting essay about our Monsters being scarier than others, a pun used by every cheesy kid with claims on bragging rights, that makes for an interesting premise if the supernatural and horror is concerned. Award winning genre novelist, China Mieville has also said in more than one interview that if he'd pick between any story, he'd pick the one with the cool monster.
Mike Carey has put together all sorts of monsters in the stories and novels he's writtern and we ask him how he does it (like only the British can too). The scary has never been as compelling as it is today with plenty of the best writers stretching the genre to its strongest for always...
M R Carey himself, looking great! (from his Facebook profile pics)
REACH: Hello Mike! Great to talk to you about horror as a goldmine for all sorts of story and as one genre that has climbed out of the doldrums to become everything from Shiny Vampire YA romance, to Bizarro Yuck-fests, to New Weird goodness like Kraken from China Mieville (a comedy of sorts too!). You've explored crime noir as an environment for horror and the supernatural with your incredible Felix Castor series. Even recent horror stories like the Penny Dreaful TV mini-series, Lost Girl, and American Horror Story have in one way or another have used crime noir as a legit and engaging environment for setting up a good scary yarn. Lots of kids everywhere, not just in our county, dream of becoming a horror novelist and want to know how to write a great horror story, no matter what environment they can play with.
How did the Felix Castor series come together as a horror yarn? What do you look for in any good scary story? Is it about stringing together images and scenes for flavor? Is horror all about atmosphere and feels?
M. R. Carey: I think it’s one of those things where there are lots of very different ways to reach the same goal. Horror is certainly a genre that’s defined by its effect on the audience. If it doesn’t unsettle you, terrify you or make your skin crawl then arguably it’s not horror but something else that looks like it.
What you say about atmosphere and overall feeling seems to me like a very good way of describing the Far Eastern approach to horror. There are many great horror movies – I’d offer Ju-On as a prime example – that really don’t trouble themselves about plot logic or overall coherency. They just offer one sublimely scary moment after another, and the audience comes out feeling that they’ve got their money’s worth.
Having said that, there’s another trend also well represented in those same countries where the stories build towards a final reveal that completely changes your perspective on what you’ve seen. The horror here is partly conceptual: emotion has to ride on the processing of the ideas. A Tale Of Two Sisters falls into this category, as of course do The Ring and Dark Water. And in the West, the Orphanage.
And of course the full-on creature feature story is different again, with its own rules and its own internal mythology. And it’s here – if you think about many modern vampire stories, werewolf stories, zombie stories – that you realise what a broad church horror is. It mixes well with other genres, lends its furniture out for free, but often in those mixes the horror response is very muted or entirely absent. When you read the Twilight novels or watch the Blade movies, being scared might be in the mix but it’s not a major component. Something else, like romance or action, takes centre stage and everything else is mediated through that.
The Castor novels are a hybrid of that kind, with the other side of the equation being noir. Essentially they’re noir-ish crime stories with supernatural horror elements. That was how I pitched them – and the fact that I was writing Hellblazer at the time helped to get me in through the door. Hellblazer is in a slightly different genre space, when all is said and done, but the overlap especially in the first novel is considerable. So there was a template for what I told Orbit I wanted to do.
REACH: You've made Horror as sexy as any writer could without doing erotica in the Felix Castor books. Is sexy something that mixes with horror, a difficult heist to pull off? What makes the scary and the supernatural such a goldmine for story for every writer, whether a Wattpad junkie or more seasoned dudes like the best of the British pulp writers like you and China Mieville, and Paul Cornell?
M. R. Carey: Sexy mixes with anything, on account of the sex drive being so fundamental to our natures. Having said that, there are different ways of incorporating it and some work better than others. When I introduced Juliet, I was conscious that as a character she’d require very careful handling. If she and Castor had been able to have sex it would have been awful. Even without explicit description I think it would have felt like some kind of sleazy wish fulfillment. It was important that she be unattainable – that’s part of what makes her cool.
I did have one actual sex scene in The Devil You Know. It was… okay. But it made me vividly aware of the difference between nuance and explicitness as far as sex goes. Nuance carries ten times the narrative power in most cases.
Why are scary stories still such a rich vein to mine? Well, see above. I don’t think it’s any one thing. But one of the most potent pleasures it can offer is the experience of dipping yourself in boiling oil and coming out whole. You’re filled with intense emotions which in a real-world setting would be powerfully unpleasant – but you surface each time into the safety of your living room, the cinema, wherever. It’s like waking from a nightmare and luxuriating in the realisation that it didn’t really happen.
And of course, like sex, it puts us in touch with something fundamental – our sense of our own mortality, which we suppress most of the time so we can function.
REACH: Lucifer as a comic book character was an amazing opportunity for you to work on a book that could explore very tricky story ideas about characters that have been stereotyped by dogma , especially ones that are canonical in religion. Neil Gaiman had paved the way with his Sandman depiction of Lucifer as being rather human and even likable as a badass dude. What was your take on developing Lucifer from what was started in Sandman, and were you given free reign to make the book the best story yarn you could spin? Does research on the mythology and dogma of such canonical characters an essential part of fleshing out your story ideas especially when creating memorable scenes and dialogue in supernatural stories? What parts of the arc were your favorites? Is there a chance for you and DC to revive the book in the future or did you tie up the story as it ended as an epic?
M. R. Carey: To take the last part of that question first, I wouldn’t want to revisit Lucifer himself at any point. I feel as though the story we had to tell through him is told. But I don’t own the character, so the way is clear for other writers to use him – especially Neil Gaiman, who of course created and defined this version of the Devil. And I wouldn’t rule out going back to that world to tell stories about other characters.
I was pretty much given free rein when I was writing the book. Neil was involved as script and story consultant, and was amazingly helpful without tying our hands in any way at all. He had a sense of what our starting point should be, and I followed that steer in The Morningstar Option and A Six-Card Spread. As the series went on, though, my conception of the character took us in a slightly different direction. I saw it as a sort of family dynastic drama, with Lucifer as the rebellious son trying to get some kind of freedom from his father’s influence. I wrote him as Everyman.
I wouldn’t want to make too many claims for the depth and seriousness of my research. I was an English Literature major at university, so I was steeped in mythology already and I tended to choose stories and characters that I was already familiar with and interested in.
Favourites… I loved writing the one-offs. They were exciting and fun and rewarding to an extent that really surprised me. Stories like Breaking and Entering, The Writing On the Wall, Bearing Gifts were ugely enjoyable to write and I’m still very proud of them. It was a model I copied from Neil, and I could really see once I started doing it why he’d made it such a big feature of Sandman.
REACH: Every writer wants to put his own mark on any comic book character he gets the opportunity to mess up. What was your take on Hellblazer? Given that you had to work off the previous writer's canon ( for unfamiliar fans, John Constantine, aka Keanu Reeves the wizard-exorcist, Hellblazer is his DC comics title ), and are you happy that they've cleaned him up for TV (no more chain smoking, less cussing)?
M. R. Carey: I came onto that book right after Brian Azzarello, and I think it’s fair to say that I took John in a very different direction from Brian. Brian had stripped the magical elements down to a minimum – used them sparingly but very effectively. He’d also taken him way outside of his comfort zone, to the hinterlands of the USA. I brought him back to Liverpool and I put the magic front and centre again. I like to see John as the laughing magician, triumphing by sneakiness and smarts over much more powerful opponents.
I don’t mind at all that they’ve cleaned John up for television. It’s very noticeable that every writer who took him on in the comic book put their own spin on him. Under Jamie he’s politically engaged, trenchant, intelligent. Garth draws him into pub culture, has him drink Guinness, tangles him up in the Irish Troubles. And he started out, in Swamp Thing, as just a plot device. A blank slate. It never seemed to diminish him that he was re-invented by every new creative team.
And with regard to the smoking, specifically… It’s a different signifier now than it was in the 80s. It doesn’t feel like a betrayal of the character to have it not be visibly in the mix.
REACH: You've also mentioned more than once that Chris Claremont was an inspiration for getting back into comics. We so love his work no matter what anyone else says ( reading Uncanny X-Men used to take an hour just to savor each panel and page's dialogue by Claremont, unlike today when you just zip by looking at the pages in 10 minutes; and the word balloons aren't an art by themselves like when Chris was penning them the way they WEREN'T supposed to be penned according to snootier pundits ). Thank goodness, China Mieville got a shot at DIAL H, and being wordy wasn't as bad as they make it out to be. How different is writing for comics today from way back when, as far as style is concerned?
M. R. Carey: Oh man, it’s chalk and cheese. Or chalky cheese versus some other kind of cheese.
All media – comics, film, TV, prose fiction – are in a state of perpetual flux. At any one time there are a million things going on and a lot of them contradict each other. But within that ferment of motion there are recognisable shifts from generation to generation. Some conventions become marked choices – almost impossible choices – where they used to be ubiquitous and uncontroversial. Thought balloons, for example, and omniscient narrative captions. They used to be everywhere, now you hardly ever see them in the wild at all.
Wordiness, as you say, has gone into partial eclipse. But the ratio of words to pictures is something that has to be negotiated afresh with every book and every creative partnership. Nobody took Bendis to task when he was writing Daredevil and produced such wordy pages that Maleev had to build the entire page AROUND the dialogue. If something works, readers won’t question it.
It very definitely is a generational thing. It’s like what Kuhn said about science. A particular template will hold for a long time, and everyone will accept it and follow it. Then someone proposes a new template and everyone gravitates to that. Stasis followed by revolution. I belong to the generation whose revolutionary was Alan Moore, and his template seeped into all our work. It was impossible to ignore.
But Chris Claremont, ten years before that, was also a revolutionary. He completely changed the nature of episodic storytelling and the extent to which continuity elements took precedence over “story of the month”. Arguably his legacy was more far-reaching and longer-lasting than Moore’s. That’s not a measure of quality or artistic merit. It’s just a reflection on the way we work in this industry.
REACH: The coming-of-age story is one of the most powerful YA themes that every writer gets a chance to work his chops on. And even on Lucifer ( as an adult reader book ), you've shown that overcoming life's demons and supernatural hurdles is always an amazing sandbox for telling an enjoyable story whether if be horror or otherwise. Unwritten is another keeper in DC Vertigo's list of amazing books about growing up for storyhunters to hunt and hoard. Whether writing for comics or a novel, what advice would you give to aspiring young writers to draw out the experience of growing up and getting there? Is it an adventure yarn of finding an identity, as cheesy as that might read?
M. R. Carey: You have to write what you know, I think. But let me put that in context.
Most fiction works from a basis of fact. You try to create a dramatic illusion, and you try to persuade your readers to invest in it – to suspend disbelief. You try to build a world that’s internally consistent, settings that feel plausible, characters who are believable and who speak in authentic-seeming voices. And when you’re doing these things, the main thing you’re drawing on is your own experience.
And it’s the same with character. The worst characters are the ones who are built to service a plot and to do what the plot needs them to do. You should always write from what you know about human nature, and try to make sure that all your characters fall within the human range as you understand it. I’m not talking about stereotypes here, I just mean that you have to try to give every character you create a personality and a set of motivations that you can believe in yourself – that corresponds to what you’ve experienced in the real world. This is not to say that you make them conform to types, unless being human is a type trait. You extrapolate from people you’ve actually met and interacted with.
So your own experience - what you know - is the foundation for everything you write. And if you create characters who just plain don't work, your audience will know it and will feel it. They'll be pushed away from engagement with the story. And as far as that goes, a coming of age story is a special case of that more general strategy. It’s an experience we’ve all got in common – leaving home, whether home was sheltering or oppressive, and going out into the big world. It’s both a human universal and uniquely personal for each of us. As a writer, you should start from the personal end of that spectrum, and if you’re fortunate you’ll end up creating a character that all your readers will identify with. Your own experiences will energise every character you write.
REACH: You have a new book out now called THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS, another YA scary book that has gotten rave reviews everywhere as one of the best novels of this year. Because it is an amazing and memorable read that will haunt you for always. Kids today all want to do something like what you do. Is a life of writing ( whatever kind of writing one does for a living ) as good as it is, like everyone with their hearts into it says so? What inspires you to write the next book, and the next one after?
M. R. Carey: I don’t really see GIRL as a YA book. It has a very young protagonist, but I wrote it for an adult audience. Having said that, it’s been reviewed as YA more than once. I guess it’s a matter of perception.
What to say about the writing life? It can be utterly wonderful. Telling stories to an appreciative audience is one of the greatest experiences there is. And I would imagine that that’s why most of us do it, whether we can make a living out of it or not. It’s just intrinsic to want to make up stories and get them out there in some form or other and have people read or watch or listen to them. William Tenn has one of his characters say that being an army officer and leading a unit is “like making love without the caresses”. I never really got that comparison, but it’s somewhat true for storytelling. You’re having a very profound effect on people, and it’s an amazing thing to be able to do. Chuck Pahlaniuk makes people faint, vomit, run out of the room when he reads some of his short pieces. I’ve never managed that, but I have had people cry when I was reading aloud from GIRL and it made me enormously happy and proud that a story I’d created could get into people’s heads in that way.
But like any other profession writing is a peculiar, hybrid thing. I do it to make a living, too, and that changes things. Once you go freelance and you’re living on your earnings as a writer, your relationship to your stories has to change in some ways. Some jobs you take because you don’t want to starve. Some commissions don’t give you a great deal of creative freedom. Every gig is different, and every day is different. I’d be lying if I said it was all good. A bad review or an internet controversy can upset your mental equilibrium to an insane extent. It can be a really hard slog to get any paid work at all. And sometimes you’re forced to make compromises that break your heart. Sometimes, also, you write something that you’ve put your heart and soul into and it gets passed over and ignored. Those are the downsides.
All in all, though, I love it and I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to do it. Terry Pratchett said one time that he was afraid his publishers would find out how much fun he was having and stop paying him. I have days like that too. And I guess that’s part of the answer to what keeps me doing it.
The other part is fear. The freelancer’s fear of the work running out, which is like the goalkeeper’s fear of the penalty.
REACH: Among all the horror stories you've done, all the characters wear their heart on their sleeve one way or the other. Even the meek ones. And the monsters most of all. From Lucifer to John Constantine. From Felix Castor to Juliet. Now, Melanie from THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS. Does it come from working in comics and making cookie cutter characters work better? This isn't something that any writer can wing like it were a mechanical skill. How do kids figure out how to create unforgettable characters for their writing? Is character such a defining part of writing story and a writer's meat and potatoes for skill? British writers write some of the most stand-out people especially in comics, and as we've seen, in novels and movies as well, what makes you guys write such memorable chaps and mollys?
M. R. Carey: Wow. Tough question. And as with your question about horror earlier, there’s no one right answer. I think I touched on it a little when I said you have to draw on your experience. There are lots of other strands to it, though. Let me think.
Well one thing you do when you create characters is you try to align the reader’s perceptions with the character’s perceptions. This is sort of what Blake Snyder is talking about when he says your protagonist should save a cat in act 1. He doesn’t mean an actual cat – he just means that there has to be a moment when you see the character do something you absolutely sympathise with and approve of. And hopefully that will make you stick around with them long enough to get to know them better.
But it’s broader than that and it can work in different ways. When Frank Underwood in House Of Cards kills the injured dog in the first episode, it’s such a crazy and disturbing and compelling moment that it does the same thing. It makes you keep watching to figure out where he’s coming from and what makes him tick.
Your character can be good or bad, sweet or sour, pure or perverted, but they always have to be good company. The audience has to enjoy the time they spend with them. Underwood, Walter White, Joffrey Baratheon, Spider Jerusalem, Dodge from Locke and Key… I mean, you wouldn’t invite any of them to your wedding, but when you turn a page or turn on the TV and they’re there, you’re happy and excited. They absorb you and fascinate you. That’s the effect you’re going for. How to do it is less easy to define but yes, it’s the absolute heart of writing and most stories stand or fall by it.
REACH: Thank you Mike! For the chance for this interview with REACH Magazine! We hope that kids here in the Philippines check out your new YA Horror book, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS as well as your Arabian Nights inspired story collection, The Steel Seraglio.
All Stories Have Endings: Mike Carey and Peter Gross Close Out ‘The Unwritten’ [Interview]
Patrick A. ReedFebruary 17, 2015
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In the closing days of January, Vertigo Comics released The Unwritten: Apocalypse #12, the final installment in Mike Carey and Peter Gross' fan-favorite meta-fictional fantasy saga. The series told the story of Tom Taylor, a man trying to live down the fact that his father used his name and likeness for the Harry Potter-esque hero of his best-selling fantasy novels. As the series begins, Tom is quickly pulled into a world where the lines between fiction and reality are not so clearly drawn.
Over the course of a 54-issue initial series, an original graphic novel, and the twelve-issues of Apocalypse, Carey and Gross wove a story that touched on a great number of literary genres and archetypes, and surrounded Tom with a rich and bizarre cast of characters, including Lizzie Hexham, a Dickens character brought-to-life, who becomes Tom's friend and confidant; Pauly Bruckner, a man stuck in the form of a giant rabbit, who's been imprisoned in a treacly children's story, and will stop at nothing to escape; Leviathan, the all-powerful creature that feeds on stories; Richie Savoy, intrepid vampire; Golden-Age comic creator Miriam Walzer; mysterious immortal and de facto villain Mister Pullman; and Wilson Taylor, Tom's father, the author whose efforts set the entire tale in motion.
To mark the conclusion of Carey and Gross's long-running narrative, we talked to both creators to learn about the entire history of the series from initial conception to final curtain. (This interview contains spoilers for the ending of The Unwritten.)
Cover by Yuko Shimizu
ComicsAlliance: When The Unwritten was first announced and launched six years ago, it seemed almost like the platonic ideal of a Vertigo book: the creators of Lucifer and Books Of Magic telling a story about stories in the tradition of Sandman and Fables, with a Tim Hunter/Harry Potter doppelgänger as the protagonist. Were you worried about that initial impression?
Mike Carey: [laughs] I was certainly worried about the fact that we were pitching into a marketplace that already included Fables, which was, at that point, the most successful Vertigo book by a long way. And from a certain perspective, Unwritten seems to be a very similar sort of animal. So that troubled me a bit. But I think, from the first, we were able to make it clear we were going in a different direction with the whole reality/story interface.
Peter Gross: I wasn't too worried about it. I think because we knew going in that what it seemed like at the beginning was not what it was really about. So for me, it was just kind of a fun ploy to present it that way. Although, we were concerned that it was interesting and original enough, but for us… When you asked the question, I pictured us putting all the Vertigo cliches on pieces of paper and pulling them out one at a time – which might not be a bad idea, actually – but it was such a unique thing for us, it was always really going to be about exploring why we wanted to make stories.
CA: I've always been fascinated with the concept of "writing it sideways", which is something pop songwriters in the '60s used to talk about – taking a tune that was already a hit, looking at it from a different angle, and switching up elements bit by bit until you had something new. And The Unwritten is, at least as a reader, a really excellent example of that style of starting with the familiar and ending up somewhere entirely different…
PG: It's funny, because all we knew when we plotted out the story was that there was a father who wrote a really famous book about this kid, and we didn't ever talk about what the book was, initially.
And it wasn't originally going to be a Harry Potter/Tim Hunter analogue, but then when we started talking about "what kind of book is it?", we quickly came around to that. Partly, I think, because I had drawn Books Of Magic, and we realized we could get away with using a boy wizard, and then knowing that people understood the phenomenon and fame of Harry Potter. I think everyone assumes we went into it with the Harry Potter hook, but we really didn't at all.
MC: It was really that, at that time, Harry Potter was the most easily graspable, a universal cultural phenomenon that rose out of a book. So it was shorthand for a lot of other things.
PG: Yeah, if we did it now, it probably would've been a Hunger Games…
CA: I'm glad it didn't start a couple of years later later than it did, or we would've ended up with a riff on Twilight.
MC: [laughs] Well, I think at one point we did talk about using twinkly vampires, but decided against it!
CA: With this series you collaborated on the initial concept, you pitched it together, it seems to be have been very much a collaborative effort. How clearly defined were the responsibilities of who did what, how you came up with the stories, determined the pacing, and so on – and did that change at all over the course of the last six years?
PG: We had a great working relationship on Lucifer, but for me, Lucifer was always Mike's book, and I was the support person. And when we pitched this, it was really something from both of us, something that both of us created.
Now, we'd had some great moments on Lucifer when I'd engage with Mike about the story with questions and stuff, but always relative to "what are you after here?" And with this, we had free rein to throw ideas at each other. That was the biggest reward of the whole thing – we've had incredible conversations and back and forth, just taking these ideas and running with them. And that's something I never would have done on Lucifer, just because I felt like I didn't have ownership of that.
So from the start, it's been really pure back-and-forth collaboration.
MC: In terms of the process, it was kind of fractal. We would do the planning together – as Peter said, we would start with a conversation – Pornsak Pichetshote was our first editor, and he was great at basically hooking us up on three-way conference calls and letting us talk as long as we needed to. And we would do that every week. And then usually it was me who would create a document, an outline or overview of a story, and then that would become the subject of the next conversation. We'd argue it back and forth, it would [feed] into an outline for a specific issue, and Peter would have input at all of those stages.
And for the first time, I think, in my entire creative life as a comic writer, I was producing scripts which were kind of an invitation to negotiate, rather than a set working document. Very often, what came back would be different than what was in the script, and the book continued to grow organically through the layouts, through the pencils, always with that conversation going on around it.
PG: Yeah, I might read a script and think that everything is great, and everything is in place, but once you start doing the layouts and you spend a lot of time with the minutia of it, things just occur to you and things grow. And it was great having that time where I could email Mike and say, "look at this," and, "what if we did this," and things would sometimes change tremendously, and sometimes just in little tiny ways. But having that extra layer of thought is a really great thing to be able to do.
Art by Peter Gross
CA: How far in advance did you have things plotted, and were there specific things that changed along the way? Did you start out knowing the ending, and was it still the same once you got there?
MC: I think the beginning and the end were the things that were most firmly fixed. We always knew what Tom's arc was going to be, and we knew, conceptually, where he was going to end up. That was a big part of the impetus of the series. But there were a lot of things that happened along the way, just because we had really good ideas, and we got excited about this or that aspect of the story. We never decided in advance which other fictions we were going to visit, so that was very enjoyable…
PG: I think we knew Moby Dick… early on, that was probably the only one that was really concrete, that we knew would be recurring.
MC: And I think there was, in the very first overview document that we did as part of the pitch that we sent to Vertigo, we had a version of issue #12, the Pauly Bruckner issue – we said it would either be a Winnie The Pooh-ish world, or a Beatrix Potter world. But we never knew then that Pauly was going to turn out to be such an integral character.
PG: I think the only characters we really had nailed down were Tom and Lizzie. And Wilson, as a presence – but we never intended him to come into the book as a living force the way he did.
MC: No, it's true!
CA: There are a blinding array of genres and styles that you delve into over the course of the series. Were there any things you'd hoped to or tried to work in, but just couldn't fit?
MC: I had a real yen to do a Pride And Prejudice arc, to have Tom stuck in an 18th Century world of very, very precisely-defined social rules that he doesn't know. And have him blundering around at the ball where Elizabeth and Darcy dance, and constantly stumbling into those situations.
PG: And we were going to do much more in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis' time period than we ended up doing – it just didn't happen. And I think there were a lot of other books we talked about, but I can't remember now, off-the-cuff.
MC: Well, at one point we were going to have a whole mini-series weren't we, about Lewis and Tolkien? And that kind of foundered, because it's difficult to refer to Lewis and Tolkien without running up against the Lewis and Tolkien estates.
PG: We ended up doing all those half-issues, when we did two issues each month for a while instead of doing the Tolkien stuff.
MC: Which actually worked out better, I think.
CA: Especially over the course of these last twelve Apocalypse issues, how did you plan out all the alternate versions of characters, and all the worlds, and keep it all straight for yourselves and with each other? Did you have one of those enormous walls filled with notes and maps and yarn running from pushpin to pushpin?
MC: No, if we were that organized it'd be dangerous. [laughs] We're not that organized, or at least I'm not – Peter may have had it clearer in his head.
I think to a large extent, it was serendipity. It was stuff we were planning, not quite on the fly, because we knew where we were going, but the route happened as a result of us going back and forth on things.
PG: And to go back to the last question, we did, for a long time, talk about getting Tom into an Arthurian story where he met a Merlin-type character, so we ended up using that and going into it at the end there.
Art by Peter Gross
CA: What was the reasoning behind wrapping the first series with #54, and making Apocalypse a stand-alone 12-issue series? At the beginning of Apocalypse, you launched straight into the final act, and really didn't waste any time with re-introductions or preambles – it's clearly a continuation of the larger story. So why did you decide to set it apart?
MC: As I remember it, that was a decision that came about because of the Fables crossover, because we did get a lot of new readers from the crossover. And at that point, [Vertigo executive editor] Shelly Bond was concerned that those new readers might be put off by coming back to a series that was already in the mid-fifties. And we were talking about wrapping up, about going into the endgame, so renumbering from #1 was really just a wave across the room at those new readers, saying, "come on in, it's fine, you'll love it."
PG: Also, we had wanted to do a relaunch, we'd talked about possibly doing it after issue #35 or so. At that point, it was like some people thought, "it's over now," because we had answered all the questions about Pullman, and it was kind of like a new story after that.
And I think partly, we touched on a lot of comic book tropes in the series, and I think relaunching is a thing that comics do! [laughs] We did a crossover, we did a graphic novel, we did a relaunch – we just wanted to try it.
CA: In this finale, over the last couple of issues, there are things that become apparent about how the story works, and even, to some degree, who the story is about. Yes, it's Tom's story – but his father, Wilson, is the storyteller, and ends up becoming the protagonist to some degree. Was that always part of the plan?
MC: Well, it was always part of the plan for Tom to save the world by becoming fictional, sacrificing himself – not dying, but crossing over into this other ontological state. He's always been, from the outset, absolutely convinced that he's not fictional, he is a real entity. He's fought very hard against that perception, and then at the end, he has to surrender to it. So that part was always in the mix, it was always where we were going to end up.
And as Peter's said, having Wilson therefore rotate into the spotlight was not originally part of the plan, but it made more and more sense as we went along – the only person who would be able to be our point of view on those events would be Wilson.
PG: I think it was surprising for us the way it ended up. Because, like Mike said, we always knew the core resolution for Tom was that he had to become completely fictional… But I think our idea of what that meant evolved as we told the story, and as we thought about what stories are. The basis of the whole series has been, "what is fiction, what's the difference between story and reality, and what does that difference mean?" So that all came bubbling up again in the conclusion, and the last issue became much more of a meditation on those questions.
MC: And certainly, we did some blatant cheating – there is no possible plot logic for Richey ending up with Miriam's ghost at the end – but that's because it's Wilson who's pulling the strings. It's Wilson who's decided what kind of happy ending each person deserves.
CA: And now that The Unwritten has wrapped, what's next? Do you have more projects planned together? It's certainly seemed a fruitful partnership, and you do have a joint website.
PG: [laughs] Well, our deal with the devil dictates that we have to do another project together, so for the good of my eternal soul, we're planning some things.
MC: Yes, we have ideas and we have directions we want to go in, so… Watch this space!
M. R. Carey Blog Interview
Mark Yon September 8, 2016 0 Comment
We’re very pleased at SFFWorld to have the chance to catch-up with M.R. (Mike) Carey.
He’s been one of our favourites here for a long time, first with his work on X-Men, Constantine and Lucifer but also when he branched out into the brilliant Felix Castor urban supernatural books, which have been a favourite in the SFFWorld Forums.
Most recently Mike has become famous for his best-selling novel, The Girl With All the Gifts, which is now about to be released as a major movie, starring Glenn Close and Gemma Arterton.
Here we had chance to talk of all of these things, and his new book Fellside, which threatens to creep us all out again.
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Hello Mike! Many thanks for joining us at SFFWorld. As I type this, we’re about to get the UK premiere of the movie of The Girl With All the Gifts. Congratulations!
Thanks! It’s hard to believe our baby is finally going to be out in the world…
I’d like to start with that, if I may. How much involvement, if any, have you had with the film?
Well, I wrote the screenplay. And it was based on a story that I’d already written – a story that I was simultaneously developing as a novel. There was a lot of synchronicity going on, and it was incredibly exciting to ride that wave. From a very early stage I was working alongside director Colm McCarthy and producer Camille Gatin to work up the outline and then to develop the screenplay. We were very much on the same wavelength throughout. We’d have page-turn meetings that went on for six or seven hours, all taking turns to finish each other’s sentences.
And now, with the film due, are you nervous, excited or worried? (Or all three?)
Excitement definitely predominates. I’m nervous too, of course. I’m always nervous, even when I have far less excuse. I’m the sort of person who goes back inside the house to check whether I turned the gas off – and then I fret all day about whether I remembered to lock the door when I went out the second time.
But yeah, mostly excited at this point.
I’m assuming you’ve seen the finished movie?
Many times – and always with the same sense of wonder and delight. These things are always subjective, but I feel like Colm has done a perfect job of bringing to life the world that was in my head. And the performances were awesome. You’d expect that from Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine, from Fisayo Akinade and Antony Welsh – but Sennia Nanua was a revelation as Melanie. The entire movie depends on her and she’s onscreen pretty much the whole time. That’s a lot to ask of a twelve-year-old actor in her first feature, but she just took it and ran with it.
Simon Dennis’s cinematography is also wonderful, as are the design and the effects. There really isn’t anything I’m even a little bit unhappy with. Well, maybe that one or two scenes I was fond of didn’t make the final cut – but they’ll be on the DVD.
I was once told by a well-known author that once you hand over your book to a film production, you pretty much accept that what the film people do is different. Has that been the experience for yourself?
No, my experience was pretty much the opposite of that. I was kept in the loop throughout the prep process, and actually went on the tech recce when we were scouting locations in the Midlands. Then I was on set for a lot of the time, watching the shoot and occasionally contributing rewrites. Only very small rewrites, I should add. The film stays incredibly close to the final draft script. And the changes that were made were made collaboratively. I’m aware that all these things can work very differently. I was very lucky to be working with Poison Chef and with Colm.
You have had success before, of course, but were you surprised by the reaction to Girl With All the Gifts?
Yes and no. I’ve been surprised and delighted by the scale of it – by how popular the book has been, and then by how quickly the movie has come together – but I knew I was onto something with this one. The short story came to me in a flash after months of noodling and procrastination. I wrote it in four days and sent it in. Job done. Except that I knew it wasn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about the world and the characters, especially Melanie herself. I knew there was more to her, more to her story. So I set about trying to persuade a whole bunch of people to humour me and let me go back to the story in one medium or another. And it turned out to be a good call. I was meant to be writing a near-future thriller about mindswaps, which I couldn’t in the end get excited or inspired about.I’m so glad I had the courage to ditch that novel unfinished and switch to Girl.
And now we have Fellside. What can you tell us about it?
It’s a ghost story set in a women’s prison. On the principle of “write what you know”.
The core narrative, though, is about addiction and the things it leads people to do. And it’s about a character trying to find redemption for something so terrible it can’t ever be forgiven even by herself.
Especially by herself.
And we have another female lead, in the shape of Jess Moulson. What do you like about writing female lead characters?
I can’t really answer that. I went through a phase of writing mostly male leads – Lucifer, Felix Castor, John Constantine. Then when I started to write X-Men I had the experience of looking at a fictional landscape that was kind of overloaded with alpha males, and I decided to focus more on the female characters in the X-verse, who to various extents had been overlooked or under-used. Rogue, Mystique, Omega Sentinel, Lady Mastermind, Ariel, Husk, Blindfold et al… All great characters who nobody else seemed to have dibs or designs on, so I purloined them and built stories around them.
But the other thing that was happening in my life right then was that I was collaborating with two female writers – my wife Linda and our daughter Louise. I came out of that experience with a different voice, as you always do after a successful collaboration, and I wanted very much to keep experimenting with it. To some extent that may have shaped my choice of protagonists.
The Girl with All the Gifts showed us that as a writer you can take some traditional genre tropes and write us something fresh and different. How is Fellside different from other books you’ve written?
I think it’s a fusion of opposites. I tried hard to make the prison itself, and its inmates and officers, feel as real and authentic as I could make them. There’s a lot of stuff in the book that’s just about that – the experience of being in prison, the compromises and the ordeals and the accommodations. But then within that world there’s another world that opens up, a world in which dreamers and the dead can co-exist. I think that’s the most unusual aspect of the book – that it’s aiming to be fantastic and grimly realistic at the same time.
What do you think was the greatest challenge for you in writing Fellside? Did you have to do much research to get the prison material right?
The research has been a big thing, and it still is as I work towards the first draft of the screenplay (which I’m developing with the same creative team that produced The Girl With All the Gifts). Some permissions took a long time in coming through, but we have now visited three actual prisons. We’ve talked to current and former inmates and to the teams who handle drug rehab for prisoners. We’ve even had a guided tour of Holloway a few weeks after it finally closed, having just failed to get in while it was still operating. And of course there’s been a lot of secondary research too – books and papers and journalism.
But the biggest challenge was probably what I described earlier, making the two sides of the story cohere so there’s no jolt or discontinuity (hopefully) when the big reveals kick in and you realise you’re not necessarily reading the book you thought you were.
You are an extraordinarily busy man. What’s next?
I’ve just handed in the next novel, which is set in the same world as The Girl With All the Gifts but about ten years earlier and with a completely different cast of characters. I’m also working on the movie screenplay for Fellside, and on another movie that’s also a ghost story, but in a different vein. In fact screenwriting has come to be a bigger and bigger part of my slate over the past year or so, and that’s been really exciting – but also challenging, because the rhythms and life cycles of TV and movie projects are so different from those of books and comics.
Which is not to say that I’m giving up books and comics. One of the other things I’m currently working on is a new series of graphic novels with Peter Gross, my collaborator on Lucifer and The Unwritten. It’s called Highest House, and the first volume is going to be released in January of 2017 from French publisher Editions Glenat.
Lastly: I’ve got to ask this one, partly because you know I’m a fan but also because we have people on the site ask: what are the chances of seeing Felix Castor again?
I’m optimistic! I’ve had the sixth novel planned out for a long time, but other things kept intervening. I think I’m getting close to the point where I can free the time and make it happen – although it may happen in a slightly different form than originally envisaged.
That is wonderful news. Many thanks for your time, Mike. Obviously we wish you all the best, and look forward to a possible movie of Fellside!
Thanks! I hope you enjoy the movie…
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW Mike Carey On Writing The Girl With All The Gifts
September 21, 2016 Dave Golder
There’s a new kind of zombie flick just about to be unleashed into UK cinemas (Friday to be precise) and the man responsible for it had a new kind of experience writing it.Acclaimed comic book writer Mike Carey (Lucifer, Hellblazer, X-Men and Crossing Midnight), as well as the author of the Felix Castor series of novels, published a new novel in 2014 called The Girl With All The Gifts. It was a delightfully dark and bizarre tale of a very special girl called Melanie, who could be key to the cure of a fungal infection which turns humans into zombies. It received all kinds of positive review and now two years later we have the film version with a script by Carey. So clearly he adapted his own novel, right? Well, it’s not quite as simple as that.
• You can read our review of The Girl With All The Gifts here. The following interview contains very mild spoilers.
MyM BUZZ: Our cute, furry friends don’t come out of this movie too well. Did you make it specifically to upset pet owners?
Mike Carey: “Not so much, but that’s an interesting and satisfying side effect.”
We don’t remember the book being quite so peticidal?
“Yeah, the line about, ‘Do you fancy a cat?’ ‘I’ve already had one,’ isn’t in the book, only in the movie.”
Is it true that you wrote the book and the script at the same time?
“Yes it is. They were both based on a short story that I’d written, called ‘Iphigenia In Aulis’. And I was pitching it around. I submitted it for an anthology, An Apple For The Creature, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni LP Kelner. And having written it I kept thinking there’s more to this story and there is more to this character.
“So I was picthing it everywhere, and I got Little, Brown saying yes to the novel and Poison Chef greenlighting the movie development at the same time.”
Was that a weird experience?
“Yes it was a weird experience but it was incredibly positive. I don’t think it will ever happen to me again. Because what it meant was I was living with this story all the time during that development process and I was kind of making parallel decisions for two versions of the story that ended up pulling against each other. So it illuminated a lot of the decisions in a really positive way. So there are things in the novel that don’t make it into the movie and vice versa because of the logic of the two media.”
Was there anything you were forced to leave out of the movie foe budget reasons?
“The was one. That was Rosie, the big armoured lab. In the book one of the climactic scenes is Caldwell driving away in Rosie with Melanie stuck inside. Well, for the film, Rosie was a build; it couldn’t move. The cab is real. It’s a big military truck. Everything else was just constructed so it couldn’t possibly move. It would have cost another couple of hundred thousand to build something that could move.
“But mostly it was about finding different solutions. One of the wonderful things about working with the director, Colm McCarthy, was that he’s a very in-camera sort of guy. If there’s a low-tech solution rather than a CGI solution to a problem, that’s what he’s going to take.
“I mean obviously there are CG effects in the movie. We didn’t drape the BT Tower in fungus, for example. But an awful lot of what you see is real world setting. The look of the hungries is achieved through make up and prosthetics. I think part of the epic scale is that this is a real world and you get immersed in it.”
You mentioned the hungries. Are we allowed to call it a zombie movie?
“Well, we didn’t use the Z-word on screen at all. And it doesn’t appear in the novel, of course. Which is really just a mind game. Which is, if you don’t use the word, then it helps people stay one step removed from the concept just a little bit. So there is a little bit of a negotiated space before you think, ‘This is a zombie movie!’
“But it is a zombie movie.”
So in your words, in a world overrun with zombies movies, why should people see this zombie movie?
“I think because of Melanie. I think the crucial difference is that this is a monster movie where the protagonist is the monster and we’re seeing things very much from the monster’s point of view.
“But she’s both a monster and an innocent, a little bit like in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where the creature only becomes monstrous because he’s treated so badly by his creator. So it’s a film that tries to put you in the uncomfortable position of sympathising with the monster, the thing that is threatening humanity.
“There’s a sense that by the end of the movie there’s another candidate for that role, for the role of monster, apart from Melanie.”
One thing we thought made the film stand out is that it has a proper resolution, which zombies films rarely have.
“It’s definitely building to a climax which we hope people won’t see coming, but we hope people will think was inevitable afterwards. In a way it’s the only way the story could end. And we see it as a happy ending but that depends on how far away from it you’re standing.”
Do you have a favourite out of the film or the book?
“I don’t. I loved the process of working on both simultaneously. Every time I see the movie I watch it with a sort of slightly stupefied ecstasy because it’s so close to the vision in my mind. The entire process was joyous. Being on the set while the movie was happening. Being in the movie. All of these were things I didn’t have any kind of previous experience of. I can’t imagine going forward taking part in anything else that was so intense and so pleasurable.”
It’s tempting to say that the film is such a complete entity in and of itself that it doesn’t need a sequel. But have there been discussions?
“Inevitably we have thought about it. We have had that conversation a few times both with Little, Brown and with Colm and Cammy Gatin the producer. But I think we all feel the same way about it which is that you could do it, but it would be a different story in a completely different genre. It wouldn’t be a zombie movie. It would be something else. And the original audience might find that something else difficult to enjoy.
“What I have done is a prequel. It’s called The Boy On The Bridge, it comes out next May and it’s set 10 years before the events of The Girl With All The Gifts. So it’s some years after the breakdown, when they’re still trying to find solutions, and it’s a completely different cast. Caldwell is mentioned in a few places but she doesn’t appear. But there is an ending that does play into The Girl With All The Gift in an unexpected way and reveals some new things about that world.”
What are your favourite zombie movies?
“I love Zombieland. I thought was hilarious and surprisingly moving. In a different way I loved Warm Bodies. I didn’t expect to like Warm Bodies – the sort of Romeo and Juliet zombie story. It shouldn’t work but it just does!
“Shaun Of The Dead is, if course, amazing. I’ve only seen the first season of The Walking Dead but I enjoyed it very much.”
What do you make of the Lucifer TV series?
“I’ve only seen a few episodes of it. I enjoyed them. I enjoyed them quite a lot. It’s obviously a long, long way from what I was doing in the comics, but I think that’s fair because all adaptation is re-invention, and there was no way they could do the comic straight in a network show. So this is something else. And that something else is, I think, quite cool. I’ve got no problem with it. As Neil Gaiman says, you play with the toys, then you put them back in the box and somebody else comes along and plays with them.
“I felt the same way about the Constantine movie. The idea of Keanu Reeves as John Constantine is ludicrous beyond belief. But if you can forget Hellblazer, and it’s a good movie.”
Interview with Mike Carey Writer and Creator of Girl With All the Gifts
Taylor Holmes January 15, 2017 cinema, featured, Interview
Interview with Mike Carey Writer and Creator of Girl With All the Gifts
I was driving my daughter somewhere earlier today (to dance, from dance, swim team? I have no idea) and I mentioned to her that I’d just gotten an email from a lovely chap who wrote an awesome book about a zombie girl and she asked… why do authors and movie makers email to you? And I was struck by the question. My response was something like, I’m cool and they want to be my best friend. Or some dork-ish response. But it’s a great question. To really take an honest crack at the question though, I think it’s because if you really are genuinely into something, whether a book, a TV show, a movie, screenplay, what have you, and usually the creator of said thing will respond to your wanting to talk about it. Sure, your odds of getting a JK Rowling to respond are low. George Lucas? Very Low. (Can we please just not talk about it already!?) But anything else? Your odds are pretty good that they’ll respond to your positive feedback.
So I bet her that if she wrote to the author of the book that she is currently reading (not telling you who that is so that you don’t sway the bet in anyway… I know you guys) and told her… or him… them, that she loved the book and asked a few questions about it… I bet her the author would respond. What do you guys think? Am I going to win the bet? Of course I am. And yet, so many of you ask me the same questions… how in heavens name do all these people talk to you about this stuff? Because they love talking about their life’s work of course. Duh!
Which, brings us to Mike Carey. Mike is the author of the book The Girl With All the Gifts. And oh wait, he’s also the author of the screenplay for the Glenn Close movie of the same name. So I asked him if he’d mind answering a few (fairly burning) questions about his book and the movie this past week (which also happened to be the same week that he was nominated for a BAFTA (cough, British Oscars! for you uncultured ghets out there)) and Mike was extremely kind and courteous with his time. Which just proves the point one more time. Chat with anyone about what it is that they are doing and the odds are great that they’ll talk with you about it. Anyway, I have already told you about the movie in detail, and there were a few complications that I just wasn’t 100% sure about. So chatting with Mike about his screenplay really helped put to bed the last few questions that I didn’t fully understand. So let’s interview shall we?!
Taylor – Ok so this question is really important to me. In the book, it seemed as though the children with the gifts… (for lack of a better term) were born from two zombies having a child? Did I make that up in my mind, or is that how the book worked? And in the movie, the mother was human, then turned, and the fetus ate it’s way out? Were the book and the screenplay different in that way? And if so, why? Seems very relevant to the ending.
Mike – “Yes, we did play the logic slightly differently in the two versions. In both cases the children represent the second generation, the offspring of those initially infected – but in the novel, as you say, infection comes first and pregnancy afterwards. In the movie the women who give birth to Melanie and the other children like her are infected at a late stage of their pregnancy.
“The reason for the change was just simplicity and transparency. The movie doesn’t allow much space for lengthy lectures on the scientific backstory, and the idea of a ward full of pregnant women all falling victim to a single attack is very easy to get across, plus it builds a strong image in the mind. In the novel I was able to play Caldwell’s guesses and hypotheses out over a much longer span of time and have her working some of this stuff out as they travel. I was also able to introduce multiple examples of hungries retaining human impulses and drives.
“I think the ending has the same significance either way. It might make a difference to the numbers of second generation kids around, but it doesn’t change their status as a new, altered human race that has achieved a form of symbiosis with the hungry pathogen.”
Taylor – “Second question – my blog dives really really deeply into movies and the how’s and why’s. I have my own theories as to the ending of the book and the movie, but would you mind shedding light on why such a lovely young zombie (Melanie) would basically light the world on fire? (Personally my interpretations for the book and the movie are very different… so maybe you could reconcile them?)”
Mike – “Again, I think the rationale is identical for both. Melanie reaches a conclusion from what she personally observes and from what she learns about Beacon second-hand. She believes that humanity is no longer viable, and that all hope for the future resides with the feral children. She spreads the pathogen so as to remove the biggest obstacle from the children’s path, which is the threat that humanity will cull them in order to make a cure for their own condition. Imagistically it’s the openingof Pandora’s box – unleashing the horrors to get at the hope that lies beyond them.
Taylor – “Third question – Do I have this right, the struggle in the book and in the movie seemed between two forces – Dr. Caldwell and Melanie. Dr. Caldwell saw Melanie as the cure to the zombies and to humanity. And Melanie saw Dr. Caldwell as the threat to the new world order?”
Mike – “I don’t think it’s ever a struggle in the sense of them deliberately opposing each other. Until the very end of the story Melanie really has no agenda, beyond an intense feeling of protectiveness towards Miss Justineau. It’s only in the closing chapters of the book and the last few minutes of the movie that she thinks it all through and realises that she has a choice to make.
“And Caldwell wouldn’t see it as a struggle either, of course, since that would involve accepting Melanie as someone with agency. She sees her, and all the children, more in the nature of a resource to be exploited. One of my favourite moments in the movie is when Melanie forces Caldwell to admit that she’s a living, sentient being in her own right – kicking the legs right out from under Caldwell’s world view and leaving her hanging in mid-air.”
Taylor – “CONGRATULATIONS on your BAFTA nomination. So excited for you guys! What has this been like for you and the gang that made Gifts happen?”
Mike – “We’ve been amazed and delighted at the critical reception the film has received. We got five-star reviews from Empire and Sight and Sound, and Mark Kermode made us his film of the week in the Observer. Sennia got best actress at Sitges and Colm was voted best director at FantasticFest. The BAFTA nomination is the crowning glory, but we were nominated for four BIFAs, and Camille Gatin won in her category as breakthrough producer. We’ve also received two London Critics’ Circle Award nominations, for young performer (Sennia Nanua) and breakthrough filmmaker (me). It all adds up to a massive vote of confidence for the film and what we did with it, which feels great. We were very ambitious and it seems we succeeded in at least some of the things we were trying to do.
Fifth question – (unless you don’t mind me bloviating some more) do you have any new screenplays in the works? I know you’ve published Fellside back in April, (which I have just ordered and can’t wait to read) but would love to hear that you are working on another film!!?
“I’m working on two films at the moment. Fellside is one, and if that happens it will be with the same director and producer as Girl, which would be amazing. The other is a ghost story with a very contemporary and in some ways very unusual setting – even more unusual than a women’s prison! Both of those projects happened as a direct result of my involvement in Girl.
“I’ve also been working with two UK-based production companies on TV pitches, both of which are at very early stages. Out of nowhere, and for the first time in my career, screenwriting has become the bulk of what I do. But I’m still working on a new novel and a couple of comic book series…”
—
Wow – there you have it. To have Mike’s life right now!! So much excitement and tons happening for him right now. I guarantee that we’ll see tons more from him and the Gifts crew in the next couple years. Mike started as a comic book writer and grew from there to an author and then screenplay magician, which seems like a perfect career path for a screenplay author. But what do I know? Here’s what I know, his writing is fresh and interesting and insightful and hopefully we’ll see tons and tons more from him soon!
The Boy on the Bridge
Publishers Weekly. 264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p84+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Boy on the Bridge
M.R. Carey. Orbit, $26 (400p) ISBN 978-0-316-30033-9
Plausible science and solid prose and characterization elevate this dystopian thriller above similar works. In the same alternate future as Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts, a fungus, Cordyceps, which began as an insect parasite, has infected people, repurposing their brains and turning them into "hungries," mindless creatures with an appetite for human flesh. Carey moves quickly to engage readers' sympathies for epidemiologist Samrina Khan, one of a group of scientists and soldiers on a research mission. They travel through the U.K. in a motor home, on a desperate quest for an inhibitor that could make people resistant to the fungus. In the midst of the devastating horror the world has become, Samrina learns that she is pregnant, news she considers "a high tide of wonder and dismay and disbelief and misery in which hope bobs like a lifeboat cut adrift." This development radically complicates things for her, and her colleagues, as the plot builds to a satisfying conclusion. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Boy on the Bridge." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 84+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487928139/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=df56193a. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928139
Carey, M.R.: THE BOY ON THE BRIDGE
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Carey, M.R. THE BOY ON THE BRIDGE Orbit/Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 5, 2 ISBN: 978-0-316-30033-9
Carey returns to the post-apocalyptic world of The Girl with All the Gifts (2014).The Rosalind Franklin, aka "Rosie," carries five scientists, one very special boy, and their escort of six military personnel in her heavily armored belly trundling over the decimated landscape of a ruined Scotland, collecting caches of data left by a previous expedition. Their mission is to find a cure for the Cordyceps pathogen that, 10 years ago, began transforming people into mindless killing machines, dubbed "hungries." Epidemiologist Dr. Samrina "Rina" Khan hopes 15-year-old Stephen Greaves, and his unique abilities, will make a cure even more possible. After all, Stephen is something of a savant whose intelligence arguably outstrips that of all the scientists on board even though he suffers crippling social anxiety. One day, Stephen ventures off from a sampling expedition and discovers a female child among the hungries, a girl with the speed and reflexes of an infected but who also seems to be intelligent. Stephen knows that his discovery could change everything, if he can only make contact. Meanwhile, Rosie's crew can't get in touch with Beacon, their home base, and Rina is harboring a secret that could endanger the entire mission. Packing 12 people into a vehicle with coffinlike bunks and one shower would be stifling during the best of times, and tensions are high, amplifying power struggles between the civilian commander, Dr. Alan Fournier, and his scientists and between Col. Isaac Carlisle and his soldiers, especially volatile sniper Lt. Daniel McQueen. Carey weaves a creeping dread into his already tense narrative and doesn't rely on cliched zombie tropes to drive it. Each crew member is compelling, but Stephen is the standout here, and his idiosyncrasies, of which he's painfully aware, only make him easier to root for, and Rina's love for him is an anchor. Just as they think they're close to a breakthrough, events force them to head for home, but they may not have a home to return to. A terrifying, emotional page-turner that explores what it means to be human.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Carey, M.R.: THE BOY ON THE BRIDGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105384/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d4c2f140. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105384
Carey, M.R.: Fellside
Portia Kapraun
Library Journal. 141.5 (Mar. 15, 2016): p99.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Carey, M.R. Fellside. Orbit: Hachette. Apr. 2016. 496p. ISBN 9780316300285. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780316300308. F
Jess wakes up in a hospital room with no memory of how she got there. She is under arrest for setting her apartment on fire, an act that left her disfigured, injured her boyfriend, and killed Alex Beech, a young boy who lived upstairs. Her own recollections too muddled by her heroin use to know what happened, Jess begins to believe the accusations. When she is convicted of murder, Jess is sent off to Fellside, a new privately run high-security prison bordering the Yorkshire moors. There she is visited by Alex's ghost, who tells her she was not to blame for his death. As she and Alex search for the truth, Jess becomes embroiled in the schemes of a drug-smuggling ring that has turned Fellside into a dangerous place for anyone who doesn't play along.
VERDICT Carey presents another genre-defying novel. While his first, The Girl with All the Gifts, was frightening because of an imagined future, this new book is terrifying owing to the realistic possibilities explored. Less a traditional ghost story than a send-up of the prison-industrial complex with a healthy dose of magic realism, this eerie tale is sure to hook crime fiction and horror lovers.--Portia Kapraun, Delphi P.L., IN
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kapraun, Portia. "Carey, M.R.: Fellside." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2016, p. 99. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A446521110/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d17baa08. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A446521110
Fellside
Stacy Alesi
Booklist. 112.13 (Mar. 1, 2016): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Fellside. By M. R. Carey. Apr. 2016. Orbit, $27 (9780316300285); paper, $17.99 (9780316395007); e-book (9780316300308).
Jess Moulson is a heroin addict who wakes up in the hospital with no memory of why or how she got there. Eventually she learns that she started a fire in her apartment, where she suffered severe burns requiring multiple surgeries, but that's not the worst of it; she is also under arrest for killing Alex, the little boy upstairs. She won't cooperate with her lawyer and ends up in Fellside, a women's prison in Yorkshire, England. There she goes on a hunger strike, the only way she can take her own life. When she is just a day or two from death, the ghost of Alex appears in her room and tells her she is not his murderer, demanding her help in finding the real killer. That won't be easy, as she is returned to the general prison population after abandoning her hunger strike; branded a child killer, she is treated accordingly. This is a dark, suspenseful, and occasionally brutal paranormal mystery with an unreliable narrator.--Stacy Alesi
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Alesi, Stacy. "Fellside." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2016, p. 56. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A447443616/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ed0d5e3f. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A447443616
Carey, M.R.: FELLSIDE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Carey, M.R. FELLSIDE Orbit/Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $27.00 4, 5 ISBN: 978-0-316-30028-5
A woman in prison must fight violent inmates and suspicious ghosts to find some measure of redemption. Jess Moulson wakes up in the hospital with no memory of where she is or what has happened. High on heroin, she started a fire that burned her own face beyond recognition, severely injured her addict boyfriend, and led to 10-year-old Alex Beech's death by smoke inhalation. Jess is found guilty of Alex's murder and sentenced to Fellside, a notorious women's prison in the remote Yorkshire moors. Alex's ghost visits her in prison, assuring her that she was not the one who hurt him and begging her to uncover the truth behind his murder. Soon Jess is projecting into "the Other World" with Alex while simultaneously navigating the very dangerous real world of Fellside. Sociopathic inmate Harriet Grace rules the hierarchy. With the help of a corrupt guard, she controls a lucrative drug ring that operates within the prison walls. Jess sets out to solve the boy's murder and expose Grace, but gradually she realizes that Alex is not who she thought he was, and she may be trusting a false ghost. This novel may appeal to those who like ghost stories, but its success requires an extreme suspension of disbelief. The problem is that most of the novel is relatively realistic and grim, so it's rather a lot for the reader to openly accept the ghost/astral projection angle when Jess begins to walk through other inmates' dreams and visit "the Other World" populated by people's souls. The mystery of Alex does have a satisfying answer, but in the end, there are too many loose ends to tie up. The leaps between reality and supernatural fantasy are just too hard to navigate.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Carey, M.R.: FELLSIDE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2016. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A441735148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=81f8605c. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A441735148
Carey, M. R. The Girl with All the Gifts
Amy Sisson
Voice of Youth Advocates. 37.5 (Dec. 2014): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
Full Text:
5Q * 5P * A/YA [A]
Carey, M. R. The Girl with All the Gifts. Orbit, 2014. 416p. $25. 978-0-316-27815-7.
In The Girl with All the Gifts, Carey has created a perfect adult/young adult crossover that follows ten-year-old Melanie, a girl who does not know why she is restrained at gunpoint every time she is escorted from her cell to a classroom down the corridor. Here she joins similarly restrained children, hoping always that her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, will appear that day. Although Melanie has vaguely heard about the "hungries" who live beyond the base walls, her only other knowledge of the world is gleaned through the seemingly random facts that the teachers impart. When the base is eventually overrun by hungries, Melanie and Miss Justineau escape, accompanied by a few other survivors who seem to fear and loathe Melanie.
Even if this book were not superbly written, older teens would welcome it based on its incorporation of two favorites: dystopian futures and zombies. The "z word" is never used, but the hungries exhibit classic zombie behavior, and Carey provides an intriguing, well thought-out biological explanation. Melanie's dawning awareness of her nature, her devotion to Miss Justineau, and her relationships with her other companions are touching and suspenseful by turn, and the book remains a nail-biter to the end. While some of the author's other novels, published under the name Mike Carey, are perhaps too violent to recommend here, this novel is perfectly suitable for older teens already familiar with this subgenre. Public libraries should be prepared for this to fly off both adult and young adult shelves.--Amy Sisson.
Sisson, Amy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sisson, Amy. "Carey, M. R. The Girl with All the Gifts." Voice of Youth Advocates, Dec. 2014, p. 74. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A424530095/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0828ea37. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A424530095
Carey, M.R.: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2014):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Carey, M.R. THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS Orbit/Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $25.00 6, 10 ISBN: 978-0-316-27815-7
Carey offers a post-apocalyptic tale set in England in a future when most humans are "empty houses where people used to live." Sgt. Parks, Pvt. Gallagher, Miss Justineau and Dr. Caldwell flee an English military camp, a scientific site for the study of "hungries," zombielike creatures who feast on flesh, human or otherwise. These once-humans are essentially "fungal colonies animating human bodies." After junkers-anarchic survivalists-use hungries to breach the camp's elaborate wire fortifications, the four survivors head for Beacon, a giant refuge south of London where uninfected citizens have retreated over the past two decades, bringing along one of the study subjects, 10-year-old Melanie, a second-generation hungry. Like others of her generation, Melanie possesses superhuman strength and a superb intellect, and she can reason and communicate. Dr. Caldwell had planned to dissect Melanie's brain, but Miss Justineau thinks Melanie is capable of empathy and human interaction, which might make her a bridge between humans and hungries. Their philosophical dispute continues in parallel to a survival trek much like the one in McCarthy's On the Road. The four either kill or hide from junkers and hungries (which are animated by noise, movement and human odors). The characters are somewhat clich�d-Parks, rugged veteran with an empathetic core; Gallagher, rube private and perfect victim; Caldwell, coldhearted objectivist ever focused on prying open Melanie's skull. It may be Melanie's role to lead second-generation hungries in a revival of civilization, which in this imaginative, ominous assessment of our world and its fate, offers cold comfort. One of the more imaginative and ingenious additions to the dystopian canon.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Carey, M.R.: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2014. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A364691199/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4b8ca313. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A364691199
The Girl with All the Gifts
Publishers Weekly. 261.15 (Apr. 14, 2014): p39.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Girl with All the Gifts
M.R. Carey. Orbit, $25 (416p) ISBN 978-0-316-27815-7
Comics writer Carey (Lucifer) delivers an entertaining take on several well-worn zombie tropes. Years after the requisite zombie apocalypse (this time caused by a mutant strain of an ant-killing fungus,. probably the book's most original touch), scientists in a remote outpost in England are working on a cure by experimenting on a group of zombified children who retain some of their original emotions and cognitive functions. Although Carey piles on the cliches (beyond the apocalypse and the recently trendy intelligent zombies, there are rogue survivalists straight out of The Walking Dead, scientists willing to cross ethical lines, and the ever-silly notion that people would use any term other than "zombies" to refer to the undead), he builds well-constructed characters--particularly Melanie, one of the zombified children, who comes across as cognitively and emotionally different from the other characters, without feeling like an offensive parody of a person with Asperger's. The requisite action sequences are also well constructed, and the book will appeal to fans of zombie fiction. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Girl with All the Gifts." Publishers Weekly, 14 Apr. 2014, p. 39. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A365458172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a2722851. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A365458172
Carey, M.R. The Boy on the Bridge
Michelle Gilbert Doshi
Xpress Reviews. (May 12, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Carey, M.R. The Boy on the Bridge. Orbit: Hachette. May 2017. 400p. ISBN 9780316300339. $26; ISBN 9780316508186. pap. $16.99; ebk. ISBN 9780316300315. F
Dr. Khan, Colonial Carlisle, Dr. Fournier, Lieutenant McQueen, Stephen Greaves, and the rest of the crew of the Rosalind Franklin patrol the Scottish Highlands on their land rovers. Their goal is to look for sample "hungries" and research a possible cure to a plague that turns humans into shells. When Stephen disobeys orders to go off on his own, he witnesses children with abilities who are definitely not human, but they are also not hungries. An intelligent, overlooked, socially awkward teen, Stephen, fearing retribution, is not entirely honest about what he saw. When he disappears again, tragedy strikes both the Rosalind Franklin crew and the children. The mission is jeopardized, and for Stephen Greaves, the stakes are higher than ever.
Verdict This action-packed sequel to The Girl with All the Gifts is a zombie thriller with a sympathetic cast of characters and multiple narrators. Fans of Carey and readers of Ben H. Winters or Steven Barnes will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 11/27/17.]
Michelle Gilbert Doshi, Fox Lake Dist. Lib., IL
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Doshi, Michelle Gilbert. "Carey, M.R. The Boy on the Bridge." Xpress Reviews, 12 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495577999/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e615d976. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495577999