CAREY MONSTERS
MR Carey tells us about going back in time with a prequel to The Girl With All The Gifts...
MR Carey on his quasi-prequel to The Girl With All The Gifts.
MR Carey’s 2014 zombie novel The Girl With All The Gifts proved to be a surprise bestseller – and formed the basis for a fine film adaptation last year. Now Carey is returning to the world of the Hungries with prequel novel The Boy On The Bridge.
“Ten years ago there was this disaster, the Hungry plague, and civilisation fell apart,” says Carey of his setting. “In this novel we’re close enough to these events to see the aftershocks still playing out. This is a time before anyone has encountered the children [intelligent, second generation Hungries who are capable of human emotions]. The triggering incident in this story is that first meeting.”
Boy is about the Rosalind Franklin – a mobile laboratory carrying a scientific team on a mission to “try and find an inhibitor for the disease, some environmental factor that might help to keep it in check.” Readers of the first book, however, will know that their mission is doomed to failure. In The Girl With All The Gifts the Rosalind Franklin was discovered abandoned. “I kept thinking about this empty vehicle in the middle of a London street. One dead body in the cockpit, no sign of the rest of the crew,” says Carey. “Like the Mary Celeste.”
Although Carey is keen to point out that Boy is “its own thing”, the book does contain rewards for fans. “There are things that reflect on Melanie’s story. There are places where we get hints about things like Caldwell’s status at Beacon, the development of e-blocker and so on. Pieces of the jigsaw. I definitely saw the two stories as parts of a whole.”
With that in mind, is the story complete or might Carey pen a third book? “There’s a temptation. I keep wondering whether it might be interesting to jump backwards one more decade and tell the story of the initial outbreak of the plague. I know exactly how Cordyceps got into the human population and I think I could weave an interesting plot around those events...”
The Boy On The Bridge is published on 4 May.