SHIVER AND SHAKE
Andrew Salomon speaks to M.R. Carey about his latest thriller, ‘Fellside’
A haunting thriller from M.R. Carey and a barrel of bawdy laughs from Paige Nick are this week’s best books
Fellside M.R. Carey (Little, Brown, R345) ★★★★★
AFAIR dollop of courage and a deft writerly touch are required to produce a poignant, characterdriven novel that works as a prison thriller, a murder mystery, and a ghost story. With his latest novel, Fellside, Mike (M.R.) Carey has again showcased his talent for seamless genre-mingling in the service of telling a thrilling story.
“I think we live in the age of the genre mash-up,” says Carey. “The boundaries are much more fluid than they were in past decades — and that seems to be true in all media.”
Storytelling across different media is something Carey has become known for and he credits comics with having taught him how to write: “When you write a comic you have to be hyper-aware of structure because you’ve got a canvas that is of a strictly limited size. If you’ve been allotted 22 pages — the standard length when I first started writing for comics — you can’t usually borrow a 23rd. If you run out of space before you run out of story, you’re in trouble. So it was a really valuable discipline for me.”
For more than a decade comics formed the core of Carey’s creative life: he wrote the entire run of the Eisner Awardnominated Lucifer, and his work for DC Comics and Marvel Comics includes such acclaimed titles as The Unwritten, X-Men: Legacy, Hellblazer and Ultimate Fantastic Four.
Carey came to international attention with the phenomenal success of his previous novel The Girl With All The Gifts — a dystopian thriller in which beauty and horror are inextricably entwined. He also wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of the novel. The film, titled She Who Bears Gifts and starring Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine, is set for release later this year.
Asked what sparked the idea for Fellside, Carey says it began with a character, Jess Moulson — an addict who does a horrible thing in the grip of her addiction. Addiction has long been of interest to Carey; there is “always a struggle against a version of you, an aspect of you, that surfaces because of the addiction”.
In Fellside, Jess’s addiction leads to her being imprisoned for a murder she cannot recall committing. Wracked with guilt, she is determined to end her life through a hunger strike. But when the ghost of the 10-year-old boy Jess has been convicted of killing demands her help, there is no way in this world — or in any other — that she can refuse. Only now Jess is set on a collision course with the merciless Harriet Grace, who has carved out her own drug empire in the maximum security ward.
In The Girl With All The Gifts a large part of the story takes place inside a guarded military facility where the “special” children are kept. In Fellside the setting is a high security mega-prison built on the edge of the bleak Yorkshire Moors. Carey admits to a fondness for enclosed settings. “Claustrophobia can be a powerful narrative engine, in that you’re trapped not just in a place but in a particular set of relationships. You don’t have any choice, you just have to work through and see where you end up.”
His work across different media continues unabated: he has recently delivered a new novel to his editor, as well as the script for a new comic series to artist and longtime collaborator Peter Gross.