To The Last Page

At the start of Blood Crazy Book 4, there is a warning to the reader from one of the principal characters in the series that "what happens to Nick Aten during his journey may well have a powerful effect on you". That might sound a little like hyperbole, but as soon as you find yourself reacquainted with Nick Aten just a few pages later in Aten Unbound , you feel the sheer weight of the memory of the horror of the what has come before suddenly hit you. There is no immediate shock event to provoke this feeling, just Nick packing to undertake the next stage of his journey "the first step of a journey I did not want to make", but the accumulation of events that have taken us here seems to re-emerge in a frightening flashback. There are a lot of scenes from those first three books that remain vividly etched in my mind. Not least the shock opening of the original book that started it all off (and there are spoilers here only if you haven't read the first three books)...

Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley premiering at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition. Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the nove...

In the spirit of Nick Aten, the protagonist from the first Blood Crazy book who is back again for the third (and final?) installment of the series and isn't afraid to make a pun, mix a metaphor or state the obvious, Blood Crazy: Aten Present starts out in an explosive fashion as Nick meets up with Jack Ranzic from Book Two: Aten in Absentia . It's an appropriate way for the leads of the first two books to meet up and Nick's forthrightness and down-to-earth qualities are appreciated, but otherwise neither of the two young survivors of the crisis that has overwhelmed the planet are in a better place by the time they unite in the third book in the series. Well, the Creosotes weren't going to disappear overnight, were they? Creosotes is the name that the groups of young survivors have given to adults over age of 19 who three years ago all turned overnight into shambling bloodthirsty monsters. It's a constant struggle for survival and despite some theories about the na...

At the end of Blood Crazy we were left with the grim acceptance that the situation the world had been plunged into was irresolvable. With the adult population having been altered in a way that would drive them to tear their own children apart, everything had changed and the world wasn't ever going back to the way it was. Without giving away any spoilers, while some interesting theories were proposed to explain what had happened to trigger this apocalyptic situation overnight, it still meant that it would be up to small communities of survivors to rebuild society and find a way of defending themselves from the ever present threat of the “Creosotes”. That doesn't mean that there aren't more stories to tell and new revelations to be told, but it has taken almost 30 years for Simon Clark to get a sequel in print. It's a long time for some fans of the original novel (recently republished by Darkness Visible), but by the end of Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia , I'm sure fa...

What do you look for in a horror book, or a horror movie even? Personally, scares don't count for much for me and I would prefer the situation to be at least half-way plausible and make a meaningful point about society and our attitude to death. So that kind of rules out zombies even if you want to hang a commentary on it about mindless consumerism. There are exceptions of course, and it's all the more impressive when you can be surprised by an unexpected new take on the genre. I got that with The Girl With All The Gifts and I've found that also with Simon Clark's Blood Crazy . While not exactly a zombie horror - there are no living dead here - Blood Crazy has a similar sense of a feeding frenzy being unleashed on society, and indeed the sides are drawn across pretty distinct generational dividing lines that does suggest there is a deeper commentary to be found here. But first of all comes the shock, and it comes fairly quickly. Staying a night at friend's house, ...