Horror for kids

It might sound like a clip from the latest horror film, but it’s actually a trailer for comedian and writer Charlie Higson’s new children’s book, The Sacrifice.

It’s part of a growing trend for publishers to produce movie-style trailers, which are posted to YouTube in the hope of tapping into the lucrative teen market. Puffin stumped up their biggest budget yet for this one.

It might seem counter-intuitive to use a social networking site, often blamed as the cause of our dwindling attention spans, to encourage children to pick up a book. Charlie Higson disagrees.

“With teenagers, particularly, you’ve got to have some kind of online presence,” he says at the end of a busy week of school visits, which included a stop at Brighton’s Dorothy Stringer.

“You’ve got to embrace new technologies because they’re not going to go away.

“If you write a book kids want to read and you get it into their hands, they will read it and they will read it avidly. But anything you can do to grab their attention, to remind them about books while they’re showing their friends things on YouTube, is great and you need to explore it.”

The Sacrifice is the fourth book in Higson’s successful The Enemy series, which follow groups of children as they fight for survival after a disease has turned everyone over the age of 14 into a flesh-eating zombie.

Things take an even darker turn in this instalment. Small Sam and his sidekick, The Kid, have left the safety of the Tower Of London and set off on a frantic search for Sam’s sister Ella. Out in the Forbidden Zone they bump into all sorts of horrors and as the children desperately try to understand what is happening, they end up turning on each other in a terrifying Lord Of The Flies-style twist.

This isn’t Higson’s first foray into children’s writing. He received widespread acclaim for his Young Bond series, which sold more than one million copies in the UK and was translated into 24 languages.

The Sacrifice is his fourth release in as many years (“If I didn’t waste so much time playing online computer games, I might manage two a year”) and Higson is keen to maintain the pace.

“The thing with kids’ books is you’ve got to keep them coming. So many kids tell me they read it in one night and I say, ‘That took me a year to write!’”

With three more books to come, does he find it difficult coming up with ideas?

“It is tricky doing horror stories and trying to keep frightening people because you can’t just keep making it gorier and gorier.

“Kids still want regular zombie attacks but you’ve got to vary the scares. It keeps you on your toes.”

At the heart of the story is friendship. Higson believes the zombie element helps him to write about the important stuff without being too obvious.

“Teenagers have a lot of problems and anxieties in their lives. The idea that you might suddenly have the dead coming back from the grave, trying to eat you and you’re suddenly chasing around trying to wipe their brains out, you think, ‘Wow, that would be so much easier than real life.’”

While he’s forged a successful career writing for children, Higson is best known for his work on The Fast Show, playing comedy characters such as Swiss Toni and Bob Fleming.

The cast reunited last year to make some new episodes for Foster’s. Does this signal that there might be more to come?

“Having done it, we’re all thinking, yeah, it was great to do it once but that’s probably it. We might do some live stuff but we’re all doing other things now.”

With an action-packed YouTube trailer under his belt, Higson must be tempted to adapt his books for the big screen.

“We’ve had a lot of approaches, which so far we’ve mostly turned down, but there are a few people we’re talking to.

“It’s difficult to do without having a decent budget, and you can get away with a hell of a lot more in a book than you can in a film.

“Politicians are always saying children shouldn’t be playing violent games, they should be reading a good book instead. You just hope they don’t find out they’re reading a book where a kid has his head pulled off and an adult sucks his eyeballs out!”

The other problem lies in the film’s classification.

“To make films truthful to the books, there’s a danger it would be a 15 or even an 18 certificate, and you would cut off your potential audience.

“It’s a challenge: could you make a really full-on, in-your-face zombie movie and keep it as a 12 certificate? We’re waiting for the right people to come forward, with the right amount of money and knowing a way round it.”

• The Sacrifice is out now, published by Puffin, priced £12.99.
• Watch the trailer on YouTube at http://bit.ly/NOdZ9j