Guest Post by Alexander Gordon Smith: The Real Magic of Horror (The Fury Blog Tour)

For a variety of reasons, recently I have been cutting back on the number of blog tours I am participating in. However, there are a handful of authors who are always welcome to guest post on The Book Zone and Alexander Gordon Smith is one of them. He writes such great articles, and if you haven't seen his earlier pieces that have appeared on The Book Zone you can find them here and here. This time he is here as part of the blog tour for his new book, The Fury. At the end of this post you will also be able to read details about an amazing The Fury competition that Faber are running.

The Real Magic of Horror

This is my third guest post for the awesome Book Zone (For Boys) blog – my favourite book blog in the world! – and I’m really honoured to be here again! Last time I talked about how playing Murderball was the inspiration for my new book, The Fury, and this time I’d like to go back even further, to when I was a kid, and talk about another moment of horrific inspiration!

When I was six years old, or thereabouts, I had my first experience of real horror. I don’t mean a tragedy, I mean genre horror. I used to go and stay with my Gran and Granddad up in Scotland. They were a wonderful couple (both sadly passed now), and my Gran especially was a lovely, round, little old lady who liked to give me and my sister treats. She worked in a shop, one that rented videos, and she would often bring home sweets and toys and films for us. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but on one of these trips I must have told my Gran that I really liked horror. Being six years old, what I probably meant by this was that I enjoyed the occasional episode of Scooby Doo. But my Gran must have got the wrong end of the stick, because one afternoon she came home from work with a stack of videos for me to watch. Horror videos.

I don’t know exactly which movies they were – I think I have blanked out the memory! But there were definitely zombies. And killer puppets. And chainsaws. I remember being absolutely terrified, but I didn’t want to hurt my Gran’s feelings by telling her to turn them off, so I kept trying to make excuses (I must have gone to the toilet seventeen times), or claiming I heard someone knocking at the door, or just staring at the wall above the telly trying to tune out the screams from the screen. But my Gran was sitting right next to me, and she kept pointing out all the gruesome bits, saying things like “Oh look, she’s just eaten his eyeballs.” That night, lying in bed at my Gran’s house (which was quite a scary place anyway, as there was a cupboard door in my room that would never stay closed and I was convinced monsters lived in there), I was absolutely terrified; literally petrified, I couldn’t even move in my bed. Right then, six years old, monsters were 100% real. Ghosts and zombies and serial killers with chainsaws were 100% real. There was no distinction between fantasy and reality in my head. Absolutely anything could happen. So, when my Gran walked into the bedroom (she must have sensed I was still awake), wearing nothing but a nightie, her teeth already out for the night, saying “Are you okay?” I was utterly convinced that she was a zombie. I fell out of bed, ran into a wall, and that’s all I can recall about that particular evening.

For a little while after that, I couldn’t even watch Scooby Doo without having a panic attack and bursting into tears. But I think that night is what gave me a real sense of the potential for horror. Obviously I didn’t rationalise it like this at the time, being only six, but looking back at that night, and the other times I was scared witless as a kid, it made me realise what I love about the genre: Horror makes the impossible possible.

Horror twists reality and fantasy in a way that no other genre does. How many times, when reading a scary book or watching a gruesome movie, have you felt that tickle of fear crawl up your spine, your scalp shrink, your guts churn? Not because of the words on the page or the images on the screen, but because right then, in that moment, you are convinced that the horror has leaked out into the real world – there really is a serial killer lurking behind the shower curtain, or a ghost in the mirror, or a brain-eating zombie right outside the front door. At the risk of sounding like a wimp, I regularly leave the hall light on at night because I’ve been reading something terrifying – and occasionally my bedroom light too (most recently a few weeks ago when I was utterly convinced there was a legless witch at the bottom of the stairs who wanted to eat me)! That isn’t sane, rational behaviour – it’s because deep down in my psyche I am absolutely, 100% convinced that there are bad things in the house, that the story has become real, just like I was when I was six.

For me, that is the true power of horror – it takes the boundless, depthless, incredible imagination of childhood and lets you explore it once again. As adults, we often lose that ability to lose ourselves in fantasy; it’s so much easier for us to rationalise, to distinguish between what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is impossible. I think we suffer for it, because we become rooted in reality, and we lose that sense of wonder and awe. For me, one of the best things about being a kid was that everything you read, watched, wrote, dreamed could be real, that literally anything could happen. Of course when you read any book or watch any film you suspend your disbelief a little, but you’re still often aware that what you’re experiencing is just a narrative. With horror, though, the physics of the story leak out of the pages, off the screen, they become as real as the world you live in; utterly, terrifyingly believable.

I’ve had a few people get in touch already to say that The Fury has had this effect on them, which is great! I wrote the book to get under your skin, to stay with you long after you have finished reading it. The core idea of the story – that at any moment, without warning, every single person in the world will turn against you, tear you to pieces, and then go back to their lives as if nothing has happened – will start off sounding ridiculous, impossible. But hopefully after reading it you’ll be in the mall, or at school, or at a football match, and suddenly you’ll start to wonder what you’d do if everyone fell silent and turned to look at you with expressions of utter hatred; if they all screamed at once and started running towards you with nothing but murder on their faces. You’ll start to plan your escape routes, your hiding places, what you might be able to use as a weapon. And in those moments, the story will have become real, you’ll be six years old again and living in a world where anything can happen.

Horror turns you into a kid again, it opens up your imagination, making everything possible. But it isn’t all about being scared. That’s the real beauty of it, I think. It’s like exercise for your brain – if you believe that monsters are real, even for a short time, then suddenly other impossible things become possible too: maybe even things about yourself that you never thought you could achieve. It makes you question your idea of reality, of your own world and your own potential. Suddenly you are no longer being told what’s real – you create your own reality, your own boundaries. It stops being a case of, “That’s impossible, I could never do that,” and becomes instead, “Well, who says it’s impossible?” That’s the true magic of horror. If anything can be real then anything can be possible. If anything is possible then anything is doable. And if anything is doable, then do it! Horror makes that happen.
Thanks, Darren, for letting me stop by on my blog tour!

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Huge thanks to Gordon for taking the time to write this for us. A lot of what he has written rings very true for me too - I have a habit of planning escape routes whenever we go out for a meal, etc - just in case the zombie apocalypse finally arrives during that evening. And this was long before I read The Fury. If you love horror and have not yet discovered the Furnace series or The Fury then shame on you!


Competition Details:

CALLING ALL ASPIRING YOUNG FILMMAKERS!!

A brand new competition from THE SPARK www.facebook.co.uk/thesparkpage, Faber’s new online community aimed at creative 13 – 18 year-olds.

THE FURY is a brand new YA thriller from Alexander Gordon Smith, about what would happen if, without warning, the whole world tried to kill you. It’s a non-stop, rollercoaster ride of excitement, mystery and supernatural terror – and we giving YOU the chance to create the trailer for it!

If you’re between the ages of 13 and 18 and fancy trying your hand at filmmaking, all you need to do is send us a script and storyboard for the trailer of THE FURY, by 2 July. You don’t need filmmaking experience or equipment – if your script is selected in our top five you’ll win a Flip camera with which to bring your trailer to life!

Finally, the filmmaker behind the best of those five trailers will win a £500 Apple Store voucher and see their film used worldwide as the official trailer for the book.

Go to the competition page http://www.facebook.com/stayfurious to find out more about the book, how to enter and tips on how to write the storyboard for your book trailer. Closing date Monday 2nd July 2012

Review: The Fury by Alexander Gordon Smith

Imagine if one day, without warning, the entire human race turns against you. Every single person you meet becomes a bloodthirsty, mindless savage, hell-bent on killing you - and only you. Friends, family, even your mum and dad, will turn on you. They will murder you. And when they have, they will go back to their lives as if nothing has happened. The world has the Fury. It will not rest until you are dead. Cal, Brick and Daisy are three ordinary teenagers whose lives suddenly take a terrifying turn for the worst. They begin to trigger a reaction in everybody they meet, that makes friends and strangers alike want to tear them to pieces. These victims of the Fury - the ones that survive - manage to locate each other. But just when they think they have found a place to hide from the world, some of them begin to change . . . They must fight to uncover the truth about the Fury before it's too late. But it is a truth that will destroy everything they know about life and death.

There are a handful of authors for whom I will drop everything to read their new book when it arrives. Alexander Gordon Smith is one of them. His Escape From Furnace series is not only one of my favourite series of recent years, but also one of my all-time favourite series of YA horror books. In my opinion he leaves most of the competition standing, and yes, I include Shan and Higson there.

What I love most about the Furnace series, and now The Fury can be added to this as well, is the way Gordon (for that is how he prefers to be known) taps into the things that we fear the most. I'm not talking about spiders, rats, death here, but those primal fears that lurk deep with our psyches have done for millennia. Loss of freedom, loss of identity, loss of the things that make us human were all themes covered in the Furnace books, and now in The Fury Gordon goes for the jugular and builds his story around a fear that nearly every child, teenager and adult fears deeply - their friends and family, the people they love the most in the world, turning on them. And we're not just talking playground bullying here, or petty arguments between friends. In The Fury a handful of young people find their loved ones suddenly turning on them,  chasing them and literally trying to pull them apart, like a pack of hyaenas slaughtering an isolated baby gazelle.

In The Fury it is as if Alexander Gordon Smith has taken the whole zombie genre, put it in a blender, added his own twisted imagination and incredible talent in equal measures and pressed the on switch. The result is something that is a gore-filled, feral frenzy of a story, with an underlying theme that will have you thinking about it for weeks after the final page has been turned. It is the book that puts Alexander Gordon Smith ahead of the pack in the race for the title of 'the Stephen King of YA horror'.

The blurb at the beginning of this review tells you pretty much all you need to know about the story, although I will clarify one major point. Although similar in nature to the traditional zombie story it differs in one significant way - there is not a zombie in sight, and this is what makes it even more terrifying. Certain individuals suddenly find their nearest and dearest filled with a blood lust and a single-minded desire to pound them into a bloody pulp, even if it means pain and injury to themselves in the process, and yet once the deed is done they immediately return to normal, as if some omnipotent being is turning their 'behave-like-a-zombie switch' on and off for fun. So if you love horror, but are tired with the idea of legions of rotting, stumbling undead munching on brains, then this is the book for you.

This is a 500-page book and yet it reads like something much slimmer in page count. I mean this as the greatest of compliments. There is not a single word of padding in this story, and every word is made to count, and as such there is no scene or passage in the book that ever feels like it is dragging its heels. Instead, I found myself poring through the pages as rapidly as possible, desperately concerned for the fate of the small handful of well-crafted characters that the author collects together. Alexander Gordon Smith is a master story teller and he knows when to speed things up and have the reader's heart pounding hard on their ribcage, and he knows when it is time to give that heart a brief moment of respite before turning the dial back up to 11 and beyond.

The Fury is the first book in a two-part series from Alexander Gordon Smith, and as such does not come anywhere close to having an ending that answers the questions posed during the story. However, it does leave us lusting for more, although at present I am not sure when the sequel is due to be published. If you are at all like me it will also have you thinking about it for weeks after, its themes sneaking back into your conscious thoughts when you least expect it.

The Fury was published by Faber Teens on 5th April. My thanks go to the publisher for kindly sending me a copy to review. Check out the piece that Gordon wrote for me some time ago explaining some of his inspiration behind The Fury, and please come back later this month for another guest post by the author.

Coming Up in 2012 #5: The Fury by Alexander Gordon Smith

I am a huge fan of Alexander Gordon Smith's Escape From Furnace series, although this won't be news to anyone who had been following this blog for a while. That series came to a dramatic and brilliant conclusion in 2011, but Smith is not one to rest on his laurels - he already has The Fury, the first book in a new two-part series scheduled for release in April. I can't tell you how excited I am about this - it is one of the books that I am most looking forward to reading in 2012. Now I hand you over to Alexander Gordon Smith to tell us more about it (and even though my wife is a PE teacher I have to sympathise with his memories - I too had a totally sadistic PE teacher and to this day I am still feeling the trauma created by some of his lessons):

The Fury is my most recent book, but I think the seed of the idea was planted in my head many years ago. Back at high school, when I was about twelve, we used to play a game in PE called Murderball. It was, just as it sounds, extremely unpleasant. I hated PE anyway (what overweight, geeky, asthmatic boy doesn't?), and what made it infinitely worse is that my PE teacher was a total sadist (what PE teacher isn't?). He obviously thought that making us run around on the field in the snow playing rugby for two hours wasn't quite punishing enough, so he devised a brand new version of the game.

Murderball, at its heart, had one rule. Try not to die. This wasn't as easy as it sounds. Basically, the PE teacher would select a victim, usually one of the fat kids (me), one of the nerdy kids (me), or one of the wheezy kids (me), hand him a rugby ball, and tell him to start running. He'd give the victim a five second head start, then he would send the rest of the group after him.

The objective for the chasers was to get the rugby ball back from the victim, but this is where Murderball really earned its name. The victim would usually abandon the ball after a few metres, but the rest of the group ignored it, and set upon the unfortunate child like a pack of dogs on a fox. It was absolutely terrifying. One minute you'd be running, the next you'd be on the floor, twenty other boys piling on top of you, plunged into darkness. Some would be jumping on your chest or elbow dropping you in the stomach, others bending back your fingers to breaking point; some would stuff grass and mud and snow in your mouth so you couldn't breathe, others took great delight in kicking you repeatedly in places you never want to be kicked. When you were the victim, drowning in flesh, you believed with absolute certainty that you were going to die.

Thankfully, nobody actually perished. But it always fascinated me how in the space of a few seconds your best friends (yes, all my friends at school were in the bottom set PE with me) could go from being lovely, gentle people who would never dream of hurting you, to a mob of savage, howling animals intent on tearing you to shreds. And the weird thing was that everybody in the group had a go at being the victim, at being at the bottom of the pile, and yet as soon as it was somebody else's turn they would become as wild and mindless as the kids who had been attacking them.

It was twenty years later that the story for The Fury came to me, but I think the idea was born when I was lying beneath a mound of people asking – with what I thought was my dying breath – why all of my friends were trying to slaughter me. This is exactly what happens to the heroes of the book (including one scene on a school playing field). For no reason whatsoever, the world turns against them – friends, family, teachers, strangers, everyone becomes a mindless, bloodthirsty savage hell-bent on killing them, and only them. And as soon as they have killed you, they go back to their lives as if nothing has happened. In the book, of course, the reason for the Fury is much more exciting than a sadistic PE teacher. But that sense of utter fear, of panic and confusion, of trying to survive while everyone you know attempts to murder you, is hopefully just as potent and as terrifying when you read the book as it was twenty years ago for me playing Murderball.