School's Out Forever

Author’s Note: The wonderful people at Pornokitsch.com, now increasingly known for organising the Kitschies awards, interviewed me twice in 2010 for the School’s Out trilogy: once in January, to talk about School’s Out and Operation Motherland, and once again in June, when Children’s Crusade had come out. Children’s Crusade was later nominated for a Kitschie.

The following are reproduced with their kind permission.

FIRST INTERVIEW ^{JANUARY 14, 2010}

Previously in the Afterblight series, readers had been exposed to the Big, Apocalyptic Picture. But, in School’s Out, you chose to drill down to the disaster’s impact on an isolated — essentially inconsequential — location. What lead you to focus like this?

Partly the old dictum of ‘write what you know,’ partly an deep affection for the original BBC series Survivors.

I know about boarding schools and all their little madnesses, as I’ve suffered in them as both student and teacher — there’s an awful lot of autobiography in School’s Out and a lot of therapeutic bloodletting as I took great pleasure in killing people from my youth!

Also, the thing that worked for me about Survivors was that these were people who were not directly involved in events — they didn’t know anything about the plague, they weren’t special, they were just ordinary folks trying to deal with the consequences of somebody else’s fuck up. That appealed to me. That sense of trying to live through a huge event but not having any sense of the big picture, of what the hell is really going on.

The big question, of course… why kids?

Because they’re far more vicious than adults. Crueller, nastier, less predictable and more morally flexible. Just watch kids bullying each other in the playground. It’s horrific the way they gang up, scent weakness and strike. I think adults can become monstrous under pressure, but mostly they’ve had the rough edges smoothed off by experience and it takes a bit more for them to revert. But kids are not fully formed personalities yet, they’re still pushing the boundaries of social conventions and trying to define themselves, so they do the most awful things sometimes. And the most wonderful, of course.

Over and above his young age, Lee seems to frequently have bouts of consciousness over his evolution into a killer. This runs contrary to genre conventions, in which a character’s progress to lethal competence is generally seen as “advancement.” Why can’t Lee just accept that he’s a badass and run with it?

Because I don’t believe those characters. Hardened killers with no conscience are either psychopaths or sociopaths. Guys who kill while being in sound mind and for the ‘right’ reasons are either very damaged by it, or they wrestle with their conscience a hell of a lot. Even Jack Bauer stops and has a good old cry every now and then.

I read an interview with a British Army sniper last week — a cold, calculating, methodical killer, but definitely one of the good guys. And he’s killed many, many very bad men. He seemed to be okay with it, but at the end of the interview he revealed that he hadn’t kept score and he didn’t actually know how many men he’d killed. And I thought that refusal to keep a tally said a lot about the psychological pressure he must be under. You can’t tell me he hasn’t had some long, dark nights of the soul.

Lee is, I suppose, like me in so far as I think I would have it in me to kill in those circumstances, but I know that I’d be a bloody wreck before, during and after the act. It just seemed more believable somehow. By the third book, which I’m writing now, the people around him are actually scared of what he might do in a fight, because they reckon his PTSD is so bad he might either flip out and go psycho or, worse, get them all killed. So the better he’s getting at killing, the more fucked up he’s becoming. That has to come to a head at some point.

Your father (noted folk musician Harvey Andrews) has also written quite a bit on the power of war and violence (albeit in a slightly different creative form). Has that had any influence on your work?

Definitely. I don’t see how he couldn’t really, as he’s the best storyteller I know [Learn more about his work at www.harveyandrews.com]. If you listen to “Soldier,” or “Somewhere in the Stars,” those songs evoke a strong sense of people caught up in violent times who are kind of bewildered by how they got there and unsure how things got that bad. All they want is to go home and live an ordinary life. And that’s exactly who Lee and Jane are.

The key sequence for me in School’s Out is where Lee says that he just wants to be able to find somewhere quiet and read a book, have a normal day. That’s what he’s fighting for — the right of people to be left alone to do nice things like play football and bake cakes and stuff. I could never make a hero out of a character who’s fighting for power or glory. Those people are monsters.

In the end, I think that even though my Afterblight books are extremely violent, blood and thunder tales, they’re essentially anti-violence. Which is having my cake and eating it I suppose. But the characters are all extremely reluctant warriors who want to stop fighting but find the world won’t let them. The books don’t glory in violence, or at least I hope they don’t.

Lee’s growing up a bit now, and so are his adventures. Initially he defended the school, but now he’s liberated Iraq and defended the British Isles from invasion (from the US, no less). He’s accomplished a lot for something that can’t even get his driving license yet. How will he top this in Children’s Crusade?

The first book was very interior and personal, kind of like a horror movie; the second was a big, widescreen war movie. Book three, which will probably be Lee and Jane’s last outing for the time being, is hopefully a blend of the two. But it’s more Jane’s story than Lee’s this time around.

Jane has some serious stuff from her past to deal with, so it’s an extremely personal mission for her, but there’s also a really nasty and powerful enemy to fight, albeit not one quite as OTT as the entire US Army! The bad guys in book one were cannibals, in book two they were warriors, in some ways the villains of book three are the worst of the bunch in that they don’t kill you or eat you, but they’ll treat you as if you were cattle, totally dehumanising you.

And speaking of growing up… In Operation Motherland, I started to see the first inklings of a little something between Lee and “Matron.” I suspect the Daily Mail would have a fit. Or is this just my sordid imagination?

No, they’re a couple by the time book three begins. I hope the Daily Mail does have a fit. That would be mission accomplished!

In Operation Motherland, you cheekily added a nod to Paul Kane’s French mercenaries from Arrowhead. Was this a one-off, or can readers expect to see more “cross-overs” coming? Did he know you were doing this? Are there Blighterbrunches where you all sip tea and chart the post-Apocalyptic landscape?

Paul and I have swopped notes extensively. I love his books. I was really pleased to be able to have a new short story at the back of his last one and — first exclusive scoop! — I’m pleased to announce that he’s returning the favour by doing an original story for the back of Children’s Crusade. It’s quite the love-in!

In fact, Lee takes a little trip to Nottingham in book three, so the crossover is far more explicit this time. It’s a bit tricky in that our timeline doesn’t match the publication schedule — Operation Motherland is set before Arrowhead, but was published after. And Children’s Crusade is set before Broken Arrow, which is already out. So we’re leapfrogging each other. In fact I was able to tease the villain for Broken Arrow in Operation Motherland, though because it wasn’t out yet, no-one noticed!

Also, Children’s Crusade takes place concurrently with The Culled, the book that kicked it all off, and if things go according to plan we’ll see certain events from that first book in a slightly different light.

School’s Out, Operation Motherland, Children’s Crusade and… The Unofficial Guide to Dawson’s Creek? Somewhere in a drawer, is there the first draft of the Cull hitting Capeside, Massachusetts? Who starts the crucifixions first: Dawson or Pacey?

Pacey is Lee, obviously, because of his affair with his teacher in season one. I reckon Dawson would be the first to snap. It’d be snuff movies and all sorts with him. And now I’m picturing Michelle Williams in combats with a gun… sigh…

Red Dawn or Battle Royale?

Red Dawn, dude, every time. Lea Thompson with an M16? Hell yeah!

SECOND INTERVIEW ^{JUNE 02, 2010}

As it says on the back cover, Children’s Crusade is the “third and final year of St Mark’s School for Boys.” Say it ain’t so! Is this truly the final volume of my favourite homicidal schoolkids?

Yes. I like stories that have a beginning, middle and end. I would be wary of revisiting the well too many times and hitting diminishing returns. The day I got the commission for School’s Out, once I’d finished doing cartwheels, I came up with the basic outline of all three books and knew, before I wrote word one of book one, that I wanted it to be three and only three. Look at how Lost picked up once they decided they were going to end it rather than stringing it out until they were cancelled. Big lesson there.

I don’t want to give anything away to our readers, BUT… not everyone makes it through the book. And I won’t lie — a few of the deaths really shocked me. As the author, how do you decide who lives and who dies? All that god-like power…

I never write with the explicit intention of shocking the reader — that’s a blind alley, a stupid thing for a writer to do, and kind of insulting to the reader. If there are shocks, they happen almost by accident, which is the best way.

I don’t want to sound wanky and say ‘the characters write themselves!’ coz obviously that’s untrue and I always sniff derisively when I read an author saying that. But I know what they mean, and I’ve found with each of the books that there comes a point where it feels like the events of the story are carrying me along with them and I’m just holding on for grim death, transcribing them. Obviously I’m controlling the story, but it feels like I’m not. It’s odd, hard to describe without seeming to be completely up myself, and it’s a great feeling.

What I tend to do is plot the book as it would happen if all the heroes’ plans worked, then I have the plans go horribly wrong and as the characters improvise to compensate, so do I.

So to answer your question — I really had no fixed idea who would live and who would die. Right up until a character actually breathes their last there’s every chance they might make it out alive. In the end, those characters who die were just in the wrong chapter at the wrong time, and paid the price.

Also, I firmly believe that a character’s death should be surprising and should hurt the reader. I remember how devastated I was when Tara died on Buffy, or Wash bought it in Serenity, or Penny died in… hang on… WHEDON!! (shakes fist)

So if a character’s death surprises me — and they always kind of do, actually, even as I write them — then hopefully they’ll surprise a reader too. And I like the idea that the deaths of my characters knock the reader back. That’s satisfying, ‘cause it means the characters worked and connected.

Children’s Crusade reads like the Afterblight’s All-Star Game — with substantial appearances from characters developed by Paul Kane and touching on villains and themes first introduced by Simon Spurrier. We touched on this before, but what’s it like working in a world this cooperative? Does Mr Kane mind you killing off a Ranger or two?

Paul picked out the two Rangers who have lead roles in the book and handed them off to me for development. But he did rein me in on their use of firearms and their rule that they should fight to wound, not kill, wherever possible. Also he was kind enough to say that I nailed Robert’s character — then gave me a whole slew of notes on what I’d got wrong about the scene where he met Lee :-) So I did rejig things to keep him happy. (Cause, you know, he scares me!)

I always intended to tie book three very closely in with The Culled. As time passed and The Culled started to seem less immediate I questioned whether it was still wise, but I eventually decided that it added texture and rewarded long-time readers. There’s even a very small reference to one of the character from that book in the long flashback in the middle of this one — see if you can spot it.

I should stress, though, that you don’t have to have read the other books to enjoy mine, just that it’s an added layer if you have.

As the last in the trilogy, Children’s Crusade might not be the best book for Afterblight virgins. What would you suggest to our readers that want to get into the series?

There’s a chronology at the back of Children’s Crusade. I’d recommend reading them in chronological order, which just co-incidentally means starting with School’s Out. How about that :-)

Ok. Zombies attack. You can have one weapon, one sidekick and one song for your zombie-slaying soundtrack. Go…

Flamethrower; Felicia Day; Zippity Doo Dah.