Geek Lit: Thicker Than Water (Felix Castor Book 4)

Gabbing Geek snared a great interview with author Mike Carey for his novel The Girl With All The Gifts a while back.  If you haven’t read it, you probably should.  Carey’s a great writer in the world of horror and dark fantasy, and if you haven’t read Girl or his great Vertigo series Lucifer, then you’re probably missing out on something.

He also has this dark, fun urban fantasy/horror series about a London-based exorcist named Felix “Fix” Castor.  Review with possible SPOILERS for the fourth book in said series, Thicker Than Water, after the cut.

Exclusive: Mike Carey On The Girl With All The Gifts, Zombie Battles, And Melanie’s Poem!

Mike Carey has given us a new form of zombie.  That’s hard to do in this day and age with slow zombies (Walking Dead) and fast zombies (Boneys from Warm Bodies), viral zombies (28 Days Later) and pathogen zombies (all the rest).  But now we have a brand new form of zombie: fungal zombie!  In The Girl With All The Gifts, Mike Carey (famed writer of comic books such as Lucifer, X-Men: Legacy, and The Unwritten) brings us a world where a fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (a very real fungus that infects insects and takes over their brains), has infected humans turning them into zombies (called Hungries in the book, the Z word is never mentioned).

The books follows an infected girl, Melanie, who has somehow retained her mental abilities while still infected with the fungus that makes her crave flesh.  The book is an epic journey around London and is now being turned into a movie (of a sort) starring Glenn Close called She Who Brings Gifts.  Mr. Carey was kind enough to give Gabbing Geek an exclusive interview and provide some never-before-heard insights into his book, movie, and new world he’s created.  There are spoilers after the break, but if you don’t mind or have already read the book he gives us some fantastic, never before revealed information.  Jump after the break for all the Hungry goodness!

Urban Fantasy: Fact Or Fiction?

Picturing a fantasy setting might give a person of supposedly sound mind an image which revolves around something that came from the mind, pen, or fever dream of J.R.R. Tolkien, even if the person in question thinks that name belongs to a particularly odd Muppet.  Or perhaps the idea is more of some sort of Game involving Thrones.  Maybe King Arthur came off his flour bag to do his thing with Merlin or Galahad or people with names way cooler than anyone else you may know, provided you don’t know any chimps of the Link family (though, to be fair, he is a rather secretive chimp).

But fantasy usually just boils down to magic and the supernatural, and if The Ring taught us anything, and it didn’t, it is that magic and the supernatural can exist anywhere, which is where the Urban Fantasy subgenre comes in.