“At that stage she wasn’t well-known as a writer,” Charlie says.
Sam had a friend called Lauren Beukes, who’d just released an under-the radar dark futuristic novel called Moxyland. So he made friends with a like-minded crazy cat called Sam Wilson, who was into the same kinds of things and was also doing the course.
“People would critique my work, but you could tell they hadn’t read a lot of that genre,” he says. It didn’t make for an easy fit with the literary context of his peers, or his supervisor. The book “started with a very different idea – I guess it was something far more serious, a kind of epic fantasy but all imbued with social meaning.” Charlie had loved fantasy and science fiction since he was a kid and got an enthusiastic response when he spoke to the writing centre’s director, the late Stephen Watson, “even though it wasn’t his genre. In 2008 he started doing his master’s degree in creative writing at UCT. This is Charlie Human the author… (Not Charlie Hunnam the robot fighter from Pacific Rim)Ĭharlie says it was “one of the things always had in the back of mind – to write a book.”
By night – dusk and dawn too, probably, and maybe on weekends – an impresario of the obscene, not just wild creatures but the thoughts, gestures and actions most of us are too polite to ever voice. This is Charlie’s gift: by day, a mild-mannered digital marketing executive. “I told her a bit about it when I was writing, but when it was a work in progress I played my cards close to my chest. A world where the hero is a manipulative smut-peddling teenager who encourages over-sensitive high school teachers to jump from the second-storey window where tokoloshes star in porn movies where parents fight and have bad make-up sex to the sound of the Best of the 80s.Įven Charlie’s wife was surprised by how visceral the book was, when he finally let her read it. It was still one of the dirtiest, nastiest, funniest, wildest word trips I’d ever been on. It had been edited and typeset, all nice and neat. I got an uncorrected proof, which I had to promise to burn after reading. The second time, maybe two years later, the manuscript had become a book – snapped up by Random House in the UK and Random House Struik in South Africa. I started somewhere on a flight between Cape Town and Jo’burg, and wound up reading right through the night, unwilling to close my screen, unable to stop.Ĭharlie let me borrow his title for a story I wrote about Oppikoppi. The first time I read Apocalypse Now Now was on my laptop. Nechama Brodie finds out how the sweet-as-pie author lured his dark side out into the open. On a journey that takes them through the realms of impossibility, they must face every conceivable nightmare to get her back, including an odd brush with the apocalypse.Charlie Human’s first novel will sneak up behind you and whack you on the back of the head with a very big stick. Plunged into the increasingly bizarre landscape of Cape Town's supernatural underworld, Baxter and Ronin team up to save Esme. He's making a name for himself as the kingpin of his smut-peddling high school syndicate, the other gangs are staying out of his business, and he's dating the girl of his dreams, Esme.īut when Esme gets kidnapped, things start to get seriously weird, and the only man drunk enough to help is a bearded, booze-soaked, supernatural bounty hunter who goes by the name of Jackson Jackie Ronin.
In the near future not happening presently but to happen shortlyīaxter Zevcenko's life is pretty sweet. a common South Africanism relating to the amount of time to elapse before an event occurs.
0 kommentar(er)
