M. R. Carey (1) (1959–)
Author of The Girl with All the Gifts
For other authors named M. R. Carey, see the disambiguation page.
M. R. Carey (1) has been aliased into Mike Carey.
Series
Works by M. R. Carey
Works have been aliased into Mike Carey.
Associated Works
Works have been aliased into Mike Carey.
Stories of Hope and Wonder: In Support of the UK's Healthcare Workers (2020) — Contributor — 11 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Carey, Mike
- Birthdate
- 1959
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- United Kingdom
- Country (for map)
- England, UK
- Birthplace
- Liverpool, Merseyside, England, UK
- Agent
- Meg Davis
- Short biography
- Mike Carey (born 1959), also known by his pen name M. R. Carey, is a British writer of comic books, novels, and films, known for the novel The Girl with All the Gifts, as well as its 2016 film adaptation.
Carey was born in Liverpool, England, in 1959 – describing his young self as "one of those ominously quiet kids... who lived so much inside my own head I only had vestigial limbs". As a child, he maintained an interest in comics, writing and drawing primitive stories to entertain his younger brother. He studied English at St Peter's College, Oxford, before becoming a teacher. He continued to teach for 15 years before moving on to writing comics.
Members
Reviews
The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
Surprisingly good book. A real page turner, but also deals with large ethical and philosophical issues in a gritty way. Several plot twists that worked well to astound the reader. I am not typically a horror fan, but this one captivated me. The inclusion of seeming accurate (and detailed) descriptions of how a deadly pathogen might work gives the book a sense of realness normally associated with hard sci-fi.
This follow up novel introduces a whole new set of characters but in the same world. Some of the issues raised about the rise of a new kind of people are explored further and while the first novel ends with a sort of horror about the end of life as we know it, this one ends with hope - the ability of human kind to find "out of the box" solutions wins in the end.
I like a good "end of the world" book and a zombie plague works as well as any other disaster. The most interesting thing about this book was the ethical dilemma - what do you do with the clash of two equally intelligent and thinking groups of people who cannot (on the face of it) co-exist. It's easy to call the undead monsters - but what about zombies who think and feel and reason like you do??
I must have missed the hype about this book because I didn't know till the author interview at the back that this has apparently been turned into a film. Neither did I know that it is a zombie novel, although weirdly no one ever refers to that word . In fact, I found it rather odd that, being for part of the time on an army controlled base there wasn't a certain amount of black humour and sick jokes generally based on the existing trope given the popularity of George Romero films in the past.
I won't say much about the plot though I'm sure nearly everyone probably knows. But it has an arresting beginning. A child is being educated but she is kept in a cell and only moved when strapped down in a wheelchair while having a gun pointed at her, and the other children in her class are treated the same. One of the teachers resorts to "medicine" in the classroom and cries: obviously something is terribly wrong. The viewpoint does switch between characters in different scenes but is not first person, but close third and in present tense. The main viewpoint is that of Melanie, the brightest child in the class and so we realise that she has a crush on Miss Justineau, a teacher who reads to the class from Roger Lancelyn Green's classic retelling of the Greek Myths, 'Tales the Muses Told'. And gradually it becomes all too obvious what has happened and that we are in a post apocalypse scenario.
The book is a real page-turner, and I read it very quickly, and the tension held up well in most of it. However, there were some jarring notes for a book set in the UK. I had thought the author must be American and had got the terminology wrong in places although some is correct (bonnet and boot of a car for instance), but terms like 'blacktop' instead of 'tarmac' and 'baby carriage' rather than pram did jolt me out of the story. And in that last one, the vehicle is also described as a push chair - if it had been that, the whole scene with the doctor trying to see what was in the pram would not have happened because it would've been blatantly obvious. The dialogue also comes across the same way at times, especially that of Sergeant Parks. So it is odd to gather from the material at the end of the book that the author is apparently based in the UK.
After the intriguing and engaging beginning, the story spirals down to the usual ending of films in this genre- nearly all the characters falling prey to the zombies - though there is a nice twist regarding the development of the fungus which has been responsible for the collapse of human civilisation . The characters are fairly well rounded, especially Melanie, her favourite teacher Helen Justineau (another Greek Myth homage) and Sergeant Parks. But the escape sequence across country is a bit overlong, the absconding of the younger army bloke a bit too convenient plotwise, and I couldn't envisage where the goal of Beacon was sited and why they had to try to get through London in the first place. It would have been much more interesting to take the story as far as Beacon and show what the repressive society there was like, rather than play it out as a chase. So for that and the fluctuation between British/American English I'm deducting a couple of stars and awarding this 3 stars for a solid page-turning read.… (more)
I won't say much about the plot though I'm sure nearly everyone probably knows. But it has an arresting beginning. A child is being educated but she is kept in a cell and only moved when strapped down in a wheelchair while having a gun pointed at her, and the other children in her class are treated the same. One of the teachers resorts to "medicine" in the classroom and cries: obviously something is terribly wrong. The viewpoint does switch between characters in different scenes but is not first person, but close third and in present tense. The main viewpoint is that of Melanie, the brightest child in the class and so we realise that she has a crush on Miss Justineau, a teacher who reads to the class from Roger Lancelyn Green's classic retelling of the Greek Myths, 'Tales the Muses Told'. And gradually it becomes all too obvious what has happened and that we are in a post apocalypse scenario.
The book is a real page-turner, and I read it very quickly, and the tension held up well in most of it. However, there were some jarring notes for a book set in the UK. I had thought the author must be American and had got the terminology wrong in places although some is correct (bonnet and boot of a car for instance), but terms like 'blacktop' instead of 'tarmac' and 'baby carriage' rather than pram did jolt me out of the story. And in that last one, the vehicle is also described as a push chair - if it had been that, the whole scene with the doctor trying to see what was in the pram would not have happened because it would've been blatantly obvious. The dialogue also comes across the same way at times, especially that of Sergeant Parks. So it is odd to gather from the material at the end of the book that the author is apparently based in the UK.
After the intriguing and engaging beginning, the story spirals down to the usual ending of films in this genre
Lists
Next in Series (1)
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 11
- Also by
- 6
- Members
- 8,330
- Popularity
- #2,898
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 575
- ISBNs
- 147
- Languages
- 13
- Favorited
- 5
- Touchstones
- 336
