Highly enlightening Guardian feature on Charlie Higson”

“There isn’t a set of rules about how scary you can make it,” says Higson, looking characteristically nice and respectable in his north London home (just down the road from the Waitrose). “So I used my youngest boy as a guinea pig. He was just 10, or maybe even nine, so he was a bit young. But I thought ‘I’ll see how scared he gets.’ ”

Higson read The Enemy to Sidney as a bedtime story, chapter by chapter as he wrote it. “And it was quite clear that he wasn’t getting scared at all. He was really enjoying it, and was saying ‘I love a bit of gore, but it’s not scary’ … Modern kids have been exposed to so much more. They watch all these DVDs they’re not supposed to, they look at stuff online particularly, and certainly when it comes to gore they’ve seen it all.” So Higson responded by “pushing it, making it grimmer and more violent and nastier, with more children getting killed and eaten”.

Eventually, he recalls, they were about halfway into the book and he’d gone to sleep, “defeated again”. But then, “at about four in the morning, there was a hammering on the door and Sidney came bursting in, floods of tears, shaking, sweaty, pyjamas stuck to his body, he’d had this really awful nightmare based on the book, and I thought ‘Woohoo!’ ”

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via Charlie Higson: ‘Kids should have nightmares, they should be scared of things’ | Books | The Guardian.