![]() When he asked if she’d supervise him, Lauren said yes. It allowed Lauren to get to know some of Charlie’s writing. Charlie still, however, needed to ask Lauren…Īt about the same time, Charlie had submitted a short story for a Moxyland competition, and was chosen as one of the winners. He started lobbying to get Lauren appointed as his mentor, even though she wasn’t part of the faculty. He decided he’d carry on – but that he’d do it the way he wanted to. “It was a real moment of deciding whether I was going to continue, or just cut my losses and do something else.” “I’d been working on it for a year and suddenly I had nothing,” he says. Someone broke into his house and stole all of it. “I’d written maybe 30 000 words of this ‘other’ book. I knew if I wanted to do something like that I’d seriously have to up my game.” When he finished Moxyland his response was “part OMG, part screw you, because it was so good. He got a copy of Lauren’s book and thought to himself: “I’m probably going to read it and think I can do so much better. “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. Charlie Human’s first novel will sneak up behind you and whack you on the back of the head with a very big stick. ![]()
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