Literary fans given chilling taste of zombie adventures

Higson, who found fame as one of the comic stars on The Fast Show on the BBC and has also pursued a successful acting career, visited St Olave’s School in York yesterday as part of the promotional trail for the paperback release of The Fear.

The book is the third in the series, which has been inspired by Greek mythology and fairy tales of terror throughout the ages that have featured adults eating children.

From Cronus, the youngest of the Titans, to Jack and the Beanstalk and Hansel and Gretel, storytelling is littered with monstrous adults eating children, and Higson’s zombie series weaves this tradition into its telling.

The first novel in his bestselling adventure series, The Enemy, was published by Puffin in September 2009, with the second, The Dead, following a year later.

Higson is a huge fan of horror films and books, and studied gothic literature at university.

He has also written books about Ian Fleming’s secret agent James Bond as a young teenage boy, which have now sold more than a million copies in the UK and been translated into over 24 different languages.