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Charlie Higson

The Enemy (An Enemy Novel, 1) Paperback – Illustrated, May 20, 2014

by Charlie Higson (Author)

1,385 ratings

Book 1 of 7: The Enemy

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In this first book in a series set in post-apocalyptic London, children under the age of sixteen must battle for survival against grown-ups who succumbed to a disease that turned them into flesh-eating monsters.

In the wake of a devastating disease, everyone sixteen and older is either dead or a decomposing, brainless creature with a ravenous appetite for flesh. Teens have barricaded themselves in buildings throughout London and venture outside only when they need to scavenge for food. The group of kids living a Waitrose supermarket is beginning to run out of options. When a mysterious traveler arrives and offers them safe haven at Buckingham Palace, they begin a harrowing journey across London. But their fight is far from over-the threat from within the palace is as real as the one outside it.

Full of unexpected twists and quick-thinking heroes, The Enemy is a fast-paced, white-knuckle tale of survival in the face of unimaginable horror.

Book 1 of 7

The Enemy
Print length

448 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication date

May 20, 2014
Grade level

9 and up
Reading age

14 years and up
Dimensions

5.55 x 2.1 x 8.15 inches
ISBN-10

9781484721469
ISBN-13

978-1484721469
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Editorial Reviews

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Praise for The Enemy:
A Junior Library Guild Selection

About the Author

Charlie Higson is an acclaimed writer of screenplays and novels, and also a performer and the co-creator of the British television programs The Fast Show and Bellamy's People. He is an expert on James Bond and is the author of the internationally best-selling Young Bond series. Charlie, a big fan of horror movies, is hoping to give readers many sleepless nights with the Enemy series. He lives in London. Follow him on Twitter @monstroso.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1484721462
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Revised edition (May 20, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781484721469
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1484721469
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 9 and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.55 x 2.1 x 8.15 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #72,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Teen & Young Adult Zombie Fiction
- #78 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Self Esteem & Reliance
- #221 in Teen & Young Adult Survival Stories

Customer Reviews:
1,385 ratings

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Charlie Higson

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Charlie Higson is an acclaimed comedy writer, producer, actor, and genuine James Bond aficionado. He is the author of the adult thrillers, Full Whack and King of the Ants; the internationally best-selling Young Bond series: SilverFin, Blood Fever, Double or Die, Hurricane Gold, and By Royal Command; and the YA apocalyptic thriller: The Enemy, which he wrote to frighten his ten-year-old son. He lives in London. Follow him on Twitter at: twitter.com/monstroso

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

1,385 global ratings

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4 star		14%
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Alex King

A Great Zombie Type Read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 16, 2011

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The world has been hit with an unknown disease that turns everyone over 16 into zombie like creatures that seek to kill the children they left behind. The book is set in London and follows the saga of a ragtag group of kids as they try to stay alive in a world turned upside down.

The kids have found refuge in the local supermarket. They have been there a year, but things are getting desperate as the older kids have to travel farther from their store base to find food to keep them alive. The older kids know it is only a matter of time until they cannot hold out any longer and are looking for a way out. They find it when an older boy arrives telling them to come to Buckingham Palace, where there they have set up a safe zone, with food and comfort within the palace walls. Knowing their plight is grim, the older kids decide they should leave the shelter of the store and make a dash to the palace. The story follows them as they make their way across London. Who will survive the trip, and when they get there what will they find?

Little Sam is a nine year old with an imagination who is stolen from the supermarket grounds by the grownups in the opening pages of the book. He keeps his wits and is able to escape only to find himself alone in the big city of London. The book follows his adventures as he strives to stay alive and make his way back to the little sister he left behind in the supermarket. He is a wonderful character who just wants to be a kid again, but is forced to grow up too fast in a world where everyone must take care of themselves.

The book is fast paced with plenty of zombie type violence. The world as Higson creates is a dangerous one and many characters do not survive their odyssey. We never learn why the new disease has affected grownups, but it really doesn't matter. These decomposing, flesh eating creatures are the things nightmares are made of. But they are not the only thing the kids have to worry about. All is not as it seems at Buckingham Palace and the kids have to determine who besides the diseased grownups are the enemy.

At its core the book makes one think how children and young teens would be able to cope and survive if left in a world without adult authority to fend for themselves. They find themselves longing for the structure and love their families provided, and note the unfairness of how they had to grow up too fast. The characters are wonderfully developed and this allows the reader to care about, cheer for and mourn with them. There were twists and turns in the novel I didn't see coming, something that is refreshing. I really enjoyed this one and found it hard to put down. There is a prequel book that will be released in North America later this year. I can't wait to read more about the fascinating world Charlie Higson has created in this series.

14 people found this helpful

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Wendy

The second half was great!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 20, 2012

Verified Purchase

It took me awhile to make friends with The Enemy. The winding tale of a group of London kids trying to survive in a world where all the adults have turned into kid-eating monsters had a great concept, but it felt like sitting down to dinner at a restaurant with excellent food but terribly slow service. The main course was great, but it took waaaay too long to get there.

It's been about a year since the sickness infected all people older than 14, and some of the few surviving children - those that haven't already been killed by the grown-ups - have holed up in makeshift fortresses, scavenging for food and simply trying to stay alive. Although they don't have any formal hierarchy, Arran and Maxie act as leaders for the Waitrose crew. Blue and Whitney lead the Morrison crew.

A kid name Jester shows up, representing another group of kids living in Buckingham Palace. Jester tells them there is plenty of food, security and room for more kids and asks them to relocate. It sounds almost too good to be true. Is it?

Taking a chance, the kids make their way across a dangerous city in hopes of a better life.

The Good:

The second half of the book. Things really started picking up after the painful first half. Sam's adventure became exciting and, once the kids arrived at Buckingham Palace, there were far more surprises and interesting plot points that could actually be developed - not just a long, repetitive series of skirmishes. Although I have no idea if the author intended this, I saw some fascinating real-life political history connotations.

The epidemic explanations. Jester brought up an interesting thought during some hypothesizing of what caused the outbreak - instead of something beginning to happen that caused the sickness, something stopped happening that caused people to start getting sick. I've never thought of zombie-esque scenarios like that. I didn't understand, however, how none of the kids had turned 15 since the grown-ups started turning to see if they would turn or not. You'd think with 50-some kids at least one of them would've had a 15th birthday sometime in the year.

Sam. I quite enjoyed Sam. His plotline was always pretty interesting and he was maybe the only character that had been really explored. For the smallest, Sam was the bravest.

The ending. Callum was pointless, but the perspective changing from the kids to the grown-ups sounded promising. I'd like to hear their side of the story.

The Bad:

Writing style. My hostility toward the book began within the first two pages, during the description of Sam Small. "Sam wasn't the youngest of the group, but he was the smallest. That's why they called him Sam Small." The simplistic writing seemed like something you'd see in a very young reader book. Like the Bernstein Bears. I noticed it less as the story went on, but I'm not sure if it got better or I just got used to it.

Character cluster. The Enemy is told from a limited third-person perspective covering 30-some characters (according to Amazon's description, I didn't keep count) - far too many to keep track of. All of the characters were one-dimensional, bland, and offering no emotional connection. Worse, the ginormous list of characters made it nearly impossible to follow the plot - especially in the dialogue-heavy parts. The fight scenes were such a mess, exhausting, and mostly useless. I skipped through them to the important part: who died. That's really all you need to know.

Word waste. This book could've easily been shortened by 25 percent or more by cutting majorly from the first half. The conversations were too lengthy. The time spent at the compound was uninteresting. The action scenes were almost painlessly predictable: Hear/smell a grown-up. Grown-ups attack. Talk about how grown-ups smell/look. End of fight. Arran and Cullum's characters should've just been nixed entirely.

Odd descriptions. Do you think a hoard of zombie-like creatures sounds like the sea or running water? I don't.

The first half of the book. I might've given up had it not been for the reviews. The plot just seemed boring and stupid. The kids were overly emo and defenseless, almost waiting for the grown-ups to come get them. Haven't violent video games taught children anything? They went everywhere by foot and didn't hijack cars even though it would've been easy to find keys in the now-abandoned houses or even in the ignitions (explained as most of the cars were out of gas by now - but how? Had all the cars been left running? No.)

As frustrated as I was during the first part of the book, the second half and ending made me want to read the next book in the series. The next book takes place a year before the first, when the outbreak first happened. I've only read a few pages, but it seems to be a little more gripping than its predecessor.

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Maybe not the best book to read three weeks into lockdown in the worst pandemic in 100 years...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

Blimey! Well, this is a great book! I'm not the target age for YA novels but I've read quite a lot of them. Well written, Higson doesn't 'write down' but uses good language and is clear. Some reviews complained about the gore - I'm not a fan of the gore-fest (I disliked Tommyknockers intensely, partly for this reason, but also because the ending made me feel that I had wasted every minute I'd spent reading the damn book) but I didn't feel it was gratuitous. You're reading about people affected by a virus which turns them into cannibalistic zombies. You think they're going to carry napkins and put plasters over the bites? On a general gore-scale, I would say yes, some uncomfortable scenes, but less gory overall than Sean of the Dead. Well written, well paced, 'realistic' in that someone appearing to be a 'main character' wasn't guaranteed to survive. I'd have loved this in my early teens. I certainly enjoyed it in my XXs!

One person found this helpful

owlstalker

A well written story - tense reading!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 17, 2013

Verified Purchase

When I started this book, I didn't realise it was aimed at teens - presumably I hadn't read the reviews. If I'd realised this fact, I probably wouldn't have bought it (I'm the wrong side of 60 and would be one of the losers!). However, I would have missed out because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It had everything I look for in a book - well-thought-out plot, plenty of action, believable characters which didn't suddenly do things out of character, suspense, and all this in a full length eBook in which I didn't note any typos or grammatical errors other than in speech which were obviously deliberate. Plenty of descriptive gore as well if you like that, and no gratuitous swearing (some, but in context) - nice to see in a story aimed at youngsters. The story has the main theme of some unexplained disease which only appears to affect adults, turning them into shambling zombies (I know a few of them already). Children and young teens are unaffected but have the problem that the zombies like to eat children! The story follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of a group of children trying to survive. My favourite bit was when a boy says the "king" doesn't like being called "Dave" - he prefers "David" - is this a tongue in cheek reference to the Daily Mail's name for "CallMeDave" Cameron?! There are unanswered questions such as... What caused the catastrophe? Will the children also be diseased as they get older? There are several hooks at the end of the book which tempt the reader to have a go at the next in the series; perhaps these questions will be answered - I don't know yet, but I hope to find out.

8 people found this helpful

A Chain

One in a series -forget where

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 29, 2022

Verified Purchase

Enjoyed the first in the series though it read as a collection of same-y scenes (undead, fight, gore,loss-on repeat). Couldn’t see an actual story. Bought two others in the series to see if a story emerges in the long game. It didn’t. Won’t buy the others. Think maybe these are for younger audience.

Richard Wright

YAking Dead

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 24, 2014

Verified Purchase

The basic outline of this YA novel is standard zombie fare - in the aftermath of an apocalypse, survivors must battle zombies and each other against a brutal landscape in order to reshape what's left of the world and make themselves a place in it (etc, etc). The backdrop is London instead of the U.S., and in tone this is a pretty good contender for the UK companion to The Walking Dead. There are some tweaks here and there - instead of being actual corpses the zombies are adults infected by a plague that only affects post-teenagers, and the characters are mostly teens and pre-teens - but there are rival camps, quests, relationships, brutal and unforeseen deaths... if Rick Grimes were to stride into the mix he'd find himself perfectly at home. That this is YA fiction makes little difference to Charlie Higson, who cuts away from unpleasantness only at its most extreme, and gives an enlivening examination of survivalism through the lens of his young cast (while keeping things ever moving forwards at pace). I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this. Whether the same momentum can be maintained through a series, and for how long such familiar ideas can be propped up by Higson's energy, I don't know. There's enough done here to make me put the next book on my Xmas list though.

Dyl

Superb, gruesome story telling.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 21, 2012

Verified Purchase

I got this after reading through the all of the fantastic Zombie Fallout books by Mark Tufo and wanted something to fill the gap until book 6 of his series came out. I wasn't sure if it would be satisfying enough because of the fact it is aimed at younger readers as well as us `old kids' and therefore may be a bit tame in its content. By the time I had got past the first twenty or so pages I was hooked though.

There is no steady introduction to the characters before getting into the action. It just throws you in at the deep end and does an excellent job of letting you know what each person is like through their actions and attitudes. These kids are a great mix of personalities and how they behave is different to how adults behave in other zombie / disaster stories. It is entirely believable that they would act as they do if faced with a catastrophe on the scale of the one they are going through.

The plot runs along at a great pace. It never slows down to a speed where it becomes dull and yet manages to have brief rests where the some of characters personalities are allowed to come out more. These characters are treated as real people though, not super heroes, and real people die. So a character that may seem like they are going to be there for the long haul could quite easily be dead within a few pages, whilst another that you think is a goner can unexpectedly reappear. They are also faced with believable problems such as whether they will be better off where they are or moving elsewhere to a supposed "promised land".

My concern about it being too tame wasn't necessary either. The blood, guts, puss and general gore is there for those that want it. One bit almost had me putting the book down until I had finished my left over curry that I was having for lunch at work. It was particularly sickening whilst trying to eat. The `zombies' sometimes behave slightly differently to your usual brainless eating machines too. Only slightly, but it does make a slight difference to how they need to be fought. In a post catastrophe world though, zombies are not the only enemy to look out for.

I'm now on with The Dead (The Enemy) , book 2 in this series and I'm just as hooked after the first few pages. Excellent stuff!

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