Get Your Copy Childmare Scripted By Nick Sharman Available In Print

security officer, Max Donnelly has been assigned to police rough innercity London school, Martin Balliol, but then a mysterious sickness affects the pupils, and its not long before their symptoms turn murderous as they rise up, murdering, raping and destroying everything in their path and then the sickness spreads to other schools across the whole country.




This is perhaps a somewhat controversial novel having children as rapists and murders, but its well written, with a brisk pace and rightly justifies its pulp status in the best way possible.

Lead poisoning food poisoning Thousands of murderous children whose hobbies include throwing babies out of second story windows and lighting senior citizens on fire.
The solution to this problem Blow up all the children! The only other Nick Sharman book I've read so far is The Cats, where thousands of cats become murderous and the solution is to blow them all up.
Why mess with a perfect formula The insanity starts early on and continues to the last page, making for a fun read that hardly ever gets boring.
Before Stephen King's "Cell" came this interesting twist on the "zombie" genre, Actually, this is more reminiscent of the classic "animals amok" genre, and is really an ingenious reworking of Nick Sharman's earlier novel, "The Cats.
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But this time, the marauding masses are young adolescents in school uniform, Sharman really knows how to throw a gut punch into a trope, It's easy to be disgusted by armies of the brainless undead or of whatever nasty creatures that might have come crawling from the pages ofs ands horror fiction.
Fans take delight in our heroes wrecking mass destruction on such obvious foes who offend our sensibilities at a primal level.


But this novel takes that pulp format and makes fans of that genre become disgusted with themselves.
Our own children are now the zombies, the rats, the spiders, the giant crabs, And Sharman treats them in the same manner as any pulp horror writer would any mass enemy, but he does so with the purpose to take us out of the escapist formula to give us pause.


Though the science that "explains" the events of the novel is hokey and flawed, the novel asks serious questions about humanity that were very pertinent in Great Britain in thes, and are just as important for any Western society today.
As older generations complain about "kids today," this book is there to ask, "And"

Lead poisoning, the spread of heroin addiction, the dehumanizing effect of project housing, the destruction of the working class, the poor quality of education and nutrition, these were all concerns tackled in this novel, which forces the reader to watch the effect of all the efforts of older generations on the developing minds of the younger generations.
Modern readers could also superimpose the impact of social media, perhaps, and can certainly identify with the heroin epidemic.


On the surface, this book contains all the elements of a good horror pulp to please the bloodandguts fans.
In fact, it contains some of the most disturbing depictions of torture and death that I've read outside of a splatterpunk piece.
But despite the relentless action and gore, there is a selfawareness to this novel that delivers a far bleaker product than at first glance.
It does lack the tongueandcheek humor of "Cats," and in fact, there is very little levity to be found here at all.
This book is merely a power tool that uses the emotion of horror for an effective purpose.
Love me an apocalyptic type novel but instead of zombies its murderous children, Creepy but really good Back when I was a young horror fiction fan in the earlys, I thought that gratuitous violence and gore in the genre got its start during the splatterpunk movement, initiated by the likes of Clive Barker and Skipp amp Spector in the mids.
How very wrong I was, That was before I discovered the British nasties of the lates/earlys, when seemingly everyone was trying to mimic the success of James Herbert's Rats, resorting to all kinds of havocwreaking creatures: crabs, worms, cats, jellyfish, slime, ants, slugs, etc.
One of the better examples I've come across recently, Childmare features, yes, maniacal children.
And the bloodshed and carnage here would probably make many of those splatterpunks blush,

Some sort of food poisoning has caused all the young students of a British school to suddenly turn into ruthless, indiscriminate killers who come up with increasingly brutal and sickening ways of dispatching their victims.
AG Scott aka Nick Sharman has a way of making the violence much more disturbing than the typical nasty writer.
I mean, don't you think that being forced to lie back on a desk, forearm being held out off the edge, then having it bent backwards at the elbow is much more horrifying than someone's head being cut off I sure as hell do.


But violence and gore isn't really what I look for in horror, I'm more interested in the fear factor, and while I wouldn't call Childmare overly scary, it does deliver its fair share of chilling scenes, such as when the teachers first start noticing the children's "dead" eyes and their emotionless gaze, and realize that they're in for a world of trouble.
But the novel became a little repetitive after a while, even for a subpage book.
I'm not a really big fan of zombie novels, and this strayed a little too close to that subgenre, though this was published well before that became an actual thing.
Still, it was a quick, fun read overall,

Any fan of nasties and zombietype fiction would probably have a great time with this.
This is noholdsbarred horror, with several scenes that are honesttogod hard to get through, So, if that's your thing, . .

.Stars

Childmare was published in the UK under the name Nick Sharman, who has a number of horror novels under his belt.
No idea why this was published under a different name here in the states,

ETA: And thanks to Will Errickson of Too Much Horror Fiction for tipping me off on this one.
Evil children is probably the biggest cliché in horror fiction, at least horror paperbacks from thes/s.
Thats why A. G. Scotts “Childmare” is noteworthy: it puts what I consider an original twist on a worn trope.


“Childmare” will work best for readers who dont know anything beyond its premise, Indeed, as the story progresses the scope of events expands exponentiallyone of the books many pleasures.
Others are the quality of writing, the tautness of the narrative, and action scenes that come across as vivid and gripping, rather than dumb Scott couldve easily padded the story to get a longer novel, but its a gift to the reader that he didnt the only misgiving I have is that the narrative couldve used a nominal nod to the parents of the rampaging children and dont forget the pervasive tone of nastiness.


In short, “Childmare” is a good time, and much different from what that unfortunate cover would lead one to believe.
Pretty disappointed by this one, I kept getting the feeling that this Kindle version must've been edited, because every punch seemed to be pulled back.
I'm used to Sharman going pushing the envelope, But not in this book, CHILDMARE isin the James Herbert tradition of fastpaced, graphic pulp horror, filled with snippets of everyday British life and locales.
But this is not a criticism at all, not for a moment, Think 'Dawn of the Dead'style mayhem and striking setups just not with bloody tattered zombies, but hordes of uniformed teenagers.
The pace never slackens in itspages the writing is powerful, direct, taut, It's an unapologetic horror novel that almost voyeuristically revels in death and destruction, both up close and at a distance.
CHILDMARE is a riproaring ride with some nicely tasteless moments of bizarre violence and cruelty that I think will make quite an impression on horror fiction lovers.
Better than I expected it to be

I dont particularly enjoy books set in London as much as others perhaps because I live there but this was ok.


The kids are not alright in Childmare, aHamlyn original paperback from Nick Sharman, a pseudonym for one Scott Grønmark.
A harmless food poisoning triggers a murderous rampage in the students of Britain's inner city schools, turning thousands of ordinary children into robotic but surprisingly imaginative killing machines.
Pretty soon all of England is in chaos because of homicidal teenagers,

The formula is familiar from fellow Brit James Herbert's novels Ratsor The Fog, with an everyday element that suddenly creates an existential threat to mankind.
Beginning with one kid bashing in his parents' heads with a cricket bat, the acts quickly escalate to widespread torture, rape, decapitations and just good mayhem.
Nobody can withstand the kids' assault, except of course a manly hero can, in this case one Max Donnelly, an exeverything security guard at a midLondon school.
The kids begin their killing spree at the school and soon spread out all over London, taking over the streets.


While the contents might be bloodshed mostly as usual, Sharman's style is anything but.
The tone of the novel is oddly cold and unfeeling, especially as things escalate towards the end.
The kids are quickly depicted as incurable, inhuman zombies, which gives the good guys license to mow them down with guns, cars, helicopter blades and so on.
The final operation to get rid of the kids is named "Operation Herod", an apt name if there ever was one, and perhaps an indication of the mindset in Thatcher's Britain.
No kidglove treatment for these troublemakers! Also trying very hard not to read anything into the fact that only state schools are affected, but not private schools.
Strangely enough, after the initial killings there are no parents in the novel, so apparently none of them were all that worried about their offspring.


The usual criticisms apply, for this is not a characterdriven novel, all characters both teenage and adult are as thin as tissue paper.
The writing in general feels rushed towards the end, probably because Sharman had a deadline and got a little bored with a book he must've known was very, very silly indeed.
The action, however, delivers throughout, with barely any lulls between the first bashedin heads and the final firebombing of the Thames.
Politically correct Childmare obviously and empathically is not, everyone from a bullied fat kid to a black WestIndian is firmly stuck in their worst stereotypes.
Childmare is trash, it's nasty, it's very dated, but in the end, that's just how we like 'em.
What a ride this was, . I went in thinking I would get a nice horror thriller and what I got was a Hollywood styled action / horror blockbuster! Childmageddon is more like it!.