Review: Hurricane Gold (Young Bond #4)

I love Charlie Higson.

This is because the man terrifies the shit out of me. I mean, Steven Moffat does things that I understand are scary in theory but don't feel in practice (the exception being The Empty Child), Kelley Armstrong occasionally freaks me out and the last chapter of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is forever etched in my memory, but for pure untainted disgusting, gory horror, the kind that gets into my bones and has me utterly gripped even as I squirm, and then cracks a joke and makes me laugh, it's Higson every time. In the first three books of this series, he's had his erstwhile protagonist:

• Immersed in a tank of hungry eels


• Nearly turned into an eel-human mutant... thing


• Tied to a stake in the middle of a jungle and eaten alive by mosquitoes


• Waterboarded with high-proof liquor, resulting in alcohol poisoning

To say nothing of the various disturbing deaths of side characters and the fucking running joke in Double or Die where one of the mooks keeps losing body parts in unlikely Bond-related circumstances, counting down to his final death.

And these are just his YA novels. Were I to add in Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), I could also mention beheading, incurable measles, umbrella-through-the-chest, David Tennant in a bloodstained wedding dress wielding a chainsaw... oh, and a ghost clearing a room by farting.

( The Mayans used to talk of a cursed treasure called hurricane gold, which if you held on to it would bring ruin to you and your family... )