Warchild by: Andrew Cartmel: Let's Just Weaponize Children

Andrew Cartmel’s Warlock is a novel that posits a message against animal cruelty and drug use and how it is totally evil.  Cartmel is an activist for all these things and Warlock included quite a lot on a one-sided debate.  He realizes however that he really has nowhere to go as a lot of the debate was already covered quite well in Warlock.  He then instead goes to do a much harder character drama in Warchild, the conclusion to his trilogy of Virgin New Adventures.  He follows up on where he left the characters at the end of Warlock, but now fourteen years later with the Doctor, Roz and Benny going through a master plan to try and get Jack back into his own body while sending Chris on to help Creed and Justine’s child Ricky who has been manifesting psychic powers.  Cartmel is a great author as he has three plotlines running separately that have to come together in the end of the story.  He keeps you on the edge of your seat cutting back and forth between plotlines at times.

 

I’m going to come right out and say it, Cartmel is great at writing all the characters into fleshed out people.  The biggest problem with Warlock is that Creed especially felt very much like a stock character and in Warchild he rectifies this by focusing heavily on who Creed is as a person.  He is now an actual person who wants the best for his children, but because all three of them are extremely odd and he has a stressful job working for the Agency.  He can’t connect with his son Ricky, is extremely distant from his daughter Cynthia and thinks his youngest Eve is already smarter than anyone in the world as she can predict the future.  He is questioning his marriage with Justine and after having an argument he decides to have in affair with a cuter model.  He’s a flawed character and you cannot help but agree with a lot of what he does in the novel for a lot of the time.  Justine is also really good in the novel as now she finally has a lot of time to be a woman and not have to worry.  She is just as confused about her children but doesn’t really show it.  She also gets to be around her neighbors, especially the nosy one as their daughters are friends.

 

Ricky is an interesting character as he fuels most of the main plot of the novel.  He is the child Justine was pregnant with at the end of Warlock and because of the drug in Justine’s system, Ricky has powers.  He always stands out in a crowd and attracts attention from other people which he hates as Ricky wants to be an introvert.  He wants to be the one of the normal people and it is something that completely causes him to go inside himself.  He is put at a special school where Chris is teaching comparative anthropology under the guise of a Buddhist monk and the principal is a smoking gardener who talks to his students man to man.  Ricky’s story at school gets us to the real climax where a school bully’s father comes into the school, kills the principal and gets ready to go on a shooting spree.  This is something that catapults the Doctor back into the narrative which is great.  Chris’s portion of the novel is the real problem because he really doesn’t have a lot to do in the novel and doesn’t even appear until after halfway through the novel.

 

Roz actually gets a better plotline as while she is in England and she is strong-armed into joining the Agency and fighting off dogs which have been rising up.  Her sections of the novel play out like a thriller as the dogs just are rising up and she and Mrs. Woodcott from Warlock are held up in a home.  It is a terrifying sequence as people get their throats ripped out in bloody detail which is great for a story.  It also leads very nicely into the reintroduction of Jack who was left in the body of a dog at the end of Warlock.  This is of course the way that the Doctor and Benny fit in with the master plan which I will attempt to discuss without giving too much away about the big twist of the novel.  The Doctor and Benny are at the house on Allen Road trying to get Jack’s body out of life support which is a series of hilarious scenes.  The Doctor and Benny get this hilarious relationship because the Doctor doesn’t want to ruin the already falling apart gardens with the life support fluid.  They are hilarious bits of dialogue in the stories which I really quite like.

 

To summarize, much like how the novel actually ends, Warchild is a really good novel that has some great characters with a great twist and conclusion.  90/100