H.I.V.E.
Mark Walden

H.I.V.E. (Higher Institute of Villainous Education) is a top-secret school of villainy, where children with a talent for wrongdoing are sent to develop their talents and learn to become criminal masterminds.

With texts books like ‘Elementary Evil’ and lessons called ‘Villainy Studies’ and ‘Tactial Education’ HIVE sounds rather intriguing. However, when Otto Malpense is taken there against his will, he and his friends decide it is time to escape.

Mark Walden
H.I.V.E.

Mark Walden spent ten years working as a video games designer and producer. He recently left the industry to embark on a far more challenging/frightening career...full-time dad. He has a baby daughter and splits his time between writing and looking after her.

The inspiration for H.I.VE. came from a very unusual source. Mark says: ‘I was sitting at a friend's house and we were discussing how his cat Otto looked just like the cat that Blofeld owned in the James Bond movies. That led to me thinking about those kinds of villains in films and literature and how they never really have their origins explained and so I came up with the concept of HIVE to answer the question of how these mysterious characters learn how to take over the world. Obviously my friend's cat supplied a little help with my central character's name too...'

His debut novel is a comedy-thriller set in an elite school where children are trained to be supervillains.

H.I.V.E. takes some of the traditions of the school-based novel and subverts them. Here is a school where the students are actively encouraged to be as badly behaved as possible. H.I.V.E. is not the typical, nurturing environment that readers may be used to from other examples of this genre - this is a school whose central ethos is survival of the fittest and where failure can have fatal consequences.'

(Page 12)

"Dr Nero stood watching as the group walked away across the cavern floor and proceeded through the doors. It never failed to amuse him the way in which their jaws dropped when they were first faced with the true scale of the facility that he had established here. It was his firm belief that one should never underestimate the power of a first impression, and that it was always better to keep the new intake of students in a state of bewildered confusion at this stage. There was less chance of any unruliness that way, something which was a very real risk when dealing with a group of young people who had already set about redefining the world standard for misbehaviour. Besides which, there was always one – that was the other purpose of this bit of the theatre. There was always one of the new students who was unfazed by this, one who was not distracted by such cheap gimmicks – one to watch. And he had been there, the boy with snow-white hair, the one that he had to keep his eye on."

Extract taken from H.I.V.E. by Mark Walden published by Bloomsbury