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When images of bloodied feet swept across the internet earlier this month, author John Birmingham took notice.
The feet belonged to 16-year-old Sam Kanizay, who was attacked by lyssianasid amphipods, or sea lice, while soaking his feet at Dendy Street Beach in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton.
Video later taken by Sam's father, showing the amphipods feasting on fresh meat, served to confirm international preconceptions that Australia is filled with creatures hungry for human blood.
Birmingham, best known for his novels He Died With A Felafel In His Hand and The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, quickly began writing a horror comedy story featuring the flesh-eating bugs.
News story was like movie The Blob
Birmingham's book Wave Of Mutilation: What Lice Beneath is not directly about the incident that made worldwide news, but instead uses the attack as a "story seed".
The Brisbane-based author told ABC Radio Melbourne's Jacinta Parsons and Sami Shah that the news story reminded him of 1958 horror film The Blob, about a gelatinous alien lifeform that steadily consumes everything in its path.
"It struck me as very similar in its narrative architecture," Birmingham said.
"You've got the little quiet seaside town and the unsuspecting teen, and then boom — everything goes sideways quickly."
It's a long short story
In what might be the fastest turnaround from news story to book in publishing history, Birmingham had the title for sale online within days.
At 3,500 words, the ebook is not a novel but more of a "long short story", and he has priced it accordingly.
Birmingham said the book would have been available sooner had he not priced it so low.
"Unfortunately I set the price in Mexico at nine pesos ($0.64) and Amazon wouldn't let me sell it, they said they'd lose money," he said.
"I put the price up to 19 pesos [but] that held me up for a couple of days."
Book title crowdsourced
As he began writing the book, Birmingham turned to his more than 70,000 Twitter followers for help with its title.
"I'd love to claim credit for it, but I just threw that one out on social media."
He said he chose "wave of mutilation" and "what lice beneath" from around 100 titles suggested to him by followers.
"The two people who suggested those titles are actually in the book, they get eaten by the cannibal sea lice," he said.
Sarah Guinevere Heald, who suggested What Lice Beneath, features in the story as the arch nemesis of the book's main character, reporter Mindy Minson.
Minson watches as blood-red waves close around Sarah Guinevere, as Ms Heald's character is called, and she is "melted into the boiling offal".
Ms Heald said she was "delighted" to be killed by the meat-eating lice in the story, describing it as "every young girl's dream".
"Now I get to tell people I'm a key character in one of his books without people assuming I was one of his housemates from hell [from He Died With A Felafel In His Hand]," she said.
"That said, given I'm currently living in Hobart I must confess I hold out some hope people might assume I was in The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco."
Topics: animal-attacks, horror-books, author, books-literature, human-interest, comedy-humour, brighton-3186, brisbane-4000, melbourne-3000
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