Three Extremely Weird Things That Happened to Author Adam Cece

Huggabie Falls is the weirdest town on earth, a place that is filled with extremely weird people who fill their days doing extremely weird things.

It’s a place where factories exist in another dimension, there’s a bottomless river, a topless hill and a train tunnel to nowhere. The people who live there are equally unusual – witches, pirates, talking rats, invisible families and that’s just the beginning.

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Words || Adam Cece

The time I had amnesia—I once I fell and dislocated my elbow. The doctor said it was the most impressive dislocation he’d ever seen, which (funnily enough) I was not excited about. I was just in pain. I had to have surgery, and because of a reaction between the pain medication and the anesthesia, when I woke up I couldn’t remember who I was, or anything about my life, for two hours. I wasn’t worried or scared, because you don’t worry about missing memories when you can’t remember what they were. I just remember sitting there in a sort of peaceful, clueless daze. It was actually quite lovely. 

 The time I watched the wrong movie—I’d gone into the wrong cinema and didn’t realise I was watching the wrong movie until halfway through it. How could this happen, I hear you ask. Well, did you know there were two Robin Hood movies released in cinemas in the year 1991, one starring Patrick Bergin, and one starring Kevin Costner (which was the one I wanted to see)? And in my town they showed these two movies at exactly the same time of day, in two cinemas right next door to each other. I mean, who does that? It was an accident waiting to happen. I remember thinking to myself, when is Kevin Costner going to be in this? He was definitely on the poster. I thought he was playing Robin Hood. When I did finally see the right movie, it became one of my all-time favourites.

 The weirdest day at school ever—When I was young our family lived in New Zealand for a few years. One day when I was in Year 6, a bull got loose in our school—yes a bull! We all had to stay in class, lined up along the windows, watching in amazement as the bull roamed the school. And then I saw my best friend, who was always late for school, wandering across the oval. He was oblivious to the bull until he got about ten metres from it. The bull stared him in the eye. We were all waiting for it to charge. My friend ran screaming and climbed the high fence around the tennis courts and sat on top of it. He sat up there for an hour, with all of us watching, before a farmer came and took the bull away. From then on we referred to that day as (the not very inventively nicknamed) ‘bull day’.

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Adam Cece lives in Adelaide. His first book, Wesley Booth Super Sleuth, was published in 2015. In 2017, Adam won the Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing for The Extremely Weird Thing that Happened in Huggabie Falls.