Paul Magrs

My friend Deborah says animal books are usually sentimental. Yet she still loves ‘Follyfoot’. My friend Alicia’s amazed that I still haven’t read – Paul Gallico fan that I am – his two cat novels, ‘Jennie’ and ‘Thomasina.’ I’ve said before that I love animal books of all kinds – rabbits, moles, frogs, lions – the whole lot of them.

This short novel by Michael Morpurgo has Kaspar the cat as its hero – but he’s a silent hero in all of his adventures at the Savoy hotel and on board the doomed maiden voyage of The Titanic. He seems very properly catty to me – yowling and spitting at all the right moments. Having to be swaddled in blankets when he’s rescued from the sinking ship in case he scratches his rescuer to bits. And mostly curling up and sleeping somewhere that gives a good view of everything that’s going on.

Like other things by Morpurgo I’ve read this has a pleasing feeling of being a ready-made tale… almost fabular in its construction. As if it’s something you recognise and realise you already know as you read it. It’s original and brand spanking new… but perhaps because it’s so well made and put together it gives off the sensation of corners rounded with use, end papers frayed with much turning… all the twists and reversals of fortunes seem like things we’re looking out for already. All the good fairy tales have to be anticipatable somehow, if that’s a word. They have to be breath-baitable and edge-of-seatish. I think this book delivers all of that – and gives us just enough lost-orphan stuff, enough newfound optimism, enough excitement, near death, new devoted friendships and eventual sadness. I don’t think it’s sentimental, though. It’s so thoroughly rooted in real life and experience and these characters are tossed about on the Edwardian seas in a way we never stop believing.

I have to say how much I love Michael Foreman’s illustrations. I’ve loved his work all my life. It always looks as if it’s still just drying on the page. It’s always twilight or dawn in his pictures, with darkness melting away. Something very benign about the world he illustrates.

I was in London for a little while this week. Zooming about Bloomsbury and looking at some Egyptian stuff and then comics and some books and going out for lunch. Staying in a fancy hotel. Gadding about at the Headline meet-the-book-bloggers party – which I loved. Red wine and chocolate cake, and getting to meet some of the people behind these blogs I’ve been reading: Savidgereads, DoveGrey Reader, Book Chick City, NextRead, Nick from a Pile of Leaves. All of these writers and these blogs focus on quite different genres, with a bit of overlap here and there – but they all read and write about things that I’m really interested in. It was a delight to meet them – up there at the top of Headline towers – where the publicity team looked after us a treat, plied us with cakes and tote bags of new paperbacks – and then took us to the pub. What more could you ask for?

I didn’t get any pictures of the proceedings. I’m hoping someone else did, as a record of a happy afternoon. My pics here are of things I saw on a blowy, showery couple of days. I was hurrying through Bloomsbury when I bumped into Wendy Law-Yone – a wonderful writer who I knew back at UEA, who was writing fellow there for a bit. Her novel is out with Chatto – ‘The Road to Wanting.’ I’ve got a copy and I’m looking forward to it. How strange and lovely though, to bump into her like that, just after I’d arrived in London. I keep doing that. Dashing round corners in places and coming face to face with people I know.

I’m rereading Charles de Lint’s Moonheart – about 15 years after I first read it. Prompted by some talk on Nextread and Book Chick City about what ‘urban fantasy’ actually *is*. Also, while I was running about and travelling, I was listening the audiobook of Donald Cotton’s ‘Doctor Who – the Myth Makers’, read by Stephen Thorne. It’s a wondrous object: a Who story as told by the elderly Homer, eating goats cheese under a tree and gossipping about the heroes of old.

So – digging out my reading diary and flipping straight to the front, to the start of Easter break during the second year of my degree at Lancaster… what was I reading?

It was a time when I was stuck right into my reading for my courses – but I was, as ever, reading for myself, too. Trying to pin down my tastes at twenty. Looking for new stuff to take me new places. Thinking about the kinds of things I’d like to write for myself.

The coming term would be an important one for me in all sorts of ways. That summer I’d meet someone who’d introduce me to a range of writers who’ve been vastly important to me ever since. But that Easter I found the following for myself – some of them, if not all, coming from that little remainder bookshop by the market place in Darlington.

Just looking at the four of these makes me laugh. That combination of Star Trek, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen and HP Lovecraft seems so typical of me. Two of them were branching off lit courses I was taking – and the sf was me taking time out for the holiday. In my head, of course, the whole lot would get all mixed up – delightfully.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a really good werewolf novel. There are a scattering of great Angela Carter short stories. And with films we’re spoiled: Lon Chaney Jr, An American Werewolf in London, etc etc. But novels?

When I was a kid and addicted to the Ladybird ‘Well Loved Tales’ books there was one that scared the life out of me, every time: ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.’ That’s the much scarier version of the ‘Three Little Pigs’ in which the wolf gets smarter and disguises himself as  the goats’ mother, sticking his flour-covered paw round the door, pretending it’s her, come home. It’s a viscerally nasty fairy tale, as all the best ones are.

Anyway – here comes a  brand new wolf novel and it’s a book that’s stiff with foreboding and dread right from the start. There is something peculiar about the atmosphere of this novel. Its two main voices – Jack and Francis – are complementary and work well together, alternating chapters, building this picture of a life of graduates in shared houses, call centre jobs and nights out in Manchester. The slightly sombre mood slowly creeps up on the reader – with the introduction of Jack’s new girlfriend, Jennifer; the bungled suicide attempt by strange call centre boss, Kenny – and the morbid dwelling on death and disease by the depressed and slightly autistic Francis. (I was mortified to find that his conspicuously freakish B-movie film tastes are similar to mine.)

This is a kind of OCD horror novel: building in cross-hatched layers of fierce preoccupation and a claustrophobic feeling of being hemmed in by life and by rubbishy jobs. There’s a hippyish nostalgia to Jennifer’s decision to sell her dead mother’s house and to buy Fell House, a place she and Jack find – seemingly by chance – up in the Lake District. It’s an abandoned place with layers of ancient wallpaper and clawed wainscoting (oh no!) and seems the perfect place for them to escape to. Soon the rest of their household are following them for a birthday weekend – launching a surprise birthday party on Jack, and inviting hordes of anonymous gatecrashers via Facebook. And that’s when things start to go crazy.

The actual horror stuff doesn’t start till relatively late on. It’s almost a relief when it does, because the atmosphere has been mounting and the suspense is terrific. I was very anxious for the lurking  horrors to emerge and to be really nasty – and I wasn’t disappointed. There’s been hints and footprints and, just when everyone is at their most drunk and the party is at its delirious height… that’s when it all kicks off.

What I love about this is that it manages to be gruesome and schlocky – as well as psychologically true and insidiously creepy. It’s like some weird, delicious combination of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ – all suggestion, hysteria and darkness… and some 1970s New English Library gorefest horror novel. (‘Don’t go in the barn….!’) For the horror aficionado this has got everything.

The characters are not always likable, but they’re note-perfect. We know them all so well by the time they meet their eventual fates. The sense of place is beautifully done – at the start of the book, this really feels like Manchester now, and nowhere else (which means, of course, that the book will translate extremely well into other languages and for other countries). The Lake District is evoked as a strange, ancient place – riven with folklore and bizarre legend – and lakes that are endlessly deep. Even the sheep are sinister in the world that’s created here.

I won’t spoil the ending, or give away too much about what exactly goes on in this novel. It’s a literary, literate horror novel – and has a mordant, knowing, blackly ironic style to it. But it’s relentless, too, in its avowed intention of scaring the life out of its readers, with everything it can throw at us. The book knows we’ve seen all these films, we’re au fait with all the cliches of horror. But somehow all that knowledge doesn’t help when you’re stuck on the Fells and it all starts coming true. That’s what it feels like – that slowed-down, dreadful moment from dreams – when it all seems to be coming true…

Over at Amazon, Jon Arnold has submitted at wonderful review of ‘Diary of a Dr Who Addict’… which goes some way to alleviate the irksomeness of there being – for some reason – so few  copies of the book on the shelves at WH Smiths and Waterstones. He writes:

“I wish this book had been around when I was 13.

“This isn’t a book about growing up in the nostalgia show approved 80s, where everyone had at some point a Chopper, listened to the New Romantics and ate Spangles. This is the absolute opposite of that, exposing it as a communal illusion of grown-ups trying to refit their adolescence as cool. This is growing up as experienced by the kids who didn’t quite fit in, who didn’t grow up quite as quickly as everyone else (in every way), who didn’t really want to put aside childish things. It understands how growing up can be the most difficult thing in the world, especially if you don’t conform to society’s conventions. And it adds verisimilitude by understanding how sometimes trivial things that don’t matter can be the most important thing in the world at that age – liking the wrong, uncool songs and squirming discomfort with the randomly cruel actions of the friends you’ve gron up with, friends who’re changing into someone you don’t quite know or recognise.

“Instead of relying on cheap nostalgia for the period feel, Magrs captures the era with the flavour of experiences – the frustration of being stuck on your own in a small town in the middle of nowhere, one the internet generation will never quite understand. There’s the wonder of the first VCR, being able to watch your favourite programmes again and again, the wide-eyed wonders of the Doctor Who Exhibition, the huntsman’s thrill of finding a Target novelisations you never had… it struck so many chords it wasn’t just playing my tune, it was playing my symphony.

“If I’d had this book at the equivalent age (that’d have been around 1987 for me) it’d have been an absolute godsend. It would’ve taught me, turning into a typically self-obsessed teenager, that there was someone else who’d gone through what I was going through. But it would’ve told me that in a wise, understanding and non-judgemental manner, the only sort of voice I’d have listened to, let alone understood at that age. You need to know you’re not alone, but the hardest thing is understanding that.

“Magrs flirts with breaking the narrator’s heart for much of the novel before finding… not a happy ending but the right ending. The character Davey needs to reassure him you can survive adolescence with your love for Doctor Who intact may appear almost out of nowhere, but in the social hierarchy of teenagers it rings perfectly true. It’s as wise and true as I’ve come to expect from Magrs’ work.”

Something else online that’s made me happy is an interview Mark Morris alerted me to – and the fact that Johnny at All Things Horror had found Mary Danby! Legendary short story writer and anthologist of the 70s days of the Fontana books of Horror Stories…

http://www.allthingshorror.co.uk/#/mary-danby/4530741590

She seems quite surprised that people are such fans of this series of books, and remember them with such fondness. My favourite bit of the interview is when she reveals that she herself was, in fact, the model for the book cover photograph of the budgie-lady.

At the moment I’m just coming to the end of reading one of the scariest horror novels I’ve ever read. Full review on its way!

Also, this week I’m celebrating the twentieth anniversary of my reading diary. I’ve kept a list of everything I’ve read since the end of spring term 1990 in the same black hardbacked book. There’s only a few pages left but a huge list of books in different coloured inks and worsening handwriting. Towards the end of this week I’m going to look back at what I was reading twenty years ago exactly… and see if things have changed at all…

Finally – here’s Bret Herholz’s latest drawing of the Fourth Doctor as he should look in ‘Hornets’ Nest’. Bret and I are working on a comic strip together set in that very location. It’s a short, special fanzine project that should see the light of day before too long. This is the first time I’ve actually written a comic strip. It was so fun – and so natural-feeling, embarking on that script. But then, I suppose I should know how it all works, after reading comics for almost forty years (From the earliest possible age I was reading both ‘Pippin in Playland’ and ‘Dracula Lives!’)

Also – Amazon.com outed the news that I am indeed working on a sequel to the Hornets’ Saga… with the title of ‘Demon Quest’… due for spooky release this autumn…

“He opened the door and stared out into the darkness, speaking in a harsh whisper. ‘Nobody leaves the circle. Not until the day of release…’

“He disappeared into the night. Matthew stared after him, trying to make sense of the ominous warning he had left floating in the air. ‘Nobody leaves the circle,’ he had said. How absurd! There was nothing to stop them. They would leave as soon as his father had finished his research, and that wouldn’t be a moment too soon. This place, with its strange, puppet-like children and its potty old poachers, was beginning to get on his nerves.”

Matthew and his father Adam are renting a house in Milbury, a village surrounded by an ancient stone circle. His father is a physics whizz and is studying the strange properties of the legendary stones. Matthew takes an immediate dislike to their housekeeper, who is bit too ready with her chocolate cake and her unctuous smile. All the villagers greet each other with, ‘Happy Day!’, sounding a bit like a cross between the locals of Portmeirion and Summerisle. Everything here gives Matthew the creeps.

He makes allies in the form of Dai, the old poacher, who knows far more than he’s telling. And also, two other new arrivals and love interests for our two heroes: Margaret, who runs the local museum, and her daughter, Sandra.

This is one of those kids’ books you’d read on holiday. It takes place during long summer days, with our lead characters zipping about the countryside on bikes, investigating mysterious deaths and observing strange, folkloric rites undertaken by spooky villagers. There’s a wonderful villain in Mr Hendrick, the urbane lord of the manor and high priest, who has a dining room-cum-observatory at the top of his house, with a ceiling that slides back during certain alignments of the stars…

This short, atmospheric book was adapted by the authors in 1977 from their own teleplay (or was it vice versa?) It was published originally by Carousel, a list whose name and logo make me all nostalgic for books ordered through our school book club (Chip and later on, Beaver Club). Another kids’ book that should be repackaged and reprinted, I think. The creepy, unsettling atmosphere of the TV show is recaptured here – and it’s supplemented by some strangely imagistic moments, especially when Matthew develops his psychometric powers – and has visions when he touches items belonging to other people.

The ending to this book is very unsettling, I think. No one comes out of it happily… apart from, perhaps, the wrong people. The most our heroes can hope for is escape from this terrifying village…

I’ve never been to Avebury, the village on which this is based, and where the show was shot – but I really want to go.

This weekend I’m reading and thinking about the novelisation of classic TV kids’ serial, ‘Children of the Stones.’ It’s a wonderful melange of The Wicker Man and The Midwich Cuckoos, with some Nigel Kneale chucked in there for good measure. I’m thoroughly enjoying it and looking forward to moving on to the same authors’ ‘Raven.’

Did the same writers do any other spooky serials or books for kids? Looking around, asking around, it seems not.

In a way: how wonderful – to write just a couple of things in a genre and they’re brilliantly memorable like this.

Also – I’m thinking about kids’ stories that deal with stone circles, pagan magic, myths and legends and border line black magic stuff. Sort of the Son of the Devil Rides Out. Anyone got good recommendations? Books, TV or film.

One of the things I love about the Burnham and Ray novelisation is that it in no way talks down to its young audience. We get astrophysics and pagan ritual and we’re expected to have a higher level of general knowledge than I’m sure kids’ books these days expect us to have. If half of this presupposed stuff was in a mainstream commercial adult novel these days, I imagine the blow would still be cushioned some and there’d be bits added to make us feel less stupid. Is the general reader generally less well informed these days?

One thing that I can think of from recent years that comes near to having the same spookiness and intelligence on kids’ tv is that Christmas one-off that Jeanette Winterson wrote, ‘Ingenious.’  (Which I intend to go on mentioning in glowing terms until the BBC commission a full series of adventures about witchy Una Stubbs living in the shadow of Jodrell Bank.) The Sarah Jane Adventures is clever and smart of course – but it’s mostly sf. There’s not much spookiness in it, which is a shame. (Unlike ‘K9 and Company’ – its ancient forebear. That was v spooky and not a little influenced by ‘Children of the Stones’.)

So – which current kids’ novels strike these chords? Glimmers of the ancient world peeking through the civilised surface? Surreal adventures for well-informed kids?  I’d nominate – straight away – the short stories in those early 90s Scholastic Christmas anthologies I keep going on about.

I got an email from the delightfully-named Crumblecat Tiger:

“Hi was just wondering if you would be doing a book signing at goth weekend in April this year we enjoyed it so much last time. Thanks”

Easy answer to this! Yes, I’m going to be at the Whitby Bookshop  on the evening of Saturday April 24th. This is the (I think) third year in a row the shop has thrown a Brenda and Effie do on the Saturday night of Goth weekend. It’s always great to see people turning up in costume – and buying heaps of books, of course.  I’ll be reading and signing, and it’ll be lovely to see lots of you there. There’ll be fancy new copies of ‘Hell’s Belles’ in paperback to buy. I just got my copies the other day and it looks great. I love getting the paperbacks – with the excerpt from the next book in the series at the back. I always wanted to have books with an excerpt at the back!

I got another message from Whitby this week, from the lady who runs Becketts – my favourite cafe in that town. She’d noticed that I’d mentioned the cafe on here and was promising to have my favourite of their cakes all ready for when we come to town for my reading. My favourite is easy: apple and wensleydale cheese – something I’d never had till I first went to Becketts. Also, their Goth-weekend-themed ice cream floats – Goth Froths are magnificent and bright purple.

Another nice  thing in the post yesterday was from Kate Quinn, author of ‘Mistress of Rome.’ Here’s what she said:

“Thank you for your wonderful review of Mistress of Rome.  Any praise for my first novel is thrilling (this is my first trip on the rollercoaster known as publication) but a review as enthusiastic, intelligent, and thoughtful as yours is always a special pleasure.  Thank you again, and I’m glad you enjoyed the adventures of Thea, Arius, Lepida, et al.

Kate Quinn”

I like the idea of having authors write back to reviews. In no other place do writers get to do that. I think whether the reviews good or bad, it’s nice to have a place you can reply to. (Wasn’t there a story about Jeanette Winterson in the 90s doorstopping reviewers who gave her a hard time?) Anyway, I was chuffed that Kate wrote and I asked her what’s next from her:

“Hopefully there will be a prequel about some minor characters who appeared in Mistress of Rome (like Domitian’s Empress, and one or two others who just had one-line references here and there) and the sequel will be about Vix and Sabina in the reign of Emperor Trajan.”

Which is brilliant news. You can kind of tell from the ending of the first book that the saga will grow organically both into the past and the relative future, but it’s good to get it confirmed, straight from the author’s mouth.

So: historical fiction. What else out there at the moment is written as well and as excitingly as ‘Mistress of Rome’? Who else has the same verve and zappy, contemporary-feeling prose, while steeping their book in authentic period detail? I think I also like Kate Quinn’s focus on the female characters – and the fact that she chucks a few homo’s in there, too. Always a good move. So – any recommendations? I get the feeling there’s a whole genre of gutsy and splendid historical novels I’m not even aware of. I suspect Stella Duffy’s forthcoming ‘Theodora’ might be a bit like that. Its tagline, ‘Actress, Empress, Whore’ promises great things for June.

Right now I’m back in spooky-contemporary fiction – getting my teeth into ‘The Leaping’ – Tom Fletcher’s first novel, from Quercus. Set in Manchester, which always gives an extra shivery frisson – especially reading it on the train going home after work yesterday.  I’m also in the middle of the novelisation of ‘Children of the Stones’, the 1977 classic TV serial, by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray. One of my students has leant it to me. My workshops for the MA in Writing for Children are about to come to an end, which is a shame. What am I going to do on Tuesday nights? There’s a kind of black market circulation of out-of-print recommendations going on: every week someone gets to take home ‘Children of the Stones’ – or other things I’ve been evangelical about: ‘Steps Out of Time’ or ‘Lizzie Dripping.’  Anyone remember her, and her scary friend in the graveyard?

This is a quote from one of my favourite reviews I’ve read this week. It was over at The Book Smugglers, and they were reviewing seminal Steampunk novel, The  Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Imagine getting this in a review of a book of yours.  Ouch!:

“…even though, intellectually I can certainly appreciate the genius of the idea and the premise, as well as the mind-blowing effort of bringing together that many characters and events together in an interesting and certainly fascinating manner, I will just be honest and admit that I was bored out of my mind for most part of novel and I had zero emotional connection with any of the characters.”

I must say, that’s my problem with some science fiction, too. But also with some fantasy and crime and thrillers. I think the harder-core you go in any genre, the more abstruse and clever it all gets and the less ‘open’ it is to more casual readers, who perhaps read lots of genres and not just one.

The Book Smugglers did make me chuckle with that one, though. During their Steampunk week they had some fantastic Steampunk-inspired artwork on show. Beautiful stuff.

I’ve been thinking about lucid prose: about writing that lets you in. I’ve been enjoying books with zippy, intelligent, uncongested prose – like George Mann’s books, or John Harding’s ‘Florence and Giles.’ These are all set in the nineteenth century but they don’t feel the need to clog everything up with badly-pastiched Victorian writing. They give a flavour of that kind of writing – just a hint of it – but keep it modern; keep it nipping along nicely. Similarly with Kate Quinn’s Roman book: the prose feels very fresh, without any of that clunky thee and thouing and forsoothing of the worst kind of historical fiction.

I’m looking forward to Angry Robot reprinting K.W Jeter’s Steampunk novels. I’ve never gotten my hands on them before, and they look just the ticket.

Some novels you know you’re going to have to work hard at to get into and stay with. Others you know – you just know – straight away that you’re going to adore them all the way through. It’s like being dragged bodily into a world and a time and a whole set of characters that you’d fight to the death for. This is what it’s been like for me and ‘Mistress of Rome’.

It’s the characters who do it for me. Everyone in this large cast of characters was absolutely fascinating. Everyone is involved in intrigue and everyone has their own backstory that we gradually unpick and put  back together. This is a wild and desperate time in which people reinvent themselves, and struggle daily to keep themselves alive. A merciless, complicated era. As readers we are made privy to all the secret shenanigans in Rome towards the tail-end of mad Domitian’s reign as Emperor. Everyone is interesting, even compelling – I can’ t think of anyone in this novel who isn’t done justice to; who isn’t given their comeuppance or their just reward by the ending.

Mostly, however, we are focussed on the lovers at the heart of this great big thick novel: Thea, the Jewish slave girl, used and abused and tossed from pillar to post. Arius the prisoner who becomes a Gladiator despite himself and becomes Rome’s most famous entertainer – dispatching hordes of combatants in every Colosseum fight and watching them being raked away through the Death Gate and fed to the lions. By the end of the book we know these two characters so well – brutalised, perhaps, but not broken by the outrageous horrors they have to face.

It’s one of those novels in which the heroes come into contact with dangers from every level of society – they see the underworlds, the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, and they get involved with the duplicious upper echelons of this dangerous society. They have a secret child who must be protected. They are separated by miles and years and circumstance… and despite everything are drawn together and wreched apart again and again by fate. Arius is almost obliterated by his sadistic Emperor in the Games and so is Thea who, as she reinvents herself as the famous singer Athena, attracts Caesar’s attention and is invited to take on the lethal role of his mistress.

All of this could be really cheesy and naff, of course. These are the makings of schlocky blockbuster melodrama, but I think this novel is really well written. It gets under their skin and it gets under ours. It does that thing that great popular fiction can do: makes us love the heroes, but forces us to understand and love the villains as well. Domitian is utterly, scarily believable, as is the complicity of the terrified souls around him. The wicked, self-serving ferret-faced society beauty, Lepida, is Thea’s first owner and sworn enemy. She creates the worst situations that spring up for our heroes. She is behind all the worst shocks and surprises and yet – even when she’s beating up her own daughter or blackmailing her noble and just husband – we sneakingly enjoy every moment of it all.

This is the Rome – a few years on – that was so thrillingly nasty in ‘I, Claudius.’ And it’s making no bones about setting out to be gloriously entertaining. It’s sexy and violent and shocking throughout. There are more twists and turns here than there are in those stone passages where the doomed sit waiting underneath the Colosseum.

The Gladiator scenes are pretty bloody. Some of the details made me feel sick, especially near the start. I don’t think any of it is gratuitous. The facts and figures are staggering, and it’s amazing to think of these characters we love – even the compassionate ones – idly sitting and watching, almost bored, the endless massacres that went on. (When we went to the Colosseum in 2003 I was horribly thrilled by the experience. I  hadn’t realised till that moment how impressively scary the experience would be. When you stand right in the middle, at floor level, your whole horizon is filled up with those walls – with the great big roundness of it. You can see there’s no escape for you, ever: the Colosseum has become your only world. You don’t really appreciate one speck of how that must have been until you’re standing there, on those wooden boards they’ve laid over the old pens and cells. It’s a place to make you shiver – even now, and even on the most blazingly hot Roman days.)

I don’t want to give away spoilers. Suffice to say, this is a great, sprawling epic, very much rooted in the human dramas. The politics and cultural stuff is commuted beautifully through the adventures of these people we come to care about deeply.

And – tootling about on Google – I’ve discovered it’s the first in a trilogy. Wonderful. When’s the next one out?