'Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror' by Chris Priestley

I was captivated by the scraggly illustrations of 'Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror' in the library, produced by David Roberts, that were somewhere between Ronald Searle, Edward Gorey and Quentin Blake. The book itself is a series of short stories with a framing narrative, each story told by the eccentric Uncle Montague to his (insert indeterminate number of greats) nephew Edward in his creepy house in the woods. Every story is punctuated by Edward's realisation that an object from the story, often irredeemably lost within the story itself, is here, on the wall as a trophy (or a warning...)

There are (un)healthy doses of Edgar Allan Poe in 'Uncle Montague...', as well as a clear influence by the Victorian children's exemplar books which meted terrible and extraordinary punishments to any children who disobeyed their elders. Every character in the stories has an identifiable transgression (except maybe the final short story, which is also the creepiest) and each pays in an appropriate way. Priestley admirably weaves subtle horror with a faux-Victorian setting to build up an atmosphere that fully lends itself to the twist in the tale so common in ghost stories of the time.

Priestley's prose isn't action-packed or thrumming with anticipation, and sometimes I felt the denouement fell a little flat as a result, but the style Priestley pastiches effectively is instead full of creeping terror and things half-seen out of the corner of your eye. This is not the place for oh-it-was-only-a-cat scares (unless they are of the Silent Hill double whammy variety!) The stories grow more grotesque and scarier as they go, each introducing more explicit horrors, until we reach the climax of the book: the framing narrative itself. I thought Priestley overdid the ghostly phenomena at Uncle Montague's house slightly, but perhaps it is just that, as the stories slowly build pace, the framing narrative must build faster, since it only has the bits between the tales to work in. Trust me, hang in there. It's totally worth it.

This isn't the sort of book to become an instant worldwide classic like His Dark Materials or Harry Potter, but it's really worth checking out. It's the sort of odd little book you stumble upon and that piques your interest on its own terms. I find that's a common thing with short story anthologies, especially, but I hope that in the future children (and maybe adults like me too!) will dig this out of the rows of Twi-likes and find joy in a horror style that never truly goes out of fashion.

Useful things

So I'm trying to formulate lists using the handy list features of blogger of useful writing resources online and also generally interesting writing blogs or websites that haven't been as personally useful to me. The reason for the divide is that many blogs are, for instance, primarily about publishing or getting an agent, which is currently not relevant to me, but they're still really good, enjoyable blogs with valuable advice. Also, there are blogs which are writers' own blogs about the process of writing which are not so much tools for others to use but merely observations on their own work, which again are fascinating but not necessarily useful.

I'll try and keep them updated, since it helps me to make a note somewhere central about new sources of inspiration and advice (I'm rubbish at remembering web addresses). Writing books are something I'll also try and assess somewhere (since it's very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff at a quick glance-through), but that's a different form and therefore won't be included in the lists. Note that the kind of advice I personally like is very specific (very much not of the 'write a scene where your character is sitting in a park' or 'write about your last holiday' because they feel like primary school again to me) and I am in no way deriding others' working methods. I find concrete advice about plot and characterisation to be useful, personally, as well as more inspirational ideas about the creation of story and the importance of narrative, so that's what I'll be focusing on.

'The Carbon Diaries 2015' by Saci Lloyd

I've literally only just finished this book but I've barely been able to put it down. Therefore this will be a slight rave review, be ye warned ;)

So 'The Carbon Diaries 2015' is a fictional diary by a teenage girl called Laura Brown in 2015. A big storm hits Britain in 2010, costing thousands of lives, and to combat global warming, the British government (Saci Lloyd is careful not to predict the outcome of the 2010 General Election, since this was written in 2008, so she just refers to 'the prime minister') makes the UK a guinea pig for a new carbon rationing system which means that life must change drastically for Brits. Add to this increasingly extreme weather conditions that are linked to the predicted results of global warming. But Laura doesn't care about that stuff: OK, it makes her life more difficult, but all she wants is a normal life where she can get decent results at college, play with her punk band and go out with the boy next door.

I don't respond well to preachy books, but the nice thing about 'The Carbon Diaries 2015' is any preaching it does is either very subtle or very obvious and put into the mouths of characters presented as self-righteous. But still, it gets the message across with terrifying alacrity. Where before I enjoyed apocalypse and disaster movies out of a kind of combination of schadenfreude, vicarious thrill and general amusement, now I don't want what happens in this book to happen to anyone, ever. Laura never turns round and says "Oh, God damn you, older generation! Why did you do this to us? Why?!!!" She grumbles that they were selfish, but she just deals with the way the world is because that's the only way to survive. The people she gets angry at are the people who continue to be selfish and make the world worse. Gradually, the trappings of civilisation fall away and people either sink or swim, but it's written in such a personal way that Lloyd never breaks the illusion that this is a real diary, about real people.

The style is natural and fun, though occasionally it strays into 'totally rad' territory with jargon that'll be dated pretty soon, and Laura presents the world she lives in with wit and wry observation. For instance, her friend gets stuck in John Lewis due to snow storms and power cuts. Laura's response? "Serves her right for being middle class." There are so many little moments where Laura expresses something I've thought but never said, and Lloyd really does tap into the zeitgeist of modern Britain, even if things do get a little unbelievable at times (Laura's parents, a couple of aging hippies, are taken a little too far). Not only that, but when it's time for pathos, Lloyd shows she can handle that admirably too. I'm not sure she succeeded in her aim of showing how a global crisis can pull people together (attempts to do so are treated with cynical humour) but she certainly shows how it strips away the pretences we put up to make our lives more interesting.

All I can say is, this book is amazing, and it really makes you want to both change the world and stock up the cupboard with tins and blankets. The thing is, 'The Carbon Diaries 2015' doesn't preach that whole 'changing the world one person at a time' shtick - what it presents is the necessity of a change in culture and mindset which, Lloyd suggests, is something that's not going to happen till it's almost too late.

'The Poison Garden' by Sarah Singleton

I find this cartoon of a rhino on Kristin Cashore's wonderful blog This Is My Secret almost unbearable to look at or think about. It makes me really sad for the rhino and frustrated that I can't help it, despite the beauty and humour of the cartoon. So yeah, I'll cry about a cartoon rhino desperately trying to become a unicorn :( And that is why I cope with the world through dreams and pretend dragon-slaying.



The other picture makes me laugh though :)


'The Poison Garden' by Sarah Singleton is fabulous. And I don't just mean that in the sense of 'good', I mean that it's story-licious. It's like stepping through worlds I never want to leave. Dammit, I want a magical garden where I can grow plants that make perfumes and live forever in the real world, so that beautiful red rose won't wilt and those daisies will stay fresh. 'The Poison Garden' is a bit untidy in places but the plot is enjoyable enough to keep me reading despite the slightly odd pacing. Plus I love any books which revolve around the intricacies of old-fashioned pharmacology or magic. I feel this is comparable in style to 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell' by Susannah Clarke, though less dark and adult in tone.


'The Poison Garden' is about a young boy called Thomas whose grandmother dies, leaving him a mysterious box that lets him into a magical garden. He discovers that she was part of a group called the Guild of Medical Alchemists who all have their own pocket-dimension gardens and that one of them poisoned his grandmother, as well as being told he is to inherit the power to remake his own garden as he wishes.

I may just have been being dense, but it took me quite a while before I realised that 'The Poison Garden' was set in the nineteenth century, but it has such a lovely nostalgic feel that it didn't seem out of place when I did realise. A label at the beginning wouldn't go amiss, however. The subject matter probably struck an extra chord with me because I have fond memories of playing in my grandmother's garden, which she spent a lot of time caring for before she had to move into a bungalow due to her health. Singleton gives you mental gardens to play in and you feel the joy in discovering them that (I hope) she felt in creating them. She manages to bring across so much individuality in each garden: I suspect everyone would choose a different one as a favourite. My mum would love Albion, as it's near the sea, whereas I would enjoy Nineveh a lot. That's actually one of the pities about this book - Singleton is more concerned with the story than the setting, which is admirable, but we barely get to explore the gardens at all. I would love to have seen more of them, especially the ones near the end, and have a few choice details explained (like who the lady in Nineveh was - I always assumed Hegel was gay from the way he talked about Karsch). Thomas is quite likeable but his female counterpart, Maude, is darned creepy, as he acknowledges in his narrative. It's weird therefore, that she ends up being presented as suddenly less creepy and more well-adjusted than expected. There doesn't seem to be a character arc there, more a character shift to provide him with an ally of his own age. But the adults in the Guild of Medical Alchemists are nicely-drawn characters and the idea that one of them is a killer adds a nice level of suspicion about their motives. Unfortunately the killer is a bit of a late addition to the story and the traitor is a pretty obvious choice, which means we don't end up having to question our assumptions about any of the Guild members. It also feels a bit of a cop-out when an extra party is added halfway through a story and is very obviously the killer, ruining the carefully-wrought tension and suspicion that had been built up.


Essentially, this book could have done with being two books in which Singleton could fully flesh out the characters and magical gardens. It would also allow her to dwell more on the main character's years in the pharmacy of Dr Constantine, which I found highly interesting, as well as developing Dr Constantine's character and maybe spending more time getting to know Mrs Lawrence and Miss Hudson, who feel a bit underdeveloped. Still, it's highly enjoyable, well-written and terribly imaginative, reminiscent of classic Diana Wynne-Jones. Recommended, if you like magical tales of weird and wonderful dreamscapes.

A brief word on politics before we continue with the reviews

It amuses me to see Labour get their own back on the Conservatives' reactionary sniping over the past couple of years. I dislike it when the opposition, whoever they are, sit there and pass judgement on the current government's decisions, since I'm pretty sure they'd do a similar or worse thing in the same position, but damn is it good to hear Labour gleefully pointing out the flaws in the Coalition Government's budget choices. And I'm not even a Labour supporter, but I feel the Lib Dems, now they've been given a chance to make a difference, have flailed and compromised until they have lost sight of their goals completely, overwhelmed by the Conservatives. It's sad to be proven right about both the party I support and the party I mistrust.

On to less inflammatory things. 'Dark Harvest' by Norman Partridge is a teen horror book with aspirations to the style of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. In fact, its lyrical phrasing and rolling, elegant style is highly reminiscent of 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' by Bradbury. I found this novel in my local library, displayed face-out by some helpful librarian soul in the teen section. I'll admit, I'm dreadful for judging books by their covers, and this one is a corker. However, the novel itself entirely justifies it. 'Dark Harvest' tells the story of a little unnamed midwestern town with a sinister ritual: every year, an entity called the October Boy, a living pumpkin man, has sweets stuffed inside it and is given a knife. Its aim is to get to the church by midnight and the aim of every boy in town is to knock the stuffing out of the October Boy and feast on the sweets within, winning fame, money and a chance to get out of this sinkhole of a town.

The characters are a little generic and I must say I find it difficult to remember their names (hero is a teenage boy blah blah alcoholic father blah blah big dreams, small town) but they do fine for a story that is well-constructed and atmospheric, full of rustling cornfields and dark tarmac roads. The story is much less slow than 'Something Wicked...' (which I still haven't got through) but it defied my expectations. This is no slaughter-a-minute teen slasher movie in book form (unlike the film of the same name, which is unconnected as far as I can tell) but a dark meditation on small-town life (as seen in 'American Gothic', 'Something Wicked...', 'Stepford Wives' and most of Stephen King's canon) with really interesting overtones of ancient ritual. I can't talk about my interpretation because it would be a massive spoiler but there's more going on than meets the eye in this simple set-up.

Overall, it's not unlike a lot of other things in this vein, but 'Dark Harvest' is a highly enjoyable read and well-worth having a look at.

'Def by Temptation'

Yesterday we made an Aztec (or Mayan, I'm rubbish at remembering which one's which!) Sacrifical Temple Cake. With gummy bears as the Aztecs and jelly babies as the helpless conquistadors being sacrificed. It was a delicious day :)


It was a follow up to our earlier project, the Gingerbread Fortress of Doom, but in this instance we actually made almost all the parts of the structure rather than using a gingerbread house kit.

So, while we were doing this, we had to have some rubbish film going on in the background because watching 'The Princess and the Frog' meant we didn't get the baking started till around 3:30 (it's a good film, though). One of our number of creative cooks has a wonderful ability to collect really random bad horror films, so we put on the dreadful 'Def [sic] by Temptation'. It has Samuel L. Jackson in, somehow.


I don't really feel I can review it properly as we didn't get through it, but 'Def by Temptation' (1990, Troma Films) concerns a succubus/vampire preying on lecherous gentlemen. My friend originally bought this (very cheaply) because it a) looked awful and b) had Samuel L. Jackson in. Well, we reckon Mr Jackson owed someone involved with this film some money, because he is in it for five minutes, during which time he shouts a blood and hellfire sermon, is threatened by the succubus and then dies in a car crash. It's...terrible. Like, really terrible. It's directed, written and produced by James Bond III, the main characters (James Bond, played by James Bond III) and Kadeem Hardison have massive chunks of completely irrelevant dialogue that presumably Mr Bond thinks is deep (including a section about how amazing New York is because "y'know, everyone's a character", kill me now).

The scenes where the succubus kills people are high on the softcore and disappointingly low on the gore. Cynthia Bond is very game as the 'temptress', but the reason we gave up on this film was that, despite having more murders per hour than a lot of modern films, it was unbearably boring. So we can't really put forward a reasoned judgement, and judging by the Wikipedia article on 'Def by Temptation', the pace presumably picks up after the bit we watched, in order to fit all the action described (which would have made it rather more exciting). The article reads like James Bond III himself may have written it, as I'm pretty sure the film itself wasn't that coherent. Essentially: disappointing, even as a bad film, due to the director/writer/producer's pretensions to something more than a trashy mess. Characters were introduced and murdered before we got to know them, and I honestly couldn't care less what happened to the ones who stay alive more than five minutes. The plot is surprisingly coherent, but I suspect that's only because there isn't much of it. Overall, avoid. Like 'Blue Blood', it has much promise as a trashy treat, but never comes close to living up to it. And unlike 'Blue Blood', 'Def by Temptation' doesn't even have Derek Jacobi wrapped in a tennis net and sacrificed by Satanists (note that the Wikipedia article on 'Blue Blood' refers to an entirely different, and probably better film).

Thoughts on editing

You know, it might seem like a trivial point, but people who write books on writing seem to regard editing as some magical process that just happens. After all, once you've written a whole novel, how hard can it be to draft it?

Well, it turns out it can be pretty hard. Because you have to reread your work, which can be unpleasant at the best of times. Of course you'll come across sections where you think "Oh, the cleverness of me!", but for the most part, it will be cringeworthy. Because, apparently, as all the books tell me, the first draft of every novel ever written was bad. I don't believe them. There's no way it could be as bad as mine.

At some point I need to post up a list of useful resources on writing, for myself as much as anyone else (I always forget what that website was called, or whether that book was any good). One that would be up there is the NaNoWriMo website, specifically for its pep talks. They are almost exclusively on writing the novel rather than editing it, but Katharine Paterson's one mentions editing, comparing it to smoothing and carving mined granite (from a speech prepared for schoolkids in a town with a granite-mining industry, so it was a metaphor they understood). At the time I thought it was a fairly obvious way of expressing the idea, but after spending yesterday evening editing, I think I understand it a lot better. Paterson actually provides a useful paradigm for considering the difficulties of editing.

See, I think what defeats me in editing (and I do avoid it where possible, where it used to be my favourite part of the process) is that nobody mentions that once you've got your words down on paper, that's just the first part of the slog. The writing itself is horribly difficult at times, but taking part in something like NaNoWriMo can really help. That's just false economy, though: when you've done the mad rush of NaNo, you've wept and laughed and banged your head on the desk, and you've been lucky or detemined enough to make it to 50,000 words, you're ready to dive right into editing. The site (and many participants) advise against doing that, as leaving it to stew for a couple of months is always good. However, if you're anything like me, when you've left it for a couple of months and are ready and raring to edit, you fish the manuscript out from its drawer, open it up, red pen at the ready and...promptly become disheartened. Because all that time you saved in NaNo by shutting off your inner editor and letting the words flow as they would, all those hours just pressing on, not caring if what you wrote was rubbish, the race to get finished - all that means that editing takes twice as long, because you have to do a draft just to make it readable first.

I think NaNo is a great thing and I certainly wouldn't have one of my now favourite stories around if I hadn't taken part, but trying to edit it is like chipping slowly away at an ugly, rough bit of granite. You have to trust that there's a shape in there to be found, and chip away at the parts until you find it. It's horrible, tough work, and you have to cut off promising bits of stone and sometimes you have to just close your eyes and make a drastic change, risking ruining it completely on the offchance you'll make it better. Then comes the smoothing and the prettifying, but if you've not been sketching out the shape as you go along, you'll have a lot more work to do come the editing phase. Luckily for us writers as opposed to stone cutters, we have a nice handy 'undo' button if everything goes wrong, like the equivalent of being able to rewind time and stick a bit of stone back on. But, if you keep on chipping away, even if there doesn't seem to be a beautiful statue inside this rough bit of stone, you eventually start to see the curves, and maybe they'll build up to something beautiful. I suppose we just all have to trust to our skill that we can effectively make art from a block of stone.