Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

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In this episode we discussed 'The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray' by Chris Wooding.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, find her work at makiyamazaki.com

Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and his band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk

Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

Transcript

Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about spooky, creepy and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, and with my co-host Adam Whybray today I’ll be talking about ‘The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray’ by Chris Wooding. Enjoy!

(intro music plays)

Ren: Hi Adam!

Adam: Hello.

Ren: This does feel quite early to be doing a recording, but I’m sure we’ll manage.*

Adam: Well don’t worry, because I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I’m ready!

Ren: Great. So The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was my suggestion because it’s a book that I read when I was a kid, and has stuck in my memory as one of the scariest books I’ve ever read.

Adam: I’m impressed you read it as a kid! There is no way I would have got through this as a kid. You know, if I’d tried reading this before, even fourteen would have been a push, but before sixteen I would not have got through it, to be honest.

Ren: Yeah, it came out in 2001, so I think I must have been twelve or thirteen when I was reading it. And it’s a scary, scary book.

Adam: It’s pretty nasty! It goes there.

Ren: Yeah, it does! So I didn’t remember very much about it from having read it back then —

Adam: What did you remember?

Ren: I remembered Stitch-Face, who is the serial killer character, I didn’t remember that he’s called Stitch-Face, I just remembered there was a horrifying serial killer. And I remember specifically part of the rhyme — So one of the wych-kin, which are the monsters in the book, is called Rawhead, and he follows behind you at night and you hear an extra footstep as you walk, and if you turn around three times he appears and kills you. And there’s a rhyme that says:

‘Rawhead close behind you treads, three looks back and you’ll be dead. But close your eyes and count to ten, and Rawhead will be gone again’. And I remembered the second half of that rhyme and I often thought about it when I was walking at night by myself —

Adam: And presumably walking through London, I mean it’s very much a book set in London, so I did think that maybe for you growing up in London it would be quite a different experience reading it, than for me who has only ever gone as a tourist to London, or when i’ve stayed with you.

Ren: Yeah, it definitely had a few locations I recognised and felt a connection with it in that way. So, to give some context: it’s set in a kind of alternate timeline Victorian London, in which twenty years before the start of the story Britain was badly bombed by the Prussians. After this bombing, which is caused ‘The Vernichtung’, which means destruction in German, nightmare creatures called ‘wych-kin’ started to appear in the cities, but particularly in London.

Adam: And they’re much worse than otherkin.

Ren: Yes, they are. And they overrun the Old Quarter of the city by night. And one of our main characters, Thaniel, is a wych hunter and he’s one of the few people who have any means of dealing with the wych-kin, and our title character Alaizabel is a girl he finds in great distress when he’s out hunting, and she’s lost all memory of who she is. There’s quite a lot of plot to this book, and I’ll try to explain as we go along.

Adam: Yeah, I did think as to how nimbly we’re going to step around spoilers.

Ren: I think we can’t?

Adam: I mean, that’s always going to be an issue when you start with an amnesia plot line, basically. Which I think is actually handled quite well in this book. I’m always a bit sniffy about amnesia as a kind of convenient plot device, particularly as someone who’s played quite a lot of interactive fiction, as it’s used a lot in old ones as a useful means of withholding information. But I think you’re aligned with Alaizabel’s perspective enough that it kind of works, I think. It doesn’t feel wholly abstracted and a plot device, it feeds into her character in a way that’s quite convincing. So I didn’t mind it too much.

Ren: I think there’s definitely quite a few tropes used in this book, but they’re used pretty well and it kind of avoids some of the more lurid or sensational aspects, in a way. I’m thinking about the asylum….

Adam: In a way. I think it’s similar to Neil Gaiman’s stuff, it reminds me of Neverwhere quite a lot. Obviously, partly the creeping underneath London, and the idea of the kind of secret society of undesirables, living in bondage in name only. It’s got a somewhat romanticised image of what it means to be homeless, in a way that Neverwhere also does.

Ren: Yeah, are you talking about the society of the beggars?

Adam: Yes. Who have a lot of camaraderie, they’re pictured having a lot of good times, feasting and drinking and supposedly pretty wealthy, even though this is Victorian London, so clearly this is a major divergence from real Victorian London.

Ren: Haha yeah, I see what you mean. It reminded me of Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, where they have the fools guild and the thieves guild and so on, but it’s done for more dramatic effect in this book.

Adam: Yeah, it’s slightly less satirical perhaps than in the Discworld books. I mean, talking about the plotting, the thing it made me think most of was a very good D&D campaign. There were a lot of times when it felt like they were doing dice throws, right?

Ren: Yeah, I can see that! ’And then these hell dogs come at you!’

Adam: ‘Do a perception check!’. There’d be a lot of perception checks in this. Things lurking out of the dark. And generally it’s very mission based, the plotting, especially once our heroes work out what they need to do, it’s very much overcome these obstacles which get increasingly nasty to get to the final battle. Not that this is necessarily a problem, I mean it can make plotting quite dynamic, it’s certainly propulsive and it keeps you turning the pages. And interestingly there’s almost some meta commentary on it, there’s a character called the Devil Boy?*

Ren: Yes.

Adam: And again, it’s odd because I feel that the book probably did have a lot of issues with representation, but it didn’t trouble me in the way that say, Boxtrolls did last week.

Ren: Yeah, I feel like it’s quite humane. Like, I feel despite some of the issues, it’s trying to acknowledge people’s humanity and so on.

Adam: Yeah, I think so, and I like the fact that even when you get these incidental characters who are murdered off quite quickly, Wooding’s very good at giving telling details, or giving us a quick but convincing sketch of this character. All the characters do seem recognisably human basically, even if they’re only there really for plot reasons.

Ren: Yeah, I did want to talk about that actually. Okay, to try and explain, there’s two big threats. One of them is the wych-kin, who we will talk more about, and they’re the supernatural horror who do all kinds of ‘orrible things, and then there’s the serial-killer Stitch-Face who is a Jack the Ripper character.

Adam: Clearly modelled on Jack the Ripper.

Ren: So there’s kind of supernatural horrors, and there’s horrors that are more based in the real world, and we get to know some of the more incidental victims before they are horribly murdered in one way or another, and I think these characters bring the real-world based horror to life. Like Stitch-Face’s first victim in the book is a woman called Mary Woolbury who was sold to a workhouse as a child, and became a street sex worker, and we just hear details of her life and it kind of brings together the supernatural horror of the wych-kin, and also the real horrors of poverty, disease, slavery, war corruption, all these things that are in the background of the book.

Adam: Yeah, I think that obviously you feel on side with the victims, but more than that I don’t really feel that you’re vicariously enjoying the mythic Jack the Ripper. I mean, I’m very on-off with Alan Moore, I guess, as a lot of people on the left tend to be. There are lots of things I like about Alan Moore, and then lots of things that make them roll their eyes, and in some ways I was really impressed with From Hell, and I thought it was a much richer work than Watchman, for instance. I guess, coming from academia I liked all the cod-academia in it, but for those of you who don’t know From Hell, in graphic novel form it is quite different really to the film, and it’s much more about the Jack the Ripper murders as psycho-geography essentially. So - have you read it?

Ren: I haven’t, no.

Adam: It’s much more about sort of myths around London and how Jack the Ripper changed the psychological landscape of London, basically. So it’s a very clever work, but there are times in it where it feels like he’s taking a bit too much enjoyment in Jack the Ripper’s killings, in this slightly gleeful seedy way that made me feel very uncomfortable. And this is obviously not uncommon in how Jack the Ripper is portrayed in media or in museums, I know there was a fair bit of controversy a couple of years ago because there was this Jack the Ripper museum set up that just seemed to be revelling in his crimes with little regard for the fact that he, you know, horribly murdered several real woman.

Ren: Yes. I was sort of weighing this up as I was thinking about this book, of whether Stitch-Face becomes a kind of anti-hero in a way, and I think it avoids doing that. So, to explain, there’s Stitch-Face and then there’s the Fraternity, so Stitch-Face is a Jack the Ripper like serial killer who murders women and mutilates their bodies, but there’s another set of murders going on that imitate Stitch-Face’s killings, but these are eventually revealed to be the work of the Fraternity, who are a cultist organisation who tried to kill Alaizabel. This is why she has no memory.

Adam: And they’re basically like the Rothschild group, like the possibly real, it’s hard to say, conspiratorial elite group that you get in conspiracy theories.

Ren: Okay, I’m not familiar.

Adam: I’ve probably read more conspiracy theories than you.

Ren: But yeah, the Fraternity are like a group of the elite and powerful and also strategically useful people who control the city. And their head is, um… I’ve forgotten his name.

Adam: Spoiler warning!

Ren: Spoiler warning for all of this. A man called Pyke, who’s the director of the asylum. And he has this grand plan to bring about the Glau Meska, which is the new gods who will destroy the world but hopefully save this band of cultists. And the murders that are imitating Stitch-Face’s murders are forming a shape, their locations are forming a shape of the Chackh’Morg.

Adam: (full Klingon pronunciation) Chackh’Morg!

Ren: (even more exaggeratedly phlegmy pronounciation) Chackh’Morg! Which is the tentacled cultist symbol that is also tattooed on Alaizabel.

Adam: So that’s obviously where we get the Lovecraft stuff.

Ren: So the Chackh’Morg is described as a ‘stylized image of a many-tentacled thing, seen in three-quarter profile, etched in simple blue-black ink.’ And the copy of the book that I had as a kid had that on the front, but my current one doesn’t.

Adam: No, I’ve just got the one with the pentagram on the front, which isn’t nearly as exciting.

Ren: My one’s quite a good cover, it’s got Alaizabel in a kind of anime-type style, and she looks kind of haunted or possessed as is appropriate.

Adam: Ah, because I’ve heard quite a lot of talk about failed film adaptations of Alaizabel Cray, and actually I think it would work much better as an anime. Yeah, I think the rhythms of it and the character types and stuff would fit anime better than live action. It’s not dissimilar to something like Bleach in some ways.

Ren: Okay. Sorry, I keep not getting your references!

Adam: Oh no! Well, Bleach is this mammoth long series about demon hunters basically. I haven’t watched all of it, it used to show on the freeview anime channel and it seemed to be one of the only anime they had license for and they’d play it through the whole day. It’s similar to Alaizabel Cray in that all the demons are really ‘orrible and horribly grotesque and such, and it has a similar structure: it tends to be discussing what the plan’s going to be, and then fighting a demon, and then a bit of a recovery, and a bit of discussion about what they’re going to do next, and then fighting another demon! Sorry, I’ve got a bit off track.

Ren: It’s alright! I think I was talking about Stitch-Face.

Adam: And the Fraternity.

Ren: So, the Fraternity are the people who are on top in society and have the power and money to protect themselves from the supernatural threats, and there’s kind of an extra horror that the head of the Fraternity is the director of the asylum, so him and his agenda gets to decide who is sane. I don’t know if there’s the temptation to see Stitch-Face as the anti-hero in opposition to the Fraternity, but actually I think they’re shown to just be two sides of the same thing.

Adam: I had similar thoughts. I mean, I guess in D&D terms the Fraternity are effectively lawful evil, and Stitch-Face is chaotic evil. So neither is really more evil than the other, although I suspect Wooding’s allegiances, if pushed, would be towards chaotic evil.

Ren: Yeah. And Stitch-Face does win. I mean, he survives, and at the every end of the book in the epilogue, the very last line we see that Stitch-Face is off to horribly murder Pyke, who is the head of the Fraternity. So he doesn’t get any comeuppance.

Adam: I can’t remember if I’ve ever made you watch Con-Air?

Ren: No…

Adam: Con-Air being a very sweaty testosterone-drenched action film with Nicholas Cage. John Malkovich plays the main villain in it who’s called ’Cyrus the Virus’ and claims that he has ‘killed more people than cancer’. Which is quite a claim.

So Steve Buscemi in the film plays a serial child-murderer, and abuser possibly, and he gets off completely scot-free at the end, and is basically portrayed as ‘Oh, that wacky child murderer!’ It’s really odd, the other evil characters are definitely evil and they deserve their comeuppance but for some reason Buscemi is just used for comic relief. I thought of it because the last shot is just him gambling, or playing cards, and it ends with him saying ‘I feel lucky!’ or something like that. Which is sort of enjoyably ghoulish, but obviously pretty troubling at the same time. I wouldn’t quite say the film has the tone of ‘Oh lovable Stitch-Face’ —

Ren: But he doesn’t get any comeuppance.

Adam: But I guess in real-life, or certainly in evil Victorian London…

Ren: So, if we maybe go back and talk a bit about the wych-kin themselves a bit more, because I think they’re one of the most memorable aspects of the book.

Adam: Agreed.

Ren: So, just a few of the ones that we encounter: The Cradlejack, a spindly-fingered child-eater whose scratch turns you into itself. The Draug, or drowned folk, whose presence is heralded by ice-cold temperatures and the smell of the sea, and the sound of wet flippers on the floorboard and so on, and they want to drag you under the sea with them —

Adam: Yeah, that one’s really like from ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’

Ren: (struggles to remember) Um…

Adam: Oh no! The Lovecraft story ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’

Ren: (remembers suddenly) No, I do know that! I do know that!

There’s the Wight, who lives in the shadows and whose touch causes instant necrosis of the body’s tissues, and shrivels you up.

Adam: Oh yeah, those descriptions were quite deeply unpleasant actually.

Ren: Oh yeah, absolutely! and there’s the deildegast, who places his stones on the corners of your house and when he places his last stone, your house collapses.

Adam: Oh yeah, that was really great! That was probably one of my favourite bits in the book, that was brilliant.

Ren: I loved the bit - because, basically, the Fraternity’s plan starts to work, and they start the process of conjuring these old gods, and then the darkness descends and there’s permanent shadow over London so all the wych-kin can come out during the day. And there’s this great sequence of all the wych-kin coming out and the various horrible things happening.

Adam: Yeah, shall we read a couple of them, because they are really good and it’s probably my favourite part of the book. So I’ll read the first one.

‘In her bed in Chelsea, the copywriter’s wife Claris Banbury woke with a shriek to see her husband rising from the sheets of his own bed, lifting silently into the air. As the white shroud fell free, she saw in terror that his eyes were closed, that he was lying perfectly straight in sleep. Still shrieking, she saw the thing lurking in the shadows of the corner of the room, visible only in the murk of sleep-fogged eyes. Naked, twisted, an old, old crone with her long straggly hair cloaking her bent body, she crouched on all fours with hooves for feet and a long tail twitching behind her. Claris’s heart had always been weak; it stopped altogether at the sight of the Night Mare taking her husband, and she sighed and lay back in her bed as if returning to slumber. She did not see her husband continue his smooth rise to the ceiling, dreaming of flying, until he was swallowed by the shadows up there. She was spared the slow, steady droplets of blood that began to splatter the beds, drip, drip, drip, painting the white sheets in shocked flowers of red.’

Ren: (Ren screams a bit) Yeah. I’ll read another one.

Jimley Potter, master pickpocket at the age of twelve, street-urchin in the employ of Pete the Knife. He slept, twitching, in his cot in an empty warehouse, along with six other boys his age who formed the rest of Pete’s gang. It wasn’t a bad life, stealing other people’s purses, keeping a bit and giving the rest to old Pete. Apart from the occupational hazard of being hung, it was really quite rewarding.

It was of the hangman’s noose that he dreamed now, a gallows standing alone on the Yorkshire Moors, the rope swinging steadily. He often dreamed of the noose, but he never remembered, just as he would not remember this one, which was remarkable because of a new element in it. There was a small child standing by the gallows, a little girl wearing a black funeral dress, and a black cloak with a hood set halfway back on her head. He could see she was entirely bald. Her eyes were downturned at first, but when they looked up at him he could see that her irises were red as blood, and her face as cold as the grave. He awoke as normal that morning, stretched, and got up to have breakfast. It was only later that day that the Crimson Fever began to make itself felt.’

(Ren screams a bit more)

Adam: And the crimson fever is described horribly, it creates these rivulets in the flesh —

Ren: I think that’s trench fever. Trench fever does that and is, yeah, pretty horrible.

Adam: It’s not a nice place to live, the London of ‘The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray’, to say the least. I’ll just read the last one:

‘Frannie Best, prostitute and mother, lived on the top floor of a two-storey house. It stood alone, a little island in the centre of a particularly tight muddle of back streets. The property was the result of a helping hand from an appreciate client, who was also a landlord and who lived on the bottom floor with his wife. He had made a fortune from unscrupulous dealings in the developing areas of London, fiddling property boundaries to make a profit. Downstairs, he was sleeping soundly.

Upstairs, Frannie did not know what to do. For twenty minutes now she had been watching the wych-kin circling her house, listening to the soft scrape of its feet, watching it lumber slowly and awkwardly along with the great, glowing round stone held in its big hands. Three times now it had stopped to put the stone down, each time at one of the corners of the house; three times it had walked away and come back with a new stone. It was a tall, mournful, dreadful thing, known in wychlore as a deildegast.

It took the shape of a narrow, lanky man in rags, his head bowed, his shoulders drawn as he carried his burden. Shuffling like a sleepwalker through the fog, it made a slow circuit of the house, and if Frannie had counted she would have noticed that it always made three circuits before dropping its stone.

Now, as it approached the fourth corner on its third trip around, Frannie panicked. She rushed into her two-year-old daughter’s room, swept her up, and ran. Down the stairs she went, her infant starting to squeal in her arms. Out of the door, her fear of the wych-kin overwhelmed by her fear of staying in that house when the final stone was placed.

The deildegast placed its last stone on the final corner, and vanished. A moment later, the house gave a groan and collapsed, burying the landlord and his wife, leaving only the stones, their glow dimming until they had faded to grey rock once more.’

Ren: Ah, it’s so good, it’s so good. This whole portion of the book is just like underlines and screaming in the margins. There was a bit that actually made me yelp out loud in fear —

Adam: Oh, what was that?

Ren: It’s in the same bit, it’s just one line:

‘Children who had squalled in the night that there was something under their beds were missing that morning, and only little dolls of them were left on their pillows’.

Adam: That’s like something from a particularly unpleasant Edward Gorey! I think the bits I found most scary, (or dreadful, I don’t know if scary is quite right, if I’d read this when I was young I’d have found it quite scary, but now it’s more just filled with dread and horror) was the the sequence with the wolf attack near the end in the tunnels, where the wolves get set alight.

Which is just a horrible image and is described very vividly in a way that made me feel a bit ill. And I’ve been in the bathroom most of the last two days, which in a way felt like an advantage, being quite unwell reading this book, because there is a lot of physical suffering, and Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill talks about how you can’t have true empathy for someone who is ill or physically unwell unless you’re undergoing that currently, and as soon as you’re not your mind forgets what that’s like.

So since I was feeling very wretched, it was actually a weird advantage, that was the silver lining of reading the book shivering in bed, I felt like I could have a bit more empathy for the horrible trials and tribulations of our characters. But the other sequence which was the only time I almost put the book down for a little bit, because I found it quite upsetting, was when Alaizabel was captured by the Fraternity, and is suspended in a kind of cage…and she feels like her skin is melting off her —

Ren: So we haven’t quite described what’s going on with that. So the Fraternity wanted to use Alaizabel because her parents were involved in the Fraternity, and then they took her as a sacrifice.

Adam: Her parents are described as being dissolute in the same way that Oscar Wilde describes Dorian Gray as being dissolute. That we don’t actually have many specifics about what they’re up to but we’re informed that it’s really, really, bad shit. Basically.

Ren: Yeah, they’re really not upstanding members of society.

Adam: It said something like, ‘Some of which would make stitch-face’s stomach churn’ or something.

Ren: I mean, all sorts. So the Fraternity take Alaizabel to be their sacrifice, which involves putting this spirit inside her, and it’s the spirit of an old woman called Thatch who is instrumental to creating this apocalypse that Pyke wants to bring forth. So Alaizabel has to be slowly killed, because she has to be alive when the spirit’s put in, but weak so that the spirit will overtake her own. She has to be drugged, and it’s quite graphic and upsetting.

Adam: I think it does a good job of getting across the horror of loss of agency, which is a real-world horror, and the horror of, I don’t want to quite say dysmorphia, but the feeling that her body’s not her own and she’s been taken over with something. It’s described very vividly in a way that is quite upsetting.

Ren: Actually the sequence reminded me quite a lot of in ‘Legend of Korra’, I don’t know if you’ve seen that?

Adam: No, clearly this is the podcast where we don’t get each other’s references —

Ren: — The podcast where we don’t understand. It’s at the end of the third series, and Korra is captured by the big villain of the series, and he wants to kill her when she’s in the Avatar state (I realise this doesn’t make much sense to you), so the avatar is permanently killed. So he drugs and weakens her and ties her up and it’s very vivid and upsetting in a similar way to this sequence with Alaizabal. Yeah, where were we?

Adam: I don’t know if there’s so much more to say about it. I don’t think if it’s a book of monumentally deep thematics particularly. I guess in terms of situating it in a cultural context, it’s coming really towards the end of that nineties goth scene, I suppose, obviously bands like The Cure had been around before them, but you get that Industrial Goth, Tiergarten, Legendary Pink Dots who I really like, who I guess take goth and make it even grimier basically. That always seemed to strike me as the difference really, that the nineties goth was a bit more industrial, and a bit more genuinely grubby than the slightly more romantic 80s goth. And I imagine the Haunting of Alaizabel Cray probably was the entry into goth culture for quite a lot of kids, I’d imagine.

Ren: Yeah, I mean really I should have become a goth.

Adam: I should have been a goth. I’ve never had the work ethic.

Ren: I couldn’t bring myself to commit.

Adam: It’s a shame because I often like a lot of goth culture, like my favourite role-playing experience was playing Vampires the Masquearade which is the most ‘90s goth game imaginable frankly, and I like quite a lot of goth bands, I guess I’ve never been fully committed, and I thought ‘Oh, could I really wear a big top hat down the street?’ I mean, to be fair, I was a ghost tour guide briefly, so I did it then.

Ren: That’s pretty goth. You did literally wear a big top hat down the street.

Adam: Down the streets of York, which I think is a particularly goth city in its way. I mean, it’s touristy, but if you walk around it at night with all its snickleways and cobblestones.

Ren: There are a couple more things I wanted to talk about, one of which is Cathaline, who I love. She’s Thaniel’s mentor, so Thaniel’s seventeen, and Cathaline is in her late twenties, and there aren’t many wych-hunters —

Adam: Like you! whose birthday it is today.

Ren: Like me, whose twenty-ninth birthday it is right now.

Adam: So now it’s time for you to grow up and become a wych-hunter.

Ren: And also I definitely read Cathaline as queer, which is my right, as it’s my birthday. Because she has shorter hair, and she wears trousers and it’s very daring, and she’s a wych-hunter which is not a very feminine occupation, and she’s independent and so on. So I’ve taken her, and decided she is queer.

Adam: I think that’s all well and fair. It’s time for you to start writing the fan-fic.

Ren: And I thought she actually had quite a touching scene with her, and with the woman who is Leanna Butcher, who is the fraternity’s last victim, so when Leanna Butcher dies the Chakh’Morg will be completed and the gods will be called forth and so on, and Thaniel tries to come to her aid to stop this from happening, and she doesn’t die immediately but they can’t save her ultimately. So there’s a little while where it’s only her hanging onto life that stops the impending darkness from coming. And Cathaline’s the only person who sits with her and thinks about her life and her humanity, and she thinks ‘if she never awoke, if she kept on breathing but never awoke, why that would be just perfect for them’. They don’t really see her as a person. And I really liked that scene, Cathaline thinking about this ordinary woman and her life, and I thought it was a good moment.

Adam: Yeah, I think it gives those moments of empathy with characters who in other books would be treated in a more disposable way which is what elevates The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray over what it could have been. Even thought it does still have slightly dodgy Jack the Ripper aesthetics and stuff, it’s because of those moments that it doesn’t feel nearly as problematic as one might imagine.

Ren: So the other thing is the ending. So going full spoiler. This book did come out in 2001. So during the book Alaizabel is periodically asking about the wych-kin, what they are and where they came from, and people don’t really want to talk about it too much, and then in the end there’s a big sort of villainous reveal, Pyke does his big villain speech and he says that wych-kin were created by humans. He says:

‘We take all our sordid guilt, all our hate, all our shame, everything we dislike about ourselves, and we fashion ghosts to haunt us and monsters to plague us. And we don’t even know we’re doing it!’

So the idea is that humanity has entered the age of reason and is kind of having a collective mental breakdown a the idea that there is no-one to blame for our misery and suffering but ourselves.

‘In the deep parts where science cannot reach, we were afraid of the emptiness we were making for ourselves, the self-destruction we started. So we made the wych-kin, woke some ancient part of our minds that we did not know we had, and fashioned creatures out of our own nightmares to terrorise us. Because all the hate and guilt and shame has to go somewhere, Thaniel, or it would eat us alive. Keep it in, and we’d all be like Stitch-face’.

So it’s kind of a fairly frightening twist, because we think we can protect ourselves from the fairy-tale monsters through reason and logic, but actually it’s because we’re too invested in those things that we’ve created these monsters.

Adam: Which I guess, this book being set just before the eve of the two world wars, thematically makes sense, so we have this moment of twentieth century history in which… I mean, obviously with nazism it’s tricky because you’ve got this kind of weird, pseudo bollocks spiritual stuff in there, but you definitely have this mechanisation of absolute cruelty and evil, right.

Ren: And it’s kind of transposing that to the precipitating event being the imagined bombing of Britain —

Adam: Which seems like a kind of world War I.

Ren: Yeah, so. Pyke’s solution is to just scrap it, just destroy the world and bring back these old and hungry gods, and they’ll form some sort of new world order, but I think the book somewhat suggests that the solution is more to do with making society more equal and less oppressive, and less full of misery and poverty and the sort of real-world horror that feeds the supernatural horror rather than just scrapping it altogether.

Adam: In that way it’s got very similar thematics to the second Amnesia game. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, but I don’t know if you’ve played that….

Ren: Well, I’m just going to pretend I have at this point. Oh yeah, yeah, it is just like that!

Adam: — yeah, yeah exactly.

Ren: So on that reference that we both got, I think that’s maybe…

Adam: Keep it referential, spooky kids! Oh god, that was too Nathan Barley like. You’ve seen Nathan Barley right? Did I ever make you watch Nathan Barley?

Ren: I have seen Nathan Barley, yes.

Adam: On with the credits.

Ren: So our theme music is by Maki Yamazaki, outro music is by Joe Kelly and the artwork is by Letty Wilson, and I’ll put all the details in the show notes. And you really should have a look at those because they are very cool people, and good artists.

Adam: Far cooler than us.

Ren: Yeah, I mean, they would get all the references, every single one.

Adam: And if you feel so inclined and you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go onto itunes and leave us a kind review.

Ren: So you kind of did the sign-off, do you have have anything else?

Adam: Not really, I’m off to Unitarian meeting now to find a way to navigate myself in this godless society.

Ren: Okay, good luck.

Adam: Bye!

Ren: Bye!

(Outro music plays)

  • 9.30 on a Sunday morning.

  • So neither of us completed this thought, but basically there is a character called the Devil Boy, whose eyes are sewn shut (hence the conversational shift into slightly problematic tropes), and who can tell the future with scrying stones. I think what Adam was getting at here is that the Devil Boy acts as a kind of dungeon master in the climatic sequence of the novel, leading the characters through events (and deaths) that he has foretold.


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About this podcast

A podcast in which one film lecturer and one scaredy-cat discuss creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and tv.

by Ren Wednesday, Adam Whybray

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