This week we talked about Grinny and Monster Maker by Nicholas Fisk. Audio clips are from a CBS Storybreak Special adaption of Grinny from 1988 and a Jim Henson Hour adaption of Monster Maker from 1989.

If you want to follow us on instagram we are stillscaredpodcast, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and new music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. Today we’re talking about Grinny and Monster Maker by Nicholas Fisk. Enjoy!

Ren Hi Adam!

Adam Hoy hoy, hello Ren!

Ren Are you ready to talk about some scary grannies?

Adam Do you mean, am I ready to talk about safeguarding issues in the 1970s, because yes I am!

Ren I think that will come up, yeah!

Adam So we’re talking about two books by Nicholas Fisk, Grinny and the slightly later Monster Maker.

Ren Yes, and this was a listener recommendation actually, so thank you Dave, if you’re listening!

Adam I hope they’re still listening, when was this recommended?

Ren Only last year! It’s fine!

Adam Yeah, knowing our updates that’s pretty good! So had you read either of this before?

Ren No, I hadn’t even heard of them!

Adam I’d heard of Grinny, and the name stuck in my head but I’d always side-eyed it. The kids in the book do this ‘eyes right’ trick which is basically side-eyeing, and I think I side-eyed Grinny much as the kids do. I didn’t like the name, so I didn’t read it. But I did read Trillions, which isn’t horror though it is a bit uncanny — it’s a science fiction book that he wrote about an alien dust that communicates by forming itself into patterns. Which did make quite an impression on me, but that was the only Nicholas Fisk I had read until now.

Ren So he’s described as a science fiction writer for children, which is quite an interesting niche. In terms of comparisons to what we’ve talked about before I’d say he’s closest to William Sleator.

Adam Because some William Sleator is more cynical and nastier than others, the view of human nature is quite cynical in something like House of Stairs, or The Night the Heads Came, and there is a bit of William Sleator crossover.

I think Nicholas Fisk is certainly more interested in the science fiction side of things — William Sleator is basically Black Mirror for kids. The science fiction stuff is thinly sketched and he’s mostly interested in the ramifications — if there was a doubling or a cloning machine, what would be the ramifications? He doesn’t really care very much about what that cloning machine would look like and how it would operate.

Whereas I feel with Nicholas Fisk, even though he doesn’t go into lots of detail about Grinny’s home planet, I feel like that’s all worked out in his head. There’s some real sci-fi underlying these books even if you don’t see much of it.

In Monster Maker, which actually isn’t much of a science fiction book, there is a lot of technical detail about how the monsters in the book are made.

Ren Yeah — Monster Maker is an interesting book, I think we’ll get to that later and talk about Grinny first, because it’s the more well-known one. Even if we both preferred Monster Maker.

Adam Yes, that’s true but you are right, Grinny is more well known, and my edition is the Puffin Modern Classics edition, a re-release from the ‘90s when we were kids, and it’s got an afterword, possibly by the series editor talking about when he first read Grinny.

Ren I have the same edition, with an old lady on the front with bright white eyes and purple teeth in front of a flying saucer, with some forked lightening coming down.

Adam It looks a bit like a graphic from one of those terrible alien conspiracy videos on YouTube.

Ren Yeah! But it’s in pretty good company in the Puffin Modern Classics — we’ve got Watership Down, The Borrowers, The Dark is Rising —

Adam — Which we will have to do at some point.

Ren We will, yes. So it’s obviously quite well-liked.

Adam It’s pretty high concept.

Ren Yeah!

Adam What if there was an alien invading your home but it looked like a sweet old lady.

Ren So it’s told through the diary of 11-year old Tim who is… (Ren laughs)

Adam You’re just laughing even thinking about Tim!

Ren He is a very pompous little boy.

Adam He’s precocious, I think it’s fair to say. Can I just read this little passage, it’s from page 11, so right near the beginning but I think it will give the listeners a sense of the character of Tim.

‘Then Father came in from feeding the rabbits. He made a complete bosh of it as usual, saying all the wrong things, making it quite clear that he hadn’t a clue about the existence of Great Aunts. But she fixed him with her beady eye and grinned and said: “You remember me, Edward” and he re-entered the twentieth century in great style, pouring everyone sherry. He gave Beth, who is seven, as much sherry as me, eleven, which is typical. Beth was as ever the outstanding social success and shook hands and said “Oh, what a lovely surprise” and looked more like a telly ad than ever. Hmph. I suppose it’s a graceful accomplishment but it’s also the mark of a little cow. She swallowed the sherry pretty fast and went across to pour herself some more but Mum caught her eye and said “Beth” and that was the end of it. I got another half-glass later. It was quite good sherry, a Manzanilla.’

Ren Thank you.

Adam Reading him as Noel Coward, perhaps. But yes, he is a little eleven-year old sherry connoisseur.

Ren Yep. That’s a good passage because that shows us Great-Aunt Emma’s, later known as Grinny’s, main trick for dealing with adults, which is saying “You remember me” and then they go “Oh yes, of course, Great-Aunt Emma.”

(Clip from CBS Storybreak Special adaption from 1988: Woman: Hello, may I help you? Beth: She says she’s my Great-Aunt Emma! Mom, do I have one? Woman: Not that I know of! Grinny: Oh, I’m sure you remember me. (Sound effects) Woman: Beth, this is your Great-Aunt Emma! The one we’re always talking about! Man: Who did you say it was, dear? Woman: You know my Aunt Emma? Man: Funny… I don’t seem to — Grinny: Of course you remember me! (Sound effects) Man: Oh, Aunt Emma! How have you been? Will you be staying long?)

Adam Which I think is the name of the sequel to the book: ‘You remember me’, in which another alien of the same race, another robot alien is dispatched to Earth in the form of a TV presenter, apparently.

Ren So she appears on the doorstep and says ‘You remember me, Millie’ and is invited into the family home for a seemingly indefinite visit. Tim records the various eccentricities of Great-Aunt Emma that are first amusing — she stares at the family as they get out of the pool naked, she has this odd aversion to electricity, but then become sinister as Tim’s little sister Beth becomes convinced that Great-Aunt Emma, or Grinny, is not only not related to them, but not real at all.

(Clip from TV adaptation: Beth: She’s weird! Tim: Come on Beth! Great-Aunt Emma just doesn’t like dogs, especially wet dogs! Man: Tim, Beth, what’s all the noise? Beth: I’m telling Mom and Dad about you!)

Adam I looked this up on Goodreads, and the swimming pool nudity seems to be the thing that puts a lot of modern readers off. So, the top most rated review was from a woman who said this book was not appropriate for children because the family swim naked, and this had a lot of likes.

Ren Huh!

Adam And there’s some truth to the fact that the kids don’t seem to particularly care for the swimming, although I think their issue is not so much swimming naked as swimming when it’s cold. I can see why Nicholas Fisk uses it as a device, and you probably wouldn’t get it in a kids’ book today, but Grinny doesn’t know anything about human anatomy, and being on a fact-seeking mission from the aliens is interested in this.

So that’s why when they get out the pool naked she looks at them, and obviously that seems creepy and weird. Tim as a narrator contextualises it a little bit and talks about the free-thinking health set, and puts it in this very 1970s context when there would have been middle class families going to a naturist colony for their health. So I think the idea is that the father’s on a health kick and this swimming naked is part of that.

Ren And it is their own pool.

Adam Yeah, which he does say, ‘We do have standards, we wouldn’t just walk around naked in someone else’s house or leave the toilet door open’. But I thought it was worth mentioning that this does seem to be the most common response to it on Goodreads, that the book is inappropriate because of this. And it is a small element near the beginning of the book.

Ren Of all the things to object to!

Adam There are a lot of issues around child safety in this book!

Ren That’s interesting, that would never have occurred to me. I mean, I thought it was interesting that they had their own pool — that’s pretty unusual, but the nudity didn’t really bother me.

Adam I can’t remember, did it say what part of America they’re in? Is it like California?

Ren This is England!

Adam What?! This is English?! Oh my God! Well, in that case them having a swimming pool is outrageous! In America it seems like, you know…

Ren Can’t you tell from Tim’s narratorial voice, it’s incredibly English!

Adam That’s a good point! I guess I just kind of assumed they were American new money. It was the swimming pool, I mean God, they must be really rich…

Ren It’s based on Nicholas Fisk, he had his own swimming pool.

Adam I guess he must have made a pretty packet of his books!

Ren But yeah, no one has their own swimming pool — apart from Nicholas Fisk — in the UK.

Adam It is an interesting thing, it makes me think about the Blumhouse horror films, I think there’s one based on the Enfield haunting. The second Conjuring film is set in England, and it’s set on this housing estate, but then they go to this house and it has this massive basement. These are terraced houses, and I was like ‘This is not an English house. Where did this massive basement come from?’

Ren Yeah.

Adam Okay, okay, gosh. They’re an English family with a swimming pool, so I now understand —

Ren — So it’s already speculative fiction.

Adam — Well, I can now understand why they’re sat around drinking sherry all the time!

Ren Right, anyway! So the first sign that something is very wrong, Grinny slips on the ice outside, and hurts her wrist. Beth goes out to help her up, and then runs away without saying anything and is acting very strangely for the rest of the day. Eventually Tim manages to get the story out of Beth that when Grinny fell over she broke her wrist, and the skin was split open and the bone was sticking out, but the bone was made of metal and there wasn’t any blood. So Beth says ‘She’s not real’ and Tim goes ‘…Okay’ and isn’t entirely convinced yet.

Adam I like that as existential horror, it’s not that Beth says ‘She’s made of metal’ or ‘She’s a robot’, she says repeatedly ‘She’s not real’. I really like that, this idea that she’s not Aunt Emma so she’s not real. She has this nonexistence, her existence is impossible and Beth’s way of explaining this is to repeatedly say ’She’s not real’.

It was at this point in my copy of the book that some young upstart crow has written ‘Ass’ in gold pen before the entry of February 8th. Which I was none too impressed with. So, listener, if you were the child who wrote this in the copy of Grinny that I ended up picking up, consider yourself told off and duly chastised, because I was not impressed.

Ren Yes, yes. It’s not big and it’s not clever.

Adam Even if that’s what you think of the book, you write that in you Goodreads review.

Ren ‘Ass’. Yes. So the next weird thing that happens is that a UFO appears outside the window. Tim’s watching and he gets his Dad out of bed and they both look at this UFO. The description of it says:

‘It was far brighter than the moon and it had a yellowish brilliance. I remember thinking how it clashed with the steely blue of the moon. I also remember seeing the yellowish reflections of its light on the frosted grass of the lawn — the sort of effect you get when you look at a boat with a light on it, far out at sea.’

Which I thought was quite a nice description.

Adam It is a nice description. And did you notice what was different about this scene to almost any other children’s horror we’ve read?

Ren No…

Adam The Dad sees the UFO!

Ren Oh yeah!

Adam Normally the kids would see this thing and get the parent, and the parent wouldn’t believe them. But in this one the Dad gets to see it through the telescope.

Ren Yes, which is interesting because Grinny seems to fit quite well into the Demon Headmaster sort of thing with kids vs adults, in that the parents are hypnotised by Grinny but the kids aren’t. But it’s true, he does see the UFO as well.

Adam So in the book there’s a sketch from the father of the UFO, he doesn’t have time to set up the camera, but he does a composite drawing of it based on Tim and Beth and his own descriptions of what the space craft looked like. And it seems like Grinny on some level communicates with the UFO, I don’t know if that becomes apparent at this point.

Ren Yeah, you get that idea because Tim goes to her room and finds her lying flat on her back and glowing from the inside. She’s murmuring to herself, or it says ‘a slight fluttering twittering sound’, which is what they later call Grinnish, her language for communicating with the UFO.

Adam Here it is on page 50:

‘Grinny was lying flat on the back on her bed, with her arms by her side above the covers. She was rigid and still, like a corpse or an Egyptian mummy. But she was luminous. There was even a faint glow through the bedclothes. I remember thinking in a matter-of-fact sort of way, ‘She doesn’t seem to need much covering. Just one blanket…’ Because of course the light couldn’t have passed through several blankets. I went closer — I wasn’t frightened yet — and saw another thing: her eyes were wide open. She was staring at the ceiling, staring at nothing. And her eyes were lit up from the inside. Like water when you put the lens of a lit torch in it. Her mouth was open. She was grinning’

Ren Yeah, and then just a little bit further on it says ‘I think it was the reflection of her luminosity on her teeth that made me give a sort of scream’, which is a detail I really like.

Adam Yeah, that’s almost Texture of the Week level.

Ren Yes, that was one of my contenders — her inner luminosity reflecting on her teeth. It’s a good one.

So the kids decide to test Grinny’s aversion to electricity with a Wimshurst machine. This being the 1970s when children were free to electrocute themselves if they wanted to, they bring this machine into the house.

Adam To be fair, this is the kind of thing I can imagine my Dad having as a kid. I remember him talking about having a chemistry set as a kid and he literally blew the door off the garage.

Ren Yeah, it’s described here: ‘This is the antediluvian device with two big contrarotating wheels and sticks with knobs on the end of them sticking out. You wind the handle, the two wheels turn, static electricity is generated and you get exciting blue sparks zipping about between the two knobs’.

So they have this contraption —

Adam — Just knocking about in the house.

Ren Yeah! It’s Tim and Beth and their friend Mac and they’re showing it off to Grinny, going ‘Ooh look at this, isn’t it brilliant’ and she’s getting more and more uncomfortable and they pretend not to hear and start winding it up so there’s all these sparks flying about and bringing it closer to her, and they put their hands in the sparks and dare Grinny to do that as well. It’s clear that she’s pretty scared of this thing and they only stop when Tim’s Dad bursts in and shouts at them all. So they have definitely established that Grinny is scared of electricity.

Adam As well she might be, electricity is really weird.

Ren I mean, yeah, it’s not an unreasonable thing to be scared of, even if you aren’t made of metal. And I think by this point Tim is quite convinced that Grinny is not real, but if she’s not real, what is she?

Adam At first he’s treating Beth’s claims as if they are Claims of the Week, but they don’t qualify for Claims of the Week, because Beth is completely right. He says a lot about how women and girls are just led by their emotions and are irrational creatures and so on —

Ren Yes…

Adam But Beth is wise to Grinny from the start, and is proved to be right. I feel like you’re meant to… I don’t know, be fairly on side with Tim. From what Nicholas Fisk is quoted as saying in the Afterword, it seems as if Tim is like him when he was eleven, and there’s maybe a bit of an assumption that boys of around that age are going to be reading this book and they are going to relate to Tim. So it’s good that Tim isn’t validated in all his chauvinism, but it does get pretty wearing because there’s a lot of it.

Ren I think that’s one of the things that has aged about this book, is this jocular sexism of Tim’s.

Adam It’s wearying. Oh, and Tim has a friend called Mac who comes over and also gets in on this Grinny conspiracy action, and he’s part of the electricity game to test Grinny.

Ren Yeah, he gets involved in trying to figure out what he wants and why she’s here. So as you mentioned they do this ‘Eyes Right’ trick on Grinny where instead of looking right at her, they address a spot one foot to the right of her at all times, and this makes her very anxious and then drives her into a frenzy where she starts speaking Grinnish. And when they do this a second time she gets so worked up that she ends up grabbing Mac’s hand and breaking his thumb.

Adam Does she snap it backwards?

Ren Yeah, I think so. And I think that the reason why she does that is that Mac uses her own phrase on her. She’s speaking Grinnish and he asks her to tell them about spaceships and says ‘You can tell me, Grinny, it’s Mac, you remember me’. And that’s when she grabs his hand.

Adam It’s a pretty nasty little moment and I think one of the reasons for genuine suspense in this book and in Monster Maker is you do think the kids are at serious risk of harm. There’s always the sense that Nicholas Fisk is quite willing for these kids to get hurt or killed, potentially.

Ren So that night the UFO appears again. He goes to Grinny’s door and overhears her saying something about ‘little difficulty’ and ‘quite suitable’ and realises she’s talking about the planet.

Adam ‘Mostly harmless’ to use the phrase from Hitchhiker’s.

Ren Mostly harmless! Yes. So Tim confronts Grinny about breaking Mac’s thumb and I’ll just read this extract of what happens next: ‘I do not suffer from heat or cold or toothache or any such things, as I think you know. Even if you break my wrist, I feel no pain. And it mends itself almost instantly, which is most convenient.’ I said, ‘Mac feels pain. You broke his thumb.’ She said, ‘You sound upset. If you like, you may break a finger of mine. For Mac.’ She held out her old hand with the fingers spread. ‘Any finger,’ she said. I made some sound or other and flinched back from her. She said ‘You are afraid, and quite rightly. It is quite correct that you should be afraid, quite in order. You must not mind, Timothy, you must get used to it indeed you must. The strangeness of it all… You must accustom yourself to it.’ She still had her hand stretched out. Then she took hold of one of her fingers with the other hand and gave a sudden twist. The finger she broke just split open. The skin parted and it split open. The finger was twisted and it was all out of line with the other fingers. There were little metal bones inside the split skin and some of them stuck out, glinting. I thought I was going to be sick and was floundering about rather. She soon put a stop to that, however. She said, ‘There! You must accustom yourself to it, it is a fact of life, Timothy. I am a new fact of all human life’

Adam That’s quite Demon Headmaster-y. That repitition of logical imperatives, and ‘that’s the way it is’. Though I think Grinny’s even more alien than the Demon Headmaster. He seems to basically understand humans whereas I guess Grinny’s only just arrived on the planet so spends a lot of time trying to puzzle out humans.

Ren And as for the showdown of the book, Grinny explains to Tim and Beth and Mac that her planet is far too overcrowded, and so her planet are coming to settle on Earth. The adults will all be hypnotised but the children will be enslaved to serve the new conquerers.

(Clip from TV adaptation: (dramatic music in the background) Grinny: Quite suitable! I see no difficulty. You may come in now, Tim and Beth! As you may have guessed, I am a new factor in human life. You are going to have to get used to me! Beth: Are you going to eat us? Grinny: Oh my, no, we never eat, we just need energy. You see, we used up our world. Tim: So now you want this one? Grinny: Exactly! Beth: But what about people who live here now? Grinny: The useful ones, the people under our control, will be put to work. Beth: What about us, you can’t control us! Grinny: It’s true, we can’t control the children, their minds are so wild, so unpredictable. But you will either help us or you’ll have to go away.)

And Beth is in favour of killing Grinny, pushing her against an electric heater or bashing her with an iron poker. But Tim doesn’t think this will be much use as they will just send a replacement, so they decide that they’re going to have to make her surrender and say to the UFO that the Earth isn’t suitable after all.

Adam There’s no sense that Grinny can be reasoned with, she’s very much like the Terminator. And Beth seems kind of scarily violent in this, but she’s also clearly right. Grinny does seem more like a robot than… I mean, obviously that’s a whole other debate but I can understand why Beth doesn’t have a sympathetic or sentimental response to Grinny.

Ren Yeah. So you texted me after you read this: ‘The end of Grinny is just an extended torture sequence!!’, which it is.

Adam Yeah, they’re basically torturing a robot, but I don’t know if anyone has seen A.I. and remembers the robot torture sequences in that? It doesn’t make it any more comfortable.

They’re basically trying to break Grinny’s programming, I suppose.

Ren Yes, they do the Eyes Right thing on her again, and they’re trying to project emotions at her. So Mac’s trying to project determination, and Tim’s trying to project confusion and Beth’s just going with hate. It says she’s muttering ‘I want you to die and die and die!’.

Grinny has this instrument that is described as a ‘torch thing’, I’m not quite sure what we’re imagining — what were torches like in 1973, were they quite big?

Adam I assumed they were quite bulky.

Ren Yeah, I would imagine so. So quite a big bulky torch, and Grinny lets slip that this can be used to punish, and the kids direct it to punish her instead. She reveals why she’s so scared of electricity, and it’s like some humans are scared of blood, it’s her life fluid. They threaten Grinny with this device until she tells the spacecraft that they’re not suitable and then the torch thing tears Grinny apart!

Adam Yeah, shall I read it. ‘Then she was on the floor and there was the metal-cutting noise again and her screams, but they stopped just as they were getting unbearable. I couldn’t see much of what was happening and what I could see I could hardly believe. She seemed to be tearing herself to pieces, you could see the fragments of cloth and patches of her skin and the glinting metal of her bones. There was a sort of drumming noise. It was her heels and elbows on the floor. Beth was screaming ‘I don’t care, I’m glad!’ and sobbing and shuddering. Her eyes were completely round, she was staring at Grinny on the floor, still hating her. I thought she shouldn’t be watching and put my arm around her, trying to push her head into my chest so that she couldn’t see , but she just clawed my arm aside and went on looking. Mac was trying to get the lights to work. I am glad he failed’

(Clip from TV adaptation: whooshing, crashing noises, and dramatic music.)

‘And then all the noise and flailing motion stopped: there was just a small dragging, scraping sound. It was one of her arms. It was separated from her body. It was being pulled towards the windows by the torch thing. It went on like this, on and on. We three just stood there, cold with horror, while she was dismembered. The limbs and bits of machinery weren’t so bad — it was the clothing that made you feel sick. Old lady’s clothes, human clothes, with some busy, vile, alien machine inside them making them heave and twitch and bulge as it cut and ripped. The torch thing was as busy and unstoppable as a rat, never pausing from its nibblings and humped-up scurryings and lunges and tugs. At last it had finished. What had been Great Aunt Emma was a pile of rubbish outside the French windows.’

It’s a pretty gruesome extended description.

Ren Yeah, I think there’s definitely something evocatively creepy about the old lady clothes and the metal arms.

Adam It was my first choice for Texture of the Week, so shall we do it?

Ren Yes, sure.

Adam and Ren (Strumming, drumsticks banging together) Texture! Texture! It’s the Texture of the Week!

Adam Yeah, so that was my first choice, but I also really like the slurks that are the little monsters in Monster Maker. They’re little stop-motion monsters, the kind that Ray Harryhausen might have made. I also imagine them kind of like Warhammer monsters, I guess? And their first description is this:

‘They were called slurks. There were ninety-six of them, all the same. Their bodies were deathly white, like dead flesh left too long in a pond. Their mouths could be opened or closed and were coloured inside with a nasty yellow-ish hue. Sharp spines ran down their backs and there was a sinister plumpness around their middles, as if they had just gorged themselves on carrion. Their eyes were green enamel, over small dish-shaped tin cups. Periwinkle had suggested and carried out the enamels. “You must be mad to think of using plastics, Chancey, plastics go dull and I can get you a ghastly glitter at only half the cost!”. She had been right about everything, as usual, apart from the cost that turned out to be very high as she chanced Chancey for two new electric enamelling stoves, which she’d long wanted. Somehow, Periwinkle had got a reptilian slit-like pupil into the enamelled irises. The slits had to be set just so or the sinister effect was lost.’

I like the enamel surface and I think in Monster Maker this ambiguity over whether the monsters are just models or are somehow secretly alive is something that sustains the book. I think you get that from the first description, because even though they’re clearly models and you get materials and the texture of the paint, their fleshy physicality, the plumpness as if they’ve gorged on carrion is really emphasised as well. Which does make them seem organic and alive.

Ren Yeah, that’s good.

Adam How about you?

Ren Well, I’ve already mentioned Grinny’s luminous reflecting teeth. I’ve got a small one which is in Monster Maker, the main character Matt has a ‘nice bouncy radish’ that he considers throwing at his sister. I just found the idea of a bouncy radish quite pleasing. But the main texture I’ve gone with is also from Monster Maker, we’ll get to this, but Matt, the main character, gets a concussion and there are lots of very good descriptions of the world going a bit woobly, but this is just after he gets hit on the back of the head.

‘There was an explosion somewhere. Then nothing happened. Then there was grass right in front of him, grass everywhere. The grass was the wrong colour. Each blade was sharply outlined in brilliant grey light, and the centres of the blades were another sort of greenish white. He raised his head from the grass and looked at the sky. The sky too was the wrong colour. It was bleached to a blue-grey white that hurt the eyes. Even the trees, their branches moving with the wind, were wrong. So far away yet they were like rubber sponges, each pore distinct and sharp. But blinding grey instead of green.’

Adam There’s some really sharp descriptions in Monster Maker.

Ren Yeah! It’s really well-written.

Adam It is really well-written. Antonia recommended it to me because it was the one that made an impression on her when she was young. She’d read Grinny as well but she said that Monster Maker was her favourite. And I do think that his writing has really improved quite a lot by the time he gets to Monster Maker. Not that Grinny’s badly written. Maybe it was just that he really enjoyed writing about these little models and the film-making. But there’s some lovely description in Monster Maker.

Ren Yes, so, Monster Maker shares some common preoccupations with Grinny, around animacy, I guess, what makes something alive, and also shares a gleeful disregard for electrical safety.

So Monster Maker is about a 15-year old boy called Matt, who is a great admirer of a man called Chancey Balogh.

(Clip from Jim Henson Hour adaption of Monster Maker from 1989: Matt: Dear Mr Balogh, my name is Matthew Banting. I’m 14-years old and I want to be like you, the greatest monster maker in the world.)

He’s a practical effects and model maker for TV and Film and his workshop is in the same village that Matt lives in, and he’s desperate to see inside. He manages to catch a lift with Chancey when he sees him in the local hardware shop, and impresses him with a functioning radio that he’s built inside a walnut shell. So he gets to see inside and gets taken on as an unpaid apprentice and ends up working on these creatures called slurks that you described. So there’s lots of great descriptions of the slurks and the Ultragorgan which is the massive beast that Chancey has been working on, that breathes actual fire.

The conflict of the book comes because Matt’s sister Jan has been taunting him a bit, calling him an errand-boy, so in retaliation he pulls out these nine five pound notes, that Chancey had dropped and he was going to return later. But he’s like ‘Look how much money I’m making!’. So in today’s money, £45 is about £240.

But the news travels about Matt’s supposed great earnings from Jan, to her friends, to the group of boys led by Darren, who like to ride their bike up to the studios and toss bricks through windows and fire their air rifles and generally be a menace.

Adam And there’s a fight sequence. So they start hassling Matt, and Matt has maybe in his excitement at working at the studio, and with these film dreams dancing around his head he thinks that he’s going to be able to fight them in this heroic battle. The adrenaline gets to his head a bit and he gets quite carried away.

Ren Yeah, though he does seem to be winning for a while, until one of the gang slugs him around the back of the head with a log and then rides off. And that’s when things start to go a bit weird.

Adam So he’s concussed, and the doctor sees him and says ‘Oh, that’s a nasty bump’ and that’s when the reality in the book starts getting a bit wibbly, as you said.

Ren Yes, and as you said the book has an interesting indeterminacy around the models and creatures being alive, and even before the concussion when Matt’s working on the slurks he starts to think that he’s seeing them wink, or that his sweat on their bodies is this clammy reptile fluid.

There’s this playing with the odd semi-life that these models have as they come to life with stop motion. And they also physically move because they have wire inside them that means that they spring back into position slowly as if they are alive.

Adam I’ve said it before, but I really love the attention that’s given to the technical details of model making. There’s this real focus on how the joints are articulated and how a certain texture or certain look is achieved. We have the character of Periwinkle who’s a make-up expert, and she works on painting the models.

Ren And jewellery. She’s an eccentric artist who also has her studio nearby to the film studio, and they can’t keep her out. But she sometimes just flourishes her paintbrush and makes something work that wasn’t before.

Adam Yes, and Chancey the model-maker is clearly a bit of a grumpy old man but he clearly has this soft spot for Periwinkle and knows that she’s very talented, so he plays up to not liking her around, but clearly actually does.

Ren Yeah, so, after the fight this doctor is very old and not very with it, and doesn’t do anything useful like tell Matt to go to the hospital. So he just kind of wakes up and says that his face reminds him of ‘rotten plums and puffballs’.

Adam Eurghh.

Ren But he tells himself: ‘Come on you noble lad, be brave, be bionic!’ Which I think I might be stealing.

Adam I was going to say that, you should take that self talk, Ren.

Ren I’ll put that over my mirror: ‘Be brave, be bionic!’ But he stumbles to the studio and Chancey presses some £10 notes onto him and tells him that he’ll have a job there when he leaves school but he should just go home until his face isn’t mush. But he finds that his bike’s been vandalised and there’s a note that says ‘Tonight’s the night!’ and in his concussed state he finds it all a bit too much and just makes himself a makeshift bed in one of the rooms of the studio.

But no-one knows he’s there. Darren’s gang arrive at the studios at the end of the day when Chancey and Reg are bickering over their coffee. Oh yeah, and they’d built this security system. The boys had been throwing rocks at the studio and stuff, and Chancey got Reg to knock up this security system. And Reg keeps saying ‘Are you sure, Chancey, this could kill someone!’ and Chancey’s like ‘Yeah, yeah. Sure.’

Adam Health and safety standards in the 1970s. I mean, I think Reg speculates that what they are doing is illegal.

Ren Yeah, Chancey is extremely unbothered. They realise that they need to turn the security system on, but the gange are already inside the building. They find Matt asleep and tie him up, and they also find Periwinkle and tie her up, despite her trying to attack them with a soldering iron. The gang kick some Slurks about, and then find the Ultragorgon. One of the gang who’s gone off his own looking for money comes a cropper of Chancey’s booby trap and gets knocked unconscious and the alarm sounds.

Matt and Periwinkle manage to escape and they run into the Ultragorgon’s enclosure, and Matt in his concussed state sees Ultragorgon eating one of the gang. He faces up to Darren again but Chancey, Reg and Periwinkle appear and pull him off.

They all get out, and none of the gang are actually dead, just somewhat hurt.

Adam It was probably a close call.

Ren Yes. But Chancey is quite confident that he can defend himself against any charges of child-maiming. Parts of the studios are on fire, including Periwinkle’s workshop, but crucially to Chancey, Ultragorgon is safe. Matt cycles back, absolutely out of his mind at this point, seeing a London Underground map of lights behind his eyes. He sees Slurks and creatures coming for him. He collapses on the road, and the next thing he knows is being back in bed and his family have found him. Chancey picks him up the next day and explains that the things he saw coming alive weren’t real — the Slurks were just fluttering pieces of paper, the glinting eye of the creature was sparks from the fire. And he’s like ‘Okay’. I think he believes him in the end, but it’s definitely a bit ambiguous.

And that’s pretty much the end of the book. The real horror was teenage boys, all along.

Adam It’s a funny book. I don’t know if I’d call it a horror or not. It’s maybe more about horror than it is horror. I don’t know, I just think it has a bit more too it than Grinny.

Ren Yeah, I agree. It’s got some really interesting atmosphere and great descriptions, and the playing around with what’s real and what’s animate… it’s just an interesting little book .

Adam It is. It might be a bit slow for some kids today. But then, Grinny would have been too scary for me. I’ve been at the local primary helping out at lunchtimes a few times a week and they were talking on about Hugsy Wugsy. Who’s scarier, Hugsy Wugsy or pennywise? What would you do if Pennywise was chasing you down an alleyway? I said that when I was a kid I hadn’t even seen Pennywise. I was so scared of the idea that I used to have to shower with the plug in the plughole, and I put my foot over the plug because I thought that would stop Pennywise from wiggling his way up the plughole. But I imagine a demonic ancient evil clown probably could make his way through a child’s foot, to be honest.

But the thing with Pennywise is that the way to defeat him is to not be scared of him, and then he hasn’t got any power. And that seemed to reassure those of them that looked a bit nervous. Did I tell you though about the conversation I had with one of them about Spiderman?

Ren No.

Adam Right, last week one of them had a Spiderman lunchbox. It was a 6-year old boy and I tried to start a conversation and said ‘Maybe Spiderman has a lunchbox’. And he says ‘No, Spiderman eats when he gets home!’. He seemed quite affronted by my suggestion that Spiderman had a lunch box.

So I said ‘Well, you know, Spiderman— ‘ to be honest, I haven’t seen a Spiderman film since that terrible Spiderman 3 where Spiderman was an emo, so I don’t know much about Spiderman. But I said ‘I know that Spiderman goes around on the rooftops, he might get hungry, maybe he would want to eat when’s he out on the job.’ And then the little boy said: ‘Spiderman would eat you!’ and I said, ‘Well, no, Spiderman wouldn’t eat me because Spiderman doesn’t eat people.’ and he said ‘Yes, Spiderman eats people!’ and I said ‘No, Spiderman’s good, he’s not a cannibal’. And he said, ‘Well, Venom eats people’ and I don’t know much about superheros so I couldn’t say he was wrong about that but I said, ‘But Venom’s bad though’. He paused and reflected and then said ‘Hmm, Spiderman eats spiders’. And I left it there, to be honest.

So if anyone wants to email about whether Spiderman does eat people, that’d be good to know. I’m in the dark, I’m really behind on superheros and I know they have to up the ante to make them more exciting, so maybe nowadays Spiderman does eat people for all I know. I guess he is between a spider and a man, so it’s okay for him to eat spiders and people, really.

Ren Well, yeah.

Adam Serves me right by patronising Spiderman by suggesting he could have a lunchbox.

Ren He could have a lunchbox full of spiders.

Adam Urgh! A lunchbox of spiders and people.

Ren Cool. Well, uhh… that was our journey into the 1970s with Nicholas Fisk, thanks again Dave for suggesting that, it was an enjoyable read.

Do you have a sign-off for us Adam?

Adam Of course I do, be brave, be bionic creepy kids!

Ren Be brave, be bionic spooky kids, see you next time! Bye!

Adam Bye!