In this episode we talked about Revenge of the Toffe Monster and Killer Mushrooms Ate My Gran, by Susan Gates.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and 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

Adam Welcome to Still Scared, Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Adam Whybray, my co-host is Ren Wednesday, and today we’re talking about two books by Susan Gates: Revenge of the Toffee Monster and Killer Mushrooms Ate my Gran. Enjoy!

Ren Good evening, hello! Hi Adam.

Adam Hi!

Ren And hello Willow, our returning guest, who was last on quite a while ago to talk about The Box of Delights, and is now back to dredge up another artefact of our shared childhoods, which are a couple of books by the English author Susan Gates who’s another one of those incredibly prolific children’s book authors, written over a hundred books —

Adam Really?! These must be early in her career, because my copy of toffee monster only mentions Sea Hags, Suckers and Cobra Sharks, so I thought this must have been a bit of a flash-in-the-pan author, but no —

Ren No — this is just her early work! So we’re talking about only two of these hundred books: Revenge of the Toffee Monster from 1999, and Killer Mushrooms Ate my Gran, from 2000.

Willow I feel like they're classics of children libraries in primary schools. I distinctly remember their covers on shelves.

Ren Oh yeah?

Willow And I remember being intrigued by the textures, in fact.

Ren Yes, well they were published just at the right time for someone born in, say, 1991 to have read as a kid. And you did, Willow, you definitely had Revenge of the Toffee Monster.

Willow I did! I think I was a bit displeased when I first bought it to find that the gorgeous colour picture on the front was not replicated within and it was in fact only words, that I had to read, using my brain. It tricked me! But I do remember reading it nonetheless.

Ren Yes, and I also picked it off your shelf and read it and had this memory of just textures and an unsettling atmosphere, so I thought it would be a good candidate for the podcast.

Willow Absolutely. And in contrast you were a most prolific reader, so keeping you away from my books would have been tricky.

Adam It says in the little autobiographical section that Susan Gates was a prolific reader, and she read every Science Fiction novel in Cleethorpes public library, and also had a craze for detective stories. Which makes sense, I do think these have a hardboiled edge to them, they are interesting stylistically.

She was born in Grimsby, and they do have a bit of the feel of Grimsby about them, but they also have almost a parody of that American detective story style. Not on the plotting, just how it’s written somehow.

Ren I mean, it’s very liberal on the similes, is mostly what I noticed about the writing.

Willow There’s so many, I was thinking I could use these older than the ones I do teach about similes and metaphor.

Ren I don’t know if you did this, Willow, but I asked you if you would write down what you remembered about this book before re-reading.

Willow I did! So, what I remembered about The Revenge of the Toffee Monster, is that someone breaks into a toffee factory and finds a toffee monster. I might have been using context clues for that first part. I believed that the monster was once a human, and suffered some kind of grave injustice, or accident, that led to their toffification.

So there were elements of correctness in there, but also parts I misremembered. I thought it emerged and maybe absorbed people, a bit like the blob. Maybe, I wasn’t sure. And I remember finding the character sympathetic, but I wasn’t sure if it was sympathetic on the cover and more frightening in the book? I thought there might be some tension there between the front cover and how I experienced it as a character. So those are my recollections.

Ren Cool! That’s more than I was expecting because all I remembered was a toffee texture and a disconsolate atmosphere.

Willow But Ren, you read a lot more books than I did, you see. This was a much smaller percentage of your total.

Adam That’s true, although I think that speaks to how Ren’s memory works as well, that it’s textural.

Willow That’s true, while I remember the character beats. I think it was the cover that drew me to this book, when I was young.

Ren Oh yeah, we should probably describe the covers.

Adam The covers are really warty!

Ren They are really warty, both of them.

Willow By Tony Blundell, in both cases.

Ren Yeah, Revenge of the Toffee Monster has a very warty toffee monster, with a grin? A grimace?

Adam Oh, definitely a grimace. It looks pained to me!

Ren And the title is also written in a blobby toffee font.

Adam It’s a bit like a movie poster.

Willow Yeah, a schlocky movie poster. There’s a difference in the way the words and the monster are printed, so they’re shiny, they’ve got a clever publishing trick on them.

Ren Yep, they’ve got a bit of the old laminate. And then Killer Mushrooms Ate My Gran has again some very warty mushrooms, red and —

Adam — brain mushrooms.

Willow Very severe looking.

Adam Inquisitorial.

Ren Surrounding the gran, who is wearing a cycling helmet and gear.

Willow And the mushrooms are laminate but the gran is not, this time. Also, just as a flight of fancy I tried to write down what I remembered of Killer Mushrooms Ate my Gran, never having read it before. Just to see if it was more or less accurate than what I remembered of the one I had read.

Ren Okay….

Willow So I guessed that there might be a child who lives with their gran, who hates mushrooms and never eats them, in fact they throw them down into a basement after pretending to eat them each night, and then I thought they might hear noises from the basement, and see strange orange glowing eyes at the windows, and then they venture down, and scare off the mushrooms, but the gran is not so lucky. They eat her, but then they hunger for more, perhaps they control her like a pod person, and use her to lure others down to the basement. And then the child has to build a ragtag bag of misfits from school to destroy the mushrooms, and it validates their dislike of mushrooms.

Ren That’s really not bad at all, you clearly have a strong grasp of children’s horror tropes under your belt. I’m impressed. I like how surreal you’re making this podcast, already. Good addition.

So, Revenge of the Toffee Monster.

Lenny is bored during the summer holidays, all his friends are away, he’s riding around on his bike and he finds a sign to a ‘Toffee museum’. He investigates, but finds it dusty and dreary, and is a little disturbed by the image of a Victorian child with a mournful expression on an old toffee tin. He’s about to leave, when he smells the sweet, buttery smell of toffee, and follows it into an industrial kitchen where a woman is throwing toffee by hand in these great looping strands.

Lenny is transfixed by this display, but the toffee throwing woman, revealed to be Miss Butterworth, is initially very hostile to him. She says that little boys used to love Butterworth’s toffee, but now they only sell it to the old folk’s home and soon they’ll be out of business entirely. Lenny tries to explain modern sweets to her, using the example of the Sparkle Bar in his pocket, which is a candy that fizzes blue foam and turns your teeth blue. And also has a theme song, I don’t know if anyone wants to try and sing the theme song on page 25.

Willow Sure, yeah, can I get some backing music? I’ll give it a go.

Adam (groans, gets up) Okay, if you start drumming Ren, I’ll be back in a sec.

I'm too old for this!

(Ren starts drumming)

Willow Wowww. Cosmic kids eat sparkle bars. Woww. Sparkle bars are ace. They wow the world, the universe! They wow aliens in space!

(Adam strums guitar)

Ren Thank you Willow!

Willow You’re welcome, it was a bit more like a spoken word poem.

Ren No, that was great. I really enjoyed that.

Willow Do we want to talk about Lenny in the beginning first?

Ren Yeah, feel free if you have things you want to say about Lenny.

Willow I thought Lenny was an interesting choice of character, and quite cool, that the character in this story is from a poor household, his family can’t afford to go on holidays, and he’s bored in this industrial area.

I thought that’s not — it’s not a bunch of posh kids in the countryside solving mysteries, he’s only been to the countryside twice on a school trip. He’s also a person of colour, he’s half Chinese and that’s relevant in the story although that isn’t made a big deal of in most ways — apart from maybe having toffee in his blood — but I just thought it was nice to see him represented as a character, and especially for older primary age children today, cost of living crisis, lots of kids won’t be able to afford to go on holiday and will have similar experiences to this.

Ren Yeah, I think he’s quite charming, he’s quite a little scamp. I liked him as a character.

Adam I likes that he has a whole bunch of ideas whizzing around his head, and sometimes he keeps them to himself and sometimes he just says them. I think it gets across how higgeldy-piggeldy things can feel when you’re a kid. That sense of emotional overwhelm. And she captures that sense of childhood outrage really well.

Willow And there’s some elements of quite subtle storytelling, like Lenny feeling sympathy for Clum, who we haven’t heard about yet, getting in lots of trouble. I thought that was quite nice, like rather than saying ‘Lenny was a child who got in lots of trouble’, it just had that moment of emotional connection and left it at that.

Ren It’s very straight-forwardly written, like some of the books we read are much more poetic.

Adam Oh I see what you mean, this is the opposite end of the spectrum to Moondial in that regard.

Ren Yeah, it’s easy to read, it’s fun, I think kids would like this book. Which, for all of Moondial’s qualities, it’s not something that I necessarily said about it.

Adam That is really true actually, I did think with Moondial, my step-son is not going to be bothered with this, but I thought he might enjoy these two books and find them fun.

Willow And I suppose that’s what they’re going for, they’re going for a shclocky movie monster genre, rather than trying to be arty and scary.

Adam Yeah, I guess that's part of the way they seem more indebted to American genre fiction, than they do necessarily to the classics of British children’s fiction. Which is nice, because I think in this book that’s where the industrial environment comes in.

Willow Yeah, a working class child on a bike rather than a posh child in a mansion, which is much more classic English literature style.

Ren Lenny has the idea, he has a lot of ideas, that he should be her consultant, and thinks that he might have toffee in his blood, because his mum’s Chinese and toffee was invented in ancient China. Which is, um, sadly not true.

Adam Thank you for doing your research.

Ren Yeah, a quick google suggests that toffee was invented in England or possibly Wales, as a result of the plentiful supplies of sugar reaching the UK in the nineteenth century from slave labour in the Caribbean. Which puts a bit of a realistic damper on this whole nostalgic Victorian toffee company, but there you are.

Willow I found a company called White Rabbit, who produce toffees in China, but they originated in 1943, which I don’t think is the ancient origins of toffee that they were alluding to.

Ren Yeah, so that’s a fabrication, but it’s fine, it’s enjoyable. Lenny mentions the toffee tin with the mournful kid on it, which he takes to be a girl because they’re wearing a frilly dress, but to Lenny’s great outrage Miss Butterworth reveals was a boy, young Master Harold, and that small Victorian boys wore dresses before they were allowed their first pair of trousers.

Willow Lenny gets some proper gender outrage across this book.

Ren She also tells him that her grandfather, Josiah Butterworth, was an inventor, who experimented with frogs and was fascinated by electricity, and who one night made a living creature out of brazil nut toffee.

Willow Can I just say that I’m so disappointed with myself, that for all my love of foreshadowing in RPGs that I run and genre fiction that I read, I did not get the frog reference. Even though Clum was very explicitly described as warty and croaking, but I just did not think that the frogs were referenced was relevant.

Adam I think the science presented in this book might constitute a (booming sound effect) Claim of the Week. Compared to the relatively rigorous mushroom science of Killer Mushrooms Ate my Gran, I think the animate toffee science is sketchy.

And Miss Butterworth also makes a claim, and I quote: “Toffee is a miraculous substance. It has limitless possibilities.” Which makes me think of that bit in The Simpsons, with the salesperson with the gummy lips who claims they have a hundred different uses: ‘Like a comedic replacement for your own lips!’ and Homer says ‘Go on…’

We get the claim of toffee being used to patch up tyres, like a puncture. Which I guess would work.

Ren It’s like bluetak and it’s thousands of uses, isn’t it. Like, you stick something to the wall, and then you stick something to something else.

Adam I think most of its uses are going to be based on its stickiness. I don’t know if stickiness is the only useful property in the universe.

Willow I’ve got another possible Claim of the Week.

Adam Oh my gosh, nice. We haven’t had any for a while so I’m glad to be getting lots of claims.

Ren We’ve already had the toffee was created in Ancient China, so.

Adam This is a book of claims.

Willow This is less objectively verifiable that those, but the claim that there was a famous film stunt man, actually Harold when he was grown up, who just as he was flying midday, a piece of flying toffee struck him in the right eye, and the explanation given was that it was probably dropped by a passing crow. I just don’t think that’s the most likely scenario! I don’t know how I think a toffee would end up in the air, but I don’t think a crow would drop it!

Adam Well, maybe a crow took a fancy to toffee and then thought ‘eh, it’s not all that’.

Willow Very much like the children of today.

Adam Yeah, with their sparkle bars.

Ren I mean, I can imagine a crow picking up a stray toffee from the ground and deciding it wasn’t for them.

Adam Tense times on Still Scared with sibling disagreement!

Ren So, yeah. Miss Butterworth goes into a bit of the lore about this creature made of Brazil nut toffee. How they wanted to be helpful, but its toffee body never set properly, so anything it tried to fetch, it stuck to.

Willow She says ‘as a lifeform it was a total disaster’, which you know, same. Sometimes.

Ren Millennial mood, that.

It becomes known as Clum, because it was always being called clumsy.

Adam Awww.

Ren And ends up being banished to the toffee works, with young Master Harold as its only friend.

Then one night, Harold’s mother was getting ready for a ball, when Clum tried to fetch her peacock fan, and it sticks to his hand —

**Adam ** Ooh, can I please read this section.

Ren Yes, go on!

Adam ‘That day,’ said Miss Butterworth, in a voice grim as graveyards, ‘the humbug machine was running full pelt — there was a big humbug order to fill. Harold came dashing in. He didn’t think. He was only concerned for his friend. Before Clum could reach his vat, Harold threw himself at him to give him a big hug. It was the only time in his short life that the creature had ever been hugged. He was so overjoyed he put his arms around Harold. He lifted him high in the air-‘

Lenny’s hand flew up to his mouth. ‘Oh no, I can’t believe it! They stuck together, didn’t they?’

‘They did. And Harold panicked. He shouted, ‘Set me down!’ But Clum didn’t understand and only squeezed him tighter. Clum didn’t know his own strength and poor Harold couldn’t breathe. He struggled to get free from the creature’s sticky embrace. But he fell-‘

Lenny gnawed at his knuckles. It was too awful to think about. ‘Harold didn’t fall into the humbug machine, did he? Is that what you meant when you said he came to a sticky end?’ He looked fearfully at the great machine towering above them. He imagined those great iron paddles whacking the toffee mixture, spitting it out as humbugs, flicking it into tins. The thought of Harold being turned into humbugs was more than he could bear.

'Good heavens,’ said Miss Butterworth. ‘What gruesome minds you modern children have got! No, Harold didn’t fall into the machine. (Calling out the reader there!) He struck his head on one of the paddles as he fell. Clum saw Harold wasn’t moving. He cried toffee tears. His poor heart was broken in two.’

Willow Tragic stuff.

Ren Thank you, Adam, that was a very good reading.

Willow Clum has something of a Lenny from Of Mice and Men about him.

Adam That’s true, actually!

Willow Loving, but written as having quite low cognitive abilities.

Adam Doesn’t know his own strength.

Willow Or indeed stickiness.

Ren Thinking Harold dead, a mob went after Clum and hunted him to the iced-over river. Clum, seeing no way out, broke the ice and slipped into the river. I’ll just read that bit out:

'They say,’ said Miss Butterworth, ‘that he turned to look back at the screaming mob, just once. Then he looked up at the shining moon. He seemed to reach out for it, trying to fetch it. He loved silvery things, remember. Then he gave a last despairing croak and jumped up and down on the ice until it cracked beneath him. He lit himself slip into the icy water.’

Poor Clum!

Willow Justice for Clum.

Ren Slips into the river, and they pull him out downstream as a frozen block of toffee and Miss Butterworth reveals that they dragged him back to the toffee works and broke him into sacks.

Adam As basically happens to the Blob, I think. Willow, you were making the comparison to the Blob, and I’m pretty sure that the Blob ends up frozen and that’s how it gets blobbed.

Willow That’s quite interesting!

Adam It might be a deliberate reference.

Ren She goes down to the cellar and brings up a brown sack labelled Clum, as Josiah Butterworth chipped Clum into convenient pieces with his personal silver toffee hammer. It’s important to note.

Adam Hopefully not eating bits as he went. I made that Simpsons reference earlier and now I’m thinking of Homer eating his delicious lobster and cries as he devours it: ‘Oh Clum! nom nom nom.’

Ren So that’s the tragic tale of Clum, and Lenny’s heart goes out to Clum —

Adam And this is about halfway through the book almost. We don’t actually have the living toffee monster for quite a long way through. I was expecting it to be the second chapter and it’s very much not.

Ren She tells Lenny that Clum’s kind nature changed towards the end of his life, after being constantly mistreated, and he became dangerous. She says it’s for the best that he’s in pieces in the freezer.

Lenny’s still thinking about being a toffee consultant, and coming up with idea of how to use Clum to revitalize Butterworth’s toffee.

Adam I’m just thinking about his imagined advert, which is great.

Ren Yeah, he’s like: ‘Kids love being scared!’ - what does he say about that?

Adam He basically says you could have Clum in this advert threatening children to eat more toffee.

Ren Oh yeah, ’buy Butterworth's toffee, or else!’

He holds up one of the Sparkle Bars and says that they could tell Clum to fetch all the Sparkle Bars in the city, and eliminate the competition — but then his spiel is interrupted by a bell tolling, and he realises that he needs to go home, telling Miss Butterworth that he’ll be back but not meaning it.

Willow There’s a sweet line that ‘all the time he was talking he didn’t have to sort out all the mixed-up feelings in his head’, which I thought was quite nice. Natural extrovert there, just keep talking, it’ll be okay.

Ren Extrovert correspondent, Willow.

Willow And now we’re getting up to bits of Clum, which I really enjoy.

Ren Miss Butterworth, tired out from the commotion, goes upstairs for a nap, forgetting the two pieces of Clum, which start to defrost on the kitchen counter.

Willow She left the hob on! Really dangerous.

Ren Oh yeah, so they’re defrosting really fast. Meanwhile Lenny goes home and she talks to his mum and she remembers her mum talking about her grandmother, making life-size toffee swans for banquets in China. Learning that he does have toffee in his blood, Lenny decides to go back to the toffee works after all.

Meanwhile, the bits of Clum have activated, and something in them recognises Lenny’s instruction to fetch a Sparkle Bar. These toffee slugs escape the toffee works and rampage across the city, snatching Sparkle Bars from children’s hands.

Willow Yes, they ‘were moving horribly fast like speeded-up loopy caterpillars’.

Adam Ooh, you can imagine the stop-motion in the film adaptation.

Willow Yeah, you’d need some kind of Cronenbergian modelling for the actual monster.

Ren Yeah, so when Miss Butterworth wakes up, and sees what they’re doing, and hauls the rest of the twenty-two sacks of Clum up from the cellar to defrost. With her limited knowledge of the late 90s from the Lenny, she believes that Sparkle Bars are Butterworth toffee’s only rivals, and she’s ready to wipe them out with these bits of Clum.

Adam It’s quite sweet that she has no knowledge of these multi-national conglomerate sweet companies, and she’s just like ‘yep, sparkle bars’.

Ren Lenny sees the trail of Sparkle Bars and follows them back to the toffee works, and he realises that Clum had frog DNA in him, and he’d seen something about how some frogs could stay alive through deep-freezing, and he thought that Clum must have this frog ability.

Willow Sorry, I was just thinking about Sparkle Bars, they’re very enchanting, and I was wondering if you remember the crackly chocolate, I think it was Willy Wonka branded.

Adam Yeah, yeah, with popping candy.

Willow Yeah, that was great, wasn’t it?

Ren That was one of these very 90s chocolates. It didn’t make people’s mouths blue, but it was crackly and satisfying. But only 90s kids will remember that, so if you’re not a 90s kid then sorry.

Adam Younger listeners are busy, meanwhile, drinking their energy drinks sponsored by YouTubers. Washing down the tide pods with the energy drinks, that’s what gives you the real buzz.

Ren I saw one of those in the newsagents —

Adam One of those YouTuber energy drinks?

Ren Yeah, it was like, nine pounds!

Adam I know! I let George spend his own pocket money on one, and he doesn’t even — he just said it was the talk of the playground! All the other boys say it’s really good. I was like, ‘really??’

Willow Hang on, are we Miss Butterworth now?

Ren Yep.

Willow You either die a Harold or you live long enough to become a Miss Butterworth.

Ren Heh, die a Harold.

Adam I will just mention briefly, actually Willow, as it’s been over a decade. For listeners I still have Willow’s copy of the Orange Box, which is a Half-Life 2, Portal, Team Fortress compilation. I will say Willow, I can’t play it, George my stepson, wanted to play it so I tried loading it up for the first time after having borrowed it like, thirteen years ago or something, and you must have already registered it with Steam because I couldn’t use it. So I borrowed it for all these years for nothing!!

Willow Oh dear, wow. That’s a very large tangent there.

Ren While we’re tangenting, I should say that I just got Bert, the coconut-head puppet back in my possession.

Adam Oh my gosh! Is Bert still doing alright?

Ren He’s doing great, yeah. Lucy had him for a few years but now he’s back with me. This is a puppet that Adam made for me some years ago, with a coconut head and wearing a floral dress.

Willow It’s very good.

Ren Bert is very good. Maybe I'll get Bert to join us for Texture of the Week, actually.

Adam Ooh yeah, I like that. Bert can sing Texture of the Week, good stuff.

Ren Shall we do that now? Okay, I’ll get Bert.

Adam I don’t really have clacking coconut halves. I have a metal cup but I don’t know if I can get much of a sound out of it.

(Clacking and rattling sounds)

Can Bert sing it too?

Ren Okay, I haven’t done the Bert voice in so long!

(as Bert) Texture, texture! Texture of the week!

Adam Razzle dazzle!

Ren (as Bert) Razzle dazzle!

Adam Now that’s showbiz! Okay, so what’s your Texture of the Week? Is it toffee?

Ren I mean, it is kind of just Clum, isn’t it? But I did narrow it down a bit, we haven’t quite got to it yet but Clum ends up covered in Sparkle Bars as a kind of armour — when he reconstitutes all the parts of him fetch the Sparkle Bars back and he’s plated in these silver-wrapped sweets, and I think that’s quite an arresting image.

Adam It’s quite majestic.

Willow I went for a slightly more horrific option. ’It looked like like a writhing mountain of maggots, but they weren’t maggots, they were toffee slugs, and they were jiggling about in a frenzy’.

Ren Uh-huh, yeah yeah.

Adam Mine is actually from Killer Mushrooms Ate my Gran, and as we’re only going to discuss it briefly I will read this section as there are some great textures in here.

So the protagonist here, who is actually called Maggot has come across a shed-full of mushrooms.

‘He’d never seen anything like it. He didn’t know fungi this weird existed!

They were sneaking over the edge of the mushroom beds, pushing up through the floor, hanging anywhere they could get a grip. They had taken over the shed and driven out the button mushrooms. There wasn’t a boring button mushroom in sight!

These fungi were all sizes, all shapes. From tidy toadstools to great big puffballs. They were all colours! From sickly yellow to poisonous blue. Those toadstools were black and rubbery like licorice. That strange purple fungus was like a honeycomb. There was even an orange frilly fungus creeping across the shed roof. Fungus like dead grey fingers. Fungus flowing like white lava down the shed walls. Some were like soft jelly eggs, some were warty, some slimy. A crusty fungus, growing on wood, gave off an eerie green glow.’

And actually, Ren, I’ll just mention that our old friend Helen has really got the mushroom fever, and last time I saw her had quite typically, not just taken photos of lots of different mushrooms with different fungal textures, but also videos of her prodding and flicking mushrooms, to better enjoy their texture.

Ren Excellent.

Willow That was some beautiful mushroom description right there.

Ren That was great, yeah! I do want us to talk about Killer Mushroom Ate My Gran, because it gives good mushrooms.

Adam Yeah, I think the plotting of Revenge of the Toffee Monster is stronger, but the mushroom vibes are very strong in Killer Mushrooms. But we’ll finish this one first.

Ren Right, yeah. Miss Butterworth reveals that as well as the frog DNA, her grandfather chucked a sea-sponge into the Clum mixture, which means that the bits of Clum can reform themselves into a whole Clum. And they do! Reformed Clum is not very happy, and Lenny has to pretend to be Young Master Harold, and put on the lacy frock and Tam O Shanter, much to his disgust.

So Lenny leads Clum downstairs, intending to lead him back into the deep-freezer. When they pass the kitchen, however, bits of Clum dash off and pick up the Sparkle Bars, clothing Clum with them.

Lenny shows Clum his reflection, and unlike last time, which I don’t think we mentioned but just before his disasterous end, Harold’s mum showed Clum his reflection and told him he was a horrible monster, but this time he looks at his reflection and sees that he’s a majestical creature.

Willow And he can touch things now, he’s no longe a sticky mess.

Ren Miss Butterworth’s hissing at Lenny to lead Clum to the deep freezer, but he doesn’t have the heart to do it so till dressed as Harold, Lenny leads Clum outside. Lenny doesn’t know where he’s taking Clum, but as they pass a landfill site, a Sparkle Bar wrapper flutters by. Clum chases after, and Lenny chases after him, only for Clum to catch it at the edge of a vast pit of rubbish. Clum falls in, and JCB’s cover the pit with soil and rocks, burying Clum underneath.

Lenny goes back to the toffee works distraught, and while Miss Butterworth praises him for saving the toffee works, but Lenny wants nothing more to do with toffee.

But then, later, at the end of the book, he sees that the Toffee Works has gone and he’s a bit alarmed, but then he bumps into Miss Butterworth on the street, and she tells him that they’ve moved the toffee works to the Victorian street at the Heritage Museum. And in the epilogue, Lenny is Miss Butterworth’s toffee assistant.

Adam So basically, they've moved to York.

Ren Yeah, they’re at Beamish. I — I was about to swear with how much I love those Victorian mock-up streets.

Willow Do you prefer them with mannequins or out-of-work actors?

Ren Either, I’m not fussy. I just love walking down a mock-up street in a museum, I think they’re great. But the ones that have people actually doing things in them are pretty cool, so this one sounds great. You can go to an actual sweet shop and see people making toffee, that’s ideal, I think.

Willow I have really intense sense memories of fake Saxon villages that we were taken to once.

Ren We went to a Gaulish village in France, once.

Adam A ghoulish village? What do you mean a ghoulish village?!

Ren Like Asterix, innit.

Adam Oh, Gaulish! Sorry, I’ve got horror on the brain.

Willow The smell of the bread they made there is a very strong sense memory.

Ren Yeah, they were baking some bread and making some apple juice and it’s all smoky smells.

Willow Dipping some candles.

Ren All that kind of stuff. Lenny works works up the courage to tell Miss Butterworth about his Granny Wang, and her toffee swans, and she says she’s heard of the famous Wang toffee makers, and that she used to make swans too.

And right at the end, we get this horror movie silver-gauntleted toffee hand rising from the ground. Clum will be back again.

Adam I do like that it has that movie-like ending.

Ren Very Little Shop of Horrors, well, depending on which ending.

Willow You sort of have to have the ending like that, but because Clum was such a sympathetic character it didn’t feel like ‘oh no!’, more like, ‘oh dear, that’s going to be really inconvenient for Lenny’.

Adam It’s much nicer. It's very different to Goosebumps — when you’re reading It Came from Beneath the Sink or Monster Blood, you’re never like, ‘Aw, monster blood! I hope you make a friend!’

Ren Yeah, Clum’s a very sympathetic monster.

Willow Yeah, humans are trash, in Victorian times as today. I think Clum was right in his appraisal of our species.

Ren I’d forgotten that he was made of Brazil nut toffee and that’s why he’s so lumpy-bumpy.

Willow Yeah, there’s a lot of warty bumpy textures in there for Clum, he’s a whole mass of textures.

Ren And then we come to Killer Mushrooms Ate My Gran, from the year 2000. Did either of you notice the most year 2000 reference in this book?

Adam Oh gosh, I don’t think so, I don’t know.

Ren Okay, there’s a bit where Maggot’s thinking about the possibility of the mushrooms taking over the Earth, and he has this vision of them and says: ‘They’re massive, some of them are as big as the Millennium Dome!’

Instantly carbon-dating this book.

Willow Very good. And you tell the kids of today that, and they’d be like: ‘What’s that?’

Adam I’d say: ‘It’s the place I went to watch a really substandard Blackadder episode’.

Willow Yeah, that was disappointing! I think I found it very cool at the time but it wasn’t great in retrospect.

Ren I listened to a TrashFuture episode recently where they were talking about the Millennium Dome, and they kept talking about a giant boy. And I’d forgotten about the giant boy, but he was there.

Adam Was that the giant organs? Because I remember giant organs.

Ren No, there was the body bit, but there was also a Ron Mueck sculpture of a giant, mostly naked boy.

Adam I remembered the bleak spectacle of a laminate tunnel of money. It was like a million pounds that you could look at, or something.

Willow Yeah, that sounds likely. I completely misremembered the scale of it. So when people now say they’re going to the 02 arena, I was like, oh the Millennium Dome, so is that one big room then, inside the dome? And it turns out that it’s basically like a Westfield’s in there, and part of it is a bowling alley and part of it is a place where they do gigs.

Ren Oh really?

Willow Oh right, neither of you have been there either? Great.

Adam No, bad memories. I can’t go back! You can’t go Dome again.

Willow I was wondering if the the most year 2000 thing would be the slightly unfortunate colonialism. Because we’re really getting into ‘we should have know better’ with the pop culture, around this time. I mean, Little Britain was just around the corner when this came out, and the fact that it refers to ‘African tribespeople’ without any degree of specificity is not great.

Adam Yeah, it’s fast and loose.

Ren It’s very broad. I do want to just read the beginning of this book, though, because I think it’s got a pretty strong opening.

'When Maggot arrived at Gran's house, she was trying to read a mushroom.’

Adam (laughs) Sorry, that was a good opening line!

Ren: ‘She’d taken it out of a blue plastic box full of other button mushrooms. Gran squinted at the mushroom. ‘What’s it say? I can’t see without my specs.’ Maggot peered at the top of the mushrrom. It had two words carved into it. He read them out loud: ‘SAVE ME’. Gran was already rummaging in the box. 'There’s something written on this one too.’ She ran into the other room and came back with her reading glasses. ‘This one says “HELP ME”,’ said Gran, in a puzzled voice. She handed it to Maggot. 'There’s a face on it!’ said Maggot. Above the words ‘Help Me’ someone had carved a tragic little face. It was like a sad clown. It had a turned-down mouth and tears squirting form its eyes.’

I was quite taken with that opening.

Willow And this book does start with a mystery format. There is a person with a very convincing reason why they’re not there, who it then gradually transpires is not there for more dark reasons, and they have to investigate that.

Ren Yes, so this is Maggot’s gran’s gentleman friend, Jack Dash, who stood her up at their wedding and she’s just feeling kinda sad about that, but Maggot realises that something more sinister has happened to that than just standing up his gran.

And Jack Dash is a daredevil botanist with a passion for mushrooms, who in his old age was running an ordinary button mushroom farm, but as we heard in Adam’s Texture of the Week earlier, there was a lot more going on at the farm than just button mushrooms.

And then this book is… well, have either of you been watching The Last of Us?

Adam No, I haven’t. People have said it’s the first good video game to TV or film adaptation but obviously they haven’t seen the original Super Mario Bros film, so obviously I’m not taking that claim very seriously. But I’ve heard it’s good!

Ren Well, I only saw one episode of it but the concept is a fungal pandemic inspired by these cordyceps mushrooms that take over their host. Which in the case of the real cordyceps fungus is carpenter ants, which was in a David Attenborough documentary a while ago, and got quite well known from that. But for anyone who doesn’t know I have bookmarked the description of them in Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life:

'The most prolific and inventive manipulators of animal behaviour are a group of fungi that live within the bodies of insects. These ‘zombie fungi’ are able to modify their host’s behaviour in ways that bring a clear benefit: by hijacking an insect, the fungus is able to disperse its spores and complete its life cycle.

One of the best-studied cases is that of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which organises its life around carpenter ants. Once infected by the fungus, the ants are stripped of their instinctive fear of heights, leave the relative safety of their nests and climb up the nearest plant - a syndrome known as ‘summit disease’. In due course the fungus forces the ant to clamp its jaws around the plant in a ‘death grip’. Mycelium grows from the ant’s feet and stitches them to the plant’s surface. The fungus then digests the ant’s body and sprouts a stalk out of its head, from which spores shower down on ants passing below. If the spores miss their targets, they produce secondary sticky spores which extend outwards on threads that act like trip wires.'

So that’s the cordyceps.

Adam What I found most disturbing from Sheldrake’s book was that the mushrooms, you just assume that they grow inside the ant’s brain or something, but they actually replace the whole ant’s nervous system. So it’s like they’re being puppetered and the nervous system has been replaced by a network of mycellium. Which is a really freaky idea.

Willow Is this replicated in The Last of Us, Ren? Is it spore-based transmission or is it more bitey?

Adam Do they climb up high and get stitched to things?

Ren I honestly don’t know because I only saw one episode and by that time they’d got to the point of ‘the humans are the real threat’.

Adam They get quick to that point these days! It used to be nearly the end of a Romero film where you find that out.

Ren No, the real threat was already Melanie Lynskey by the time I saw an episode.

Willow Ah, I think it’s biting. I mean, I haven’t seen it so I don’t want to insult it, but —

Ren — It would be better if they climbed lamppost and rained spores down.

Adam YES.

If Junji Ito gets bought in to do an animated version I guess that’s what will happen.

Ren But yeah, this book does actually go pretty hard on the horror of people being not so much eaten by mushrooms, as taken over by mushrooms.

Adam Killer Mushrooms (metaphorically) Ate My Gran.

Willow Yes, it’s true, they don’t really eat her at all. If anything, they persuasively convert her to the cause of communism. The reason why communism is because this book has some obvious inspiration from The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney in 1955, which was very much a red scare schlock book about people being taken over, where the American individualism would be robbed by this group control and think. So to really labour that metaphor, Gran becomes a communist by the end of it.

Adam And actually, it does make being a mushroom sound pretty great! Like, when she has been… fungicised? What’s the word they used? Fungized? Something like that. She has utopic visions of a mushroom-colonized future, with no cars and no pollution, just mushrooms dotting the landscape.

Willow No war.

Adam Yeah, it all sounds lovely, to be honest.

Willow Can I sign you both up? I’ve got some literature here you might find interesting, just read it in your own time.

Ren Yeah, I mean it’s worth considering, I think. I’m not going to discount the option of becoming a fungus-person at this point.

But yeah, they go to the mushroom farm and find Jack, and he’s all mushroomified.

Adam That’s pretty wonderfully described, actually.

Ren Yeah, have we got that passage?

Adam Yes, well, we don’t know who it is at first, it just says ’the thing’.

'The Thing had scuttled into a corner. Now, for the first time, he had a good look at it. It crouched there, slyly watching him. Its eyes glittered from under the brim of a strange, tall hat.’

This description makes it sound like the Babadook.

‘It was thin and spindly, like a seedling grown in the dark. Its lips were like chalk. You could see its skin, as white and waxy as church candles, through its tattered clothes.

Hang on a mo! Maggot finally twigged. That’s not a World War Two flying suit!

Along with the top hat, the Thing wore a tail coat and trousers. The whole outfit was speckled with rust and mildew. It seemed to be mouldering away. But you could see it had once been a really posh suit — grey, with a tasteful blue stripe.’

Willow The ‘white and waxy as church candles’ was another texture that I enjoyed.

Ren Yeah, there’s some writing advice that’s like: ‘if you have two similies or metaphors on a page you should make them fight it out and only keep the best one’. Susan Gates is taking the entirely opposite approach.

Willow As I do when introducing any scene in a roleplaying game, just layer them in. It’s fine, no-one’s going to re-read it.

Adam And yeah, Gran is turned to the mushroom cause, and Maggot has to find a way to save his gran and possibly mad Jack Dash, as well.

Ren Which he does with the help of his gran’s own green tea, which Jack had bought back for her?

Adam Yes, a kind of medicinal tea.

Ren He manages to de-fungify his gran, but it’s too late for Jack, he’s been mushroomed too long.

Willow And he sacrifices himself to save them in a moment of heroism!

Adam And the mushrooms seem to be defeated and come back, and seem to be defeated and come back.

Ren Yeah, there’s several rounds of this.

Willow It’s quite interesting, I’m not sure how old Maggot is meant to be, but at the end of Chapter 9 he has quite a difficult choice — he choses to lie to his gran about the remaining sentience in Jack Dash, because Jack says he’s going to sacrifice himself, and Gran asks Maggot if Jack said anything and he kind of has this Telltale Games moment where he has these two difficult choices, and Gran will remember it.

And he choses to lie to her and say that Jack didn’t say anything and had become full mushroom, because his Gran would have been too sad to learn that there was something of him still in there. Which is quite heavy, if this is like, an eleven year-old child!

Adam He’s still in primary school, we know that.

Willow Yikes, that’s an adverse childhood experience right there.

Adam Yeah, and Maggot’s quite an interesting kid, I like the echolalia of when he’s overwhelmed or feeling awkward, Maggot makes an arfing noise like a seal.

Ren Oh yeah.

Willow There’s quite a lot of sounds in this as well. There’s the ptonging and the ptinging from the spit bowl, which is quite a significant artefact in the story. And the mushrooms make a crrrack noise. Sharp as a whip crack, it says. It’s quite a noisy book.

Adam It made me think of Philip Ridley a bit, with the sounds, like Vinegar Street.

Ren Yeah, where everyone's got their own little ticks and things they say, and sound effects.

Adam And it ends on a similar note to Revenge of the Toffee Monster, where a sequel might be set up.

Willow But I don’t think either of these actually got a sequel, it was just a narrative flourish.

Adam Yeah, I think it’s to make them seem more like 1950s shlocky horror films.

Ren But Susan Gates was clearly pretty interested in fungi, and did her research for this book, because at the end it’s talking about hyphae, the snaking arms of mycellial networks that stretch underground.

Adam And according to Merlin Sheldrake can somehow sense the end of a maze without actually touching it. That was one of the bits in his book that freaked me out, the idea that mycellium can navigate a maze and sense somehow that there’s a dead end without getting to the end of the path, and scientists do not know how they do this.

Ren Yeah, so I think Susan Gates was a bit ahead of her time, with this interest in mushrooms.

Willow She was right about sponges, as it turns out. You can put them through a sieve and they’ll come back together again. Correctly researched, Susan Gates, congratulations.

Adam Oh, maybe I shouldn't have been so dismissive of the toffee science in Revenge of the Toffee Monster.

Willow Also, she wrote A Brief History of Slime in 2003, and you don’t need to be a 90s kid to like slime, because kids today are bang into it.

Adam That’s true actually, slime’s really come back with a vengeance. They were making slime for science week at the school I’ve been doing my teacher training at just this week. Slime’s cool again.

Willow She wrote so many books!

Adam Can we finish off with some of those, are there any interesting titles coming up, Willow?

Willow I mean, I think Seahags, Suckers and Cobra Sharks is one, it has a cover that’s really quite something. This kind of jellyfish creature with a screaming baby face and shark fangs.

There’s also a trousers-based one? I think it’s called Killer Trousers, and a Killer Coat? There’s a few about items of clothing that devour people that I remember. Return of the Killer Coat, Revenge of the Killer Trousers, that kind of thing. The zip became their teeth and so on.

Oh my goodness, there’s one called Dr Fell’s Cabinet of Smells.

Ren A texture less often explored.

Adam They might be ones to look into in the future.

Ren Yeah, I found these ones pretty enjoyable!

Adam They’re fun, thank you -- were they your suggestion, Willow?

Willow I think so, I was discussing with you, Ren the possibility of me coming on the podcast again and you asked me which children’s horror or spooky books I remembered, and I had a flash of the cover and started googling ‘sticky orange creature children’s book?’ and I managed to find it.

I’ve never before noticed that the moon’s on the front cover, that he reached out towards.

Adam Oh yeah, of course.

Willow It’s great to revist this, a friend of mine saw the cover and it had a very strong sense memory for him as well.

Ren Well, thank you for joining us again, Willow. It’s great to have you on.

Adam Yes, thank you!

Willow Thank you for having me on!

Ren And as you are actually a primary school teacher, if you come across any children’s horror in your line of work that you want to discuss, just let us know.

Willow Yeah, that’s intersting. I’d have to ask my colleagues who teach older kids. There are a few spooky-ish books aimed at the Year 2 age group that I teach, like Lemony Snicket’s The Dark, which is a beautiful picture book that explores some spooky themes.

Adam We haven’t done any Lemony Snicket.

Ren And we haven’t done a picutre book round up for a while.

Adam Yeah, not for a while — we did Not Now, Bernard.

Ren Maybe we’ll have you back on for a picture book round-up.

Willow That would be wonderful, yeah, I’d love that!

Ren Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam Die a Harold, don’t become a Butterworth, spooky kids!

Willow And also if you do have toffee in your blood, please see a GP, it’s actually very serious.

Ren See you next time spooky kids!

Adam Bye!

Willow Bye!