Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Room 13 & Nightmare Stairs

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In this episode we talked about Room 13 and Nightmare Stairs by Robert Swindells.

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, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at behance.net/lettydraws

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray, and today we’re talking about Room 13 and Nightmare Stairs by Robert Swindells. Enjoy!

Ren: Hello Adam!

Adam: Hello!

Ren: It’s good to be back, we haven’t recorded in a little while.

Adam: It’s been a month, my beard has grown long and haggard.

Ren: Mine is still paltry, I’m afraid.

Adam: Not poultry — a chicken beard?

Ren: Urgh, that sounds horrible. But we’re back to talk about Room 13 and Nightmare Stairs, a little bit, mostly Room 13 as it’s more horror.

Adam: Okay, okay, I hadn’t read Nightmare Stairs, and I had assumed that given the name it would be a horror.

(Echoey sound effect) Nightmare Stairs!

It’s called that because the main character has a recurring nightmare about some stairs. So to be fair, the stairs themselves aren’t that nightmarish. I was expecting really kooky slanted angle staircase, maybe some steps bigger than others, perhaps spiracular. Maybe painted an unusual colour, that’s what I wanted.

But actually it’s ordinary stairs, in a nightmare. But that’s not a very good book title.

Ren: I hadn’t read either of these —

Adam: Had you read any Robert Swindells?

Ren: No, I hadn’t. I’d heard of them but I hadn’t read any. But, I mentioned my podcast, as I do, to my D&D group a couple of weeks ago. I’m getting cooler by the minute.

Adam: Was this in the middle of some climactic battle?: ‘Just a moment guys, just checking that you are listening to my podcast’ ‘No, we’re fighting this dire wolf Ren, come on!’

Ren: ‘I will help you with this battle… if you all promise that you’re listening to my podcast’

Adam: ‘If you answer me these questions three: have you listened to my podcast? Have you listened to my podcast? Have you listened to my podcast?’

Ren: But yes, one of them said: ‘Oh, you should do that book about Dracula living in a hotel in Whitby’. So shoutout to Zoe, because here we are.

Adam: As long as there isn’t another book about Dracula living in a hotel in Whitby.

Peter hadn’t read any either, I asked him and he said ‘Oh, it sounds like a swindle’, his propensity for puns having put him off any of the guy’s books.

I had. As a kid I read a few Robert Swindells books, I read Brother in the Land, which was probably the first post-apocalyptic book I’d read, and is very focussed on the relationship between these two brothers: it’s an older brother trying to look out for a younger brother while they both slowly die of radiation poisoning.

Ren: Hmmm.

Adam: And having a younger brother I could imagine this situation. It’s a little bit like Grave of the Fireflies, in its relentless bleakness. It’s not as pretty or as lovable, perhaps. But that one was quite harrowing, and really stayed with me.

And I also read Stone Cold from 1993, which is a very disturbing book for slightly older readers than the ones we’re looking at. It’s a tale told from two perspectives, one chapter is told from the perspective of a young homeless person, and then alternate chapters are told from the perspective of a self-appointed vigilante serial-killer who turns out to be murdering the homeless people. And inevitably their two paths horrifically collide.

Ren: Crikey.

Adam: It’s a really nasty work, to be honest. It describes the experiences of being young and homeless very convincingly and with a great deal of compassion, but it doesn’t skimp out on the bleakness. It’s a pretty rough time, that book — probably the darkest thing I read as a kid. It’s not so much scary as just horrifying. It’s very much rooted in reality, just a very grim and upsetting book.

I think it really stayed with me. Perhaps one of the reasons that I tend to have quite a lot of homeless friends, and I find it all but impossible to just ignore people who are homeless or on the streets, and I do wonder if that book is at least somewhat the reason why. It definitely brings home the vulnerabilities of being in that situation.

So it’s a very powerful book, and in a sense I’d recommend it, but it’s really heavy going for a young audience.

Ren: Room 13 is just a bit of a lark, really.

Adam: It is! These are for a slightly younger audience, and a bit more fun than the Swindells I’d read. Which is possibly better for this podcast, really. I think I would struggle making jokes when talking about Stone Cold.

Ren: Room 13 is from 1989, which you can tell by the kids dancing to Madonna at the disco.

Adam: No the kids still dance to Madonna, don’t they!

Ren: Uhhh…. Information not found. But also by the the cavalier manner in which a teacher grabs a disobedient boy by his hair and yanks him around. I feel like this might not fly these days.

But then again, Swindells was a teacher so maybe it was just wish fulfilment.

It’s also another instalment in the theme of ‘sinister things in British seaside hotels’.

Adam: Oh gosh yes, we really are going all out on that theme!

Ren: It’s good yes, when we make the thematic collections of our podcast that will be one strand.

Adam: You’re right, that is what the cool kids do isn’t it. Evolution of Horror has the folk horror and the zombie. We’d have… texture, that would be all of them. The hotel. The ones in which Adam and Ren make obscure ‘90s comedy references that none of the listeners appreciate, again that would probably be most of them.

What else have we covered? Houses.

Ren: Weird houses.

According to the dedication at the front, it was inspired by ‘a real school trip to Whitby by Year Two, from Mandale Middle School in Bradford, 1987’. Which was a real school, which is now closed.

Adam: Do you know if it was a school that Swindells worked at?

Ren: No, I couldn’t find any more information. That would make sense, I guess.

Adam: It would be quite odd if that was just a random school trip that he observed while in Whitby. So maybe it’s his students that he’s dedicating it to.

Ren: Ohh, that makes sense.

Adam: What did you think?

Ren: I thought there was some mystery about a middle school class going to Whitby and meeting a vampire!

Adam: … So you thought this book was based on real events, basically?

Ren: I thought that’s what it was implying!

Adam: Maybe that’s all part of the rich, fictional tapestry.

Ren: Anyway.

Adam: Anyway. Drawn from real events —

Ren: — whether there are a Dracula in a hotel room or just the experience of taking 13 year-olds to Whitby.

Our protagonist is Fliss, about 13 years old and going on a class trip away to Whitby. The night before she leaves, she has a foreboding, and rhyming, dream about her feet leading her against her will to a sinister house, she goes past the ‘gate of fate’, and the ‘the keep of sleep’, and over the threshold of room 13, which is ‘the room of doom’.

Adam: It does feel like we’re continuing this D&D theme. That could be straight out of Knightmare on TV.

Ren: In this room she sees a shape in a box, and smells damp earth and the voice tells her she’s seeing the ‘bed of dread’.

(Sinister organ music)

So Fliss is pretty freaked out, but when morning comes she gets over her fear and decides to go on the trip anyway.

On the couch to Whitby we meet Fliss’s best friend Lisa, Gary Bazzard, a loudmouth boy who starts talking about Dracula living in Whitby —

Adam: That’s a great name.

Ren: Yes. And Ellie-May, who’s a student that no-one really likes very much.

When the coach stops for a toilet break, Fliss’s friend Lisa uncharacteristically breaks the rules and goes to the shop to buy a novelty torch in the shape of a dragon.

When Fliss asks her why she did it, she says ‘it’s as though my feet were going by themselves’ (this will be important later)

Adam: The dark powers of consumerism!

Ren: So they arrive at the Crow’s Nest Hotel in Whitby, to find that it has the same image of the bird on the gate that Fliss saw in her dream.

(Sinister organ music returns)

Adam: Which also rather neatly in the chapter headings, the gate of the hotel forms the heading, you have the number and within the gate there’s a little picture representing what’s going to happen in that chapter. And for chapter 13, the chapter itself is wholly blank.

Ren: Yes, I mean, was it wholly blank to you?

Adam: What?! Do I have to hold it up to the light or something?

Ren: Well, mine was blank because it was the e-book version. But Zoe was saying that her edition when she was a kid looked blank at first, but it had glow in the dark writing saying something.

Adam: That’s amazing!

I’ve misplaced my copy, I can’t do it right now. In fact I was just trying to do it with my edition of Nightmare Stairs, which of course didn’t work. Although it did give me a jolt of amazement, because I turned to chapter 13 of Nightmare Stairs and obviously there was writing on the page! But I have mislaid it somewhere, sorry.

Ren: Can we break with tradition and do a very early Texture of the Week?

Adam: Yes, sure, I’ve got a comb right here!

Ren: Brilliant.

(Comb and tapping noises)

Adam: (singing) Texture!

Ren: Texture!

Adam: Of the week!

Ren: Of the week!

Because, I just talked about the gate, and my Texture of the Week is the gate.

So.

Adam: Is a gate a texture??

Ren: Hang on Adam, let me read this.

‘She came to a gate. It was made of iron, worked into curly patterns. Near the top was a bit that was supposed to be a bird in flight — a seagull perhaps — but the gate had been painted black, and the paint had run and hardened into little stalactites along the bird’s wings, making it look like a bat’

Adam: Yeah, that’s cute.

Ren: Lil paint stalactites!

Adam: Well mine was the stick of rock.

Ren: Oh yes.

Adam: Spoiler warning, but we already know this a Dracula story, and I think this was foregrounded enough. Is it Gary who has the rock?

Ren: Yes, I believe so.

Adam: Well one of the boys buys this big stick of rock and slips it into their trouser leg in order to hide it from the teachers, and sneaks it back to their bedroom to gnaw on in bed, because young boys are disgusting and sticky.

But throughout the book his gnawing and licking sharpens the tip of the rock, until it is usable as a stake, a candy-cane stake, to plunge into the heart of Dracula!

Ren: It’s so good, I love it so much.

Adam: So I very much enjoyed the idea of plunging a big stick of rock into a body. I mean, it would shatter, but presumably it would all shatter into the body and the glucose and the blood would all mix together. You’ve got the blood dripping down the candy, and then licking it off.

Ren: Blood and peppermint and boy-saliva.

Adam: All of that was my texture!

It was like the most illogical adventure game puzzle ever.

Ren: I’m very into this. I’ve been telling people about it like, ‘I’ve just been reading this book where they stake Dracula with a sharpened piece of seaside rock’.

Adam: That was my favourite bit too.

Ren: I did also used to do that. Not stake Dracula. But I did used to suck pieces of rock until they had a very sharp point. Until they hurt my tongue.

Adam: Is that why you did it? As a kind of self-punishment?

Ren: No, no. I just liked it.

Adam: If it had been me as kid, that’s why I’d have done it. Catholic guilt.

Ren: But I had a thorough enjoyment of that whole idea.

Adam: And I bet Dracula didn’t see it coming. He spent all of his time going: ‘I’ve got to be on the lookout for wooden stakes’ but then a boy comes in with a stick of rock, and he’s like, that’s fine, it’s a stick of rock, what’s that going to do? Then suddenly, ‘Oh my god my heart! How did that possibly happen!’

Ren: Are sticks of rock a particularly British thing? Maybe calling it rock is. It’s just like a candy cane, without a hook for hanging on things.

Adam: Yeah, it’s a stick of candy and often there’s a word or a picture running all the way through it. Like…

Ren: Blackpool.

Adam: Blackpool running all the way through it.

Ren: Because if our podcast statistics are correct, we have a number of international listeners.

Adam: We don’t have to specify numbers, but it’s a number.

Ren: Yeah, a number!

Adam: Are you sure this isn’t your claim of the week? ‘A number’ of people are listening to this internationally.

Ren: Yeah, it might be. A number of people not from our benighted island are listening to this podcast.

Adam: Or beleaguered island, as it very much is.

Right, so. They’ve gone on a coach. Do you have any particular coach memories? I was very travel sick as a child.

Ren: Me too. My particular coach memory is throwing up all over myself, and all the other kids on the coach having to file off past me, with my skirt covered in sick. So.

Adam: Yeah, that’s awful. Sorry. Coaches were never that fun, were they?

Ren: Luckily we didn’t get any vivid descriptions of coach sick in this book.

Adam: But you have now lovingly provided one for our listeners, just in case you were worried of missing out.

Ren: So they get to the hotel, there’s this ominous gate with its stalactites of paint. Fliss notices an unmarked room on her hallway.

Adam: And the teacher says it’s just a linen closet, probably.

Ren: Yes, but that night Fliss is lying awake hen she hears a sort of whimpering, crying noise. At first she thinks it’s from the next door room, but then she realises it’s coming from behind the unmarked door, the one that she’s been told is a linen cupboard.

When she goes into the corridor to look at it, she sees the number 13 on the door, that wasn’t there before.

The next day the kids go for a walk, and Ellie-May drops behind, feeling sick and dizzy. Another boy, David Trotter, says that he saw her creeping about in the middle of the night. But Ellie-May claims that she was asleep all night.

Adam: But he knows what pyjamas she was wearing. Ellie-May says ‘Urgh, you must have been creeping around looking at the girls in our bedroom!’ But it seems she might have been sleepwalking.

As my brother used to do. He was amazing at sleepwalking as a kid, he’d walk very fast up and down the landing upstairs in our house, and would repeat things to himself like ‘One, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five’.

And when he got really into gaming when he was 8 or so, he’d spend hours and hours playing Ocarina of Time from early in the morning, and he must have been having this dream where he was in Ocarina of Time, because honestly, I remember him in a trance waving his arm about and saying ‘I’ll help you Link! I’ll help you Link!’

He says he doesn’t really remember it, but it was quite a scary thing to witness. Have you ever sleepwalked?

Ren: No, I’ve never encountered it either. I’ve seen someone sleeping with their eyes open and that was creepy enough, to be honest!

Adam: Peter can do that. Pete’s one of the worst people to sleep next to in a bed. He’ll just wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, he might have sleep apnea, because he’ll just wake up really suddenly and go: (loud gasping breath).

Ren: Fliss starts to believe that Ellie-May was in the cupboard that night, and gathers Lisa and Trot and Gary to join her.

So they meet on the landing at half 11 and they all see the number 13 materialise on the door. Which I’ll just read the description of:

‘As Gary whispered, ‘Zero,’ they heard the town clock chime, then strike. At about the fourth stroke they noticed a small shapeless mark on the door, and Lisa moved the torch slightly to get it in the centre of her beam. It was like a stain, lighter than the surrounding woodwork. As stroke followed stroke, the stain seemed to shrink and become paler, and then to divide, becoming two whiteish blobs whose shapes altered until, but the twelfth stroke, they formed the figures one and three. As the echo died, they heard a door close somewhere below.’

So the number has formed on the door, and they They see Ellie-May, looking as though she’s sleep walking, seemingly, towards Room 13. The four of them start to physically restrain her, and pin her to the floor, but she still asleep tries to fight to get into the room.*

The teachers find them, but they end up deciding that Ellie-May was sleepwalking and the kids were worried about her, so they don’t get too badly punished.

On their last day in Whitby, Fliss goes with Gary to the Dracula Experience, which is a kind of cheesy seaside, ghost train without a train?

Adam: I was just imagining it like the London dungeons, but much diddlier and cheaper.

Ren: Yeah, a bargain at 50p.

Adam: Oh my God, that’s great.

Ren: This was 1989 though, it was one of those thick 50ps, if you remember.

Adam: Hamburgers were a penny then!

Ren: Fliss panics when she’s in this exhibit and and tries to escape but she ends up in a backstage area with Sal Haggerlythe, who she’d seen outside the hotel at the bus stop, and people had said ‘Oh that’s the mad woman’. But Sal tells her the history of the Crow’s Nest and its inhabitant.

So Dracula who now occupies Room 13, used to live in a gatehouse at Whitby Abbey, preying on unsuspecting tourists.

But when the gatehouse was hit by shells in the First World War, he had to find a new place to live. He choses the house that became the Crow’s Nest, where Sal was a chamber maid.

The young daughter of the house falls sick, wasting away, the doctor thinks she’s been walking in her sleep. Her family take her away and she recovers instantly. The house stands empty, having this aura of creepiness about it. Occasionally someone tries to live in, but moves out soon.

But then it becomes the hotel, and now Dracula’s got visiting coach loads of children each week, to —

Adam: — snack upon.

Ren: Snack upon to his heart’s desire. Sal somehow knows about Fliss’s dream from the beginning of the story, and tells her she’ll know what to do when the time comes.

And throughout the story these four kids have been finding or buying these little bits and pieces, Lisa has the torch, Gary has the stick of rock, Fliss found a big heavy stone, and then —

Adam: — other boy.

Ren: Other boy buys a cheap plastic kite that breaks almost instantly, and then there’s this great coming together of the kids’ various knick-knacks into a vampire fighting kit. In the style of Lord of the Rings ‘You have my axe, you have my bow’ except it’s ‘You have the cross-shaped frame of my broken kite, and my novelty dragon-shaped torch and my sticky piece of rock covered in bed fluff’.

Adam: So definitely more in the 90s point-and-click adventure game style.

Ren: And so the next night they gather outside the hallway and when it becomes Room 13 they break inside. Lisa shines the torch in his eyes, Trot holds the cross-shaped kite frame out, Gary brings the stick of rock to the vampire’s chest, and Fliss hammers it in with her big flat stone.

I’ll just read the description of Dracula when they find him.

Adam: Oh yeah, he’s all gnarled and ratty.

Ren: ‘He lay with his hands crossed on his breast and his eyes closed. He was thin, and small, and dirty. His face was dead white, except for a dark smudge on the forehead and a brown crust about the bluish lips. A fleece of pale, tangled hair, grey with dust, covered the skull, falling onto the bed of earth which covered the bottom of the coffin. His fingernails were split and blackened, and a disgusting smell rose from the single, filthy garment he wore, which looked like a nightshirt or shroud’.

Urghhh.

Adam: A good Nosferatu! How you picture the Murnau silent film version, I think. Or at least I did. All sallow and spindly, withered and rat-like.

Ren: Dirt in the creases of his skin.

So they struggle and they manage to drive this peppermint-smelling stake through his chest, and spill onto the hallway. The teachers run up the stairs to find that the room is just a cupboard once again.

Adam: And go (man shaking his fist in a cartoon voice) ‘Why you kids!’

Ren: And the story ends on the bus back, with Ellie-May telling Felicity that she knows what they did for her, and that she’s —

Adam: A witch! I mean, how does she know?

Ren: It’s a good question.

Adam: But yes, that she’s finally free of Dracula and is going to be a nice well-adjusted kid from now on, who has friends.

And apparently their adventures continue. So really, instead of being led down the Nightmare Stairs by its misrepresentative title, we probably should have read Inside the Worm from 1994, which is a sequel.

Ren: Oops. Sorry.

Adam: So it’s set in the same school, same kids, and they dress up as a giant worm and seemingly end up being possessed by the spirit of the giant worm.

Ren: Oh my goodness, we’ll have to come back to that.

Adam: Yeah, well we haven’t done the sequel to Interstellar Pig, which was requested as well in one of the emails we got.

So maybe we could have a sequel episode.

Ren: Yep, that sounds good.

Adam: So did you enjoy this?

Ren: I did, yes. It was lively and full of slightly odd slang. My favourite example was someone saying ‘she’s chuffed to little mint balls’

Adam: That is quite odd.

Ren: To mean, she’s pleased. That’s what chuffed means, I don’t know what the little mint balls are there for. But I enjoyed that.

The kids are from Bradford, so some Northern slang.

Adam: I think all of Swindells stuff… he was born in Bradford, he’s a Yorkshire man.

Ren: It didn’t have a brass band in it, though.

Adam: It didn’t. But I do think there’s something quite Northern about his books. They’re enjoyably no-nonsense, in a lot of ways. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that the girls who are our protagonists in these two books are mean exactly, but they’re not super lovely and likeable either. They’re quite snarky.

Ren: I guess it’s interesting that we’ve chosen ones with lots of main female characters. But they remind me a little bit of Diana Wynne Jones’s characters, who are also pretty no-nonsense.

Adam: Which I think works quite well when you have characters encountering supernatural events. There’s something quite enjoyable about having characters like ‘Oh, this is annoying, better get on with it’, rather than having characters in a constant state of fear or astonishment.

They do a good job. They defeat Dracula! Better than I would have managed at 13, that’s for sure. I don’t think I’d have even dared go in The Dracula Experience, let alone face the real Dracula!

So I was trying to find a pdf of this book, for the quotes. But instead I seem to have downloaded a teaching guide to Room 13. It’s all formatted in Comic Sans, like all good teaching guides. We’ve got stuff about the National Curriculum objectives.

Stuff about getting in the mood, it says that if you’re reading this book to pupils you should probably adjust the lighting, and add sound effects. Which is what I try to do with the podcast, although lighting is something that you as a listener will have to adjust for yourself. So if you have a dimmer, use that. Or listen to our podcast while walking in the woods.

Ren: As our sometime-guest Alex is known to do.

Adam: But not while crossing the road. After I got hit by the car a few weeks back, my mum keeps reminding me to take off my headphones when I’m crossing the road. So I’m saying that to you as well.

Oh, that’s ambitious. Hot seating activity, where you get the pupils to play one of the characters and they have to answer questions. I don’t know if you’d want to —

Ren: Go for it! Try me.

Adam: Okay, which character do you want to be?

Ren: Umm, I’ll be Gary.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Alright Gary? How do you feel about Kirsty then?

Gary: Um, she’s in a different book, so I don’t know her.

Adam: Very good! I was trying to catch you out, Gary. A different plane of existence.

How do you feel about Fliss?

Gary: Well, I mean, she’s a girl innit. She’s alright. She came in the Dracula Experience with me, I didn’t think she would I thought she was too chicken. I mean, she was too chicken. She ran away. But she’s alright, I guess.

Adam: So you liked the Dracula Experience, Gary?

Gary: Yeah! I mean, it wasn’t scary enough. Like, obviously I wouldn’t be scared.

Adam: Yeah, sure.

Gary: But even the real Dracula wasn’t that scary.

Adam: Is that true, really? The actual Dracula wasn’t scary.

Gary: Nah nah nah, it was fine. We just got on with it.

Adam: So what did you do, how did you defeat Dracula?

Gary: It was really cool actually, cause I had this stick of rock —

Adam: What? A stick of rock?

Gary: And it was the biggest stick of rock that anyone’d ever seen.

Adam: What, you mean like a stalactite, or a bit of granite?

Gary: Nah, nah! Like rock that you eat, obviously! And like I had to hide it down my trouser leg from the teachers so no-one knew I had it —

Adam: What? Don’t tell me that, that’s weird! Alright Gary, so you had this stick of rock, what did you do with that one?

Gary: Well I had it in my bed, cause we had to stay awake. So I just sucked on this bit of rock for hours, it was great.

Adam: That’s gross, but okay.

Gary: Yeah, and then it got this really good point on it, it was really pointy. It was really impressive.

Adam: Alright, but how on earth did that help you defeat Dracula?

Gary: Well obviously, to defeat Dracula you have to put a stake through his heart, everyone knows that.

Adam: But a stick of rock’s not a stake, is it? It’s a stick of rock.

Gary: It’s a pointy stick of rock!

Adam: Now come on, that’s nonsense Gary. You’re telling me porky-pies.

Gary: Excuse me, excuse me, I’m the one who beat the actual Dracula! So. I don’t know who you are, I don’t even know who I’m talking to —

Adam: — I’m Adam Whybray, and I have a podcast.

Gary: Yeah, I mean I don’t even know what that is, it’s 1989.

Adam: Yeah, you’re still in the ‘80s. Do you like Madonna Gary?

Gary: Yeah, I guess. She’s fit innit.

Adam: Come on mate, look. Get off my podcast mate. You come on here, you tell lies about defeating Dracula with a stick of rock —

Gary: Well bog off, Adam! Bog off.

Adam: Can we cut him off, Ren?

Ren: Yeah, right. Bye Gary.

Adam: Well. I think that’s why you don’t have children on the podcast.

Ren: I think so, yeah.

Adam: Well thanks for that. I have a list of spooky ideas. I don’t really understand how they’re ideas. It says ’Spooky Ideas!!!!!!’ In Comic Sans and then it’s got half a dozen exclamation marks and then lots of clip art pictures of ghosts.

And it says: Haunted house! Hotel! Churchyard! Hospital! School! Street! Cathedral! Cemetery! Ghosts! Friends! Family! Children! Monsters! Creatures! Animals! Werewolf! Poltergeist!

Ren: Wh-what?

Adam: Pretty spooky!

Ren: What are we doing with all these things?

Adam: I don’t know! They’re spooky. They’re spooky ideas! OoOoOohhh your family!

I guess you’re meant to take them like ‘oh what if your family were in hospital and they were dying so they were going to end up in the churchyard, ooh pretty spooky’.

What about if there was a street, and on that street was some animals?

Ren: Yeah?

Adam: And the animals ran a hotel… a hotel for monsters! Pretty spooky.

You can write a news report, I don’t think we have time to do that. So that’s the lesson, really. I guess the kids learn how to distinguish spooky things from not spooky things, which is a pretty important life skill.

Ren: It is, yeah. And one we’re hoping to cultivate through this podcast.

Adam: If you’re listening kids, and your teacher asks why you haven’t done your homework, you can say ‘actually I was teaching myself, as an autodidact, by listening to Still Scared and I learned more from that than I could from any book learning from you’. And if you get in trouble, that’s on you, not on us.

Right, Nightmare Stairs.

Ren: Nightmare Stairs.

Adam: So, more of a thriller.

Ren: With some supernatural touches. It’s from 1997, so we’re zipping forward almost a decade. With another 13 year-old girl protagonist, Kirsty Miller. It’s a kind of reincarnation murder mystery.

Ever since Kirsty was a baby she’s had reoccurring dreams about falling down stairs. She knows details from the past, and from her mum’s past, that there’s no way she could know. But she does.

Do you want to read the description of the nightmare?

Adam:

‘I’m in the dark at the top of the stairs. Steep, narrow stairs. I have to get myself down these stairs but there’s something wrong with my legs. They’re stiff. It hurts me to walk. I’m standing there, sort of gathering myself to make the effort when I see movement out of the corner of my eye. Somebody or something comes out of the spare bedroom, fast and quiet. I don’t have time to feel scared. Whoever or whatever it is puts a hand or paw in the middle of my back and shoves and I toppled forward, crashing down the stairs in a chaos of terror, shock and pain. I never hit the bottom. I wake up, damp and shaking. For a short time I can actually feel the pain, hear the crashing row my falling body makes. I lie gasping, knowing that if I ever reach the foot of the stairs asleep, I’ll never wake’.

Nightmare Stairs!

Ren: Nightmare Stairs!

So she works out eventually that the reason she knows these things is because she is the reincarnation of her grandmother, and the reason she dreams about falling down stairs is because that’s how her grandma died, and contrary to the family story, she was pushed.

So the story is about Kirsty trying to work out who killed her former self. And the obvious candidate is her mean Aunt Anne —

Adam: — because she’s mean!

Ren: She’s such a meanie.

Adam: Which is basically Kirsty’s only evidence. Just like, my Aunt, sometimes when someone wants to get into a parking space she’ll take a really long time to vacate the parking space, so QED, she’s a murderer.

I just thought she was a bit presumptive, to be honest.

Ren: Is this your Claim of the Week?

Adam: Right, yeah. (Clears throat, comes out with some kind of Balrog croak) Claim —

Oh god, what was that? It’s like a Mr Bean voice.

(Continues in a Mr Bean voice) Claim of the Week!

I’m not above silly voices, Ren.

Yeah, so, ‘aunt, you’re a murderer. I don’t have any evidence at all but I’ve got this intuition, dammit!’

Ren: So she sets out to scare Anne into confessing, by sending her creepy post —

Adam: Well, threatening letters.

Ren: Threatening letters, yeah. Including a very nostalgic trip down memory name, she uses Encarta which was an encyclopaedia CD-Rom that I used to do my primary school homework with.

Adam Was that the one that had mind maze on it?

Ren: I don’t know, it was just like an encyclopaedia that was on your computer.

She finds a photo of an Egyptian mummy, and prints that out and sends it to Anne with the caption ‘Mummy’s back!’. She’s very pleased with this.

Adam: I quite liked the fact that as the narrator she points out, ‘This was really good, I was really pleased with this. I sent this one first.

Because what’s a threatening letter without a bad pun in it. If any of my family members are ever kidnapped I’ll be really disappointed if the letter they send doesn’t have a pun or two.

Ren: I don’t have terribly much to say about this book.

Adam: It’s quite zippy, which is the word you used to describe Room 13, it paces along quite nicely. And it does have a twist in its tail, I don’t know if we should reveal it or not.

Ren: I think we should. So, it turns out that Anne was not the one who pushed her mother down the stairs, it was Kirsty’s mother. So the mean, childless, career-driven woman is not, in fact, the murderer. It’s the seemingly kind maternal figure.

Adam: And I actually quite liked this as an exploration of cognitive dissonance, or selective bias, I suppose. Because throughout most of the book, when she thinks it’s her Aunt Anne she says, ‘She’s a monster, she’s 100% a villain, she should be locked away for life. She’s absolutely evil.’

And then when it turns out to be her mum she suddenly wants to make excuses for her, and says ‘Well, I still love her. I’m sure she had her reasons. She’s not bad really.’ Which I thought was quite perceptive, I don’t know how many kids would pick up on that, but I thought it was quite a useful message, I guess.

Ren: Yeah, true. She does a very quick turnabout in her thinking. ‘Oh, she didn’t mean to push her down the stairs, it wasn’t premeditated, she just snapped.’

Adam: And of course you have the strange situation that she was murdered by her own mother, in a past life, who was also her daughter.

Back to the Future-like scenario.

Ren: So, do you have any further thoughts?

Adam: Not really. As I say these two were a bit lighter in tone than the ones that I read as a kid, but they do still have this sense of dread to them. I think he’s very good at building up a sense of dark things going on.

There’s something very conspiratorial about the tone of these books. I guess they do tend towards the thriller, in as much as the character is trying to work out what’s happening. They definitely kept me reading, I never felt bored reading them.

Generally I think I quite like Swindells, and he’s great at book titles. He’s released a lot and if I can just read out some of the titles, it’s almost like reading out the titles of a video nasties list. Because some of these titles are so suggestive.

So I’m just going to read a few of them as he has written a lot, but starting in the early 1970s we have:

  • When Darkness Comes
  • Voyage to Valhalla
  • World-Eater
  • The Thousand Eyes of Night
  • A Serpent’s Tooth
  • Follow A Shadow
  • Unbeliever
  • The Last Bus
  • Smash!
  • Abomination
  • Doodlebug Alley
  • Wrecked
  • Blitzed
  • Branded
  • SnakeBite
  • Burn Out
  • The Tunnel

And ‘A Skull in Shadow’s Lane’.

Ren: Ooh-hoo-hoo! I’d definitely be happy to come back to some Swindells, at some point.

Do you have a sign-off?

Adam: Goodbye spooky kids, and if you have a nightmare don’t get too STAIRED!!

Like… scared.

Ren: Alright. See you next time spooky kids!

Adam: It’s the pun I’m going to put in my threatening letter, alright.

Ren: Til next time!

Adam: Bye!

  • Apologies, I messed up the chronology here! On the first night that the kids see Ellie-May sleepwalking, they don’t try to restrain her. They just see her enter the room and return, still asleep, 45 minutes later. It’s on the second night that they physically stop her entering.

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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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