This episode we talked about The Dark Portal by Robin Jarvis from 1989, book one of the Deptford Mice trilogy.

Many thanks again to Ava! Follow them on twitter at @avafoxfort.

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

This is the Decemberists song mentioned in the episode.

The sound effects and music used were as follows:

priestjd - Spooky Wood ShadyDave - Small Adventurers Hannebu - Frying dekstromoramid - A Prosimetrical Cubavit Lamia Bhagavadgita

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 joined by returning guest Ava Foxfort to talk about The Dark Portal, the first book in the Deptford Mice trilogy by Robin Jarvis.

Ren: Good evening, Adam, and Ava, returning guest, friend of the show, friend of…rats.

Ava: Friend of rats. That’s what they call me.

Adam: (plaintive) What am I a friend of?

Ren: Toucans!

Adam: Oh yeah, friend of toucans! Hm!

Ren: We’re here, we’re gathered here to talk about The Dark Portal —

Adam: You make it sound like a funeral!

Ava: The Dark Portal has passed from us.

Ren: Passed too soon, only published in 1989. Written and illustrated by Robin Jarvis, the first book in the Deptford Mice trilogy, and possibly the most disturbing book — well, we did doThe Witches.

Adam: It’s like Redwall, ON ACID!!

Ava: Oh dear.

It’s certainly the most anti-cat book that you’ve discussed. I’m glad to be here for that. I do actually love cats, for the record.

Adam: But is it just to balance out all our anti-dog rhetoric?

Ava: You’re just so anti-dog on this it feels like it’s about time.

Adam: To be fair, I think last time round I did talk about kittens eating rats, I believe. In relation to Tom Kitten, we were trying to balance out the narrative.

Sadly, rats do not come out any better in this book than they have previously. Arguably, they are possessed by evil plague gas, or something, so. They know not what they do. If they had just been left to their own devices they would just be licking slime from off the walls, apparently.

Ren: Yeah, that is something I wanted to discuss — the inherent evilness of the rats, or not.

Adam: They’re a great bunch of lads.

Ren: So, yeah. To give a sense of the tone of this book I wanted to read the very first paragraph, which goes:

"When a mouse is born he has to fight to survive. There are many enemies – owls, foxes and of course, cats; but mice suffer far more at our hands. I have heard of a whole family of kind, gentle mice, wiped out by eating poison – four generations gone and only the baby left because it was too small to eat solids."

Which kind of feels like a deliberate staking of grimness.

Adam: Darwinian territory.

Ren: If you can’t handle this, go no further. That is also the only place in the book where humans are mentioned —

Adam: Well, there’s cars mentioned. But I guess they are somewhat discussed as disembodied, autonomous car-beings, rather than driven by people.

So, did you cross the threshold as a kid. Did you read this? I don’t think I got any further than the cover.

Ren: Which cover was that?

Adam: The cover as drawn by Jarvis himself, I think.

Ren: The red eyes peering out of the grill.

Adam: Yeah. I think I had The Woven Path as a kid, which is another one of his that has a terrified and slightly scrabbly-looking teddy bear and a big scarab beetle like thing, and I remember finding the cover quite troubling in a way that I found quite hard to place. I don’t know what it is about his drawing style that I find so disturbing.

Ren: It’s quite, ah, gloopy but —

Adam: — Not quite gloopy.

Ava: Gloopy and dry?

Ren: Kind of bulbous, fleshy?

Adam: Yeah, gloopy and dry at the same time, I get that. Or kind of like sackcloth, like the characters have been stuffed and they’re living taxidermy creatures.

Ava: It’s all a bit Hornimnn museum, isn’t it.*

Adam: Yeah!

Ren: But no, I hadn’t heard of Robin Jarvis and his frightening books until very recently.

Adam: Oh! What about you, Ava?

Ava: I read them all when I was little, and I could barely remember anything about them except the true nature of Jupiter as revealed at the end of this one. That was the one thing that stuck in my head about it.

I remember loving them, I remember being really gripped by them. I don’t remember being scared, but I think that’s because I don’t remember fear except in the most extreme circumstances. I don’t know if I repressed that, or if I was just too used to ridiculous fantastical tales that I didn’t think of it as being real.

For me it’s got that thing of thinking about being a mouse and being at that scale, that is actually more scary than the Lovecraftian nightmarishness.

Adam: We’re back to our conversation about The Witches!

Ava: I’m sorry! I do this every time!

Adam: Your obsession with being turned into a mouse.

Ava: I wanted to be a mouse, I didn’t want to be a mouse. It was a complicated childhood. I was somewhere on the mouse spectrum, but not all the way.

Anyway. It had that feeling as I was reading through it of half-remembered stuff, and as soon as something happened I’d be like ‘Oh yeah, I remember!’, but it felt very familiar and I warmed to the characters immediately. But I still couldn’t tell you anything about what happens in the next books.

Adam: Well, there is a lot of plot to keep track of.

Ava: There’s a lot of plot! A lot of things. And it’s so happy to just bounce between them mid-paragraph in a way that I really like, but is quite jarring.

Adam: It’s sort of like Tarantino plotting, you know?

Ava: It’s not all in order at all, is it? There’s big leaps forward and back at different times.

Adam: Lots of cross-cutting.

Ava: I think I got a bit bewildered, possibly by the rat’s names. There felt like a bit where I couldn’t place the order of events, the ritual of Blackheath and where that happened in relation to everything else.

Adam: I spent quite a lot of time trying to geographically map where everything was, and of course you are on that mouse scale, so this must be quite a small borough of London, presumably? I found it quite interesting the talk of the countryside, as to whether the mice actually were in the countryside or whether when they said the countryside they just meant someone’s suburban garden.

Ava: I feel like the next book is significantly more rural, if I recall. But how they scale these distances is an interesting question. They are fast little scurriers, the old mice.

Adam: Right, so Ren, do you want a go at summing up the plot of this.

Ren: Yeah, okay. So this is just a little summary so we can get a grip on where we are and then spiral out into chaos from there.

So the book’s heroes are the mice, who live above ground in The Skirtings. The villains are the rats, who live in the sewer. These two worlds are separated by the Grill, and it’s through the Grill that a mouse called Albert finds himself slipping as our story begins. Albert finds another lost mouse called Piccadilly, and they are unlucky enough to come across the shrine to Jupiter, the unseen God who the rats worship.

The same day that Albert disappears, his children Audrey and Arthur are receiving their mousebrasses, which will define their destiny. But there’s something unusual about the mousebrass that Audrey gets, and as she enters the sewers as well to look for her father, her and her companions become entangled in Jupiter’s plan.

Aside from Jupiter - Audrey, her brother Arthur, city mouse Picadilly, tiny country mouse Twit and the sensitive albino mouse Oswald also have to deal with the very real dangers of the ordinary sewer rats, and they’re known desire to peel and eat mice.

Ava: shudders

Adam: Nothing wrong with a good peelin’!

Ava: It’s so dark! It’s one of the things that I find really strange about it, it’s so shudderingly horrible to have these animals not just behaving in a more human way, but also in this really disturbingly violent way.

I mean, rats don’t peel anything, right? They’re classic gnawers. And if there was just a lot of gnawing going on, that would be a different kind of horror.

Adam: And it does give us the worst of both worlds, basically. They have the ‘eat anything, everything goes’ gnawing rapacity of rats, and their animalistic instincts but also the base cunning and sadism of humans.

Ren: Yeah! We get several examples of this rat tendency towards extreme violence to one another. For example, a rat called One-Eyed Jake becomes important later in the book when he captures Audrey, he says that the female rat that took his eye is now called Peg-Leg Meg, on account of him tearing her leg off.

We learn about a rat called Smiler, who lied to Morgan, Jupiter’s right-hand rat, and had his lips sliced off in return.

Ava: Ahhhhh.

Adam: Banter, Ren! Harmless banter.

Ava: And I can’t even remember who it is, but someone ends up hiding in a pile of mouse skins! Peeled mouse remnants. And it’s — Oh my God.

Adam: If you think about that in human terms there’s nothing wrong with that, you wouldn’t have an issue with hiding under a pile of human skins. So I don’t see the issue really, with a rat hiding under a pile of rat skins.

Ava: Argghghghghg.

Ren: It’s Oswald and Piccadilly. Piccadilly is the city mouse, Oswald is a naive albino mouse. When they’re in the sewer they end up exploring a cave —

Adam: And they find the larder.

Ren: Yeah, I’ll just read a bit of the description. Which comes accompanied with a horrible picture, of I assume Piccadilly looking stricken as he holds up a tatty scrap of mouse fur with haunting holes where the eyes and mouth should be.

Adam: (haunted waif voice) You could wear it like a mask!

Ren: "Not knowing what to expect, Oswald fearfully looked down at what Piccadilly was holding. It was not cloth or sacking as Piccadilly had first thought it was a mouse’s skin.

It had been a brown mouse with a splash of white on the breast; the ears were missing and Oswald felt sick as he recalled the rats’ passion for them fried and crispy.

His bottom lip trembled – what a horrible thing it was! There were holes where the eyes had been and the paws and feet had been chewed off. It was a macabre trophy.

Oswald began to weep. ‘There was a mouse,’ he stammered through his tears, ‘who disappeared when I was young. He lived on the landing and he . . . they . . . they used to call him Bib because of a white patch on his chest.’ His voice broke up chokingly."

Adam: Oswald and Piccadilly’s picaresque adventures in the sewers are something of a subplot in themselves, and really the plotting is ‘one damn thing after another’. Or, one absolutely horrifying thing after another. It’s just constant peril, they have a really bad time of it in this book.

Ren: Yes, and we’re having three subplots going on at once.

Adam: So there’s Oswald and Piccadilly together for a lot of it. Piccadilly appears right at the start of the book, where he is accompanying Albert.

They bump into one another, and Albert’s gone through the Grill and passed down to the sewers, and seemingly meets a rather sticky end, right in the first chapter of the book, which is quite a way to start the character we assume is our protagonist, getting bumped off very quickly. And he seems like a real genial chap as well, so it is quite upsetting.

Ren: He’s a real dad mouse.

Adam: A real dad mouse. But no more tinkering in the garage for that dad mouse.

So Piccadilly has a pretty traumatic experience from the go-get, and manages to escape the sewers, but because he’s a very brave mouse he goes back in on an errand along with Oswald, who is the awkward lanky mouse, who I read as being dyspraxic, basically.

Ren: That makes sense.

And they go in after Audrey, who went in after her father. So we get this chain of mice going through The Grill.

Adam: And Audrey’s story is kind of another subplot, and she’s the closest thing the book has to a protagonist, I would say, although is quite a long stretch where we don’t see her.

But I found her the most immediately appealing character, she doesn’t suffer fools gladly, she’s very ready to stand up for herself, but she’s also pretty good-natured and decent and courageous. She’s just a good egg, really. And like a good egg, appears very tasty to all the rats, who are all very keen on peeling her and gobbling her up.

But Jupiter, who is this unseen commander and god-like figure to the rats has insisted that they take Audrey alive, so they’re forbidden from squeedling her.*

Ren: And this is because, Audrey has figured in a prophecy from a rat called Madame Akkikuyu. Who is a bit of a topic in herself.

Adam: I thought you were going to introduce her as ‘the problematic rat’. Or probleRATic rat.

Ren: Yeah. She’s described as a black rat from Morocco. She’s a fortune teller who wanders around selling potions and charms to gullible customers. And she appears first at the mousebrass ceremony, or they talk about her at the mousebrass ceremony and Oswald’s mother Mrs Chitter, who’s characterised as rather vapid describes her as ‘that awful rat woman with the shawl who came last year — the one with the foreign name’.

Adam: And to be fair, she’s a kind of little Englander mouse, who we can read as small-minded and prejudiced, but.

Ren: But, Madame Akkikuyu is sort of a grab-bag of racist stereotypes.

Adam: And her speech is kind of rendered in patois? Sort of?

Ava: One of the things that I thought, I kept on having moments of hoping that… it doesn’t stop it being problematic, and I’m not going to make the case that it doesn’t, but she does have a significant amount more agency and backstory than any of the other rats. We’re introduced to her from her point of view, which I don’t think we get from any of the other rats.

Adam: Yeah, we get a sense of her internal world which I don’t think we do from any of the others. We get a little bit from Morgan, but he’s such a shallow nasty piece of work that it doesn’t really count. Madame Akkikuyu is the only rat that we get the sense has a depth of feeling, I guess.

Ren: Yeah. She’s definitely our most sympathetic rat character, even though she’s not unimpeachably good. She comes as far as almost having a change of heart about giving Audrey over to Jupiter.

So yeah, she’s a bit of a complicated case.

Ava: I was kind of dreading how racist it was going to be, when she first got brought up and discussed by the mice, and when she first appeared in the first couple of pages I thought that they actually undermined that quite quickly with the story of how she got to where she was. But it also didn’t get over the idea that ‘she’s a rat, so she’s evil’, and that feels a bit shitty.

Adam: I mean, did you generally have a problem with the rats being characterised as evil, because you said you wanted to talk about that more broadly?

Ren: I don’t think it’s very clear on how much of the rats’ nastiness is coming from Jupiter, and how much is inherent. As you said, the clue we get to this is when Jupiter shouts from a crystal ball at a group of rebelling rats:

‘Without me you would revert to sucking the slime from the walls as you did when I found you. I have blessed you with the thirst for blood and murder — yet you would rise against me’

Ava: But even that is contradicted by the fact that there is a secret murderous rat religion that has been displaced by Jupiter, and you have a loyal follower of that and three bloodthirsty god statues.

Adam: I was quite keen to read that section, if I may. Because I think it’s one of the most outright gruesome bits of writing in the book.

So there’s a rat called One-Eyed Jake, who you’ve already mentioned Ren, who clearly gives as good as he gets and has already ripped the leg off one rat in a fight previously, and we’re told has rat cannibalistic tendencies as well. He’s eaten rats before, and he liked it.

He’s a pretty nasty piece of work, and quite scary, and he’s currently being charged with bringing Audrey to Jupiter, but the rats are quite easily distracted. Jupiter is trying to get him to do all of his bidding, but they often end up in their own little fights and backstabbing.

But Jake, it becomes apparent, isn’t a very devout follower of Jupiter, and instead follows, as you said Ava, an older rat religion.

"Jake turned the corner that Piccadilly had run so blindly around, pulling Audrey harshly. He had drunk too much and walked in a zigzag along the ledge.

‘I’ll show you what I really honour,’ he mumbled. It was damp in the tunnel and moss grew down the walls in sickly pale clumps. Jake strode up to one large patch and drew it aside. He thrust the torch in front of him. There was a passage beyond the moss, leading steeply down.

Jake pushed Audrey inside and followed after her. The mouse scrambled down the passage and waited at the bottom. She wondered wildly where she was being taken and why. Jake grasped her paw again and her skin crawled at his touch.

‘Not far now, lovely,’ he said. The bricks were different now. They were older and larger than those in the main sewer. Audrey knew she was walking into a very ancient place. Marks began to appear on the walls. At first they were meaningless scrawls, but soon she could make out pictures in the torchlight: crude paintings telling of battle and bloodshed. They entered a great room. Jake let go of her and bowed before something she could not see.

‘Oh Lords and Lady,’ he said reverently. He turned on Audrey savagely. ‘Kneel!’ he roared. She dropped to her knees, and Jake fell silent for a moment. ‘Oh yes,’ he sighed, ‘there are still those amongst us – just a few, who remember. My old dad was one – soft though he was. He told me, like his dad told him before.’

Audrey raised questioning eyes to him. Jake flourished the torch and strode to the far wall of the room. There were three altars, covered in the mouldering remains of some old offerings. Above them, painted in the primitive rat manner, were three figures. Jake went to the first. It was a crouching rat with no head. At its feet were many heads.

‘Before His Highness came, all those years ago,’ Jake said, with the wide eyes of a fanatic, ‘there were the three gods! They were not living gods like Him but gods in the true sense. The three gods of the rats – now forgotten by all save a few dedicated ones like meself. We come here from time to time and do what worship we can. Until He goes it won’t be safe, see. Oh I does all He asks and show humility but that’s just to save me neck.’

‘Who is that?’ asked Audrey. ‘Why hasn’t he got a head?’ ‘That’s Bauchan – the artful one. He wears whatever head he likes – master of disguise he is. A great liar.’ Jake moved to the second altar. The picture above it was of a female rat with a tooth necklace and a third eye daubed on her forehead. Tassels hung from her ears.

‘This is Mabb – the sleep visitor. She comes in dreams and urges us to war: a dark one she is. Revels in slaughter.’ Jake laughed madly. Jake went to the last altar. Audrey gasped when the torch revealed the painting. This was surely the most evil thing she had ever seen: it was a rat with great horns protruding from his forehead and a mass of red hair curled like a mane about him. The tail of this figure was forked and at his feet lay a mass of bloody skeletons.

‘Lord Hobb,’ breathed Jake. ‘War-bringer.’ He turned to Audrey. ‘These are the true gods of the rats – fighting and slaughter’s what we want. Not diggin’ in poxy mines.’"

So, it does seem like the rats have been a bit of a bad lot for quite some time.

Ren: Yeah, Jupiter might be trying to take credit for something that they were doing pretty well at already.

Thank you for your rat voices, Adam.

Ava: I was trying to work out if Lord Hobb was a reference to Robin Hobb in the Redwall books, or if that was a bit too meta for this Robin.

Adam: Wait a sec, it was Robin Hobb who wrote the Redwall books?

Ava: Was it not?

Ren: No, it was Brian Jacques, like my year 9 French teacher.*

Ava: Well, it’s not that then! I just have a very muddled up memory.

Adam: It’s a shame it wasn’t (outrageous French accent) Jacques! Ze rat king!

Ava: Anyway.

Ren: So we kind of touched there on Jupiter’s plan, which involves the rat doing a lot of digging, and is the site of another great misfortune that befalls Oswald, in which he and Piccadilly end up running into the rat’s sleeping quarters. Does anyone remember what they were doing there?

Oh, they were retrieving Audrey’s mousebrass.

Ava: The divining rod led them directly to… was it Peeler’s paw? Skinner. That’s the one. Skinner had the mousebrass tucked in his scarf.

Ren: Skinner is a rat who has a potato peeler attachment on his arm.

Adam: Well, for an arm, I thought.

Ren: So they go right to the sleeping, dangling arm of Skinner who is holding Audrey’s mousebrass. They manage to take it off without waking him. Piccadilly runs off with it, but just as Oswald’s about to leave the alarm goes for the rats to wake up, and they all see Osawald there.

But because of his unusual height and lankiness for a mouse, they take him to be a juvenile rat and drag him off to the mine to dig with them.

Ava: It’s really creepy. He gets taken under someone’s wing, Finn. And appears to be treated very favourably, but it ends horribly again.

Adam: Finn who is described in the character profiles as ‘a sly old worker. One of his ears is missing but he doesn’t miss much’.

Ren: Yes, it turns out that Finn is treating Oswald favourably just to get him by himself, gain his trust and then get a tasty mouse meal. But Jupiter has had the rats digging for a long while, because… as you alluded to Adam, his plan.

Adam: I don’t understand this plan in the slightest!

Ren: His very high-concept plan to dig under Blackheath in London, to where there were plague pits, and release the plague gas into the sewers. Umm.

Ava: Which is definitely a bold move for a cat to attempt to reinvigorate the Bubonic Plague.

Adam: I don’t really get what Jupiter’s long game is?

Ava: I think it’s worth remembering that while Jupiter appears to be a grotesque ginger cat, it’s incredibly Lovecraftian, the way that he’s presented. He’s treated as if he is an old ancient force who doesn’t comprehend time enough to think beyond ‘here’s an opportunity to cause an enormous amount of death, let’s go for it’.

Adam: I mean, I guess that is probably how cats do think.

Ava: ‘Ooh, there’s some unspeakable horror here, let’s have a little play’. Just batting a little ball of plague flesh around, like a ball of yarn.

Ren: Yeah, the reveal incidentally, that Jupiter is a cat only comes right at the end of the book.

Ava: Oops, sorry! I’ve spoiled it!

Ren: All we see is Jupiter’s eyes and hear his voice.

Adam: But the full reveal when we discover that Jupiter is a cat is pretty great.

Ava: I think I was slightly disappointed that this was the one thing that I remembered. ‘Oh yeah, Jupiter’s a cat’ was the one thing that had stuck with me since I was little, so there was no mystery this time around.

Adam: But a super gross cat!

Ren: Yeah, I’ve got the description here.

Adam: I think that might be my Texture of the Week.

Ren: Ooh okay, shall we?

Adam: I’ll do it in my rat voice.

Ava: (warbling)

Ren: (textuuuureeee)

Adam: (textureeee of the week!)

Ren: Do you want to go ahead Adam?

Adam: No, you read it.

Ren: Okay.

"All the rumours, all the legends, and all the horror stories were wrong. But the reality of the dark god was much worse. Jupiter did not have two heads: his one, huge head was nightmarish enough.

The Most High Satanic Majesty was a monstrous cat!

So massive and bloated was he that he could barely squeeze himself through the archway. His hideous face was covered with repulsive warts, and everywhere poisonous boils poked through his ginger fur.

A squat purple nose sat in the middle of his face and bulging rolls of fat hung heavily beneath his open mouth. Slowly he pulled his humped back under the arch."

Adam: (singing) James the cat!

(audio clip of the theme tune to James the Cat: ‘Chasing birds and butterflies! James the cat!’)

He’s a portly puddy cat.

Ava: It does lean into that faintly fatphobic way of framing things, as from then on every time he’s mentioned every adjective is another way of saying that he’s fat. There’s a lot of unpleasant horrible texture there, but that disappears and it becomes ‘that’s a very big cat’. Which I didn’t like.

Ren: So my Texture of the Week is going back to the beginning. We haven’t talked about what happens to Audrey during the mousebrass festival. They set up a little kind of ghost train for the mice to go through before they recieve their mousebrass from a villager who is dressed as the Green Mouse.

But in Audrey’s case the show that they’re putting on becomes real, and the mousebrass that she receives isn’t one that was put into the bag, and it is the one with the picture of the cat.

So that’s the hint that you get, of Jupiter’s true form. Not that I got that at all, as I can never spot a twist coming. But maybe if you could you would pick that up.

Adam: Not even a Goosebumps twist, when it’s like ‘argggh there’s a monster at my door! Oh no actually it was my dog wearing a monster mask’.

Ren: I mean that one might be about my level, yeah.

Ava: I think there’s something interesting in it that, because you expect there to be a cat at some point because it’s a cat charm, but also in the vision that Madame Akkikuyu has when talking to Audrey there’s a whole lot of stuff foreshadowed there that is from later in the series.

Ren: Ahhhh.

Ava: So it feels clear that there is so much going on there that you don’t know when stuff is being hinted for, so I don’t think it’s a dead giveaway that the mousebrass is a cat because you don’t know when it’s going to become relevant.

Ren: Yeah. Well, because we were having so many grimy and gruesome textures, I chose a nice texture, which is when Audrey is seeing the show come to life and it says:

"Audrey was astonished. Everywhere glowed green like the sun through the leaves. Blossoms fell in a snowstorm of multicolours and fruit took its place, expanding and growing quickly. Apples puffed up and shone red and green; pears filled out sensually and hung heavy and ponderous on the branches. Acorns and hazel nuts browned in the sunshine before dropping to the floor. Audrey could see whole fields of grain rippling like strange yellow seas."

Adam: That’s rather lovely.

Ava: It’s definitely a very pro-pagan book. The Green Mouse and the wildlife imagery is very well put across. There’s so much weird imagery in there, and I think there’s some very interesting tensions.

I assumed that you were all going to do ‘orrible textures so I picked a nice one as well in the end. And I’m not even sure it qualifies as a texture, it just felt really beautiful.

Adam: Well, if there’s a lesson from our podcast it’s clearly that anything can be a texture.

Ava: If there’s one thing you learn kids, it’s that everything’s a texture now.

It’s just the texture of the moonlight falling on the skirtings when Audrey makes her first trip below.

"The moon was high when Audrey slipped out of bed. Carefully she dressed, anxious not to wake Arthur.

She yawned sleepily and tied the pink ribbon in her hair. In the moonlight the silver bells looked like small blue globes. Audrey picked them up gingerly and they made no noise. She slipped them on to the end of her tail and moved silently out of the Skirtings.

In the dark the hall was a different world. Tall shadows covered the walls, altering them into areas of pale moonlight and black caverns; deep shade and soft moonglow. Audrey could not tell the solid objects from the illusions.

She noticed that all the decorations had been cleared. Audrey was glad of that. She remembered the hateful masks and nameless horror of the cold.

Crossing the hall Audrey took deep breaths and dug her nails into her palms. The long shadows of the banister rail scored her path with deep diagonal stripes."

Oooh it’s a good texture! Just banister shadows, is my Texture of the Week. Love it, love it.

Ren: I love a good banister shadow.

Adam: So that kind of covers Audrey, we stay with her quite a lot at the start of the book with her mousebrass ceremony and her venturing out into the sewers to find her missing father, Albert. But after meeting Madame Akkikuyu she gets bonked on the head and kidnapped and we don’t see her until right near the end of the book, really.

We’ve talked about Oswald and Piccadilly, and really the other subplot is that of Twit and salty sea-dog mouse Thomas Triton.

Ava: Ah, the midshipmouse.

Adam: So, Twit is a field mouse. I say Twit, I feel a bit bad calling him that.

Ava: William Scuttle.

Adam: Thank you. William Scuttle has accepted that he’s called Twit, even though it’s quite an insulting name. The idea is that it’s related in a folk ballad that he was the progeny of a city mouse and a country mouse, and never the twain shall mix or something, so the idea is that he’s slow, basically.

It’s interesting because it shows the mice in a slightly different light, because usually the mice are genial but apparently not always very tolerant. So you get the sense that Twit has grown up being the butt of a lot of jokes, and has kind of resigned himself to being seen as stupid.

But he’s a really interesting character!

Ava: It’s interesting because he’s presented this way by the people around him, but the book makes it quite clear that he is… great, basically. He’s lovely, and goes on these adventures and takes it all in is stride despite it being quite an overwhelming experience. So I think it is asking us to think again about those kind of assumptions about intelligence, and how that is assessed and viewed by people.

And that’s nice, I like it when stories promote the idea that everyone is actually pretty great. This story doesn’t do that. It clearly assumes that there are plenty of others who can be treated as monstrous peelers, but there’s nice that there’s some of that in there.

Adam: His first adventure is really to go and see the bats, who are definitely the bearers of the Claim of the Week award, although they make quite confusing and opaque claims.

Ren: So the bats are who the mice traditionally go to if they need some form of soothsaying. Although when they’re talking about it at the mousebrass ceremony, they seem quite dismissive of the bats’ advice. And it is pretty cryptic!

Adam: But Twit’s very taken with it.

Ren: Yeah. It’s Audrey’s brother Arthur who goes to see the bats, and doesn’t really make head or tail of what they’re saying, but Twit is sneaking along and overhears it, and then steps out of the shadows to talk to the bats himself. And they end up swooping him up and taking him high in the air across London until they get bored, and drop him down on what turns out to be the Cutty Sark.

Adam: A dry-docked boat. Do we get what kind of boat it is?

Ren: Well, it is the Cutty Sark isn’t it?

Adam: Oh, is that an actual boat?

Ava: Yep.

Ren: Oh yes!

Adam: Oh well, you Londoners!

Ava: I am not a Londoner.

Adam: No, no. Well, what is the Cutty Sark, apart from a curiously named boat?

Ava: It’s just a tall ship, is it not? Moored up in Grenwich docks.

Ren: It’s a thing that I visited once or twice as a kid.

Ava: I imagine if you grow up in London you get taken on school trips to the Cutty Sark.

Ren: Yeah, there’s the Cutty Sark and the Greenwich museum and the Greenwich Meridian line, so you can be like ‘Ooh, timezones’.

Adam: So it’s kind of like the London equivalent of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Which is where we were always taken to as kids.

Ren: Yeah, Twit goes on a school trip to the Cutty Sark. Accidentally. A bat trip.

Ava: The flight with the bats is brilliant. Genuinely manages to make it as scary as that should be, and something about the fact that he’s being mocked by these bats at the same time that they’re giving him this once-in-a-lifetime experience. There’s something about how it sits in the narrative. My eyes went wide when I was reading it, which I think it quite impressive.

Adam: It’s a bit like the ‘walking in the air’ sequence in The Snowman, but if the snowman was a jerk. Just insulting the kid all the time and dunking his head in the water and stuff.

Ava: If Raymond Briggs had been more of a bully, this is exactly like what the Snowman would have been.

Ren: So, on this boat Twit meets Thomas Triton, midshipmouse, and gets him involved in this adventure as well.

Adam: Well, surely in the books to come there must be more of this Thomas Triton, because you get the sense that he has quite the rich backstory that we’ve yet to be privy to. He has to catch himself as he talks about past troubles and the reason he doesn’t go to sea, but it’s never revealed. He is a mouse of mystery.

Ren: Did you have a Claim of the Week from the bats, Adam?

Adam: Not particularly, just anything the bats say really. Did you?

Ren: No… I’ve lost the entire portion of the book where the bats are.

Adam: What do you mean you lost it? Did it fall out of your book?

Ren: I mean, I assume it’s still in there somewhere.

Adam: They speak of fire, and a lot of apocalyptic visions. What did you imagine their accents to be like?

Ren: Like someone doing Shakespeare? Amateur Shakespeare actor bats, is what I imagined.

Adam: And they do come across as jerk-ass bats.

Ava: But they are on it. They do appear to be correct.

Adam: Not only that, but they do surprisingly come back right at the end in the fight against Jupiter and save the day.

Ava: It’s lovely to have an oracle who’s willing to get stuck in, you know?

Adam: I guess bats hate cats just as much as mice do, apparently.

Ren: I mean, bats are kind of mice with wings, so.

Adam: Have any of your cats ever managed to eat a bat?

Ren: It’s like in Alice in Wonderland, that made me laugh uproariously as a kid, as Alice is falling down the rabbit hole and she starts wondering: ‘Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?’

No, I would be very upset if I had a cat who successfully caught a bat as I am rather fond of bats.

Ava: I promise this is not entirely a non-sequiter, but the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen on the telly was a giant centipede that dangles from cave ceilings and grabs bat out of the caves in the middle of the night.

Ren: What?!

Ava: Oh my God, I couldn’t sleep for ages.

Anyway we like bats, we don’t want them to be eaten by centipedes or cats.

Adam: Oh, I bet I’m going to have a nightmare about that now. And it’ll be a flying dream too, I’ll be flying and then ‘Oh no, I’m a bat. Oh shit’ and then the centipede will come.

Ren: Shall we talk about the final fight with Jupiter?

Adam: The final boss battle.

Ren: The boss battle, yeah.

Adam: Like an online MMO RPG, all the characters with their maxed-out stats each working together in unison to defeat the boss. It is pretty epic!

Ren: It’s good! Audrey has a particularly brilliant line where she faces Jupiter and says: ‘You don’t frighten me anymore! Before I die I curse you with all my strength and all my faith in the Green Mouse. You are an abomination in nature. Choke on my bones!’.

Ava: It’s very badass!

Ren: Yeah!

Adam: That’s a proper 80s action film line. Or Alan Partridge (Partridge ‘Eat my cheese’ voice) ‘Choke on my bones!’

Ren: So they’re all fighting with Jupiter, they’re all down here at this point, even Audrey’s mum has made it into the sewer.

Adam: I liked that, that she’s grieving her husband for most of it, and she doesn’t leave the house and at the end she’s like: ‘right, I’m going to go and kill this Jupiter!’. That’s pretty cool.

Ava: I really liked the joining of everyone together, where they form the posse and she slowly realises that her entire family is about to go into this dread sewer, and instead of resisting them anymore she’s just like, ‘well, if you’re going I’m going’. Does she have a weapon of some kind?

Adam: Yep, she’s got a sword!

Ava: She’s got a sword!

Adam: We don’t even know where it comes from! All the rest of them have sticks, and she just goes upstairs and is like, right yep, here’s the sword, saving it for a rainy day.

Ava: The entire Brown family gets tooled up to go down into the sewers to save Audrey.

Adam: It’s pretty cool, this tooling-up sequence.

Ava: And there’s something very sweet in the busybody Aunt mouse —

Adam: — Mrs Chitter.

Ava: Mrs Chitter. Her watching them all go into the Grill and being genuinely terrified is a very good angle on that moment.

Adam: The camera stays on her, as it were.

Ava: "All alone, without even the cold company of the moonlight, Mrs Chitter sat outside the Skirtings and waited. A great, silent tear welled up and slid down her cheek. She bent her head and prayed."

That’s a great setup for a final boss battle.

Ren: So Audrey hurls her mousebrass towards Jupiter, saying ‘this is for my father!’. The charm glitters, hits Jupiters’ head, explodes in green fire. Fire’s in Jupiter’s fur, green flames jumping out of his face. He falls down into the sewer, but manages to stick on the ledge, digging his claws into the brickwork, going ‘You cannot defeat me!’.

But at that moment, they think he’s going to claw his way back up, in the water below him it says:

"But, deep in the water, something else was stirring. Faint blue lights began to appear around the struggling monster. They glimmered underneath the waves, steadily growing brighter. Audrey rubbed her eyes.

‘What are they?’ she asked, but when she turned to the others it was obvious that none of them could see them. ‘No!’ cried Jupiter suddenly. ‘It cannot be!’ Slowly he sank deeper into the water, Audrey stood transfixed by the sight she was witnessing. Ghostly blue arms rose out of the depths, and small paws clutched at the ginger fur.

Every mouse that Jupiter had tortured and devoured had returned from the Other Side to claim him. With the strength of death they pulled him down."

Adam: Weirdly similar to a song from The Decembrists album Hazards of Love. There’s a nasty rake in that album, he’s just called ‘the rake’ who’s murdered his infant children and at the end of the concept album he’s pulled down into the bottom of the river to drown by the ghosts of his dead children.

Ren: Huh, yeah! A classic. Dragged down into the depths by your ghostly victims, is a hazard of the murdering profession.

Ava: It’s quite nice that after that Audrey gets her reconciliation with the ghost of her Dad. And again, one of those sweetly observed little moments is Audrey accepting that Albert is dead is actually the climax of that scene, and that’s beautiful. It’s a little bit of death acceptance, and at the end of such a bold dramatic thing it ends quite sharply and abruptly with a lot of tears and then a cryptic threat of what’s to come.

Adam: You say bold and dramatic, and it’s funny because I found it very epic, but if you step back and think ‘what would this actually look like’ it’d be hideous! Can you imagine the scene, set in a horrible stinking sewer and a giant tomcat being set about by a bunch of mice and bats.

Ava: And a bat carrying a mouse with a sword, Adam! A bat literally carrying a mouse with a sword through the air! Come on!

Adam: Okay, okay.

Ava: It is that interesting thing throughout the whole book there’s the question of scale because you’re looking at everything through this particular scale, it is epic and dramatic and terrifying, but again there was a grill on the front of our house, if I remember rightly, leading down into the cellar and I remember looking at that and thinking ‘Oh right, that’s like the grill that they won’t go down’. And even as a small human looking at the grill I remember thinking ‘It’s just a grill’.

Adam: Well, you say it’s just a grill, but there’s a really good line where Arthur begins to wonder if the grill’s alive in some mysterious way: ‘Had Jupiter imbued it with life and thought? Arthur was not sure. A few days ago he would have laughed at such a suggestion, but not now’.

I think it’s a shame we don’t get the wonderful talking, singing, animated grill that presumably the animated film version of this book would include. I wanted the grill to talk.

Ava: It’s called the Dark Portal, not the Talk Portal. That doesn’t work.

That was one thing I wanted to mention as well. There’s something really nice about the fact that the dark portal refers to both the grill and the cave where Jupiter lives, and that double ominousness that enthrals things, and the threshold into different kinds of darkness that enfolds it.

Adam: (singing grill voice) I’m the grill! I’m such a thrill! If you enter me you’ll get a chill!

Ren: (dubious) I think that loses some of the atmosphere…

Adam: Not at all!

Ren: Okay, so. We’ve come to the end of a book so full of horrors that we didn’t even think it worth mentioning that a rat gets incinerated starting with the tail and then creeping up the rest of the rat until they’re a pile of dust. That’s just par for the course in this book. But right at the end, the last line is on the bat:

"Orfeo lowered his foxy head behind his wings. ‘Until the summer . . .’ he said darkly."

So I assume that is where we will take this up again in The Crystal Prison in a couple of weeks.

Adam: Oh, I see what you mean, because by the time we get to it it won’t be spring anymore it will be summer.

Ren: Yeah! That’s exactly what I mean!

Ava: And in the books.

Ren: Cool. So, thank you again Ava for taking the time to talk about mice and rats and portals —

Ava: — to draw you wildly in different directions that are entirely irrelevant.

Adam: Nah, that’s good! It distracts me from doing that.

Ava: I don’t know, I couldn’t stop you from being a talking grill, Adam.

Adam: I know, I know.

Ren: I’m not going to let you off this week Adam, do you have a sign-off for us?

Adam: Yeah! Goodnight, creepy kids and don’t loose your skins.

Ava: Urghhh.

Ren: Ohhhh. Yeah, please don’t! That would be very upsetting.

Adam: Unless you want to. Night!

Ava: Byeeee!

Ren: Bye!

• A natural history museum in London that has been home for more than a century to a large and dubiously taxidermied walrus.

• I listened to this line several times and it didn’t coalesce into a recognisable word, so I assume it’s an onomatopoeic Adam-ism.

• Robin Hobbs is actually an entirely different fantasy author active in the ‘90s, and not affiliated with Russell Hobbs, who manufacture household appliances.