In this episdoe we talked about Moondial (1987) by Helen Cresswell.

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

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 the book Moondial by Helen Cresswell. Enjoy!

(intro music plays)

Ren Hi!

Adam Hi — I can hear you rubbing your hands together, are you cold?

Ren No, I’m making some honey-fermented cranberries and I picked up the jar to give them a little scoozle around and there was honey on the jar because they have been fermenting, and expanding outwards. So I have honey on my hands, and that’s why I’m rubbing them together.

Adam So firstly I love that you used the word scoozle, and secondly you are quite into your fermentation, aren’t you?

Ren Yes, this is at least the second time I’ve mentioned it on the podcast.

Adam It seems to be what you’re doing with your thirties, fermenting things.

Ren Yes, kombucha and kefir and sauerkraut when I can be bothered, because grating a whole cabbage is a hassle to be honest.

Adam I’d like to grate a cabbage patch kid. I think that would be quite satisfying.

Ren Yeah, make sauerkraut from a cabbage patch kid. You just need the cabbage patch kid, salt, filtered water, a jar, and then leave it for a week or two.

Adam So listeners if you do that please send in your photos!

Ren (Pictures this) Gosh. I’d hate to see what you create from fermenting a cabbage patch kid.

Adam A taste experience.

Ren So yeah, are you ready to talk about Moondial?

Adam I am ready to talk about Moondial, but I’m not sure how! This is quite a strange impressionistic book from way back in 1987, the year of my birth.

Ren Ah, yes, it’s by Helen Cresswell. Crezwell?

Adam I assumed it was ‘Cress. Well.’ But that’s just because I like cress and want to believe that the cress is well.

Ren Don’t we all. But written in 1987, and it does have some specifically late ‘80s references but it also feels quite timeless, notwithstanding the references to cassette players and digital watches.

But yes, Helen Cresswell, according to Wikipedia wrote over 100 children’s books, and I’ve spent the last three months working on a single 1000 word short story so I’m wildly impressed and very intimidated by that feat.

Adam Yes, that’s remarkable. And I assume that most of them are not of ’Spot the Dog’ brevity.

Ren I don’t think so, I think they are books with a certain number of words. And judging by Moondial they’re not just dashed off either, because this is a very well-written book.

Adam Moondial is quite a literary work, I’d say. If I was to subscribe this book succinctly I’d say impressionistic. It’s a book of tones and atmosphere and strange inbetween-y feelings and places.

Ren Yes. So it was published in 1987, and then was apparently popular enough to be made into a BBC TV series the following year.

Adam Which is remarkable, because it’s not that easy a read!

Ren I was a bit surprised! It’s very good but it’s not… I guess the visual aspect is strong enough that you can imagine the visuals of the TV series and the Moondial looking good in the mist.

Adam I don’t know about yours, but my edition was published in association with the National Trust. The cover is a still from the TV series, so it’s got three child characters staring out at the reader with hard to place expressions. The boy known as Tom looks slightly consumptive, which is the right look for him, to be fair. Minty is cocking her head to one side, questioning the reader and then there’s the other little girl — what’s her name?

Ren Sarah.

Adam Sarah! Sarah looks concerned. And they’re posed around the moondial. What about your cover?

Ren I have quite a lovely illustration by Julia Sardà. It’s of the moondial with the man and the boy who are both winged, holding the moondial. They both have hollow eyes and mournful expressions, and behind them is a graveyard and there are ghosts with similarly hollow-eyed expressions poking their heads up, and there’s a silhouette of a cloaked figure standing in front of the moondial.

Adam So it sounds like your cover focuses on the horror aspects of the book?

Ren It does, yeah!

Adam So this is a tricky question — would you call this children’s horror?

Ren Ehh… um… it’s a slippery one!

Adam Yeah! I really don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot because part of me says no, this is a time travel book that’s about time and loss, and reconciling these things, and love versus time. It’s got these quite broad philosophical themes and it’s an impressionistic dream like novel.

It doesn’t really have outright horror sequences, but on the other hand I keep wondering what I would compare this to and realising that it’s quite M.R. James like. It does seem really indebted to British ghost stories, and surely if anything is horror a ghost story is.

Ren And I think you can definitely draw parallels with Coraline, in the other direction. There’s definitely threads that connect with other things we’ve talked about.

Adam I think in terms of what we’ve talked about before, Marianne Dreams has similarities in terms of the child protagonist, and sticking very close to the child protagonist and their experiences, and occupying a very uncertain space between waking life and dreaming life and keeping that open and ambiguous.

Ren And I thought that the character of Miss Raven could have come right out of Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

But I was wondering if you would read the prologue to set the tone?

Adam Sure!

“It is midnight in that most dark and secret place. If you should chance – and why should you? – to be walking there, you would be blindfolded by the night. You would hear the hooting of a lone owl from the church tower, the scuff of your own steps on the gravel. You would smell the ancient, musty scent of the yews that line the path, and the curious cold green odour of dew on grass. You put out a hand. It gropes to find the ungiving touch of stone. The shock of it brings an uprush of fear so strong that you can almost taste it.

At that moment your fifth sense is restored. A slow silver light yawns over the garden. Shapes make themselves, statues loom. Ahead, the glass of the orangery gleams like water. You notice the shadow the moon has made at your feet as you would never notice a mere daytime shadow.

You stand motionless, with all five senses sharp, alert as a fox.

But if by some chance you should possess another, a sixth sense, what then? First a tingle of the spine, a sudden chill, a shudder. You are standing at a crossroads, looking up at a statue. A huge stone man seems locked in struggle with another, smaller figure, that of a boy. But the presence you feel is all about you now, and with a lifting of the hairs at the nape of your neck you are certain, certain that you are being watched.

You turn slowly, half dreading what you might see. But the path before you is empty. Your gaze moves to the great, moonwashed face of the house itself. The windows are blank and shuttered, though that strange sixth sense is insisting on hints, whispers, secrets.

The scene fades and you realize that the moon is going back behind the clouds, and then you run. And as you run through the disappearing garden you feel that a mighty wind is blowing and voices are clamouring in that empty place.

What you also hear, and what you will remember ever afterwards with a shudder, even in the full light of day, is the lonely sobbing of a child.”

To investigate the lonely sobbing, turn to page 6. To explore the moondial, turn to page 4.

Ren Hehe. Yeah.

Adam And the book doesn’t use second person again, it’s just for this enigmatic prologue.

Ren I really like that starting with the sense and then introducing the sixth sense, it’s really cool.

Adam It is really cool, it really draws you in.

Ren The protagonist is Araminta (known as Minty) Cane — which kind of sounds like a joke name, but that is her name — who has always known that she has senses beyond the ordinary. But the truly strange experiences only start when she gets sent to stay with her Aunt Mary in the shadow of a former manor house.

It’s supposed to just be a holiday, but on the way back from dropping Minty off in the village of Belton, her car is hit and she’s left in a coma. So Minty is left with Aunt Mary, who is not actually her Aunt, but her mother’s Godmother, and essentially a stranger to her.

Adam Could I quickly use Minty’s experience on hearing about her mum’s accident, just because I think it’s a remarkable stretch of writing.

“‘It’s Kate! It’s your mother! There – there’s been an accident!’

What followed then Minty could hardly remember. It all seemed very slow and strange. An eternity passed, and then she actually heard her own voice screaming. It went out of her and froze in the air until it was followed by another scream, and another. As she stared, it seemed that Aunt Mary’s head had swollen like a balloon, and was suspended crazily in air, red and monstrous.

Then Minty felt her whole body go into a violent shuddering, and now she seemed to be laughing. Hands came down heavily on to her shoulders and she was being shaken. She was being swallowed, and fought to escape. She tugged herself free, and a sharp blow on her cheek made her gasp with shock and pain. The palm of a hand struck her other cheek, and she drew a long, juddering breath, and was silent.”

And it was at this point that I realised this book had some real children’s horror stones. I found it quite upsetting, to be honest.

Ren Yeah, I wasn’t expecting her mother to be struck down. We’d already learned that her father was dead, and that’s how it goes for a children’s novel protagonist but her mother being struck down as well —

Adam And then the jump to her hearing herself screaming, then laughing manically and then the sensation of being swallowed until she’s slapped across the face. It’s pretty startling.

Ren I like the willingness to go weird in service of describing the subjective experience of someone.

Adam Yeah, I think that’s impressive in this book! And that’s really early on, it’s quite willing to potentially disorient the reader. It doesn’t hold you by the hand at all.

Ren So Aunt Mary is trying to keep her occupied and tells her to go and talk to a man called World who works in the grounds of the house, and he tells her that she’s the one to turn the key, and free the children.

She keeps exploring the garden and finds the moondial. I’ll read the section where she finds the moondial:

“Minty stopped in front of the statue, with icy tides washing her from head to foot. There were an old man and a young boy, both winged like angels, though she was certain that they were not. They seemed to be wrestling, struggling for possession of a bowl above their heads and, catching a glimpse of a metal beak, Minty suddenly realized what it was.

‘A sundial!’ she exclaimed softly, and then, almost immediately and without knowing why – ‘Moondial!’

And as she spoke the word a cold distinct wind rushed past her and the whole garden stirred and her ears were filled with a thousand urgent voices. She stood swaying. She put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes tight.”

And this is pretty much how it goes — when she goes near the moondial, things go strange and impressionistic.

(Ethereal music plays)

And shortly after finding the moondial she meets a dishevelled boy who introduces himself as Tom, short for Edward and they both accuse each other of being ghosts. He’s clearly from a previous era of the house, and he has a horrible racking cough but dreams of being six foot tall and a footman.

Minty sees him cuffed around the head by a gardener, and tries to help, but as she drums her fist on the leather jacket of this gardener, both he and Tom disappear.

Adam I like the fact that this book lingers on the subjectivity of ghosthood, and the fact that they are both ghosts to each other. Ghosts are usually the other and the mysterious unknown, but here being a ghost is very much in the eye of the beholder because they’re both out of time. Out of time at different points, they’re both ghosts because a ghost in this telling is just someone who’s out of time, either in the future or the past.

I like that because usually you have a sense of the ghost being dead, whereas in this book all time is almost unfolding simultaneously?

Ren Yes, and they slide into different times through the moondial, or around the moondial. And Minty can orient herself by looking at the house and the chimneys and if the chimneys are smoking, because in her time it’s not a working house, but a show house. But because it’s preserved as a museum it doesn’t look as distinct from 100 or 200 years ago.

Adam Yeah, there’s some reflections — it is very much a book about time, and the subjective experience of time, with devices like audio recording and how weird that is, that you can freeze a moment. The wrongness and the strangeness of that, and perhaps of photography as well.

I’m not quite sure what Helen Cresswell’s stance on time is, but she seems very wary of anything that tries to tie down time, like clocks and watches. And I like the fact that the ghosts and hauntings are not linear and one-directional, Tom and Minty haunt each other, they’re both ghosts to each other and it’s much more reciprocal. So there’s a very generous, reciprocal, circular conception of time that I can’t quite put into words.

Ren And also Minty’s freeing them — Tom and Sarah, somehow, we never really learn how she’s doing that or what from. We don’t get explicitly told that they’re trapped, and they’re ghosts because they’ve been unhappy children or something —

Adam Because they’re not necessarily — she goes back to see Tom in his own time, so that’s very strange.

Ren It’s quite peculiar.

Adam And like you said she’s got this mission-based narrative, same with Coraline, Coraline has to free the ghost children. But that’s quite clear. The beldam has trapped the ghost children, stolen their souls and sewn buttons into their eyes. So Coraline needs to collect these trinkets and free the children and they’re released by the beldam. Okay, that’s really clear. And Coraline was adapted into a video game, and that makes sense because you have clear objectives whereas with moondial what’s really odd is that the objective is abstracted.

So the stakes do feel high — it’s a very tense book in places — but you’re never quite sure why the stakes are high, because there’s a sense of sinisterness and bad things will happen, but you never quite know exactly what.

Ren Yeah, and how exactly can she free them, apart from taking them out of their own time? Or taking them out of time?

Adam Yeah! Where’s she freeing them to? But that’s the interesting thing about the book, you just have to go with it and these odd metaphysical assumptions. It’s hard because it makes me sound quite inarticulate, but it’s a very odd book.

Ren Yeah, we’ve mentioned Sarah but basically Sarah is another hundred years older than Tom, and she’s the singing child who’s singing this mournful song ‘Poor Mary sits a-weeping’ — I saw mournful, the lyrics are mournful, the tune is actually quite jaunty.

Adam Can you sing it at all? I genuinely don’t know it.

Ren (sings with an echo effect) ‘Poor Mary sits a-weeping, a-weeping, a-weeping, Poor Mary sits a-weeping on a warm summer’s day’.

Adam That is quite nice.

Ren Yeah, there’s worse times to be weeping. I don’t know if that’s the only tune it’s ever sung to but that’s the one I found.

And this girl, Sarah, has her face hidden by a hood and the first time Minty sees her the girl gets called away by a voice who accuses her of ‘frightening away the moon’, which is particularly harsh. And when Minty meets Tom again he says that he’s also seen Sarah, so she’s their ghost-in-common. Their less contended ghost as she’s in the past to both of them.

Adam Yeah, and she’s tormented by these cruel neighbour children who call her a ‘devil child’.

Ren Yeah, there’s a couple of separate occasions where they turn up in Sarah’s time and she’s being menaced by children with sacks over their heads calling her a devil’s child, and again on Halloween by children dressed up as devils. That’s the climax of the book, but wherever they come across Sarah she’s being tormented or browbeaten or scolded and repeatedly told that she’s of the devil.

And eventually they figure out why this is happening when they see her on Midsummer’s day doing a ritual in a pool, cleansing her face, which she hopes will cure her, and they see that she has a birthmark on one of her cheeks, and that’s the reason for everyone calling her a devil.

I thought it was interesting subtle thing with Minty and Tom’s differing reactions to this — of Tom being from an earlier time, and being quite conflicted, because he is on Sarah’s side but he is quite frightened by the idea of devils.

Adam Yeah, I thought that was neatly done. And I liked the fact that with both these horror climaxes you have this switch, where the ghosts, and in this case Tom and Minty are the ghosts as they are humans who are out of time and are appearing to the kids of two hundred years ago to be ghosts, are the sympathetic saviours, while the kids with their sackcloth masks on are the sources of horror even though they’re not supernatural at all.

So the set up of kids being visited by ghosts in the graveyard is completely switched around, where the ghosts are the sympathetic points of identification.

Have you got pictures in your edition? Because the picture in mine with the kids with the sackcloth masks is quite horrible.

Ren Yeah, I noticed that. It reminded me a bit of that deranged bit in The Deptford Mice with the mouse skins.

Adam Oh no! Oh God, I’d forgotten about that, that was awful. I think I’d repressed just how horrible The Deptford Mice gets at times. That was horrific.

Ren So if you’re a listener and you’re like ‘hm, this isn’t horrible enough for me’, just go back and listen to our series on The Deptford Mice book and it will fill your boots —

Adam Yes, frickin’ heck, they really go very far, those books. So if you feel like a fatherless main character’s mum getting in a car accident isn’t grim enough, go and read The Deptford Mice, where everything you know and love will be destroyed.

Ren In preferably the most gruesome way possible. And then the author will gloat about being a mouse killer on Twitter.

Adam So there is a villain of sorts, in this book.

Ren Yes, we have Miss Raven, who as I said at the beginning, does feel like quite a type. Maybe a little out of place, what do you think?

Adam A little, although that does make her more imposing.

Ren And I guess it is also suggested that she might be a time travel, potentially.

Adam Yeah, she might be a time-travelling ghost killer witch or something.

Ren She comes to stay with Aunt Mary because she’s writing a book about ghosts, and she’s this very stern, laced-up —

Adam — Child-hating —

Ren — Child-hating, evil governess type. She’s mostly off on her own pursuits but she’s also there to sabotage Minty.

Adam Probably.

Ren Probably.

Adam Because what’s so odd is that we don’t know. Because even though the book’s third person it’s kept so close to Minty’s perspective that it might just be that Minty’s taken against her.

Ren That’s true.

Adam There’s very little evidence that she is doing anything harmful apart from researching a book. And the thing about Minty is that she’s a really fun, enjoyable protagonist but she takes against people or she really loves people. And if she loves people she’ll tell them she loves them, and if she dislikes them she’ll be rude to them.

Ren She’s a good protagonist. There’s some fun observations from Minty about how adults talk to children. Aunt Mary says ‘there’s some other children over at the house’ and Minty’s like, why do adults always assume that any two children will get along?

Adam Yeah, I think Cresswell does a good job of getting into the mindset of the child, a lot of that is really unconvincing.

Ren The other odd thing about Miss Raven is that when Tom and Minty slip into Sarah’s time and see the woman who has been charged with — not looking after Sarah, exactly, but keeping her contained — Minty thinks that she’s the spitting image of Miss Raven. But we don’t get any more than that.

Adam That’s the thing, Cresswell’s very happy to keep things ambiguous, and I think that’s what marks it out from more modern Young Adult fiction. Which I do have a lot of time for, I think there’s good stuff that comes out but it might be the influence of books like The Hunger Games, and The Maze Runner series and Divergent and how successful they’ve been, but they’re all very mission-based and objective-based. They have a lot of clarity, in terms of how they’re written but also in terms of the world, the world-building and how things work. Whereas there’s a fogginess to Moondial that I don’t think is very fashionable now.

I guess that’s what I was saying what I said it was impressionistic. Whereas The Hunger Games books, which do have many good traits, I do like those books, but they’re not impressionistic.

Ren Yeah, I keep wanting to read out quotes from it because there’s so many lovely turns of phrase and descriptions.

For example, on the graveyard: ‘The graveyard itself was sunlit, owlless. She gazed at the headstones, barnacled and tipsy as if washed up by the tide. She walked intently as any beachcomber on the high and dry line of the shore. The little icy tongues of wind licked her face by the corner of the tower. They were a consolation, a sign that things were not as they seemed’.

Adam I’m very aware, and I’m very sorry about this listeners — it’s played on my mind this past month, that we failed to do Texture of the Week in our last episode.

Ren Did we?!

Adam Yeah! I had to put it in ad-hoc in my editing because we didn’t do it.

Ren Whaaat.

Adam I know, we goofed. We done goofed. So I was just wondering if any of those snippets qualified for a Texture of a Week because I don’t want to miss it again, I couldn’t forgive myself.

Ren Alright, shall we?

Adam Okay, I’ve got a shaker.

Ren I’ve got a handful of paintbrushes.

Adam and Ren (shaking and rustling) Texture! Texture! Texture of the weeeek!

Ren Well, I have quite a lot of contenders. But the first one I wanted to mention was the footman’s lumpy calves.

Adam Oh that was mine!

Ren Oh okay! You describe the footman’s lumpy calves then!

Adam Well, they’re like lumpy porridge. I really like that, what a horrible texture for us both to enjoy.

Ren A unanimous texture.

Adam Calves like lumpy porridge.

Ren This is in Tom’s time — the footman has been padding his calves after the fashion, but has done a poor job of it. The rare unanimous texture.

Adam That must be like the second or third time.

Ren Yeah, but I’ll give an honourable mention to Minty shifting through times.

‘Next moment she was reeling in a long green corridor of time. Her ears filled with the old whispers and voices, and that strong wind blew clean and cold. She was drinking it in and it tasted white in her mouth. She was swimming in it like a fish.’

Adam It’s just so strange!

Ren It’s strange and simple, but really striking! I really like the writing in this book.

Adam I definitely think in terms of readers’ tastes, if you’re more interested in well-crafted sentences and atmosphere than in conventional plotting, you really should read Moondial. Because it is quite relentless in terms of the quality of the writing, there’s so many lovely descriptions.

Ren I also highlighted — maybe you can read this. Minty thinking about the philosophy of the moondial, I guess. It starts at the bottom of page 113 in my edition.

Adam

“Then a thought came to her so clearly that it was as if a voice spoke.

‘What happens to time, when the moon shines on a sundial?’

With the question came a cold, distinct draught of air. She had been posed a riddle.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and accepted it.

And she walked on while her mind reeled with the enormity of the question. Moondial – measuring a different time. Moondial – free from the slow, relentless march of the sun, the trickle of sand in the glass, the minute by minute ticking of clocks. Moondial – freewheeling, measuring the real time of hearts and lives and linking them across centuries.

Moontime!”

Ren That’s just really interesting. The idea of this other kind of time that’s come to her. Or maybe the moondial itself has presented itself to her, and she’s discovering a whole different form of time. It’s weird and cool.

Adam It is weird and cool. It’s quite revelatory. It’s easy to get bound to rational clock-time and to think that is time, forgetting how weird time is. I remember when I was doing my Phd and learning about Czech communism being really caught with the idea of ‘Charismatic Time’. The idea that under Stalin the five-year plans could be compressed into four years. It’s not just about the workers being fast and efficient, the workers were meant to be so imbued with the spirit of communism that they would literally compress time.

The will of the worker was greater than the clock. Which was wild! But it’s quite a boggling idea if you decide, right, I’m going to try and take this seriously.

I read a lot of Henri Lefebvre — I don’t know how to pronounce that, sorry to future Ren doing the transcription — who talks a lot about the idea of rhythms and everything having its own time. And if you look at the natural world that starts to make sense — you can look at a tree and see that the budding of the flowers have their own time, and the roots have their own time, and the clouds have their own time. It’s so hard to get outside the human experience of time and decouple yourself from that, but the book does a pretty good job of that, to be fair.

Ren And it links cats to moontime — cats live in this other form of time.

Adam Which is another link to Coraline, actually. It’s quite a Neil Gaiman-y thing, the idea of cats being of a different dimension.

Ren So some plot happens at the end, Tom and Minty after seeing how Sarah’s been treated agree that they need to rescue her. We learn that Tom isn’t actually called Tom, his name’s Edward Larkin and he’s known as Teddy, but all the kitchen boys are called Tom as a shorthand.

This is where it’s Halloween, and Sarah tries to do her face-cleansing ritual again, but she’s surrounded by these masked figures who chant ‘devil’s child’ at her, but Tom and Minty scare them off. Minty has a hand mirror talisman, and she coaxes Sarah to look at her own reflection and Sarah realises that she’s beautiful and not a devil’s child after all.

And when Miss Vole, Sarah’s captor, comes tearing up the path after them, Minty holds up the mirror and says ‘ware the devil, ware the evil eye’, and everything collapses into a dream-like state where Miss Vole dissolves into a crumple of black clothes, and Tom (or Teddy) and Sarah and Tom’s little sister Dorrie who he keeps talking about, run away arm-in-arm into the mist.

Adam Heaven knows how they did that in the TV adaptation.

Ren Yeah, we’ll see! Because we will watch it at some point, when we can get our hands on it.

Adam When we can legally source it at a cheap price.

Ren That’s the goal. It’s one of those weirdly expensive DVDs. The thing that I haven’t mentioned is that while all this has been going on, Minty has been recording tapes for her mother in hospital, who is still in a coma but has got a cassette player and headphones, and Minty’s instructed the nurses to let her mother listen to these tapes so she can hear Minty’s voice. So at the end Kate comes round, and Minty goes to see the moondial for the last time, and she finds the tiny headstone in the graveyard that is just marked ‘E.L.’ and realises that it was Tom’s.

And that’s where we end. The last two words of the book are ‘full circle’, which says something about the odd circularity of time in this book.

Adam Yes, and the moondial itself is an allegorical sculpture of Eros and Chronos wrestling. So time and love wrestling, and Minty declares that she’s on the side of love, over time.

Which sounds like the topic of an eighties power ballad — it’s quite an abstract theme but the novel takes it pretty seriously, the idea of love overcoming time.

Ren Yeah, it’s a thoughtful book.

Adam I would argue that that’s pretty much the central theme of Twin Peaks: The Return, for all you David Lynch fans out there. So the fact that a 1980s kids book is dealing with the same heady metaphysical themes as David Lynch’s swansong magnum opus definitely says something about how ambitious this book is.

Ren And I guess we’ll see once we watch the TV series, how much of the philosophy of it is present in that, or if it becomes more of a straightforward ghost romp.

Adam I feel like it must do, but we’ll see. And it does make me want to read more Helen Cresswell, because it is a really interesting book. And not the kind of thing that I think really gets published anymore.

Ren I haven’t seen anything like it in children’s books. Which I think we’ve mentioned a few times when we’ve read older books, they are slower and more meandering, and atmospheric.

Adam I do enjoy that myself, but I will admit that as a child I think this might have been lost on me. Do you think you would have liked it as a kid?

Ren I really don’t know. I think I’d have enjoyed elements of it, Tom and Minty are good characters to latch onto, but I might have just been mystified. Actually I think the plotline with Sarah would be pretty haunting if you read that as a kid, with this child being mistreated and called a devil’s child.

Adam That’s true. I don’t want to just delay the end of the episode because I have not thought of a sign-off at all.

Ren Oh God, it’s been so long I’ve forgotten how to do the outro.

Adam That’s good, it will give me longer to think of a sign-off.

Ren Okay, well, thank you for listening. We are sort of still on Twitter as long as Twitter lasts, I guess. Kind of on Instragram, but I don’t even know if I want to be on Instagram personally, let alone as a podcast, so. I dunno. We do have an email, that’s stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. And we do check it sometimes.

Adam It’s not our fault that social media’s a bad thing.

Ren Yeah, okay, here’s the deal. If you send us an email I might not get back to you very swiftly, but we will appreciate it when we do read it and it’s not weird spam. So that’s our promise.

Our intro’s by Maki Yamazaki, our outro’s by Joe Kelly, our artwork’s by Letty Wilson. You can, if you like, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, or whatever.

Adam laughs

Ren Sorry, was that unreasonably sassy? I’m trying to buy you more time.

Adam It’s fine, not every sign-off has to be witty and sassy.

Ren No, this time it just has to be beautiful and elegiac.

Adam Oh great. Sleep well creepy kids, and keep the time of your hearts by the moondial.

Ren Thank you, Adam.

Adam We’ll pretend that’s deep.

Ren Bye!

Adam Bye!

(Outro music plays)