In this episode we talked about Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her 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

Credits:

'Fair Charlotte' as sung by Eugene Jemison for Folkways Record (1954) archived by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (2004)

creepy music box.wav by Modification1089

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books films and TV. Today we’re talking about Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell. Enjoy!

Ren Hi Adaaam

Adam Hello Ren!

Ren Welcome to the podcast that everyone is calling SSTCH!

Adam Is that your Claim of the Week? Nobody’s calling it that!

Ren They might be! To themselves! How would we know?

Adam Okay, if I hear people on the street making that noise I’ll assume it’s viral marketing for our podcast.

Ren Sussstchhh. So we promised creepy dolls at the end of the last episode and we’re delivering on that promise with Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell, a Young Adult horror novel from 2015. Here are the creepy dolls!

Adam That’s not that end of the episode! There ya go, promise fulfilled.

Ren Yeah, yeah. It says: ‘warning, not for younger readers’ on the back, because it’s quite grisly.

Adam It is! I’m quite tempted to donate this to my school library after we’ve done the episode because I like it well enough but I’m not going to re-read it, and I do think that some of the kids will really enjoy it. But at the same time… I don’t know, there are some quite violent bits in it.

Ren It’s quite nasty! It was my pick, I hadn’t read it before but I had read the sequel, or the prequel, Charlotte Says because that came up in the Young Adult Horror section of my reading app, and I thought: ‘Oh, that’s actually quite scary, we should do it on the podcast'. But then I thought we should probably do the first one first, but the first one isn’t as scary as the prequel, so I’m a little bit disappointed.

Adam What period is the prequel set in?

Ren So the prequel’s set in the early twentieth century, like 1910, with the schoolgirls who have the creepy dolls.

Adam On the Isle of Skye?

Ren On the Isle of Skye, yes.

Adam Because that’s where the first chapter of this book is set.

Ren Yeah. It goes back and expands on the schoolgirls who originally had these Frozen Charlotte dolls. And I think it was scarier because — not to denigrate this book before we’ve even started talking about it — but I think it was scarier because there was more connection with the dolls, with the girls being the right age to play with the dolls and seeing firsthand the thrall that they are in to the dolls, whereas in this one it is at more of a remove.

Adam That makes complete sense to me. So in the prequel the dolls are more integrated into the girls’ lives, whereas in Frozen Charlotte the dolls do seem quite alien. They have this presence in the house but a lot of them are sealed up in a glass cabinet, and bits of dolls worn as a necklace around one of the character’s necks, fused into the architecture of the house and into a burnt tree in the garden.

So there are a lot of dolls, and also the main character Sophie, is an amateur photographer and there are several sequences in the book where she takes photos and there are phantasmagorical dolls revealed with all their little doll hands at the windows outside. But there is very little of anyone playing with the dolls.

Ren Yeah, and you get the voices of the dolls being like (creepy doll-voice sound effect) “Hehe let’s play a game!” but the main protagonists are like fifteen, so they’re not of an age where they’re going to be…

Adam Well, no, they’re playing Truth or Dare, the game that should be banned! I don’t know about you, Ren, did you ever play a game of Truth or Dare that filled you with joy and pleasant memories as a kid? Because I don’t know that anything positive has ever come out of Truth or Dare. I only have negative troublesome memories of Truth or Dare.

Ren The teenage bullying facilitation game.

Adam That’s literally what it is. It’s upsettingly so in this book, and any memory I have of Truth or Dare from childhood is wholly negative. So.

Ren So the creepy dolls, the frozen charlottes are based on a real kind of small china doll that was popular in the Victorian era, these one-piece, cheap, usually naked dolls with painted-on faces. You can do an image search if you want, you can see they are a bit creepy-looking. And they were inspired by a ballad about a girl called Charlotte who refuses to wear a cloak in the coach to a ball, and freezes to death.

And the lyrics to this ballad appear at the top of each chapter in this book.

Adam I really liked that. I didn’t know that so I liked to follow the ballad along, it’s a good through-line and it’s creepy. I quite like quotes at the start of chapters anyway, so that really worked for me.

Ren I think it’s a good starting point for a creepy story, for sure. And the question this book poses is: what if these dolls, but evil?

We start at a school in Skye 1910, a recently blinded girl who has been making ‘ridiculous accusations’ about how the accident happened saying that the Frozen Charlottes were involved. Her school friends are playing with the dolls, holding a little funeral for them and when the schoolteacher tells them to stop being ghoulish, they say “But miss, they like being dead. They told us”.

And then we move to our protagonist Sophie, in the present day, in a cafe with her friend Jay, who pulls out a ouija board app on his phone. He asks her who they should commune with, and she says ‘Rebecca Craig’, her dead cousin who lived in Scotland, and whose family she is about to go and stay with while her parents are on holiday.

So they ask questions, and the app spells out creepy phrases like: ‘Black sand’, ‘Daddy says never open the gate’ and then it repeats ‘Charlotte is cold’ until Jay asks it when he will die, and it says: ’Tonight’. The app plays the Fair Charlotte melody.

(One voice singing with minimal instrumentation: ‘Young Charlotte lived by the mountainside, In a lonely, dreary spot; No other dwelling for three miles round, Except her father’s cot. And yet on many a winter’s eve, Young swains would gather there, For her father kept a social abode, And she was very fair.)

The planchette spins around wildly, counts down to zero and all the lights go out in the cafe. Someone screams horribly and Sophie thinks she sees someone standing on a cafe table, and feels a cold hand around her own.

When the lights come on, Jay’s phone is broken and they see that it was a waitress screaming, who’s been horribly burnt by the deep fat fryer, which I hate, really don’t like this.

Adam No, I forget — did you watch Twin Peaks: The Return?

Ren No, and it sounds like I’m not going to!

Adam To be fair I know you always a bit iffy about Twin Peaks anyway, I know you’re a bit hit or miss with Lynch, which I understand. But there’s a memorable deep fat fryer incident towards the end of the series.

Ren No no no. Hate it.

Adam Be safe with deep fat fryers.

Ren Things to add to the ban list: Truth or Dare, deep fat fryers. We can keep going as the episode progresses.

Adam We’re going to have GB news complaining about us soon: “The woke brigade, the woke podcast Still Scared wants to ban, the classic character-building game Truth or Dare—“

Ren — “The delicious chip-making appliance”

Adam But yeah, I found this opening scene very effective. I think it’s one of the best set-pieces in the book. It is quite disturbing, and you could say it’s lamp-shading but I like the fact that they address the fact that they just do this ouija board here, in a cafe. We don’t need a dark spooky house, we can just do it here, in the afternoon, on an app.

Have I talked on this podcast about when I went out on a seance with some ghost hunters?

Ren I don’t think so!

Adam So when I was lecturing at Suffolk I was in charge of professional practice, and people would get in touch with the uni to see if students would help make them promotional films, and I’d generally take them up on their offers, it was an opportunity for local businesses and usually it would be something a bit boring, like the local manilla folder or box factory association.

But this time it was some ghost hunters, and I thought: “I should probably check these people out to make sure they’re — I’m not really sure what I mean by legit when it comes to ghost hunters, but at the very least that they believe they’re legit. And that the students are going to be okay working with them. And they said: “Why don’t you come along on one of our ghost hunts at night?” and I said, sure, because I'd never done that before and so I accompanied them to beneath the Orwell bridge and they had their phones out and basically used spirit sounding board apps on their phones to talk to ghosts?

But as far as I understand it these apps come pre-programmed with words and phrases, so it seems quite convenient if the ghost is like: “Well, I just need to chose the spooky-sounding phrases available on this app to communicate.” I mean, I might be misunderstanding this but it felt like the app was doing quite a lot of walk for the ghosts.

Ren I went on a bat-detecting walk last night —

Adam I mean, bats are real, to be fair.

Ren That’s true, bats are real, but you have bat detectors which translate the sounds that bats makes and makes them 10x lower so that you can hear them when you point them at a bat.

Adam What? Does it translate it into English?

Ren No, just the sound!

Adam So it’s not like: (high-pitched garbled bat voice) ‘I really fancy some flies’

Ren No, but now I’m imagining like, what if ghosts but their sounds are too high for humans to hear so you have to have a device — this might be a short story, nevermind.

Adam Keep it to yourself!

Ren What did the ghosts say?

Adam To be honest I think they were feeling a bit sorry for themselves. Which I understand, I think they were hoping to reach out to a relative or something but they just get some random ghost hunters, and they’re like: “Oh, okay, didn’t really want to speak to a stranger".

Ren Awkward small talk with a ghost.

Adam It was a bit awkward small talk. But they seemed legit enough, and I let a student do their editing so it turned out fine.

But this is what ghost hunters use now, are these apps, so that all seemed pretty accurate. I really liked it, I thought it was a really exciting dramatic scene to start the novel with.

Ren Yeah, and she was right, Jay did die. Sophie is still unsettled by this business, so she asks him to cycle home via the towpath, rather than by the busy roads.

Adam She’s like: “Jay, it would be much safer if instead of cycling on the road you go on the slippery towpath at night.”

Ren Slippery, creepy, dark towpath. Nothing bad has ever happened on a towpath, I assume. Unfortunately he tips into the canal and dies.

So yeah, that’s the setup. I’m not going to do the whole plot in such detail, because I will get bored. There’s quite a lot of plot.

Adam It’s very plot-heavy. This is quite different to a lot of the books we talk about, and we’ve discussed the difference between 80s and early 90s Young Adult writing and more contemporary Young Adult writing. I remember talking about how I feel modern Young Adult writing is clearer, perhaps, it’s less impressionistic and odd. And what I find interesting comparing this to something like The Scarecrows, just because this is the last one we looked at —

Ren — I think we’ve really gone from one pole to another.

Adam Uhhuh! And what was really interesting is that we were talking about how The Scarecrows wouldn’t be published today, or that both of us would be okay with it being edited if it was republished today. But The Scarecrows is very explicit with its language, some of which we quoted, some of which we didn’t, and there’s a kind of nastiness in terms of the sheer level of negativity of the main character’s emotions and some of the stuff he says, but also in terms of characters saying things that are racist or misogynist, there’s an ugliness there, but it’s quite reserved in terms of the actual violence.

There are a couple of moments of real horror, but in terms of the actual action it’s pretty reserved. Whereas in contrast in Frozen Charlotte, I don’t think anyone swears, no-one really says anything that is troubling or offensive, but there's actually some pretty extreme violence, that I found quite shocking. So I found that really interesting, that the level of violence wouldn’t have been seen as appropriate for teenagers back in the 1980s, like this book has almost a video nasty element to it, I felt like I was reading the plot of something from the video nasty list, but the language is much more careful.

So I found that interesting in that maybe what we see as transgressive has shifted. You don’t have the offensive language but it is much more violent.

Ren I think we’ve established an inadevent case-study on that with these last two episodes. Because it’s fairly blandly written, this book.

Adam And that’s fine, I do have a tendency to go for texture, I guess.

Ren Yeah, I mean obviously we're both texture freaks! We like the weird chewy, knotty stuff.

Adam Exactly, there’s not a lot of crunchy detail. I remember one of my film students getting annoyed at me for disliking Christopher Nolan and these directors who are great at plotting but visually it’s all frickin’ glass and metal and concrete. I’ve had so little interest in seeing Oppenheimer, and a lot of the students love Nolan. The student was like: “Your taste is like a child’s, basically”, and it's true! I just want nice colours.

Ren I think we should establish this to our listeners, that we’re both kind of lukewarm on this book, but you might love it. We’re just weird. So you need to bear that in mind.

Adam Because the plotting of this is really good, it has loads of plot. I imagine not so many readers would be reading this going: “But where’s the weird textures?” “Why aren’t there more mushrooms? Or gristly objects? Or wax?”

RenOr “strange intensity about turnips.”

Adam So, I think that’s probably quite a personal preference.

Ren But I will tell you about the plot, I’m sure we can find some odd things to talk about as we go along.

Adam So yeah, Sophie is obviously traumatised by the death of her best friend, and it happens to coincide with the summer holiday and her parents have already booked to go on a vacation to America. And she encourages them to go because she feels like she must find out about what happened to prompt this ouija board experience. She feels like she did commune with Rebecca —

Ren — And she’s going to stay with her cousins so she’s like: “Well, I have to find out what actually happened”.

Adam How did Rebecca die?

Ren And it’s been some time, she hasn’t seen them since before Rebecca’s death, and it turns out that this isn’t the last tragedy that has befallen this family in the last seven years. Their mother is mentally ill and institutionalised and the older brother Cameron, a talented pianist, lost the use of one of his hands in a fire. The youngest, sibling, Lilias, meanwhile, Sophie learns on the first night, has such an extreme phobia of bones that she once tried to cut out her own collarbone. Which made me draw a little ‘Aeurgh!’ face in the margin, which happened several times.

Only Piper, the middle child who’s the same age as Sophie, seems like a normal, friendly teenager. Or is she??

Adam Or is she??

Ren The father meanwhile, Uncle James, is essentially a non-entity. He reminded me of the other father from Coraline — which we’re going to do for episode 100, we decided this at the beginning of the podcast and then became a lot slower at making them, but we are over halfway there.

Adam Yeah, we are going to do Coraline. I love Coraline, I recorded it all as an audio book, it’s one of my favourites. But we have to do it for a special number, obviously.

Ren Obviously. But this uncle is a kind of distracted artist, but he’s so thinly sketched, I guess, not making a pun deliberately. But he’s just truly checked out, of the narrative and of the lives of his children, apparently.

Adam Yeah, I’m not sure how deliberate that was. It sort of works, in that it makes us focus on the younger characters, but at the same time it did leave him very thinly sketched, as you said. I did like the detail that he paints these paintings of Piper as a mermaid, and one as some kind of terrible mermaid with fangs.

Ren Yeah, that’s the only detail we get about him is with these paintings. I think I might have latched on to it as a detail that I found kind of funny in a book that didn’t have a lot of details to latch onto, just the complete pumpkin-ness of the dad.

Lots of creepy scene-setting things happen when Sophie first arrives: she realises all the windows are sealed shut with black wax, the flowers wilt and die on her windowsill in a few hours, she sees a photo of the schoolgirls of 1910 — because they’re living in this old school building, that’s the house that these cousins live in — including the girl with a blindfold. Lilias finds a bone in her steak and is overcome with horror and Sophie has a nightmare where tiny cold hands are gripping her ankles and she hears the voice of Dark Tom, Piper’s African Grey parrot talking in the night saying such things as: (high-pitched voice effect) ‘Monstrous, monstrous’ ‘Never do that again. There’s blood under the rug’.

I don’t really know, is that what parrots sound like?

Adam I think a parrot could sound like that! I like that Sophie generally sees this parrot as a horrible bird, and there’s a sense that Tom this parrot is just doing this stuff as a wind-up, he’s just a trolly parrot.

Ren He is a trolly parrot! There’s also a cat, Shellycoat, and some unpleasant details about cruelty to cats that made me sad.

Adam Yes, that doesn’t surprise me that you didn’t enjoy the fate of the previous cat.

Ren No. iper explains that Rebecca had a ‘cruel streak’, and would do sadistic things and then cry about them afterwards. Piper also takes her on a walk along the cliff-edge and shows Sophie the spot where Rebecca died, as you do, — she fell off the cliff onto a ledge, broke her leg and then froze to death.

Adam It’s probably just the amount I think about The Simpsons, especially now that my stepson is watching all of The Simpsons.

Ren Oh, good choice George.

Adam A true hero! I think he’s now got to twenty… four? Twenty five? But with Rebecca falling down the cliff I did think of Homer failing to jump the gorge on the skateboard. And then falling. That is the image I get of Rebecca falling down the cliff.

Ren When you said George was watching all of The Simpsons, I thought like, oh yeah, up to series 8. No, Ren, there’s much more Simpsons than that.

Adam Oh no, I’ll let you know, I asked him what was happening in the episode he’d just been watching when I picked him up today. Apparently Homer died, and I was like: “Oh, ok.” And then Professor Frink cloned Homer, and the second clone died by eating too much potato salad, and then there were a third, fourth, fifth and sixth clone, and they all died too. So I was like: “Oh, of course, is this a Treehouse of Horror episode?” No. It’s a normal episode.

Ren Fine. Good.

Adam Fine. So apparently post season 24 or whatever, you’re actually watching a clone Homer. So there you go.

Ren Wow. Okay. And no-one knows this because no-one watches these episodes.

Adam Only George! George is the only person who knows this. I really can’t watch later Simpsons because I get through about ten minutes and then start feeling intensely sad and have to stop. But you know, if George sets himself a project he will go through with it. Which I quite enjoy, it means I get to hear about all this weird stuff in later Simpsons that I had no idea about.

Ren I thought series 12 was weird, but!

Okay, so I’ll read a description of these dolls: (Music box rendition of ‘Close to You’ by the Carpenters plays in the background)

'Made from delicate white porcelain, the Frozen Charlottes were stretched out on their backs, completely naked, with short, painted curls and a pinkish blush to their death-white cheeks. The rosebud lips were little more than a painted red dot, making the dolls look prim and disapproving somehow. Their painted eyes were all different — some were open, some were closed and some of the dolls were so faded with age that they didn’t look like they had eyes at all.

The dolls were very small, some were no bigger than a penny and most were just a few centimetres long. A lot of them were chipped or broken in some way, missing arms or legs or even heads. Unlike normal dolls they had no joints, so their limbs couldn’t be moved. They were frozen in place, lying on their backs with their arms bent at the elbow and their hand stuck up in the air, like claws reaching for their last dying breath. Like little bodies laid out in the morgue. This wasn’t Charlotte on the way to the ball — this was Charlotte after she’d died’.

Adam Cute!

Ren Piper tells Sophie that they found most of them in a locked box, and the remainder painted into the plaster of the walls.

Adam Ooh that’s my Texture of the Week! That’s my Texture of the Week! We have to do it now!

(grinding, clattering noises) This might not sound like much, but it’s actually part of a cuckoo money box, where you turn the handle and the cuckoo pops its head out, with quite a sharp metal beak, and takes the money! I managed to make a toddler laugh at this. My mum kept doing it and managed to make her laugh twenty times, just poking the cuckoo’s head out.

What do you have?

Ren I have a tin of ‘Curiously Strong Mints’ — an empty tin.

Ren and Adam (rattling noises, sped-up voices) Texture — Texture! Texture of the week!

Adam Yeah, I really liked the texture of the dolls painted bumpily into the plaster of the walls. They’d been plastered in and I liked the idea of little toes and fingers poking out of the wall.

Ren That’s good, yeah. Mine was actually the dolls burnt into the tree. In the old tree there’s a bunch of little faces melted in.

Adam It’s not a densely textured book.

Ren No, not a densely textured book. But where there are interesting textures it’s the dolls in their various permutations.

So yeah. They found them plastered into the walls but they chipped them out, so that Rebecca could play with them. Rebecca took one of the dolls with her the night she died, and Piper keeps it with her, threaded it into a necklace along with the broken china hands and arms of other dolls. Which is pretty weird but Piper doesn’t seem to think it’s weird, she’s just like: “Aren’t they cute?”

But Lilias comes past the door and she’s horrified, saying “You’re not going to let them out are you”, and they say: “No, no, we’re going to lock them back up in the cabinet.”

Adam Do you think that Piper’s too obviously a wrong ‘un?

Ren Maybe, yeah.

Adam I kind of wanted to be left guessing a bit longer.

Ren Yeah, it becomes quite clear once she has her weird little tea party —

Adam — Oh what, the truth or dare scene? No, the tea party, what happens with the tea party again?

Ren She invites Sophie to a little tea party where she’s made lemon cakes and fresh lemonade and they have it by the burnt tree. And one of the things that the Frozen Charlottes were used for was as ice cubes, so she puts a Frozen Charlotte doll in the lemonade as an ice-cube and then it bites the inside of Sophie’s mouth, which was quite funny.

Adam Yeah, I quite liked that.

Ren I feel like Sophie is maybe a little to credulous of Piper’s super-sweet act.

Adam Yes, I feel like the problem is maybe that Sophie is generally depicted as a fairly typical, slightly cynical teenager. She seems like a pretty accurate teenager, but I feel like for some reason that doesn’t seem to apply to Piper who she seems very easily taken-in by.

Ren Yeah, I feel like if I was fifteen and some girl was like: “Let’s be best friends, let’s have a tea party!” I would be like: “Hmm, you don’t seem very legit.”

Adam She’s much more suspicious, at the start, of Cameron who is very much the brooding young man. Byronic teenage boy.

Ren Absolutely. Piper says: “Cameron’s very sensitive, he’s very moody, don’t listen to what he says” and it starts up this dynamic where Piper is warning Sophie off Cameron, and then Cameron is warning Sophie off Piper and she’s not sure for a while who’s in the right.

Adam And she reveals that Piper’s been sneaking off at night with a slightly older rather doltish ruffian of a motorcyclist, and apparently last time they had a run in, Cameron beat him with a riding crop!

Ren A riding crop! Flogged him with a riding crop, if you can imagine such a thing!

Adam Which was bizarre, it was like suddenly reading some gothic Victorian novel, which I quite liked.

Ren And this is during this tea party scene, so they’re having this weird tea party underneath a burned-out tree and Piper’s like: “Yes, he flogged my boyfriend with a riding crop!” and Sophie’s like: “…Uhhuh” and then trying to take this in and a Frozen Charlotte icecube doll bites the inside of her mouth.

Adam Poor Sophie gets put through it in this book!

Ren She does!

Adam She manages to keep her sanity impressively in tact, because I would not have lasted nearly as long as she does.

Ren She turns up on the first night and they’re like: “Rebecca threw our previous cat in the fire, and little Lilias here tried to cut out her own collarbone!” like, uh-huh, right, (panicked breathing).

AdamLilias gives her a creepy children’s drawing.

Ren A creepy children’s drawing of a family who’s been murdered, and the father’s like: “Oh dear.”

Adam “This again.”

Ren She gets introduced to the resident creepy dolls, the parrot starts —

Adam — squawking about murder.

Ren In the middle of the night.

Adam Yeah, Sophie keeps it together a lot longer than I would have done. To be honest.

Ren She even sees Rebecca having a little frolic outside by the dead tree, and she hears the voices of the dolls whispering, like (high-pitched) “Tee-hee, let’s play a game, let’s play the stick-a-needle-in-your-eye game hahah.”

Adam Earlier I said this was like a Video Nasty, but actually if it reminded me of anything it was probably a Blumhouse horror film.

Ren Oh yeah?

Adam In terms of the beats of it, it reminds of The Conjouring or Insidious.

Ren Neither of which I’ve seen, but I’ll take your word for it.

Adam I guess they’re haunted house movies, or well, people have called them ghost train movies. It’s escalating things that go bump in the night, so you’ll get the flickering lights and then the spooky ghost voice, and then the visitation. It hits all those beats. I do feel like the book feels like a series of set-pieces. But some of the set pieces are very good.

Ren There’s definitely some bits where it’s like scenes in between, where we have to wander around and do plot things before the next creepy doll event.

She stakes out the night in Rebecca’s room to try and see Rebecca’s ghost but then she sees all the Frozen Charlotte dolls standing up with their hands against the glass.

Adam I like that the Frozen Charlotte dolls’ little icons are used as chapter dividers.

Ren Oh yeah. Wait, are they?

Adam In my edition, as breaks in chapters.

Ren I’ve just got a bloody handprint and then small bloody handprints.

Adam Oh! In my one I’ve got little iconographic Frozen Charlottes, all holding hands. Which I really like.

Ren Aw, I prefer that! That’s better. I’ve got the Frozen Charlottes holding hands on the front, but the dividers are handprints.

Adam It’s just like the ones on the front, but little.

Ren Well, there you go!

She also gets possessed by Rebecca at one point, she’s staying up with her torch pointed at the cabinet and she starts smelling this deathly smells and she hears the Fair Charlotte song coming out of her mouth, and the ghost possesses her but then escapes and runs down stairs, and when Sophie follows her that’s when she finds Piper and her boyfriend having a tryst.

What did you think? Where there bits where you were like: “ooh, scary”? Did it give you the creeps at all?

Adam Only really the opening seance in the cafe scene, which I did find creepy. I think once it was in the house, maybe it just felt a little too generic, being in this creepy old Victorian house.

The bit where she finds herself frozen in the bathtub I found quite creepy. She takes a bath and the water freezes around her and she can’t raise herself out of the ice.

Ren And that’s the part where she’s finally like: “Nope, I’m going!”, and she gets out this bath like, I need to leave this house right now. But Lilias persuades her to stay by giving her a message from Jay, or from Rebecca who says: “Jay says hello,” and she’s like: “I guess I'd better figure out what’s going on with Rebecca.”

So she does a bit of sleuthing. She goes into the town and finds the niece of Martha Jones, the student who was blinded. There’s some more creepy revelations about what happened to the school in its final years, there’s a teacher who’s pushed down the stairs and a student who jumped from the window and Sophie asks this woman about the dolls and she’s like: “Well, they’re just dolls but I wouldn’t have them in my house. The way my aunt talked about them always stayed with me.”

You do wonder why this family is still living in this house, but I guess the dad really likes the clifftop views, I guess, despite the numerous ills that have befallen his family.

Then we get to the camping on the beach with the Truth or Dare, and Piper’s mean side comes out and Sophie’s like: “Whaaat?”, even though it does seem fairly obvious.

She’s snidely putting down Sophie to her friends, mimicking her. They play truth or dare and she dares Brett to kiss Sophie, which he does, and she’s like: “Urgh, gross,” and leaves them to it. Then, in the night, they hear screams coming from the boy’s tent. It’s Brett, with needles stuck through his eyes. And when Sophie goes to shake out his sleeping bag there’s a Frozen Charlotte, bloodied up to the elbows and grinning, having played her favourite game of all, the stick-a-needle-in-your-eye game.

Adam And of course, this has set poor Sophie up too look as if she had some kind of motive to revenge herself on Brett.

Ren Yeah, it’s kind of simultaneously setting up Sophie and Cameron, I think.

Adam Oh yeah, that’s true.

Ren I think Piper’s trying to blame Cameron for maiming Brett, because obviously he came at him with the riding crop, as you recall. But Piper has also been setting up Sophie to frame her as having killed herself.

Adam And so we can at this point just conclude that Piper must be under the thrall of the dolls.

Ren One must assume!

Adam And that’s definitely what Sophie assumes.

Ren We’re reaching the end and Sophie chucks all the Frozen Charlottes from the cabinet into an empty suitcase, then takes that to the cliff and throws them into the sea. Then the ghost Rebecca appears and reveals what actually happened to her, showing Sophie a vision where she climbed down onto the ledge to rescue a Frozen Charlotte doll. She manages to climb back up but Piper’s there watching her struggle, and there’s this really long, brutal description —

Adam — Oh yeah, it is actually quite brutal. It’s longer than it… it’s like a scene where the take keeps going on and on —

Ren — And you’re like: “Oh, I don’t want to keep watching this.”

Adam Yeah, I actually found it a bit much if I’m honest.

Ren I think it is a bit much! It’s like Piper taunting Rebecca as she’s trying to climb back up the cliff, then she kicks her in the face, then pelts her with snowballs as she’s trying to get up, Rebecca breaks her leg. It’s really nasty.

Adam It’s properly nasty and it goes on over quite a number of pages. Or it felt like it, definitely! It’s effective but, I don’t know.

Ren I did find this book quite odd in that way with this combination of being fairly bland and then intensely nasty at points.

Adam It definitely makes it interesting in a way, that shift, because it is quite bland or pedestrian, I guess in that there’s not a lot of vivid writing. It’s perfectly decent writing but there aren’t a lot of super memorable sentences. And then you get these very violent, often quite drawn-out scenes which are upsetting. It’s effectively nasty, it’s not really scary or creepy but that’s a discussion about what you want horror to do.

Like, I watched the film Talk To Me recently, which is a recent horror film made by YouTubers. It’s very well done, I didn’t find it scary at all. I found it upsetting and uncomfortable, now, for me if a film is going to do that I want it to leave me with quite a lot to think about. Maybe morally or ethically. If it’s just doing that I don't really get the purpose. I don’t find that fun, so if I’m going to be made to feel upset or uncomfortable I’m okay with that potentially but I want it to be leaving me with something.

And I guess with Frozen Charlotte, personally, I’m not sure that the themes were deep enough to justify that.

Ren Yeah, I think that’s quite a good way of putting that. Because before Rebecca dies she asks Piper: “Is it the Frozen Charlottes that are making you do this?” and Piper’s like: “No!”

Adam “I’m evil!”

Ren “I’m evil!” and you’re like: “Okay!”. Right.

Adam This is not The Tulip Touch, right. Because in that book you have the character Tulip who does some really hurtful, harmful, violent things but the whole book is trying to explore like, okay, why is a kid doing these things? And ultimately it makes her a very human figure. She’s still an upsetting figure but she seems like a human figure. Whereas Piper is just like: “Nope, I’m evil.”

Ren She’s just like The Scarecrows in The Scarecrows, she’s made of evil.

Adam And I guess, ocassionally, there are people who really are thoroughly bad. But I guess I feel like it doesn’t often happen, personally. I think generally people have their reasons and think they’re doing the right thing, or at least feel justified in what they’re doing. I think it’s unusual for someone to just be like: “I am evil. And I am doing evil.”

Ren “And I enjoy it. Hahaha!”

Adam That can be okay in a horror, I don’t know. But then what do we do with that?

Ren I think it feels a bit too much like it’s trying to be a twist. It wasn’t the dolls, she’s just evil! Well, okay, but…

Adam And of course the Frozen Charlottes are like: “Help us, help us, rescue us!” because they’ve just been thrown off a cliff.

Ren When Piper finds out that Sophie’s thrown the dolls off the cliff she goes back to the house and sets it on fire —

Adam — In a rage!

Ren In a rage. Cameron and Sophie have to find Lilias and escape and the ghostly hand of Rebecca guides their way. But then Piper has this knife that she was going to use to kill Sophie, and she’s ready to kill Cameron, but it turns out that the remaining Frozen Charlottes aren't happy about being burnt in the house and the one that Piper keeps around her neck buries its teeth into her flesh. Which is again, quite funny.

Adam Oh I quite liked that! Being killed by the evil mouth of a doll necklace!

Ren Pumpkin-dad arrives at this point running through the gate going: “Oh no! The house is on fire! My children are about to die!”

Adam And says something like: "I knew something like this would happen, I should have done something about it long ago!”

Ren Yeah, like, yeah man, what were you doing?

And then you get the 6 months later and Sophie meets Cameron at her favourite cafe and he says that all the family are doing much better since Piper has died and he’s finally going away to music college, and Lilias has made a friend and their mum’s getting better.

We didn’t mention the evil skeleton, actually.

Adam What?

Ren Lilias is afraid of bones because Piper told her that there’s an evil skeleton who lives inside her?

Adam Oh, she probably just showed her that meme that’s like: “The skeleton is inside you.”

Ren Yeah, yeah. And all that remains at the end is the Jumanji epilogue, in which a little girl on a beach finds the washed-up suitcase and all the dolls inside who want to be her best friends.

Adam Which I assumed was then going to be the start of the next book, which you’d read. But you’re telling me that’s not the start of the next book.

Ren No, the next book is actually about the little girls in the school back in the olden times, and I think it works better.

Adam But we didn’t do that book!

Ren We didn’t do that book!

Adam Maybe we’ll do that one for another episode then, because I can see how that works better with that setting, or that period.

Ren Yeah. So, that’s Frozen Charlotte.

Adam And it seems to be pritned by this Red Eye publishers that print Young Adult horror, as far as I can tell. Because in my edition, which seems to be different to yours, my back page has all these other books.

It has Charlotte Says, which is presumably the one you read.

Ren Yep, that’s the next one.

Adam It’s also got Savage Island by Bryony Pierce; Flesh and Blood by Simon Cheshire; The Haunting, which is another Alex Bell; Dark Room by Tom Becker; Sleepless by Lou Morgan; Bad Bones by Graham Marks and Fir by Sharon Gosling. All of these seem to be children’s horror so!

Ren There’s some material for future episodes there.

Adam Well, as ever, we’re not going to run out! We’re going to be doing this forever! Going to Oxfam Books today, they had a couple of Christopher Pike books, which I remember reading when I was young and we haven’t covered.

Ren There really is a wealth of material.

Adam A lot more than we ever expected!

Ren And next time we might have a collaboration of some kind, have a guest on.

Adam A guest on, and potentially, I like this idea, Ren has suggested that we discuss three different adaptations of the same source material. Each of us looking at a different one. It might be chaos! But it’s a cool idea.

Ren Yeah, I think that’s everything! We managed to keep it to an hour for the first time in a while.

Adam If you’re more into plotting than description, I recommend Frozen Charlotte. Because it is nicely plotted. I’m more interested in weird description and atmosphere than I am in plot, but.

Ren Yep, there’s a buffet of options in the frozen horror dining hall. Children’s horror. What?

Adam Do the credits and I’ll try and think of a sign-off!

Ren (Credits: See above!)

Also if you follow us on Instagram you get a special treat because I’m doing a collage for each episode.

Adam Ooh, I haven’t checked, did you do one for The Scarecrows?

Ren I did! That’s stillscaredpodcast, on instagram. So if you follow us there you can see a collage for each episode. Do you have a sign off for us, Adam?

Adam Yeah, I’d say just leave the evil dolls in the walls, creepy kids.

Ren Don’t get out your little pickaxe, it’s not worth it. Also don’t open any weird suitcases you find on the beach. That’s just a general rule for life, I think. Not specifically creepy-doll related.

Adam It might just be filled up with dead jellyfish.

Ren Yep. See you later, spooky kids!

Adam Bye!

Ren Bye!

(Outro music plays)