Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo 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 cohost is Adam Whybray, today we’re talking about a selection of stories by the American author Robert Cormier. Enjoy!

Adam Hello Ren, we were just saying we’re veteran podcasters now!

Ren Yeah, we kind of are!

Adam We definitely are! Which means we’re super equipped, capable and connected and ready to talk about Robert Corm-i-air, or I don’t know if it should be pronounced (extra Frenchly) Robert Cormiair — since he was from the French Canadian part of Massachusetts.

RenAs will be relevant.

Adam As will be relevant. But we’ll call him Robert Corm-i-air.

Ren Well, his website says Cor-meer.

Adam Oh does, it, it tells us how to pronounce it! See we are pros, you’ve done your research, thank you.

Ren Which is good because until I read that I was calling him Cromier, which would have been embarrassing.

Adam Robert David Cromier-berg. So I discovered — I can’t remember how you pronounced it now —

RenCor-meer

Adam Cormier’s work by a Discord friend, Polygonal, who has a tendency to recommend things out of the blue, and dropped me a pdf of The Rag and Bone Shop and said ‘What do you think of this?’, so I was like ‘Oh, okay, I’ll get back to you’.

But it looked in my wheelhouse, when I looked on Wikipedia I saw that he was a Young Adult writer and it was clearly going to be horror or horror-adjacent — it turned out to be a thriller — and I was just struck by how grim it was! Reading the Wikipedia article, I liked this description of him: ‘Robert Edmund Cormier (January 17, 1925 – November 2, 2000) was an American writer and journalist, known for his deeply pessimistic novels, many of which were written for young adults. Recurring themes include abuse, mental illness, violence, revenge, betrayal, and conspiracy. In most of his novels, the protagonists do not win.’

And then I discovered that his work has been challenged and banned from many school libraries across the States and while I’m not normally sympathetic towards book bans there were moments where I could understand by parents might be uncomfortable with their children reading some of this. Which was interesting because that’s very rarely how I feel, but my gosh they go to some troublesome places!

Ren I think for this we’re leaning into the disturbing part of our ‘creepy, spooking and disturbing’ tagline.

Adam I know we interminttenly do content warnings, but these books are dark! I would not have coped with them before sixth form — I think 16/17 but before that, if I’d come across them at 13/14 they would have done a number on me, they would have triggered my OCD something terrible.

He’s basically got all the Catholic guilt but without the possibility for redemption! In some way he’s got the passion and intensity of an adult Catholic novelist like Graham Greene or Flannery O’Conner, but with this gloomy atheistic belief that the world is unjust and that bad things happen, and a deep, deep cynicism about institutions, which I wonder is what led to the bans, because generally figures of authority are not to be trusted in his work.

Had you heard of him before?

Ren I think he’s one of those that I might have seen on a rotary display in a school library, but not really.

Adam My partner Leah reckons that she might have read the Chocolate War, and I think that’s his most well-known. But we were probably just that tiny bit too young for him.

Ren Yeah, he died in 2000

Adam But certainly he seems more well-known in America than in the UK or Europe. But broadly, you’ve read two of these books, I’ve read three and a bit so far, how have you found reading them?

Ren Fascinating. He’s a great writer, it’s so tense. I read The Bag and Bone Shop first which is his last novel, but it’s such a tense, sweaty little novel. It’s not quite like anything I’ve read before, and particularly not anything Young Adult.

Adam It reads more like a play or a film, a thriller, something like Seven by Fincher. There’s moments that recall the intensity of Harold Pinter’s plays perhaps. The bulk of it is a long interrogation scene and the only reference point I have for that is Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman which is a very upsetting read, before he moved into screenplays like In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, which is very intense and this is similarly a very intense read.

I think my favourite of the ones I’ve read — I read that one first and then I read Fade, which is sort of atypical for Cormier because it has some supernatural or fantasy elements, arguably. It’s a complex book but it’s less grounded than some of his other novels or novellas. Then there’s I Am The Cheese which I know you haven’t read yet, which is easily my favourite I think it’s astonishingly good. But that’s the one I mentioned last time because I was intrigued by it being called I Am The Cheese, which is a reference to The Farmer in the Dell, where one version of the nursery rhyme is that the farmer’s wife wants a cat, the cat wants a mouse, the mouse wants some cheese, and ‘the cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone, ee-i, adio, the cheese stands alone’.

I’ve started reading the fabulously titled ’After the First Death’ which is an incredible name for a Young Adult book, he’s not messing around! It does indeed start with a kid having just been shot in a terrorist attack and that is the first paragraph. And that one is controversial because Cormier likes playing around with narrative perspective and one chapter is narrated by the teenage bus driver, she’s a 16-year old bus driver, I don’t know if that ever happens! Maybe it’s work experience, I got to work at a funeral parlour, I guess some teenagers get to be bus drivers.

Ren Maybe Otto started when he was 16, in The Simpsons.

Adam Ah yeah, that would check out. Narrated by her, also I think maybe one of the teenagers on the bus, and also one of the terrorists. And I think maybe some parents weren’t okay with their kids inhabiting the point of view of a terrorist. But I respect Cormier’s humanism because I think he’s very much of the school ‘hurt people hurt people’ and that people do things for reasons, basically. That seems to be pretty he’s pretty keen to understand why humans do the things they do, and he has this curiosity towards human behaviour even at its worst. So which one do you want to start with?

Ren Shall we start with The Rag and Bone Shop?

Adam In a way, it’s a good place to start, and in a way it’s a funny place to start as it was his last novel before his death. But it is a short one and I think it’s a good one to introduce someone to his work. I read it over two sittings which is unlike me, scattered attention these days. But it’s so intense, it’s so gripping that I really did plough through it.

Ren I think I did the same. It’s about — a little girl is murdered and this master detective is bought in who is known for always getting the confession.

Adam And it seems like he’s right out of film noir, right? You can picture him immediately as this hard-bitten weary detective, he’s quite deliberately archetypal. And the main suspect is a boy.

Ren Yeah, who had been the last person, or so they think, to see the girl alive. But he’s a very gentle soul and a bit of a misfit, but he just likes doing jigsaw puzzles with this girl, they’re friends, kind of. But he’s the suspect and so the bulk of the novel is this interrogation, he thinks he’s just going along to give general evidence but he’s actually being bought in as the main suspect and the bulk of the novel is this interrogation in which the detective psychologically breaks Jason down.

Adam We’re kept in a certain amount of suspense about whether he might be the killer, right? Jason definitely seems sympathetic but we don’t know that much about him, and we are repeatedly told that the interrogater is a very good interrogater and he’s never been wrong before.

It feels like maybe — the idea of investigating what it means to tell a story is present in I Am The Cheese, for instance, which is a much earlier book, but it seems these meta elements become more present in Cormier’s later work to me The Rag and Bone Shop seems to be about why we tell stories, the power of stories, and to a degree whether stories can alter reality, or how it feels like they can alter reality even if the truth is out there.

You could almost say that it’s a novella about post-truth because once authority figures start saying something is the truth and they’re very certain it’s the truth and keep repeating it, if you’re the person in the position of not having a very clear sense of self, maybe being easily manipulated, being vulnerable, you might start to question what the truth is even if it relates to you and who you are.

Ren Shall I read a bit of the interrogation that demonstrates that?:

“What kind of books do you like to read?” Mr. Trent asked, as if reading his mind.   “All kinds. But I like mysteries. Horror stories. Stephen King. Science fiction.”   “You don’t mind all that violence in those books? People killing each other?”   “It’s only stories. They’re not real.” “How about movies and television? Do you like violent ones, too? Horror stuff?”

Jason was puzzled. He liked horror stories but he wasn’t wild about them and somehow these questions made it sound like he was some kind of fanatic when it came to horror stuff.

  “I like other kinds of stories and movies, too. I mean, adventure. Like Indiana Jones, and Star Wars.”   “They’re kind of violent, too, aren’t they?” “I don’t know.” He thought of them as cartoons, unrelated to anything in real life. “They’re unreal.” “You seem to be fascinated by things that are unreal,” Trent said.

  Do I? Jason wondered. He had never really thought about it.

  “Do you sometimes get confused between what’s real and unreal?”

  Jason squirmed, fidgeted, tried not to show his impatience and his growing uneasiness.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

Adam It really puts you slap-bang there in the interrogation room with them, you really start to experience what Jason experiences, I imagined that I was going to start sweating myself, reading it. You start to feel the claustrophobia, or I did anyway.

Ren Oh yeah, absolutely. Trent is doing these tricks like putting him in a small cramped room, planting the idea of being thirsty and then not bringing him water, this kind of thing.

Adam From my limited experience, I've been arrested once on a climate protest which was thrown out of court, but I did have to spend a night in a cell on the charge of trespassing, we protested a petrol station.

And yeah, the police sergeant and then the person questioning me definitely played little mind games that did get under my skin. So it’s strange even being taken in the back of the police van because you can’t see out and there’s no seatbelts, which is a bit funny because normally it’s illegal not to wear seatbelts! But if you’ve been arrested you can slip and slide about in the back of a police van, and handcuffed as well so it’s hard to keep steady which feels pretty dangerous.

And if you’ve been arrested somewhere you don’t really know the journey you’re taken, you might be taken to a police station a county away, it’s not necessarily going to be taken to somewhere near where you are, so it might be quite a journey, and you can’t see out, so you feel, or I felt, quite disorientated by the time I came out.

And one of the first things the desk sergeant said to me was: ‘Don’t worry back when we used to arrest you eco-protesters I used to spit in your food. But then my daughter got involved in that kind of thing, so I don’t do that anymore.’

And of course, with plausible deniability he’s introduced this idea that he might spit in my food, he had done it before. Oh, he doesn’t do it anymore but that was a possibility. I don’t think I was offered any food anyway, but there was no way, I have OCD, there was no way I was going to eat food after that.

In the police cell there was a white spray painted arrow on the ceiling seemingly pointing to nothing, it was really odd. I kept trying to work out why that’s there — is it pointing to a crack? And I wondered is that just there to put the fear in you a bit — what’s that? what’s that relate to? Because it did, it played on my mind.

And in terms of being questioned I was being questioned at two in the morning, without having got to sleep because you’re checked in on every hour. And it was a Friday night so it was noisy, there were a lot of people in the drunk tank, people who were drunk and crying out, shouting and screaming. So there’s no way I would have got to sleep, and it was a hard bed and a thin mattress anyway.

So by the time I was questioned I was shaken up, and it was a small room so it was claustrophobic. And some of the questions they asked were tricksy — how did you feel when the fire engines arrived? And I was like ‘What? I don’t remem—‘ and I should have just No Commented, you’re told to just go ‘No comment’, but I think I’m too scrupulously honest to be able to do that, I want to be fair and give answers so I said ‘I didn’t know there were any fire engines’.

And I spoke to my partner at the time afterwards who was also at the protest and she said ‘No, there weren’t any fire engines, that never happened’. So clearly they were trying to confuse me or make me feel guilty about protesting, like ‘oh, you inconvenienced the fire service’, but that never happened that was just completely made up. And the funniest thing was they asked me if I had a religion and what I believed in and I said I was a Unitarian and they clearly hadn’t heard of Unitarians ‘Uni-what now? Uni-what now? What does that mean?’ So at two in the morning, without any sleep I was trying to explain the principle tenants of Unitarianism under interrogation, which is very difficult: ‘We um, don’t believe in the, err, divisibility of the trinity, um’.

So it did bring some of that back to me actually. The way you’re really put on the back foot in a police interrogation.

Ren Yeah that’s fascinating context, and then this is a 12 year old boy that he’s going to town on with all his interrogative skills and tricks.

Adam And I’m sure this happens, right. There are still states in America where children are tried as adults and sentenced as adults, appallingly. And it does happen, often to kids of colour. Twelve seems very young but it does happen. You can easily see how a skilled interrogater would just end up getting the answers they want to get.

Ren So I think for once we’re not going to spoil these books.

Adam No, I don’t want to say exactly what happens at the ending. It’s interesting and provocative but it’s a short read and I don’t really want to reveal the ending. I think the book works very effectively even without the ending, though the ending is very interesting. It definitely got under my skin, it’s an effective little book, and an inditement of children being treated as adults and an inditement of the justice system, I guess. I do think there is an anti-authoritarian streak in Cormier’s work that comes through here.

Ren Yeah, definitely.

Adam I’ll quickly mention I Am The Cheese, which I know you haven’t read yet but I hope you do because it’s my favourite of his books I’ve read so far. It’s one of his earlier books, first published in this country in 1977.

It has a forward in my copy, which says it began as an exercise on Saturday morning in the autumn of 1975, as an experiment with first person present tense I placed a boy on a bicycle, trying to create movement and action with words, simply because I had nothing else to create. So he’d already had a great deal of success with The Chocolate War, which is his most famous and didn’t know what to do for a follow up, so started with this semi-autobiographical sketch of the boy on his bicycle and the book then crosscuts two different narrative perspectives. You have the first person perspective of the boy on his bike, and then these interrogation scenes, possibly, or psychiatric sessions, it’s very hard to say! But these records of a dialogue seemingly between the boy and some kind of questioner about his life, and you slowly start to work out the connection between these two different narrative voices and what’s going on.

So it’s almost set up like a psychological mystery, but it has some real similarities between The Rag and Bone Shop, like what is this interviewer or interrogator doing, to what extent are they trying to work towards a certain outcome or being manipulative?

Ren What cover do you have?

Adam Oh, I have an incredibly pink cover. My cover is an incredibly garish, Windows 95, MS Paint pink.

Ren Beautiful.

Adam With a photograph of a boy, who’s been stretched and twisted so it’s elongated his arms and made him look extra quizzical and then there’s a pendant hanging down from the top of the page. And then a white, ghostly, I don’t know if it’s a silhouette exactly, but an image of a dog’ss fangs and nose coming in at the back. It’s quite striking! What’s your one?

Ren Mine is a late ‘80s Teen Tracks edition, which has that torn paper effect beloved of 80s graphic design. And the central image is a coloured pencil drawing, I think, of a boy on a bike from above, quite stylised. He looks carved, it’s quite sculptural, like he might be a wooden figurine.

Adam I’m going to have to see if I can see this now, because I don’t recognise this cover.

Ren And there’s a border above and below this central image which has a telephone receiver in the middle and little pigs on either side.

Adam What?!

Ren Yeah!

Adam Oh I can see it now, oh my gosh, you didn’t mention how green he is!

Ren Oh yes, he is extremely green! And of course the title is I Am the Cheese, so just looking at this cover I had no concept what this book was about: ‘Oh, it’s the telephone, pig, cycling book about cheese’.

Adam My favourite cover is, I don't know if it’s the original one, but it’s the incredibly grey and brown image of the boy in the cell looking incredibly haunted, it just looks like the grimmest book.

Ren Hell yeah. Oh my god, he’s like the, you know the, Ursula Le Guin, the Ones who Walk Away From Whatsitsface —

Adam Oh my god, he is! Oh no! Omelas!

Ren He’s the Omelas boy!

Adam Oh no! Yeah! So yeah if you look at that one you think ‘I’m not in for a fun time’.

But yeah it’s a beautifully written book and more dreamlike, stranger than the Rag and Bone Shop, it has some very odd, slightly trippy interactions. The whole thing has a very woozy feeling to it. Or the first person bits do, and then there are these very stark interrogative chapters.

I want to read a section from it actually because I’ve been using it in my English tutoring, because one of the questions in the UK GCSE exams that 16 year olds have to do, this is true for the AQA exam board and also for Eduqas, they’re the two main ones in this country for English at least, one of the questions is on structure. The kids get an extract and they have to say how does the structure in this excerpt create suspense.

And kids find it very hard. I find it quite hared to explain structure, I tend to say it’s the order that things happen. And I often say to them that I didn’t get structure when I was a kid, and it was only when I started looking at films and did film studies because you can understand with a film that you see one character before another, or maybe you see the location before you see the character. It’s easier to understand in a film that you see things in a different order. But anyway, it’s hard to teach and I’d been looking for extracts to use. I found this, it’s about chapter four and I think it’s a beautiful example of rising tension and suspense and just a great piece of writing, it makes sense that Cormier says it began as this exercise in first-person, present-tense with him trying to create movement with words, and I think he does a great job here.

“The dog is ferocious and I am terrified. He is waiting for me at the end of a long flat stretch at the bottom of the hill. I had seen him waiting for a long distance when he was only a small, silent lump at the side of the road. Then, as I drew nearer, he revealed himself as a German shepherd, sleek and black, a silent sentinel guarding the driveway of a big white house. The house is set back from the road. I sense that the house is deserted, that I am alone out here with the dog. I pump furiously, wanting to sail by the dog as fast as possible, so fast that I will dazzle him with my speed and leave him stunned by my passing.

The dog lifts his head at my approach, alert, ears sharp, as if he is accepting a challenge. My eyes swing quickly, left to right and back again, but there are no rescuers in sight. The driveway behind the dog is empty, no cars in sight, and the house itself wears an abandoned look, as if the people have all gone away. Across the street, an open field lies behind a wandering low stone wall. As I approach, the dog steps out into the road and I think, It’s as if he has been waiting for me all my life. The dog is unmoving, his tail not wagging, his eyes like marbles. He is silent, watchful, a killer dog. I am close enough now to see how his sleek hair is shiny, and I tell myself, Let’s go, it’s just a dog, a dog is man’s best friend, it’s not a lion or a tiger.

The dog makes a move, steps into the roadway directly in the path of the bike, his head lifted now, a snarl on his lips. He is silent, he has not barked or growled or maybe I can’t hear the growl as the wind rushes past my ears. I pedal hard, crouched on the bike, fingers clutching the handlebars, legs pumping away, the bike aimed directly for him, afraid that if I try to steer around him, I will somehow lose my balance and be flung to the pavement, at his mercy on the pavement. I slit my eyes and my legs slash away and I hurtle toward the dog. And at the last possible moment the dog darts aside, and now I hear his growl and then the growl erupts into short sharp savage barks and this is worst of all because the barks reveal his teeth.

The dog keeps trying to dash in front of the bike, as if he is more interested in stopping the bike than in attacking me. I take heart at this. The dog bites at the front tire and turns away as the tire scrapes his nose and the wheel wobbles frantically. And I keep yelling to myself, It’s all right, it’s all right, but my words are lost on the wind and inside I am saying, The hell with this, if I get away from this dog, I’m going home, I’m taking the first bus back, the hell with Rutterburg, Vermont, the hell with everything …

The bike is in danger of toppling now as the dog continues to attack the front wheel and I realize with horror that this has been his intention from the beginning: to topple the bike, send it askew and have me crashing to the roadway, his victim. We are past the driveway now and approaching a curve. I hope desperately that there is safety around the curve, a house or a store or a shack or anything. That’s when I hear a car approaching and a horn frantically blowing. I suddenly realize that I have drifted perilously close to the center of the road. The oncoming car, a yellow Volkswagen with luggage lashed to the roof, has to cut speed and swerve to avoid hitting me, the blast of the horn joined by the squeal of brakes. The dog is distracted by the car and the honking and the screeching and it hesitates for a moment, pausing almost in midair, looking at the car as if puzzled. Or tempted. I keep pedaling. But I can’t resist looking behind me and I see the dog streaking away, down the road in pursuit of the VW, barking wildly, body arched and stretched, a fuzzy furry arrow.

“Let’s get out of here,” I yell to nobody, and renew my pedaling, fear and panic having obliterated any weariness, any aching muscles. The barking of the dog grows distant as I swoop around the curve and sail steadily onward.

I am approaching the main street of Fairfield and it is hardly a Main Street and hardly a town, just a few stores and that church with the white steeple, and I speed through the street, carried by my momentum. I know I should stop but I don’t want to get off the bike. I want to keep going, to get to Rutterburg. I have a feeling that the dog will pursue me forever, will wait for me outside stores if I stop to eat or go to the john. I open my mouth and gulp air and the rush of air is sweet in my lungs and I feel strong again as the air caresses my lungs. I pedal through the town, across a wooden bridge, the sound of the slats like applause in my ears. And I say hello and goodbye to Fairfield and continue on my way, feeling as though I will never stop, never stop.”

I think that’s a pretty terrific piece of writing, a whole story in a chapter!

Ren Yeah — I wrote a short story for a prompt where the character is in motion the whole time and I wrote it about someone cycling, not being pursued, cycling in a less frantic way than this, but it’s a good writing challenge and it can really bring out a different approach than someone who’s standing… I trailed off there.

Adam But it’s true, it’s hard to make writing dynamic, and when I’m practicing creative writing with the kids they find it hard not to just paint a frozen picture. They either just do back and forth dialogue — well the younger ones just do ‘and then, and then, and then’ just a succession of stuff, but the older ones struggle to create a living scene and to get that sense of movement, so I think it is a useful example of writing.

Ren It also reminds me, there was some kind of scrapyard that I had to go past on my way back from school that had German Shepherds barking it and they would always jump at the fence and bark.

Adam I hated that kind of thing as a kid!

Ren And now I’m with Mattie and he's very fond of them, and I actually did meet a German Shepherd later who was the first dog that I ever really got to know, and she was very calm and placid and also intimidating enough to all the other dogs that they didn’t bother us, and I was like, okay, I like this one.

Adam Yeah, I think for me having the years during lockdown of living with two dogs made a big difference in terms of my fear of dogs. It made me realise that when dogs are barking it doesn’t automatically mean they’re angry or trying to get you to go away, dogs do also bark when they’re excited and happy and I think understanding that helped quite a bit.

Ren But a German Shepherd also comes up towards the end of Fade, so there might be an autobiographical —

Adam Well Fade seems the most autobiographical, he certainly is inviting that reading, because it seems to track his life in that the main character is also born seemingly around the mid 1920s and is growing up between the wars and then the outbreak of World War II. And also in the French Canadian section of Massachussetts. So it certainly seems to have autobiographical elements, this is quite a complex novel, it’s a hard one actually to succinctly —

Ren Uhhuh.

AdamStructurally it’s quite complex, but it starts narrated by a character called Paul, talking about his experiences as a teenager and then later we flash forward to many decades later at which point Paul has becomes a successful author and his agent, or publisher, discovers this lost manuscript that she realises has autobiographical element. So there’s that meta element to it where the protagonist becomes an author known for setting stories in his hometown, which Cormier does, does make it seem like it might be quite autobiographical! And Paul has hidden this manuscript away in part because it has some shameful aspects, some confessional aspects, so rightly or wrongly it does make you wonder if these confessional aspects are true to life, are there some things that Cormier is confessing to, in which case it does make it a pretty unsettling read.

Ren I will say, the beginning is quite a traditional children’s horror star.

Adam That’s an interesting point, with the photograph?

Ren With the photograph, yeah, he's talking about this mysterious photograph of his father’s family, taken before World War I in Quebec and there’s his father as a kid and his grandparents and all his aunts and uncles but one of his uncles is invisible — isn’t in the photo, though everyone swears he was there when the photo was being taken. And I feel like that’s quite a traditional intriguing start.

Adam Yeah, it’s almost like a Goosebumps start!

Ren It is, exactly! And then the rest of the novel is so weird.

Adam And then we get to — I don’t know how much depth we want to go into and I certainly don’t want to spoil too much of the book, but I will say trigger warning for squickiness. If you’re someone who’s not comfortable with um, troubling, I guess… oh gosh there’s all sorts of troubling stuff! I guess if you don’t want to read about unhealthy sexuality, I don’t know if there are any healthy displays of sexuality, maybe avoid it. It can be squicky at times. Squicky in an insightful and probably pretty accurate kind of way, in terms of looking at a teenage boy who hasn’t had much in the way of good direction? I don’t know, I don’t really know what to say. I don’t think it’s exploitative exactly, he’s not an exploitative writer it’s just —

Ren Uncomfortable.

Adam Yeah, it’s very uncomfortable. It reminded me of watching Peep Show sometimes, the Robert Webb and David Mitchell sitcom. But obviously Peep Show is for adults and this is aimed at a young adult audience. I will say basically, the main character really fancies his aunt, and we hear quite a lot about this and it doesn’t go well. It’s like some weird thing out of a visual novel, basically. I’ve said enough I’ll pass over to you Ren! What are your thoughts?

Ren It took me quite a while to read this book, I read the first Paul section and I was like: ‘right, okay, that’s some rich stuff there’. It does have this supernatural element to it because Paul discovers that he can ‘fade’, become invisible, and this is a hereditary skill/curse/.

Adam Yeah, kind of curse because it allows him to see the awful things that various people do in his town in the darkness and some of them are really grim.

Ren That’s passed down from uncle to nephew, and any hijinks inherent in this scenario are quickly curtailed with horror.

Adam Yeah, like at first it seems like it might be an episode of Round the Twist with some quirky, maybe mildly squicky or troublesome but mostly harmless fun, but no. No it is not. It’s bad. And I guess it tracks Paul’s loss of innocence, basically. Both in terms of Paul doing some really bad inexcusable things, but also witnessing even worse things.

Ren And then there’s very much that theme of trauma being passed on generationally —

Adam The uncle seems like a very haunted figure who also had his own experiences with the Fade, and Paul learns as a much older man later in the novel that he has his own nephew, who has unfortunately grown up in extreme privation experiencing a lot of abuse and so is very troubled and uses the Fade in even worse ways than Paul.

I did send you a text because I’d just finished reading that section and I was like — if you think it’s already dark, buckle up.

Ren And I was like, ooohkay, as I read the metatextual middle section, what is going to happen now.

Adam So guys, if you want to read a Young Adult novel in which a homeless person is mercilessly abused for long stretches, do we have the book for you! The thing is it’s really well-written. It’s just really grim. This is the first thing we’ve read for the podcast where that’s part of me that’s like ‘Yeah, I don’t know if this should be in a school library’. And that takes a lot for me to say because I’m not big on censorship! But I’m glad I didn’t read it when I was too young, it would have really upset me.

Ren Yeah, I think Fade is a 16+ novel.

Adam Yeah, that’s my feeling. I think if I’d read it in Sixth Form I would have got on with it because I was starting to read adult fiction then.

Ren Yeah, I mean I was reading adult fiction by about 13, but I don’t know if that was a great idea. It was certainly mind-expanding.

Adam To be fair that is true of quite a few bookish friends I have, but we’re all quite neurotic, so.

Ren The question is, do you have a texture?

Adam Oh my gosh, I do, but the question is, is it just going to be the same texture?

Adam (editing voiceover) With a serious amount of contrition and even self-disgust here, I, Adam Whybray, editing this episode of Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror that I forgot to sing Texture of the Week before providing my texture to Ren. So with that in mind, I have my guitar here. (Loud strumming on acoustic guitar) Texturr-uhhh Textuur-uhhhh, Texturrree O—ooof the weee-eeek Okay back to the episode.

Adam Because mine is the texture of the fade

Ren Oh, no mine is a different one.

Adam Okay cool, because there are actually quite a lot of descriptions of the experience of the Fade but all of them are pretty evocative so I’ll read the first main one:

“First of all, the pause. Then the pain. And the cold. The pause is a moment in which everything in your body stops, the way a clock stops. A terrible stillness that lasts only the length of a drawn breath—although it seems longer than that, almost an eternity—and then, at the onset of panic, the heart beats again, blood rushes through your veins and sweet air into your lungs. After that, the flash of pain, like lightning, pain that darts throughout your body, so intense that you gasp at its brutality. But the pain is merciful in its quickness, gone as quickly as it comes. The cold begins when the fade begins and remains all the time you are in the fade. It has nothing to do with the time of year or the seasons of the weather. The cold comes from inside, spreading under the surface of the flesh, like a layer of ice between skin and bone”

Doesn’t sound like a nice time!

Ren No. I’m glad you did that one. My one was, so, Paul’s father works in a comb factory, and at one point he’s punished by the foreman or whatever by being sent to work in the Rub Room, which is the worst station in the factory.

Adam If you’ve had dreams about working in a comb factory because you like combs, this book will see to those!

So this is the description of Paul going into the Rub Room:

“You opened the door of the Rub Room at the comb shop and a blast like purgatory struck your face. The workers sat on stools, huddled like gnomes over the whirling wheels, holding the combs against the wheels to smooth away the rough spots. The room roared with the sound of machinery while the foul smell of the mud soiled the air. The mud was a mixture of ashes and water in which the wheels splashed so that they would not overheat at point of contact with the combs. Because the Rub Room was located in the cellar of the shop where there were no windows, the workers toiled in the naked glare of ceiling lights that intensified everything in the room: the noise, the smells, the heat, and the cursing of the men. On the coldest day of the year, the temperature in the Rub Room was oppressive; in the summer, unbearable. The workers there were exiles from the rest of the shop: newcomers from Canada and Italy eager for any job at all, troublemakers who needed their spirits broken, and workers who had lost favor with the superintendent, Hector Monard.”

Adam I appreciated actually the amount of focus on worker’s rights and the worker movement in this novel, I thought that was unusual for a Young Adult novel and gave it a lot more historical texture.

Ren There was also some discussion about the conflict around the next generation working in the industry, one of Paul’s brothers wants to work in the comb factory like his father but his father says: ‘no, I want something better for you’.

Adam It’s a very rich historical novel in many ways. Looking on Goodreads it’s got quite divisive reviews, which is to be expected I think. I can imagine if you were an intelligent introverted sort, with a tendency towards the dark and macabre, or Catholic navel-gazing this book would hit you hard if it came to you at the right time, but I can also understand why some people just bounce off it because it’s quite grubby. It’s pretty oppressive. He manages to write these very claustrophobic books, you often get very caught in the minds of the main characters and they’re not very nice places to be. Which might be why it reminds me of a visual novel, this one in particular, Chaoshead or some of these Nitro Plus visual novels that are quite grubby and uncomfortable.

Ren Endorsed by Stephen King on the cover.

Adam Which checks out, I think. Stephen King’s stuff is sort of appropriate for teenagers and sort of not. Because teenagers often do discover Stephen King novels and he’s quite accessible as a writer, but also quite grubby. Reading Carrie, I might have said before, I was quite surprised at how grubby and tawdry it is. There’s stuff that I thought was just in the film because it was in the film and it wouldn’t be in the book, but it was, very much, if not more so.

I’m not saying any of this to be like, cancel Cormier. Because it seems like he was a very decent guy. I found — this is the kind of thing that was probably ill-advised at the time but it’s quite nice to read about. In I Am The Cheese there is a telephone number for the main character’s girlfriend and Cormier just used his own telephone number where he lived with his family, and so inevitabley got quite a lot of phone calls from random teenage readers just trying it. Which obviously sounds like: ‘Oh my god safeguarding’. But I found a Reddit thread of people who had called him and there was a guy who was a teenager at the time who said it was really enriching for him they talked about literature and things and he was going through a really hard patch and Cormier was really kind and generous with his time, which was quite sweet. And while I don’t want to say you can tell a wrong ‘un or a good person from their face, he does has a lovely face.

Ren He does have a very nice face!

Adam He does! You look at photos of him and he looks like a very nice man. So that’s good enough for me!

But yeah, I’m glad we’ve had him on the podcast because although they don’t always fit traditional children’s horror they’re certainly some of the most disturbing and unsettling Young Adult books I’ve ever read.

Ren Absolutely. I’m glad we dipped into this, and you know, there are plenty more.

Adam I know! That’s the same with a lot of these writers, like Swindells, several of the writers we’ve covered, there’s always more. We’ll be doing this into our old age or civilisational collapse, whichever comes first. And continuing on the light note, we’re going to be doing another pretty dark book next, right, Clive Barker.

Ren I’m so excited. Clive Barker’s children’s book, The Thief of Always.

Adam I just can’t believe that Clive Barker wrote a kids book.

Ren That concept alone is worth it. But I met someone who read it as a kid and hopefully we can get her to talk about it with us.

Adam Process any feelings that came up.

Ren Uhuh. I watched Hellraiser in preparation.

Adam I’ve never done it. I think Antonia or someone told me I wouldn’t like it, like ‘it’ll make you uncomfortable, it’ll make you feel dirty Adam’. But you liked it.

Ren I did, I really liked it.

Adam Maybe I’ll watch it. Apparently the Hellraiser sequels are notoriously bad, Evolution of Horror did all of the sequels but Mike Muncer sounded like he’d really gone through something, he sounded really deflated. Obviously there’s a lot of bad horror sequels but the Hellraiser ones are generally seen as The Worst. It’s the worst series for bad sequels.*

Ren This is a bit out of nowhere, but speaking of bad films that people might watch for a project, it’s been a while since we’ve mentioned Cage Wisdom on here.

Adam Oh my gosh, our old blog? Well, it’s still online, so you can find our reviews of now only about a quarter of Cage’s output because obviously he continues at a pace. But I always enjoyed your review for The Boy in Blue on there because you seemed so unhappy about having to watch it.

Ren So you know, if you want to dig into our back catalogue, our pre- Still Scared project.

Adam I sometimes think I should log back in and review — I liked Pig a lot from some years back now, I could review that, The Surfer was a bit silly but not bad, an Oz-ploitation film with Cage doing his angry thing. There have been some good ones over the last 10 years.

Alright, thank you for listening. Do you want to do credits while I think of something to say.

Ren (Ren starts doing credits) You can email us at Still Scared Wisdom — oh, wait, I'm still thinking about Cage Wisdom.

Adam What?! Still Scared Wisdom! That’s not our email. Uh, Stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

Ren Or follow us on Instagram at stillscaredpodcast where I do Canva collages to encapsulate the themes of the episodes.

Adam Did you upload the last one?

Ren No, I need to do it, I need to do it!

Adam I wondered if your dad had objected, I know your dad is in this collage and I wondered if he said ‘No! that’s not going online!’

Ren Yeah, I used a photo of my dad at about 10 years old as a model of Matthew from Chocky. I will upload that now.

Do you have a sign-off for us Adam?

Adam Yes. Never forget that the cheese stands alone creepy kids!

Ren The cheese stands alone! Alright. See you next time creepy kids! Bye!

Adam Bye!

• I would contest this claim in that I thought the first sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II from 1988 was pretty decent! Maybe I’m just a Hellraiser apologist.