In this episode we discussed The Thief of Always by the legendary Clive Barker!

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.

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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, today we're joined by special guest Cat Burroughs to talk about The Thief of Always by Clive Barker. A full transcript of this episode will be available, so check the show notes for that. Enjoy!

(Intro theme plays)

Ren Good evening, Adam, and welcome to our guest, Cat Burroughs, totally unsuspicious person!

Cat I am doing everything legal.

Adam Yeah, I mean I have, I have heard some things but you know, I'm fine, I'm fine to have Cat on the podcast.

Cat Thank you, nothing has ever been proven.

Adam Well, that's the main thing, that's our policy. Okay, so let's move on! We're talking about The Thief of Always today, as written by Clive Barker, another non-sus individual. Clive Barker, of course, of the Hellraiser series!

Ren That's a really wholesome man.

Adam We're not covering the Hellraiser films, however, on Still Scared. I hear there's a lot of them. Kat, have you actually watched quite a few of them?

Cat A number. I mean, the first is just an outright good movie. The second probably has some of my favourite visuals ever. They get very, very silly, which I love, and then they get very, very bad, which I also kind of love.

But then they've done them now and now it's all really, really gory, and I'm too much of a wimp to actually watch any of the new ones.

Ren Yeah, I watched the first two in preparation for reading Clive Barker's, children’s books. And I really enjoyed them.

Adam Yeah, I mean, I was surprised, Ren, because you're not always one for sort of squishy body horror. You can get the squick. And yeah, you said you really liked them.

Ren Yeah, I don't know, maybe it helped that I was watching with a friend who kept talking about wet puppets. And that made me laugh.

Cat Good practical effects are satisfying to watch.

Ren Yeah, they're really good. They are really squishy and wet and glistening. But it's cool.

Cat Yeah, they ruined some good outfits in the first one.

Adam Yeah. So I haven't actually watched them. I've listened to some of the Evolution of Horror pod episodes on them. So I must get around to them. I also likewise own the 2001 video game Clive Barker's Undying, which again, I've not actually ever got round to. He did an FMV game as well, I think? Me and Ali have recently been playing our way through Sierra's Phantasmagoria, their notorious but wildly successful FMV game, which I have played before.*

So I'm kind of in the mood for actors having, well, not having to, but necessarily acting maybe in a very stilted way in front of green screen. So yeah, maybe I'll be playing that soon as well. Because I have to say, I loved this book! This is incredible.

Ren Yeah. So Clive Barker is known for Hellraiser and the stories that they're based on. He's also a director and an artist and he also wrote and illustrated this children's horror novel, The Thief of Always, published in 1992, which I don't think is a widely known fact.

Cat Yeah. Who knew? Well, Cat did! So thank you, Cat.

Ren Yeah. Me and Adam have been doing this podcast for a while and we're quite familiar with children's horror, but neither of us had heard of this book. And I met Cat when I was visiting my sibling Willow in London. And she said, oh, you should do The Thief of Always. And I was like, yeah!

Adam So Cat, how did you discover it?

Cat I was trying to remember this the other day, and I don't know. It sort of appeared on my radar in that way that things do. And I think I had a stepdad who was really into horror. I remember The Green Mile was coming out in serial form, like in these tiny little books, and he got all of them. So I suspect it must have come through him and actually reading it, it would make sense because I think Stephen King sort of declared that Clive Barker was the new incredible scene person on the horror scene.

And you can see a little bit of echoes. I don't think Clive Barker was like directly inspired by It, but It did come out in like 1986. And it's another one of children trying to deal with something overwhelmingly horrific and something that adults can't deal with.

And I think my love for this book, because I loved it deeply, really set up kind of my later finding Clive Barker's other work, finding Stephen King and really enjoying strong kids, especially strong girl characters, which this book has. And my life of reading good horror fantasy.

Adam Yeah, I mean, this is like what I wanted Stranger Things to be, instead of the aggressively disappointing action CGI fest that stretched on and on for what felt like decades.

Cat But you can't replicate the language. I mean, Clive Barker is one of those people that I think even like his language is so — and I guess I'll be the first one to say textured — like that honestly, you don't need to imagine anything. It's going to be intrusively in your head.

didn't reread this book so much as I remembered it and the words just sort of danced across my eyes to kind of prepare for this.

Ren I guess, yeah, what were your strongest memories from reading it as a kid?

Cat There are phrases in here that have just become part of like the things that I think, like the ‘great grey beast February’, like the first sentence is, you know, something like ‘Harvey Swick was eaten alive by the great grey beast February’. And I still think of that whole month like that.

And the moment when like Mrs. Griffin sees him and goes, Harvey Swick as I live and breathe, like there are just things in here that I have sense memories of, you know, the blue cat, with the coat of sky blue and the idea of the beetle and the worm getting into everything. Like he writes these fish hooks that stick in your brain, and you grow up with them in there. And they become these beautiful little piercings, which works because Clive Barker is a progenitor of goths, like he makes goths. You read him and you become more goth, even if you're the least goth person in the world.

Ren Yeah, that's a lovely description.

Adam And we've got we've got the same covers, Cat, because as ever my webcam does not work on Discord so you can't see me or my cover, but you kindly showed us your book cover. And it's presumably the first edition. It's hardback and it's got the house, which Harvey is spirited away to, glowing and illuminated. And then this sort of awful serpentine face emerging from the foliage below the house.

Cat Yes, and that copy has his illustrations all the way through, because Clive Barker is a good artist as well. And I love his illustrations. I was saying to Ren, when I was gushing about this book and they were very kindly listening to me monologue that I learned to draw by drawing the illustrations in this book.

Adam Oh wow!

Ren They're really good illustrations. Like they are just black ink pen, I think some of it sort of looks like brush pen. So again, textured. But sort of kind of scratchy and fluid at the same time.

Cat They are both compelling and grotesque, which is something that I love in my artwork, you know, I'm a big Aubrey Beardsley fan. And I love just good horror art. And actually I went to university during COVID and I was in Aberdeen and they've got a surprisingly good art museum there. And they have a bust that Clive Barker did and it's a representation of Francis Bacon, who's another fantastic horror artist. And I remember finding it and being like, this is the best thing in Aberdeen.

Ren That's really cool.

Adam Your cover’s not quite as inspiring is it, Ren?

Ren No, my cover is a later edition, presumably, it's very blue. And it's got some little sparkly bits, and a boy walking into a bright light and in his shadow he has big bat wings. Which, which is fine, but not as evocative.

Adam Yeah, I'm quite excited to bring this edition into my new school because I’ve got a new job. And I definitely want to put this on my bookshelf in my classroom.

Ren So as Cat said the first sentence is a real banger of an opening sentence. “The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.Here he was buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter. “

Adam It's quite Dickensian!

Cat It is, but also when it goes on, and it posits this person wondering how Harvey had died, and he'd follow through the streets, he'd sit where Harvey would sit and be bored in this way and then he would completely understand and with tears in his eyes, he would say that Harvey Swick was eaten by the great grey beast February.

And as a very melodramatic only child, I definitely had like that series of thoughts of like, this is going to happen to me and they'll wonder why and then they'll totally understand that. And they'll feel sorry for me and they will think I was such a brave little soldier.

Ren So Harvey is bored, the weather is horrible. His mother tells him don't sit wishing the days away life too short. But he is. And a strange kind of scrawny smiling figure blows through his bedroom window and offers to take Harvey somewhere out of this world. And this character is Rictus. And Rictus comes back and then Harvey agrees to go with him to Mr. Hood's holiday house.

The way I was thinking about kind of approaching this book through different children's horror tropes, because it covers quite a lot of them that that we've identified over the course of doing this podcast. And the first one, that we've already ticked off as soon as as soon as Harvey flies off of Rictus is that he's ditched his parents as soon as possible. You have to get the parents out of the way in order for the for the child to go on and have the adventure.

But I guess, yeah, we quickly get to another staple genre, which is the Weird House. Which we've encountered quite a lot in previous episodes, like Paper House and Marianne Dreams, The Haunted Mansion, the Casper movie, Monster House. And not that we've done an episode of it, but Coraline is a comparison that kept coming to mind for me.

Adam Yeah, I think that's fair. And Rictus arriving at the window is, I mean, he's not explicitly referred to as a vampire, there's vampiric imagery in here. And later Harvey is actually a character who transforms into a kind of vampire. But it's very Salem's Lot like. I mean, before recording Cat was making some comparisons to Stephen King, with comparisons to It. But that seemed like a really Salem's Lot image to me, this character arriving at the window.

But it's deliberately kind of underplayed in as much as Harvey, maybe because he's looking for some adventure, is suspicious of Rictus but not scared.

Cat And I was going to almost object and say, well, he didn't invite him in but actually he did. He said, ‘If I don't have some fun, I'll die. I'll do it. I'll die.’ And sometimes like we've learned from things like, you know, David Bowie's Labyrinth. Sometimes if you say something loud enough with an intention, it invites things, things are listening to you.

Adam Oh, yeah. I definitely felt that he'd drawn Rictus to the house.

Ren So, we come to this house. This house, we quite quickly learn is animated by a sinister presence. But it's a kind of gingerbread house of a sort in that it's deceptively beguiling.

Adam And the grounds are described as, as gorgeous, right? We spend quite a lot of time in the garden. And I really like this idea of the seasons. And you'll get into that later, I'm sure. But the seasons obviously pass very fast. It's almost like you get the best of the season. It's like the seasons have been distilled or condensed. So you get, you know, the most bright and fecund spring. And then, you know, the most dazzling, relaxing summer and the most crisp and eerie autumn. And winter just becomes Christmas. I really like the idea of the seasons being condensed down to their essence.

Cat Rereading it again, I was surprised because even though it becomes really horrifying, it really does, Clive Barker is the master at this. There's such beauty. And in the very small — because the pace is much faster than I remember it being — but he comes in at high summer, they go through a wall of clinging mist from a very grey place. And I think it's Milsap, like Barker is great at making these hideous place names, like in Abarat, it's called Chicken Town. He makes these places names that you're just like this is horrible. Like, Lurgan, someplace that no one would ever want to be, that no one wants to be from. But you escape from that. And it’s high summer and there's flowers in the tall grass and a boundless sky. And you have an open front porch and someone welcoming you in. It’s the dream, it's homecoming, you know?

Ren Yeah. And he's welcomed by Mrs. Griffin. Who’s an ancient but friendly old woman who produces all of the food that he can eat.And he meets the other children who are Wendell, who is goofy and exuberant, and Lulu, who has been at the house for the longest and is withdrawn.

Cat I love the moment where he hesitates on the threshold and he almost doesn't come in. Because he might be impulsive and he's a child, but he is shown as having a way of thinking, of thinking about thinking, of being aware of things that seems much older than 10. But it's Wendell's exuberance, his uncontrollable laughter. His absolute joy is the joy of the children in there. Because, you know, as we learn the house is a house of illusions. But for a brief moment, the thing that's so melancholic about the book is that for a brief moment the joy is real. It's just, it doesn't last.

Ren Yeah. And I'll just read the description of them, of Harvey stepping through the wall. Unless I'm stepping on anyone's texture. There's so many textures.

Adam There's a lot of textures.

Cat Mine comes later.

Adam See, see how you go.

Ren Harvey did as Rictus had instructed, and as he came within three steps of the wall a gust of balmy, flower-scented wind slipped between the shimmering stones and kissed his cheek. Its warmth was welcome after his long, cold trek, and he picked up his pace, reaching out to touch the wall as he approached it. The misty stones seemed to reach for him in their turn, wrapping their soft, gray arms around his shoulders, and ushering him through the wall.

As I was reading I was putting crosses by interesting turns of phrase and textures. And there's a lot of crosses. There's a lot of interesting choices.

Cat Yeah, Barker words real good!

Ren He describes Wendell as having a spaghetti grin at one point. So the joy of the house is that you experience all of these seasons in a day. And like Adam said, there's the best of the seasons. And autumn is Halloween. There are moments of horror before we get to that —

Cat Well, there's the almost immediate death of one of the cats, which really shocked me. I forgot how soon it was. Is it the morning after or something like that? It's his arrival. And I was thinking, las he the thing that changed the, ecosystem of the house? Because before that, I think the three cats had always been there as long as Mrs. Griffin had.

Ren And it comes just after the discussion about the fish as well. Where Harvey and Wendell are talking about it being summer, and Harvey's like, is there anywhere I can swim? And Wendell's like, there is, but you know, you don't really want to go around to the lake. And Harvey asked if there's any fish. And, and like oh, maybe we could catch some and Mrs. Griffin could cook them for us. And Mrs. Griffin is really shocked by this because of what we learn later about the fish. But this really foreboding moment is almost immediately followed by the death of poor Clue cat.

Cat Which they don't linger on as much as they could. But yeah, something like a little sodden mass. It does get you.

Ren And so Harvey does go to the lake, and does find the lake quite horrible. He sees Lulu there standing by this scummy, fly-ridden, dark and dank lake. And he's like, oh, what's she doing there? So we're getting quite strong hints about what's to come.

Cat And he's deliberately setting up, Harvey does realise that the lake is the opposite of the house, the house is alive, the lake is dead, the house is changing, the lake is like stagnant and foetid.

Ren And it also sets up as Harvey being a kid who asks questions, like right from when Rictus first comes through his window, Harvey's asking too many questions. And he keeps asking questions, asking Wendell questions about the fish, like, why would he have fish like that? Everything else is so beautiful, why does he have this horrible, ugly lake? And Wendell's just like, who cares? Is his response.

But yeah, we get a cameo from Pinhead.

Adam Yeah, yeah, I was delighted and alarmed when I noticed this.

Ren In an illustration of the Halloween masks hanging on the wall, one of them is, is the Pinhead mask alongside various other creepy creatures.

Adam Yeah, there's a particularly evil-looking punch mask.

Cat Is there ever a not evil-looking punch mask?

Adam Yeah, fair point.

Ren So this is for Halloween, they get to dress up and, and choose a mask and go out and enjoy the spooky, spooky evening. And Wendell plays a trick. I guess this gives a chance for Clive Barker to just into straight-up horror.

Adam Oh no, the horrible picture!

Ren Well, yeah, the horrible picture and the horrible description!

Adam Can I read it? Okay, so, so he's outside, he's searching for Wendell. And he thinks he hears the creaking of a ladder.

"It was not a ladder he'd heard creaking, it was a rope. No, not even a rope: a noose. And in his hand, the leg of the man hanging from the noose. He let go of it and stumbled backward, barely suppressing a second shout as his eyes rose to meet the dead man's stare. To judge by his expression, he had died horribly. His tongue lolled from his foamy lips, his veins were so swollen with blood his head looked like a pumpkin.

Either that, or it was a pumpkin.

A fresh fountain of sparks now burst from the firework, and Harvey saw the truth of the matter. The limb he'd held was a stuffed trouser leg; the body a coat spilling bundles of clothes; that head a mask on a pumpkin, with cream for spittle and eggs for eyes.”

And in the picture, the eggs are very kind of sloppy, yoke-y eggs that are dribbling down the pumpkin's woe-forgotten face.

Cat I think it says something that when I re-read this, I just went, how do you get the eggs to stay there?

Ren It's a great question.

Cat Yes, a special egg glue.

Ren Do you remember being scared by this book as a kid, Cat?

Cat Yes, but much more compelled. Like I was scared by what came later. I'll tell you especially with, with my texture, like it's all kind of wrapped up in a scene that happens later.

But I was more compelled because Harvey isn't a Mary Sue, like he lies to his friends to entertain them. He is mischievous, he does play tricks, but he also cries when a cat dies and comforts people, even though he doesn’t have to and other people shirk the responsibility.

So I think I found the fact that for a moment, he gets very, villainous, coming up to scene when he has his revenge on, on Wendell. You feel the truth of it because you feel how much a joy you'd have at being suddenly gifted with power, especially if you're someone helpless like a small child. But yeah, I think that's why I always found him and Lulu such compelling characters.

Adam And in terms of him being gifted this power, this is when we meet the second — I don't know what you'd call them really.

Cat They're called a brood. They refer to each other as sister or brother and they say loosely we're all in the same brood. But I guess we'd call them probably underlings, henchmen, uh, igors.

Ren Yeah, so we've met Rictus and then on this Halloween where Harvey gets his revenge we meet Marr and Jive.

Cat Barker's really good for teaching you vocabulary, I find. He doesn't pander. I know this is end of childhood, early YA but it was great for like, I confidently used the word quizzical, I think after reading this. But he names people for their strongest attributes, or at least the underlings are named by that.

Adam Yeah, so Jive is twitchy and always moving.

Cat And Rictus has the huge grin, and Marr can change things.

Ren And the description of her is pretty grotesque. “Unlike Jive who looked nimble enough to walk on the eaves if the whim took him, Marr seemed to have slug blood in her somewhere. Harvey almost expected to see her fingers leave silver trails on the brick she touched, or see soft horns appear from her balding head. She was grossly fat, her flesh barely clinging to her bones. Wherever it could-around her mouth and eyes, at her neck and wrists- it collapsed in clammy folds.”

Cat shudders It's like if you've ever had like a truly limp handshake from someone.

Ren Yeah, very clammy, a clammy description.

Adam Clammy is such a good word.

Ren But she has the power of transformation and, and for this prank here she transforms Harvey into a vampire of sorts, but with fangs like a wolf and a red throat and white skin. So just this kind of fantasy, horrible creature.

Cat But one that could fly, I mean, the wings.

Adam And he does not use his new-found powers for good.

Ren No, he uses them to thoroughly frighten Wendell.

Cat One moment I was always curious about is that he doesn't take the first leap. I think Jive pushes him off the roof just to see if he can fly. And he does. And there is this moment of terrible joy where like the moon looks down on him with like the face of a mother and he’d able to save himself and he swoops.

So you wonder about the other children and how many times they had done this sort of thing to them before. How many children had been tempted, would they have just pushed him off a roof and he would have got squooshed at the bottom and that would have just been it? Like, oh, well, time for another kid.

Ren Yes, it seems likely.

Cat Yes.

Adam I liked the uncertainty and the fact it's not wholly resolved how many children have been ensnared in this place and it seems to have existed maybe forever and certainly for centuries.

Cat Well, for always!

Adam Yeah, I guess it’s been for always. I don't want to give away too much, but there is some sort of redemptive ending, but you don't get the sense that every child is necessarily saved and released. It's all a bit uncertain, I think.

Ren So that's the transformation of Harvey, but there's also another classic children's horror trope of animal transformation. If you think about the boys turning into donkeys in Pinocchio, the protagonist turning into a mouse in The Witches.

I think we have another strong entry into the children's horror canon.

Adam Oh, and what was that Goosebumps we watched? Is it werewolf skin or something?

Ren There's definitely been some Goosebumps in there, turning into animals.

Adam I mean, Goosebumps loves its transformations, whether it's, you know, via a mask or turning into a monster, turning into some kind of animal, getting big, getting small, all of that's very Goosebumps.

Ren Shall we do texture of the week?

Adam Yeah, I think we need to, we need to say it or sing it in real monster voices.

Ren Okay. Cat, you don't have to, we don't make guests.

Cat Thank you, I appreciate that.

Adam Well, they can, but yeah, you don't have to.

Ren and Adam (in snarling monster voices) Texture, texture, texture of the week.

Adam Nice.

Cat That was way more fun as an on-listener than as a participant, I think.

Ren Cat, would you like to go first?

Cat Yes, thanks. It's been living in my head rent free, since I first read this book at probably slightly too young an age. It's going to spoil a little bit of the ending, is that okay?

Ren Yeah.

Cat Okay.

Adam Yeah, so spoilers from here. Hopefully, if you listen this far and you're interested and don't want spoilers, you're intrigued enough to read it because it is really great. I think all three of us enthusiastically recommend it.

Cat Thank you. So when Harvey comes back to deal with the house, he at some point confronts Marr again and she reaches out to change him and she's going to change him into something ‘humble’. And he it has this line of ‘he realised who he was and he was happy being it’. But he asked her what she wanted to be he rejected the power that she had in her hand. So it's flowing back into her and she starts to dissolve into these big gobs of slime. And she goes, I dream of nothing, so nothing is what I'm turning to. So it's it's very much this dissolving slime, like handfuls of gobs of it coming down.

Adam Yeah. It reminded me of the Other Father in Coraline. I guess maybe the idea that that these beings never truly existed or have been created. And that idea of of the being collapsing into undifferentiated mush or slime. It's really horrible.

Ren And there's a really horrible drawing to go with it.

Cat Yes, there is.

Adam Oh, gosh, yeah.

Cat Yeah. That was the thing that really scared me as a kid.

Ren I’m not surprised!

Cat It was that and the description to go along with it. And I mean, I read his work. I've read so much of his stuff compulsively afterwards so I must like being this disgusted.

Ren Excellent texture. Adam?

Adam Yeah, so mine was just a small, vivid texture when Mrs. Griffin is first introduced at the doorway of the house.

"Harvey Swick, as I live and breathe."

He looked down, the weathervane 's white silhouette still behind his eyes, and there on the porch stood a woman who made his grandmother (the oldest person he knew) look young. She had a face like a rolled-up ball of cobwebs, from which her hair, which could also have been spiders' work, fell in wispy abundance. Her eyes were tiny, her mouth tight, her hands gnarled. Her voice, however, was melodious, and its words welcoming.“

Yeah, I love the simile — she had a face like a rolled up ball of cobwebs.

Ren And ‘spider’s work’ as well, it’s not a common phrase. Okay, so I also went horrible with mine and this is, I don't know, as soon as we met the dark foreboding pond full of fish, I was like, oh no, I can see where this is going.

And so it was, the fish do turn out to be the children who have never left the house and Lulu becomes one of them.

Lulu had reached the bank, and for a moment the meager starlight found her. All that Harvey had feared was true, and more. A fin grew from her bent and scaly back, and her legs had almost fused together. Her arms had become short and stubby, her fingers webbed.

But it was her face, glimpsed as she turned back to look at him, that was the greatest shock.

Her hair had fallen out, and her nose disappeared. Her mouth had lost its lips and her blue eyes turned to swivelling silver balls, lidless and lashless. And yet, despite their freakishness, there was human feeling in those eyes, and on that mouth: a terrible sadness that he knew would never leave his heart if he lived to be a thousand.

"You were my friend," she said as she teetered on the bank. "Thank you for that ."

Then she tumbled into the water.”

Cat I loved Lulu. I wish we'd gotten to spend more time with her. But he showed their friendship in a brief period of time. He showed that she was smart enough to figure out what was happening to her long before, and perhaps one of the only children that really understood.

And then Barker gives her kind of the killing blow. Harvey is smart, but Lulu's the smart one. So definitely one of the all-time good girl characters in horror books.

Ren She's not in it for long, but they do get a real friendship. And there's a real connection between the two of them.

Cat I think so. Because Wendell kind of proves, we didn't mention it, but when Harvey goes after Wendell, Wendell tries to get the monster, as he sees it, to attack Harvey instead of him, by going, you don't want me, I'm fat, go get Harvey.

So even though it kind of teaches you, there's like two kinds of friendship in life. There's lots of types of friendship, but this book kind of covers the loud, boisterous, like fun, lovely friendship, but then the quiet friendship that you know will have your back. And when you think they're gone they're actually running after your nemesis with a gigantic piece of wood to hit them in the back of the knee. And I think that's beautiful.

Ren So after seeing Lulu turn into a fish, Harvey is like, they need to get out of there, (him and Wendell, they need to go. And they do escape, but they're set upon by Carna, which is the remaining member of the brood, who is a winged and toothed creature.

Cat Like a gargoyle kind of thing, but horrible.

Ren And they manage to escape and get out, pursued by Carna, which smashes itself against the wall and almost destroys itself in the process of trying to catch them. And then they're out. And we get chapter 14 called Time Was, which I found really creepy.

Cat It was haunting. It's absolutely haunting.

Ren And I think this is another, I'm not quite sure how to describe it, but there's a certain sort of thing that happens in children's horror, I guess. It reminded me in tone or in kind of tenor of horror of when, I've talked about this before, probably because it terrified me, In The Moomins, when Moomintroll hides in the magic hat and comes out as a creature, like a weird looking creature, and his mum doesn't recognise him.

And I just found this so scary. And I feel like there's a similar kind of aspect here in that it turns out, and I didn't see this coming, actually, I don't know if you did, Adam.

Adam No, I didn’t actually. And you absolutely could see it coming, right? It makes complete sense.

Ren But it turns out that for every day at the holiday house,for every run through the seasons, a whole year has passed in the outside world.

Adam So Narnia-like. Or the reverse, actually.

Cat Strike that, reverse it.

Ren Yeah, so he spent a month in the house, but his parents are now 31 years older than when he left. And he knows that they've been waiting for him and mourning him and not knowing what happened to him that whole time. And it really gave me the shivers.

Cat Yeah, they kept his room the same way for the longest time, and then she said they finally redecorated it but because they wanted it to reflect the taste of a man, it's a real heartbreak. He puts some very adult heartbreak into this childhood story.

Ren And the illustration to go with it is also haunting of his dad opening the door as an old man, looking tired and haunted and not recognising Harvey.

Cat Yeah, there's a quote, and I won't do it justice, by Terry Pratchett, where he talks about the way you do horror, the way you make something horrific is you take something very, very ordinary and you just twist it a little bit.

And if you guys ever want to, you should do the Tiffany Aching series, because there's some definite horror elements in some of those.

Adam Ooh, good call.

Cat But when she's caught in this sort of dream state and she thinks she's home but something's just a little bit off. And it's that thing of, yeah, he's gone home, he’s done the thing that should save you. And it hasn't.

Ren And of course, there is a similar moment in Coraline, when she escapes and comes home, only to find that her parents are still missing because they're trapped in the snow globe. So she has to go back.

Cat It's a really good trope.

Adam Oh, that's particularly well done in the film, actually, when she crawls into the bed, and then she makes her parents out of pillows.

Cat Yeah, this is completely out of left field, but there's also the Silent Hill movie, if you ever saw that —

Adam Oh, gosh. Yeah, when it came out, it's been a long time!

Cat There’s this bit where they come home, but it is the worst fake out. Or if you saw The Descent, the UK version, the fake out of coming home and then having it not be safe.

Ren Yeah, it's pretty powerful.

Adam Yeah, the TV series Channel Zero, which I really like, it’s a sort of horror anthology series from, I don't know, five to 10 years back. That does it a lot, really effectively. So yeah, it is definitely one of the most potent horror tropes.

Cat And I love that Wendell just shows up and is like, this is terrible, my parents got divorced and my mother's fat.

Ren He's less poignantly affected than Harvey, let’s say.

Adam Yeah, yeah.

Cat You've got to have your comic relief character, I think, in horror. You do need it every once in a while.

Adam So they have to venture back.

Ren Yeah, so they have to go back to face the big horror.

Cat To get the years back.

Ren And get the years back, yeah.

Cat I think it's interesting, they can't find the way until they've decided to fully commit to it and then the house allows them to find the way.

Ren Yeah, t's quite a long final battle where Harvey has to beat all of the brood before Mr Hood himself.

Cat Like a Scott Pilgrim thing, but in a different context.

Ren Like the Elite Four.

Cat Exactly.

Ren But quite upsettingly, he comes back to find Mrs Griffin locked in a coffin in the basement.

Cat And they killed Blue Cat, but I'm so glad they killed the cat off screen because I don't think I could have dealt with another on-screen cat death. Like, this thing was bad for cat deaths.

Adam I like that it establishes once and for all that the brood really are merciless. Because obviously Rictus puts on a fake smile, right? And seems kind of ingratiating and sort of friendly. So there's always that temptation to think oh, maybe they're not so bad, you know, they're just doing what they have to do. But yeah, they lock her in a coffin!

Cat But he gets to hear her story when she comes out. And actually, because I listened to your last episode, or I listened to, sorry, maybe the one before that, it was the Roger Rabbit one. And there had been a comment on the horror of like being young and then growing old and becoming a baby.

And this is almost the reverse because different things were horrifying to me re-reading this than they were as a child. But Mrs. Griffin has this thing where she grew up and grew old in a matter of days. So you picture her growing old in the range of what actually would have happened, so every day was a year. So she maybe had just that brief period, like weeks of youth, and then she just kept getting old. And she did it all because she was frightened of death and her cat had died and she didn't want to die like her cat.

And as an adult, and now after the experience that happens when you've been alive for a good number of decades, you're like, oh man, this is hitting me in a way it did not when I was a child and I knew I would live forever.

Ren And Harvey allows her to cry, she's never been, she's never been able to cry in all of these years she's been in the house.

Cat She wished for it. She wished to never cry again. And I love that all of her wishes became curses.

Ren Sorry, Gretchen's making noises in the background. I'm sorry, we keep talking about cats dying.

Cat The last one doesn’t! The last one lives forever in her arms!

Ren Yeah, so we've heard about Mars oozing destruction from Cat's texture. And then next it's Jive who keeps making illusions and Harvey's realised, you know, everything's an illusion. And I think Jive sort of implodes from eating his own illusion!

Cat You’vee reminded his belly of what he was made of, which was dust. That was going to be my second texture. I know we don't get a second texture.

Ren Dirt and dust and ashes.

Cat And that illustration is incredible as well. If you get this book, just love the illustrations because they're wonderful.

Ren So he's making his way up to the attic as he's beating these different broods. And when, does he realise that Mr. Hood is the house? At some point he realises that there isn't a separate figure of Mr. Hood, he is the house. Much like the Monster House.

But yeah, Carna is in the attic. He's badly wounded from coming after them on their previous escape. Bu Hood is still using Carna to try and attack them.

Adam Carna seems more bestial maybe than the rest of the brood. Maybe it's easier to pity Carna because Carna seems more like a creature.

Cat Yeah, it doesn't seem to be able to talk, it’s pretty much just something that you use as a punishment. Carna stole all of Mar's teeth it was alluded at the beginning, which you're just like, did Carna then put them in Carna's mouth? Or did he eat the teeth? What did he do with the teeth?

Adam So there's this claustrophobic, slightly wretched battle against Carna in the attic.

Ren And Harvey defeats Carna through…

Cat The power of friendship.

Ren Yeah, gentleness, compassion.

Adam Oh, like the sponge in it lives beneath the sink in Goosebumps!

Ren Yeah? I don't remember that? I mean, I do remember the evil sponge.

Adam It's the evil sponge that soaks up bad feelings. And the way they defeat it is cradling it and singing it lullabies.

Cat That's beautiful.

Adam So if you ever have a stinky, bad sponge…

Cat I am not touching that. I am not. I will microwave it, which I hear is helpful for antibacterial, but that is getting removed with tongs.

Adam You're not going to cradle it?

Cat No. But I did kind of want to cradle Carna. Like, he was very good at describing this wretched animal that is being forced to perform again and again, and it's broken and it's close to death, but it's being kept alive. And you know, Harvey has this realisation that all of these minions were just being kept alive. They weren't sentient but there was a spark of borrowed life and will in them. And Carna doesn't want to be alive anymore. And it's almost like Karna knew that by accepting the kindness that Harvey offered him, it would put an end to him and does it.

Ren And then, Harvey is like ‘I want the years back, and the children who’ve been turned into fish I want them back as well’. And Rictus is trying to distract him by with these illusions of saying whatever you want, have puppies, have parrots.

Cat ‘All the books in the world from Aristotle to Zola’ was another phrase that stuck in my head.

Adam What kid doesn't want to read Zola?

Cat I mean, I kind of did after reading this, but I still to this day have not, so I can't have wanted it that much. I like how we're deeply in the bargaining stage of grief at this point for both of them.

Ren And so Harvey realises that he needs to, to outwit Hood. And he does this through challenging him and saying, — previously because it is Christmas every day. So he got presents and he got this replica of this toy wooden Noah's Ark that he'd had as a little kid that got lost. And it’s a really uncanny moment for him, having this item back that had been lost.

So he asks for an animate Noah's Ark where all the animals are moving around and everything. And then, and he asks for a huge meadow of flowers, but every flower is different. And he's trying to wear out Hood's power, really.

And he asked for all of the food, like a mountain of food. There's disgusting combinations.

Cat Pig's feet, pig's feet was definitely in there.

Ren Snail fudge with pig's foot clusters.

Cat Growing up in the deep American South, I still remember there'd be jars of pig's feet in one aisle in there and I would always stare at it in fascination.

Ren So then Hood's like, oh, stop messing around you can have one final gift and after that, you have to accept me as your master forever.

And he says, I want, I want the seasons. I want all the seasons at once.

And Hood does it, but —

Cat Can't stop doing it.

Ren Yeah, it destroys him.

Adam I guess even God didn't give us all the seasons at once, so it's a tall order.

Cat I would have loved to have seen it though. I think I read that they were trying to make this into something and I almost wish they don't because it won't ever look like it does in my head. But I love that he finds a way to, to sap the power of Mr. Hood enough to equalise things. And he's not a magical boy. He's never shown to have any power other than just vitality, I guess, or just that quality of mind that he shows. People say that his soul burns brightly, but that isn't any power that he can use. He doesn't have the force, all he has is bravery. And I think the qualities that would make someone a good fighter pilot, you know, a little bit of foolhardiness, a little bit of ruthlessness.

Adam I mean, I think, it would be very difficult to adapt. You'd, I'd probably have to do it as an animation because it has so much transformation and so much indeterminacy and things moving from one state to another, which animation tends to be much better equipped for than live action.

Cat If Barker animated it himself, I'd be there in a flash.

Ren Add it as another project, a fantasy project for Henry Selick.

Adam Yeah, I don’t know if Selick's too soft. Because there's obviously there is whimsy in this to a degree.

Cat The cats are whimsical, before they die.

Ren But obviously the illustrations are quite dark and jagged.

Cat But we also get a good fake out with Hood.

Ren Yeah, Rictus turns up and Harvey’s like, how can you exist without the power of Hood and whne the house has disappeared? And he's like, ah, I stole a bit of magic! And he has this little globe full of magic.

Cat Which Hood carries from the grave, you know, the one hand.

Ren A hand with foot-long fingers reaches out from the rubble.

Adam Which is again, weirdly, I mean, you know, maybe Gaiman did just nick bits of this for Coraline.

Ren I mean, you start to wonder, right?

Adam It's very similar to the Other Mother, with the metallic hand.

Ren Also has cats showing kids the way.

Cat I definitely think there's cross pollination, like there was between King and Barker and, you know Gaiman is provably a man of his influences, look at Sandman, there's, not much that's original. He's a good weaver of existing influences.

Adam That’s a very good point. That is really true. But yeah we get this remaining hand.

Ren And this hand forces Rictus to pour the, the globe of magic onto the ground. So we’ve, had the man house or the house man, I don't know, now we have a man made of house.

Cat It's a classic Batman, Man, Bat configuration.

Ren “His eyes were made of broken mirrors, and his face of gouged stone. He had a mane of splinters, and limbs of timber. He had shattered slates for teeth, and rusty screws for fingernails, and a cloak of rotted drapes that scarcely hid the darkness of his heart from sight.”

Cat This man would give you tetanus if you gave him a high five.

Adam I like the idea that anyone would want to give him a high five.

Cat Maybe that's all he needed to be redeemed, you know, just one good solid high five.

Adam No, he'd do a trick. He'd definitely do the, down below, you're too slow.

Cat Accidentally seal your soul, like soul five. Oh, and this is where Lulu saves the day, this is where my girl comes in.

Ren This is where Lulu saves the day, yeah. So yeah, Lulu gets a heroic moment at the end.

Cat And it's physical. Usually they let the girl out-trick it. But no, she swings a freaking four by four or something at the back of his head. And then Harvey grabs the wretched draperies covering his dark void of a heart or something. And he gets stuck into the vortex that happened where the lake is. So you're like, that is satisfying. This is a huge existential version of the person that goes on all fours behind the guy and then you push the guy and he falls over.

Ren So then he is properly done in and all the, the kids are processing out of the lake, turning back into children as they go.

Cat All naked, just naked kids. So that's fine.

Ren So they all go their separate ways and realising that they're going back into separate time zones. If it's all worked out they're going back to their own childhoods.

Adam Which means they can't be friends! Or can they?

Cat It is one of those, he writes so much about ephemeral things, things that are lost, things that can be regained. But there's a point in this book where I started tearing up. And it, it was the fact that he and Wendell have a very good and friendly goodbye, but he holds hands with Lulu, for as long as the fog lets them before they go back. Because they know that there's going to be too much of an age gap there, unless, the genders were reversed and he was Leonardo DiCaprio, it just wasn't going to work.

Ren So we just get a little ending scene of Harvey being at the park where the house was and someone comes up to him, who knows about it. And he says, oh, you know about Hood, didn't you? And says, oh, yes, but he wasn't one of them. He wasn't one of Hood’s prisoners, it was Lulu. And she doesn't come over because she, she wants him to remember her young.

Cat It feels, once again, like the end of the, the child part of It, when they emerge from the tunnels and you get this feeling like the world isn't perfect, but it's better. And they've done something.

Ren It has a surprisingly sappy ending.

Cat Oh gosh, it gets real mawkish. That's the only thing about this book. Are you going to read it? Because it does give me a little bit of a cringe. I did have, like, one single solitary tear that I'm ashamed of.

Ren What do you think, should we read it?

**Cat**Do it in a fatuous voice.

Adam Aw, no!

Ren Adam, do you want to read it in a voice that you feel is suitable?

Adam The last paragraph? Well, I said it’s Dickensian in places this book and it really does sound like it's right out of A Christmas Carol.

Cat Yes.

Adam “The days that followed were unlike any Harvey had ever known. Though there was no more talk of Hood, or of the House, or of the green hill upon which it had once stood, the subject was a part of every look and laugh that passed between him and his parents.

He knew they had only the vaguest sense of what had happened to them, but they were all three agreed on one thing: that it was fine to be together again.

Time would be precious from now on. It would tick by, of course, as it always had, but Harvey was determined he wouldn't waste it with sighs and complaints. He'd fill every moment with the seasons he'd found in his heart: hopes like birds on a spring branch; happiness like a warm summer sun; magic like the rising mists of autumn. And best of all, love; love enough for a thousand Christmases.”

(in Tiny Tim voice) And God bless us, each and every one!

Cat It's pure Muppet Christmas Carol for that one, I just see the bunny at the end of it. It's a great book for all that, I just feel like that could have taken maybe one more pass.

Adam Ah well.

Ren But yeah, I really enjoyed it. And I really think it belongs up there in the canon of children's horror. And yeah, with Coraline being tainted by Neil Gaiman being a scumbag.

Adam Well, we've still sort of got the film. We've still at least got Selleck and his team's animation craft.

Cat And it's especially hard for people of alternative and goth kind of vibes. We need everyone we can get. So we still have Clive Barker and we still have Trent Reznor. And we've still got The Cure. We've got a few good people that are keeping the lights on. I mean, the dark grim lights.

Ren Thank you so much, Cat, for suggesting this and for coming on the pod and sharing your insights and thoughts and memories of this book. It's been really lovely.

Cat Thank you for giving me a reason to reread it. It was glorious. And if I can say anything, if you liked this, if you like his writing, read Imagica. It's my favourite fantasy epic, it's further up than Lord of the Rings for me and I rarely ever find anyone else who's read it. And I'm glad that he created Hellraiser, I'm glad he has that notoriety but Imagica is a masterpiece and more people need to read it.

Ren Alright, onto the credits unless anyone has anything else to add.

Adam I mean, do you remember, Ren, that amazing pumpkin head Halloween scare? Do you remember when we tried to decorate a, was it like a wooden beam or something? At your parents, we tried to make a scary Halloween trick to scare the children.

Ren I don’t remember.

Adam We had a horrid, I swear we had like a horrid bear mask or something. And then we had a cast of your teeth. And we like hid the teeth with the bear mask and stood at the door and tried to scare children with it.

Ren Good times.

Adam I think we might have dressed in a boiler suit too or something. Did you have a boiler suit? One of us probably had a boiler suit. Or maybe it was a ski, maybe a ski suit. I don’t know.

Ren Cool. Thanks for listening. You can email us at stillscaredpodcast at gmail.com —

Adam Have you checked the emails?

Ren No, I haven’t checked the emails!*

Adam ‘Of course I haven't checked the emails!’ Check the emails.

Ren You can check the emails!

Adam I can’t check the emails, I don’t have the password.

Ren We’re very good at this. You can follow us on Instagram at stillscaredpodcast where I do a collage for each episode. And I will do a collage for this episode.

Our intro music's by Maki Yamazaki, our outro music's by Joe Kelly, our artwork's by Letty Wilson. Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam Oh, yeah, well, rate and review us if you want to give us a good review, because then we'll get more listeners, apparently. I think that's how it works. And, and don't get up to any egg tricks, creepy kids.

Ren Leave your egg glue at home.

Adam All right, thanks, spooky kids, see you next time. And thank you, Cat, again!

All Bye!

• Note from Adam: I got a little muddled talking about Barker's contributions to videogames. Clive Barker's Undying is only considered a spiritual sequel of sorts to Gremlin Interactive's Realms of the Haunting.

• As at the time of transcribing, we have in fact checked the emails!!