I've been poking about in old ruins again. However, let's start from the beginning.

Today being 1st March, I went over to Innerpeffray to visit the Library, which was opening again after its winter closure. I am thrilled to say that I was the first visitor of the season! Of course they do let people in during the winter but it is mostly groups and by special arrangement. So those don't count. I made sure to sign the visitors' book to prove I had been there!

Last year saw the opening of a new and gorgeous reading room on the ground floor (pictured left). So I had a look in there and admired some of the Bannockburn-related exhibits, which include songs about that mighty battle. Then I went upstairs to the older reading room. I wasn't planning to transcribe anything today because my time was limited, but I wanted to see what was new in the displays and just get a lovely whiff of that delicious library smell that librarian Lara Haggerty prosaically described as "dust" but that I am convinced is the scent of thousands of books thinking. 

Today Lara showed me a charming little volume by Sir Thomas Overbury, entitled "His Wife" and containing a series of descriptions of character types. These included "A Maquerela, in plaine English, a Bawde", who, we are informed, "is an old Char-cole, that hath beene burnt her selfe, and therefore is able to kindle a whole greene Coppice."

I think this book should have been named "The Little Book of Innuendo", as there is very much more in this vein!

It is possible to "adopt" a book from the Innerpeffray Collection, and fund the repairs they sometimes need; "His Wife" is one of those who could do with a patron just now, as we discovered a badly torn page. If you are interested in sponsoring this or any other book, £20 pays for minor repairs such as mending the tears in "His Wife", and a really major bit of emergency surgery involving rebinding etc costs £50.

And speaking of supporting the Library, I am pleased to say that the set of ghost stories that I wrote last Hallowe'en during my day as Writer in Residence at Innerpeffray will soon be available from the Library as a chapbook. I think I have already mentioned on my blog that a single story from the set can be heard in free audio format on SoundCloud, here: Lilith's Story. I will post details of how to order the chapbook as soon as they are confirmed - usually with Innerpeffray Library publications this is done by emailing the Library.

Anyway, once I had finished in the Library I decided to take a look at Innerpeffray Castle, which is a treat I had been saving up for myself. The castle is quite close to the Library - only a few hundred metres away in fact - in a field close to the River Earn. Anyone who reads my blog regularly will know that I love poking about in old buildings - often churches, but I like old castles too! This one is ruined and I had heard various accounts of its state and accessibility so I was keen to take a look for myself. March is a good time to go because there are no crops standing - I would not want to damage anything. It was however very muddy!

This is what I found:

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a great fan of English ghost story writer M.R.James. However, my researches into his work have occasionally led me along quite different paths!

Some years ago, I was researching for an article about the demonology of Canon Alberic's Scrap-book, and one of the points I tackled was why the sacristan in that story insists on selling the scrap-book at a fraction of its real value. The idea of selling at a lower price than the purchase sum rang a bell; I immediately thought of Robert Louis Stevenson's excellent story The Bottle Imp, part of his Island Nights' Entertainments.

Stevenson's tale was published shortly before MRJ wrote Canon Alberic's Scrap-book, but even if MRJ did not see it, it was the latest version in a long tradition of bottle imp stories with which MRJ may very well have been familiar. Whilst investigating these, I gathered so much material that in the end I decided to write an article about The Bottle Imp and its antecedents. The article was published in All Hallows 40 in October 2005 and as it has never been republished, I thought I would post it here, with a bibliography and a few small corrections.

I don't believe it breaks much new ground, as some of the influences on Stevenson's Bottle Imp are very well known - Stevenson himself refers to the stage play of the same name by R.B.Peake in his notes on his own story. However, it is a (I hope entertaining) round-up of previous bottle imp tales and may suggest some new reading for anyone interested in the tradition!


It is fairly well known that Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale The Bottle Imp was inspired by an early 19th century stage play of the same title by Richard Brinsley Peake; Stevenson himself owned the debt in his introduction to the story when it first appeared in the Sunday New York Herald in 1891. Others, including J.W. Beach in his 1910 essay on Stevenson’s sources, have traced the bottle imp motif further back to La Motte Fouqué, Grimmelshausen, even to the djinn of the Arabian Nights. I would like to examine these sources – specifically, which elements of earlier versions Stevenson has used, which not, and why - in order to understand what Stevenson contributed to the tradition, and how he made the bottle imp story particularly his own.

Stevenson’s Bottle Imp is set in Hawaii and tells the story of Keawe, a young man who buys a magic bottle containing an imp. The imp will grant any wish of the bottle’s owner, but there are two catches: firstly, whoever dies in possession of the bottle must go straight to hell, and secondly, the bottle must always be sold for a lower price, which means that ultimately the owner will be unable to sell it on. In addition, if the owner is not content with what he has wished for, ill will befall him once he has sold the bottle to someone else. Keawe also discovers that the good fortune brought by the bottle often comes in undesirable ways. In the course of the story, the bottle passes in and out of the possession of Keawe and his wife Kokua, but at the very last is purchased by a foul-mouthed and drunken sailor, who has no fear of the bottle imp’s taking him to hell because he is convinced he is going there anyway; he lurches out of the story with the bottle under his coat, and Keawe and Kokua live happily ever after.

The key element of the story is the danger of wish-fulfilment: Keawe gains his wonderful house through the deaths of his good and beautiful relatives; he wins the love of Kokua but then discovers that he has leprosy, and all his good fortune cannot avail him; he buys the bottle back to wish for his health, and then cannot enjoy it because he lives under the shadow of damnation. Wish-fulfilment stories are amongst the earliest ever told: Greek legend included the tale of Midas, who wished for everything he touched to turn to gold, and then discovered to his dismay that even his food and drink turned to metal when they touched his lips. Tithonus wished for eternal life without wishing for eternal youth, and became so wrinkled and shrunken with age that he turned into a grasshopper. Semele wished to see Zeus in all his divine glory, and was instantly fried to a crisp by his radiance. The Greeks believed that to commit hubris, an act of blasphemous arrogance, would bring down nemesis, retribution, on one’s head, and such stories reflect this; in Christian culture, seeking the fulfilment of one’s wishes through supernatural means leads to the endangerment of one’s soul, hence the story of Faust and the proliferation of other tales of diabolical pacts. Wish-fulfilment is a very dangerous thing in anyone’s book.

As regards specific bottle imp stories, these could ultimately be traced back to the legend of Solomon and the demons. In the very early Christian text The Testament of Solomon (possibly originating as early as the first to third centuries AD), King Solomon imprisons the demon Kunopaston in a phial and seals it with his ring. The djinn of the Arabian Nights appear to be demons imprisoned by Solomon: in The Tale of the Fisherman and the Genie, for example, a poor fisherman discovers a yellow copper bottle bearing King Solomon’s seal; when he opens it, a terrifying djinn bursts forth. In the tale of Aladdin, the ifrit which appears from the lamp is ‘as tall as one of Solomon’s djinn’ and is controlled by whoever wears a magical ring – perhaps the very one used by Solomon. Interestingly, there is some suggestion that possession of the ring and the lamp is spiritually dangerous; Aladdin’s mother is terrified of the djinn and implores Aladdin to throw the ring and the lamp away; she tells him that it is unlawful for anyone to have any dealings with them, and that the Prophet himself had warned against them.

The bottle imp in the form familiar from Stevenson’s story – i.e., a creature which remains imprisoned in a bottle and must be sold for an ever-lower price – can be traced back to German tradition; the earliest version appears to be featured in Grimmelshausen’s Trutz Simplex, published in 1670. Trutz Simplex is the scurrilous memoir of Courasche (Courage), who steals, cheats and sleeps her way through various adventures in a rollicking tale told without a shred of remorse. Courasche is persuaded by an old soldier to buy ‘something in a sealed glass bottle, which didn’t look exactly like a spider but also not exactly like a scorpion.’ She thinks at first that it must be a masterpiece of glasswork, as the thing inside seems to move but can’t possibly be alive since the bottle is sealed. The old soldier tells her that the bottle must always be sold at a lower price, but he neglects to tell her what will happen if she dies in possession of it. Courasche thinks she is buying a valuable piece of art, but is completely unaware of the bottle’s inhabitant or its powers. Later the old soldier tells her that it is a dienender Geist, a spirit that will serve her, and that it will protect her and bring her good fortune. Thinking that there must be some cost to the owner, Courasche presses him to tell her the catch; he reiterates that the bottle must always be sold at a lower price, but refuses to tell her why she should sell it. It is Courasche’s Bohemian foster-mother who informs her that she is in danger of damnation, since she has bought the bottle for two crowns – no-one will buy it from her for one crown, knowing that they cannot sell it on. One interesting feature of Grimmelshausen’s bottle imp is that it seems to provide good luck, protection and good fortune in a general kind of sort of way; Courasche does not make a specific wish for anything. When she finds hidden treasure, it is as the result of an innerliches Einsprechen or inner voice; otherwise she simply notices that all the men she fancies are attracted to her and her business ventures flourish more than anyone else’s. Courasche eventually sells the bottle imp to her associate Springinsfeld as a condition of a settlement she makes him. Springinsfeld inherits the good fortune with the bottle but soon becomes afraid of it and tries to dispose of it. He tries to return it to Courasche, and throws it into the Danube several times, but it always comes back to him, and as he has bought it for one crown he cannot sell it to anyone. At last he destroys the bottle altogether by throwing it into a baker’s oven.

Friedrich Baron De La Motte Fouqué, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, further developed the bottle imp theme with his story Das Galgenmännlein (the ‘gallows mannikin’, a kind of homunculus created from the sperm of a hanged man; here the creature in the bottle). In La Motte Fouqué’s tale, a bottle imp is acquired by Reichard, a young merchant, described as ein fröhlicher und kecker Gesell, a lighthearted, saucy young fellow. The story is set at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, as was Trutz Simplex, and it swiftly becomes apparent that the environment of the tale shares much with Grimmelshausen’s: early in the story Reichard falls in with a group of rapacious courtesans, and it is partly to fund further amusements that he purchases the bottle from a Spanish soldier. The soldier tells him that the bottle must always be sold for a lower price, and warns him of the damnation awaiting the ultimate owner. Unlike Grimmelshausen’s creature lurking half-seen within the bottle, La Motte Fouqué’s imp appears as one of the dramatis personae of the story. It continually gloats over Reichard’s future damnation, even singing him a taunting song, and it appears to him in his dreams as a huge black being with bats whizzing around its head, which executes a foul dance and then lies full length upon him, grinning into his face. When Reichard falls ill, it eagerly awaits his demise in order to carry off his soul – La Motte Fouqué’s bottle imp does seem to grant (or deny) specific wishes, since it refuses Reichard’s request for good health – and when at the end of the story Reichard is finally able to rid himself of the bottle, the imp lies at the bottom of it in a depressed and disappointed heap.

The ultimate disposal of the bottle is more satisfactory in Das Galgenmännlein than in Trutz Simplex (in which one might have expected the bottle to reappear after melting, just as it did after being thrown into a river). Reichard sells the bottle to a terrifying giant who is a damned soul constantly slaving at Sisyphean tasks for the devil. Since the giant is already damned, Satan gains nothing by the transaction. Reichard resolves to live a better life, and ends his days as a prosperous merchant, warning his gathered children and grandchildren against diabolical transactions.
No examination of the German bottle imp tradition is complete without mentioning the story Der Geist im Glas in the collected fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, contemporary with La Motte Fouqué (their Kinder- und Hausmärchen was published in 1812). The Grimms’ tale is much more simply told and owes a debt to The Fisherman and the Genie:  a woodcutter’s son finds a bottle in the roots of an oak tree and sees a creature like a frog jumping up and down in it. When he releases the creature, it threatens to kill him, as does the djinn released by the fisherman; in both tales the imp is deceived into returning into the bottle, and in exchange for freedom performs a service to the person who releases him, leading to his eventual enrichment.

Then comes R.B.Peake’s play The Bottle Imp, first staged in 1828. As in Das Galgenmännlein, the imp himself was one of the dramatis personae; he was played by the actor Richard John Smith, dressed in a skin-tight green outfit with spreading wings, and with horns on his head. In this version, the hero of the play, Albert, is able at the end to resell the bottle to Nicola, the necromancer who sold it to him, and Nicola is unable to rid himself of it; the coin with which he has re-purchased the bottle is of the lowest value in the world. Nicola meets a Faustian end. A good description of the play is given in Joseph Warren Beach's article of 1910 (see bibliography and link below); this was the only text which I was unable to obtain at the time of writing this article, so I have not attempted it.

The works I have described above all deal with actual bottle imps; however, comparisons have also been drawn between Stevenson’s Bottle Imp and Balzac’s novel La Peau de Chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin). Published in 1831, the book details the adventures of Raphael, a young Parisian who purchases an ass’s skin from a curio shop; the skin possesses a peculiar quality, in that it can grant any wish of its owner, but with every wish it diminishes in size, and the length of the owner’s life is likewise diminished. Raphael initially enjoys the good fortune the skin brings, but gradually becomes obsessed with the shrinking of the skin, and thus also his life expectancy. He is forced to withdraw from public life and live as monotonous a life as possible, since whenever he so much as thinks of wishing for anything, the wish is granted and the skin shrinks. In the final scene, the skin has become a tiny fragment – one wish’s worth – and Raphael is trying desperately not to wish for anything. However, his desire for his mistress Pauline is too great, and he finally expires in her arms.

The parallel between the shrinking ass’s skin and the diminishing price of the bottle imp is clear. However, the bottle imp threatens ultimate damnation: the ass’s skin threatens only physical death. Some have even interpreted La Peau de Chagrin in a non-supernatural way, ie. Raphael is slowly succumbing to obsession and disease, although this would rather seem to be contradicted by the fact that Pauline feels the contraction of the tiny skin in her hand in the final scene. The main interest in comparing Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin with Stevenson’s Bottle Imp is to observe the authors’ very different treatments of a similar theme: the one a full-length novel set in the gambling dens and salons of Paris, ripe with Baroque details and extravagant descriptions and peppered with exclamation marks, the other concise and understated – there is no melodrama in The Bottle Imp.
I have tried to summarise what one might term the bottle imp heritage prior to Stevenson’s tale; now let us examine what Stevenson himself made of the motif. Stevenson set his tale on the island of Hawaii; of course he lived for part of his life in the South Seas, in an attempt to improve his failing health. The story eventually formed what Stevenson himself considered ‘the centre piece’ of his collection Island Nights’ Entertainments. In his introduction to the story at its first publication in the Sunday New York Herald, he acknowledged the debt to the stage play of the same name, and remarked, ‘…yet I hope I have made it (the story) a new thing. And the fact that the tale has been designed and written for a Polynesian audience may lend it some extraneous interest nearer home.’ The story was in fact subsequently translated into Samoan, and is supposed to have been well-received by Samoan readers; for us the Hawaiian setting is exotic, and lends a fabulous feel to the story. This is further enhanced by the manner language Stevenson uses: for example, he tells us that Kokua ‘had the good word always’; elsewhere, the hero Keawe cries, ‘…it is for you, O Kokua! that I pour my lamentations!’ The effect is rather that of an English translation of a text written in a foreign language; it adds colour to the story, and also credibility: it is easier to imagine magic occurring somewhere far away and exotic, whereas the effect would be diminished in a homely environment. The fabulous quality of the story is further enhanced by the descriptions, for example of the house Keawe visits which has steps which shine like silver and windows which are bright like diamonds: these are fairytale qualities, reminiscent of the sparkling silver-leaved trees in the Grimms’ tale of the twelve dancing princesses, or the wonderful clothes in the tale of Allerleirau (the patchwork skin), golden as the sun and silvery as the moon.

Stevenson’s hero, Keawe, differs greatly from the heroes of Grimmelshausen, La Motte Fouqué, and Balzac. Courasche is an unashamed strumpet and vagabond, Reichard is a loose-liver, Raphael a gambler. Keawe is their opposite: when, for example, he discovers that he has leprosy, he laments that he may not now marry Kokua, but Stevenson comments, ‘…he might have wed Kokua even as he was, and many would have done, because they have the souls of pigs, but Keawe loved the maid manfully, and he would do her no hurt and bring her in no danger.’ Courasche would have had no such scruples, and indeed boasts of spreading the pox to a former lover. Of course, the greater part of Victoria’s reign lies between Stevenson and the earlier versions of the bottle imp story which I have described, and one would not expect to find his hero a hard-drinking, gambling and whoring man. But more importantly than that, Keawe is a hero for whom we can really care; furthermore, he is a kind of Everyman: he is not rich, but he is active; he is educated, but not showily – ‘he could read and write like a schoolmaster’; and he has practical manly skills – ‘he was a first-rate mariner besides.’ He is not so elevated in life that we cannot imagine ourselves in his place; nor is he a rascal like Courasche, whose antics we might observe with enjoyment but never dare to try ourselves; nor is he a bad man, whose damnation would be his just reward (compare him with the coarse boatswain who buys the bottle at the end of the story: who spares a thought for his welfare?). We can sympathise with Keawe; we can think, ‘How terrible if that happened to me.’

What also marks out Stevenson’s story from other tales in the bottle imp tradition is its restraint; the things which Stevenson does not show, or does not tell us in blunt words. La Motte Fouqué’s imp is out of its bottle whenever it can be, grinning into Reichard’s face and pressing its hairy body up against him. Peake’s imp flitted about in wings and horns, taunting Nicola with his doom. Stevenson’s imp is seen by Keawe and his friend Lopaka, slipping out and back into the bottle ‘swift as a lizard’; but we do not see the imp. Its appearance is such that the two friends sit, as though turned to stone, until night falls; it is mot until then that either of them can think how to react, and this is enough to impress us with the imp’s horror. From the outside of the bottle one can only see something which ‘obscurely moved, like a shadow and a fire’, almost an abstract thing, not the scorpion- or spider-like creature of Trutz Simplex or the anthropomorphic demon of Das Galgenmännlein. Hell itself is represented by images of flames and smoke, coals and cinders, a bottomless pit- There are no frolicking demons with pitchforks to bring the story into the realm of melodrama.

It is perhaps unfair to compare Stevenson’s treatment of his characters’ behaviour with that of Balzac in La Peau de Chagrin, since the two were writing within different canons; nevertheless, it is interesting to do so. Raphael’s last scene with Pauline is a wild drama of threats, passion, and physical struggle; he repulses her, then pursues her, screaming that he wants to die in her arms; Pauline, half-naked and writhing, attempts suicide to save him; Raphael batters down the door and embraces her, at the last sinking his teeth into her breast in a fit of passion. The overall effect for the reader is one of high drama and physical horror.

Stevenson’s characters walk a tightrope over a bottomless pit of fire, yet they are collected enough to keep up a pretence even to each other. Keawe does not at first tell Kokua why he is unhappy after their marriage; Kokua does not tell him that she has purchased the bottle through an intermediary to save him, and he only discovers this when he comes upon her secretly at night-time and finds her wringing her hands over the bottle – not screaming, crying or attempting self-injury, but simply brooding over it. Keawe feels the ground heaving and the house spinning around him, and his soul is bitter with despair, but he never raves like a maniac, instead maintaining a calm appearance before Kokua; he maintains his honour even to the foul-mouthed boatswain, whom he tries to dissuade from keeping the bottle. The effect of this restraint in the narrative is to heighten the sense of long drawn-out tension, the full horror of the Faustian pact. There is no need to rant and rage now; damnation is not upon our hero yet. But it is coming, slowly and surely, be it ever so far in the future. It is always there, underlying the actions and words of every moment that passes. If Balzac’s tale s a fevered nightmare, Stevenson’s is a waking terror.

Stevenson’s resolution of the dilemma at the end of The Bottle Imp is highly satisfactory. In creating a hero as sympathetic as Keawe, he could not then consign him to perdition. Grimmelshausen’s idea of destroying the bottle through fire is, to my mind, unconvincing; a bottle forged in the flames of hell and containing a denizen thereof is unlikely to be so simply melted in an oven. It has already bounced back from being thrown into a fast-flowing river and dashed to the ground. La Motte Fouqué prefigures Stevenson’s idea of transferring the bottle to someone whose soul is already damned, but his giant slaving away for the devil is a superhuman figure, a grotesque who dyes his clothing with his own blood. It is only through this supernatural agency that Reichard can rid himself of the bottle. Stevenson uses no such dues ex machina; instead the bottle is passed on, as it always should be, by selling at a lower price to another human soul. The foul-mouthed sailor who buys it is, by his own estimation, destined for perdition anyway, and he staggers out of the story with the bottle in his pocket to meet his end off-stage, the drama left to our imagination, as is the appearance of the imp itself. Keawe, who has proved his moral integrity by being prepared to buy the bottle back even from such a creature as the boatswain, is free to enjoy his wife and home. Chastened by his experience, he is destined to keep his good fortune, for he will never be discontented with it.

That is the end of Keawe’s story, but not of the bottle imp tradition, which has life in it yet. For example, the American TV series The Twilight Zone featured a bottle imp type story titled The Man in the Bottle. And in Germany, where there is a long tradition of Flaschenteufel stories, it is possible to buy toy bottle imps, tiny creatures made of blown glass in a bottle of water with a flexible seal – the seal can be pressed or released to change the water pressure and make the ‘bottle imp’ move. There is even a card game entitled Flaschenteufel, which requires that the ‘bottle imp’ be passed to whoever plays a card lower than, and closest to, the bottle imp’s value. It seems that the bottle imp theme, like the creature in Stevenson’s story, continues to be handed on.


Tusitala and his Polish reader from No Island Is An Island by Carlo Ginzburg (2000)

The Testament of Solomon, English translation by F.C.Conybeare (1898)

La Peau de Chagrin by Honoré de Balzac, French edition published by Le Livre de Poche

NB If you wish to read this in translation, an English version The Wild Ass's Skin, translated by Herbert J. Hunt, is available from Penguin Classics.

Trutz Simplex von Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, online text at Zeno.org

NB If you wish to read this in translation, an English version The Life of Courage, translated by Mike Mitchell, is available from Dedalus European Classics.

Das Galgenmännlein from Rittergeschichten und Gespenstersagen by Friedrich De La Motte Fouqué, German edition (2000) from Buchendorfer Verlag.

Märchen der Brüder Grimm, German edition with illustrations by Nikolaus Heidelbach, published by Beltz & Gelberg.

I love Twitter (I've got 34,900 tweets on the clock to date) but now and again someone asks me something that it is very difficult to answer in chunks of 140 characters (I love being asked anyway!).

My last novel, Silent Saturday, features a secretive group called the Koekoeken, who break into empty buildings around Brussels for kicks - either to explore or to enjoy the luxurious interiors. In return for the experience, they always do one small piece of maintenance or repair - sometimes something as small as rewiring a plug or tightening a screw on a window catch. Heroine Veerle De Keyser and her friend Kris Verstraeten enjoy a series of these adventures, until one night they turn up at a house and find a murder taking place...

Today I had a tweet from mum and English teacher Lisa Farrell, who is reading Silent Saturday and wanted to know "Do people actually do that - squat in empty houses? Where did you get (the) idea? Intrigued!" I did my best to reply in chunks of 140 letters, but actually I thought there is enough to say about this to fill a blog post!  So here goes (and thank you for the question, Lisa!).

Yes, people really do squat in and/or explore empty houses. I guess everyone's heard of actual squatters, who occupy empty houses as living spaces, but exploring abandoned buildings falls more into the category of urbex (urban exploration). There are whole websites devoted to photographs of these haunting and often beautiful locations. Here is one: Abandoned Scotland.

There are other "architectural" pursuits too, such as "buildering" (climbing up buildings), which inspired some of the goings-on in The Demons of Ghent, due out on June 5th and the sequel to Silent Saturday.  

Some urban exploration is done by permission of the landowners; on other occasions it is entirely "unofficial" and the explorers post their reports anonymously. So the secrecy observed by the fictional Koekoeken is well-advised, especially since some of them explore houses that are not abandoned at all - the owners are simply out of town. At the time of writing Silent Saturday the Koekoeken website with its carefully concealed forum was simply something I invented - I was quite surprised when an article appeared in the Daily Telegraph in February 2011 describing how squatters were pooling their information about properties on the internet. So the idea is not as far fetched as you might imagine. The Koekoeken, however, do not occupy the buildings they enter; their aim is to go in and out without their visit ever being detected, and to do one single piece of work inside as a repayment.

That piece of maintenance work is also mirrored to a certain extent by reality. I'm intrigued by the Guerrilla Gardening movement, which promotes "illicit cultivation" - the improvement of drab public spaces by planting flowers. The Koekoeken's explorations include some derelict buildings, such as the castle that appears early on in Silent Saturday; these too are unloved spaces which the members improve in small ways.

Researching these books - and especially the third one, Urban Legends (out in 2015), was very interesting indeed. But more of that later...

I'm up early on a Sunday morning (couldn't sleep), so I thought I'd do another blog post in my occasional "Spotlight" series introducing my novels to new readers. Today: The Glass Demon, first published in the UK in 2010 by Penguin, and subsequently also published in the USA (Random House), the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and France. A Brazilian edition is also planned.

The Glass Demon is my second novel, published a year after The Vanishing of Katharina Linden. Like my first book, it is set in the rural Eifel region of Germany. It isn't set right in Bad Münstereifel this time, but the town is mentioned several times.

What's it about?

The heroine of The Glass Demon is 17-year-old Lin Fox, whose father Dr. Oliver Fox is a university don working in mediaeval studies. Oliver Fox is good-looking (George Clooney comparisons are made) and has rather an ego, so when he fails to get a professorship he wants, he is looking for excuse to get away from the university for a while. Dr. Fox has received a letter from a local historian in a town called Baumgarten, claiming that he knows the location of the missing stained glass windows of Allerheiligen Abbey. These windows are a kind of "Holy Grail" for mediaevalists; they are also rumoured to be haunted by the demon Bonschariant, who can be seen looking through the glass, with fatal results for anyone who sees him.
Oliver decides to move the entire family over to Germany to hunt for them, the entire family being: himself, his vain and impractical wife Tuesday, Lin, her sister Polly and their baby brother Ru. Shortly after their arrival in Germany, however, Dr. Fox and Lin find that the historian who wrote the letter has died under mysterious circumstances - and broken glass was discovered at the scene. Was the death an accident, murder, or could it possibly be the work of the demon Bonschariant?
The superstitious locals close ranks, Oliver and Tuesday are too obsessed with their own concerns to see what is going on, so as the attacks continue, with broken glass found at every scene, it is up to Lin to solve the question of who is behind them: a very human killer, or the legendary demon? Whoever it is, he is not going to stop until he has got rid of Lin and her family - forever.

So is it a real person or is it the demon?

I'm not telling you that.

Where did you get the idea for the book?

I got the idea from the fascinating real-life history of the Steinfeld Abbey stained glass windows. You can read all about that in a previous blog post entitled Lingering memories of the treasure. The Steinfeld glass - like the fictional Allerheiligen glass in the book - dates to the 16th century. A number of times during its history it was removed from the abbey windows for its own protection, and then at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the abbey was closed, it vanished altogether. A century later, the famous English ghost story writer M.R.James identified a large number of panels from Steinfeld in the windows of Ashridge House chapel, which he was cataloguing for Lord Brownlow. The windows inspired M.R.James to write The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.
Two things about the Steinfeld glass interested me very much. Firstly, I was amazed that it was even possible to remove stained glass from the window frames and transfer it to another church without smashing it all to smithereens. Secondly, given that the Steinfeld glass was auctioned in the 1920s for the equivalent of about £800,000 in modern money, if another comparable set of windows were to be discovered now, they would probably be worth £1,000,000. Their rarity and value would be excellent reasons for Dr. Fox to want to find them, and for other people to want to stop him...

And the demon? Did you make him up?

No - there really is a local Eifel legend about the demon Bonschariant. It's connected with Steinfeld Abbey. Count Sigebodo (love that name!), who built the abbey, is supposed to have had a mysterious servant named Bonschariant ("the good servant") who was actually a demon. The count turned a blind eye to Bonschariant's demonic aspects for a long time because he was such a useful person to have around - he once flew into the air during a battle carrying the count with him to save him from being killed. But eventually the count's wife became frightened and encouraged the count to get rid of Bonschariant. The count built the abbey and fixed a cross to the highest point - when Bonschariant saw the cross he flew away snarling and was never seen again.


So Lin (who is 17) is the heroine...is it a teen book, then?

It's suitable for anyone over about 14 (admittedly I was reading much gorier stuff when I was younger than that, cough). In some countries it was actually sold as an adult title, and a large proportion of the readers to date have been adults. There are some cryptic M.R.James references in the text that only fellow fans of MRJ would "get", and most of the people who have picked up on those so far have been adults!

Are the places in the book real ones?

Yes, but unlike the places in The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, I renamed most of them. Some real place names are used: Bad Münstereifel, Köln. But Baumgarten, Nordkirchen and Traubenheim are all made up. This is because much of the action is set in a castle. There are many castles in the Eifel and some are still in private hands or are actually inhabited. I didn't want anyone to think that I was writing about their home and perhaps be offended, so I decided to give the locations fictional names, and I combined elements from several different castles to be on the safe side.

Did the book win anything?

It didn't win anything but it was nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2011 and shortlisted for the Leeds Book Awards 2011. The US edition was shortlisted for the International Thriller Writers Awards 2012, category: Best paperback original.

What did the critics think?

"For teenage readers, Helen Grant's second novel, The Glass Demon, is told from the point of view of a modern-day teenage girl temporarily and unwillingly relocated to a German forest while her image-obsessed, university-teacher father does research into some missing medieval stained glass. Witty instead of facetious, occasionally scary without seeming merely silly, well-plotted and beautifully written, it is everything a young-adult novel should be. Helen, please keep on writing."
   —The Independent

"Helen Grant's publisher is marketing her as "the Stieg Larsson of teen fiction", but don't let that put you off. Grant is an original, accomplished author in her own right and with The Glass Demon, her second novel, she brings us a gripping and atmospheric adventure, involving murder, family break-up, chilling folklore and warped religion.
The story centres on 17-year-old Lin, the daughter of a failed academic who drags his entire family from their home in an English university town to rural Germany in search of some missing medieval stained glass he believes will make his name and his fortune. The glass is said to be haunted by a demon who will punish any efforts to remove it from its hiding place. As soon as the family arrives, a spate of gruesome murders begins, with the bodies always surrounded by shards of broken glass.
There are shades of Larsson in the way the murderer takes his cue from biblical stories, but the dark, chilling mood is really closer to the Brothers Grimm. Grant builds the suspense cleverly, maintaining the tension with a light touch, and Lin is an appealingly spunky narrator. It is barely a year since this author's impressive debut, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, earmarked her as a writer to watch, and this follow-up will consolidate her reputation as a talented new author."
   —The Guardian

"Helen Grant's wonderful debut, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, has just been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. This second novel confirms what a talented writer she is. It is a compelling mystery about an English family staying in a grim house in German woods, and the search for some stained-glass windows from which an evil demon is said to spring. A series of deaths and threatening events fill the reader and the 17-year-old narrator, Lin, with foreboding. An atmosphere of mounting unease builds to a terrifying climax and, along with Lin, we are drawn towards believing the unbelievable. The novel is knowledgeable about German Life, and well observed about unrequited fancying and family relationships: the vain father, shallow stepmother, sweet, self-destructive sister and baby brother are all memorable and persuasive. This book is both painful and sometimes blackly funny. Grant handles place, people and red herrings with originality and precision."
   —The Sunday Times (Children's Book of the Week)

And in the interests of taking the rough with the smooth, I should add this from a 3-star Amazon review: "Possibly the only reason why I didn't rate this higher is because of the cliché of the ruined castle in the German forest..."

That particular comment has stuck in my mind because the setting had not struck me as a cliché at all - because it was inspired by a real place! I suppose on reflection the "creepy old castle" is a bit of a cliché. But there are a great many of those clichés all over that part of Germany...Ah well.

If you happen to have read my blog post about Hallowe'en, you will know that I spent 31st October as "Writer in Residence" at Innerpeffray Library, Scotland's oldest lending library. Sitting in the upper reading room, with its charming view into the kirkyard, I spent the day composing a series of three ghost stories connected by an overarching narrative. The same evening, I read them aloud to an audience in the library, by the light of artificial candles (real naked flames being inadvisable next to all those antiquarian books). All the stories are set in and around the library and the neighbouring kirkyard of Innerpeffray, so it made for an atmospheric evening, especially as the audience had to leave via a path that runs alongside the kirkyard in question, with its mossy graves!

I wrote the stories to increase awareness of Innerpeffray Library - which is a fabulous and uniquely literary local attraction - and also in hopes of helping to raise funds for it. I am therefore very pleased to say that Ghost Stories of Innerpeffray is now available from the library as an exclusive chapbook. You can order it here: Innerpeffray library shop. It costs £5 plus postage (orders from outside the UK also accepted).

The three stories are:
Nick's Story: The Spell -  in which a scholar inadvertently repeats an ancient incantation aloud;
Lilith's Story: The Unreturned Volume - a tale to delight a librarian's heart: retribution falls upon someone who fails to return a book;
and
Jude's Story: The Book Of Fate - it's dangerous to read - but which book is it?

If you would like a taster of the stories, a single one - Lilith's Story - is available in a free audio version here: Lilith's Story audio. You can listen to it, share it, or download it to listen to later - all completely free. If you enjoy that sample, do consider buying the chapbook to help support Innerpeffray Library!

I'm very pleased to say that tomorrow - Thursday 27th March - sees the publication of Silent Saturday in paperback!

I never seem to get much of an opportunity to celebrate book-ish milestones! When my first book was published and I was writing the second, we had only just moved to Flanders and were desperately trying to find our feet there. My third book, Wish Me Dead, came out in summer 2011, at a time when I was frantically organising the move back from Belgium to the UK, so I didn't spend much time cracking open bottles of champagne then either. Tomorrow will be pretty much business-as-usual, because I have a huge pile of work to do and some fairly short deadlines.

All the same, I am quietly pleased to see Silent Saturday in paperback. The cover of the hardback edition was wonderful - the design had a really atmospheric feel and the title and my name were in gorgeous big shiny letters. Still, there are some great advantages to paperbacks - speaking as a reader. They are not half so heavy, so you are less likely to drop them in the bath(!), and your arms don't get tired so quickly if you are reading in bed. And of course, paperbacks are that bit more affordable. So I'm very pleased to see this one, and I'll be raising a glass to it tomorrow evening.

Silent Saturday is available through the normal outlets but if you'd like to support your local bookshop, do consider ordering through Hive, here: Silent Saturday paperback on Hive
The Hive website allows you to order online, with the book delivered free to your nearest independent bookshop. If (shock horror!) you don't know where that is, there is a bookshop search function too. There's even a discount on the retail price.

I've just finished and sent off a big chunk of work, and it's raining too hard to go out anywhere, so I thought I'd settle down with a nice cup of tea and do another one of my occasional "spotlight" blog posts introducing one of my books! Today it's Wish Me Dead, which was my third novel, published in the UK by Penguin in 2011.

Wish Me Dead is the last of my books to be set in Germany. It sees a return to Bad Münstereifel, the setting of The Vanishing of Katharina Linden. Although it is a stand-alone novel, it takes place in the same "universe" as The Vanishing did, although a decade later. The same familiar places are mentioned, and some of the characters who appeared in The Vanishing also make a reappearance, although they are, of course, also ten years older.

So, what's it about?

Wish Me Dead is all about Steffi Nett, the daughter of the town baker (so look out for lots of references to cream cakes, rye loaves, and in one scene, death by cherry streusel!). Shy and unassuming, Steffi is always being put upon by other people - her parents, who are just assuming that she wants to take over the family business when she gets older, her boyfriend Timo, who has a wandering eye, and slimy Achim the baker's assistant, who keeps propositioning her. However, events take a surprising turn when Steffi and her friends decide to pay a visit to a ruined house in the forest, where a notorious local witch is supposed to have lived. They hold an impromptu ceremony and make a wish - that a local celebrity should drop dead. And she does... As the friends experiment with further wishes it soon becomes clear that only Steffi's wishes ever come true. What is behind this extraordinary power that Steffi seems to have? And after being pushed around by others for so long, can she resist the temptation to have her own way for once?

Where did you get the idea for the book?

Just as The Vanishing of Katharina Linden was inspired by the genuine folklore of Bad Münstereifel, Wish Me Dead was inspired by the real history of the town and the surrounding area. The seventeenth century saw a proliferation of witch trials in the Eifel. Hermann Löher, one time mayor of Rheinbach and born in Bad Münstereifel itself, wrote a book denouncing the persecution of supposed witches, and was obliged to flee to Amsterdam with his family, in fear of his life. Witchcraft was a hot topic in the Eifel in the 1600s, and the sorry (fictional) tale of Red Gertrud is based on the real life witch trials.

Hmmm, witches. And what about the bakery bit?

The bakery products were researched as *cough* lovingly as the witch trials. I was advised by Herr and Frau Nipp of the Erft Cafe (sadly now defunct) and the Cafe am Salzmarkt, both in Bad Münstereifel, and Frau Quasten of the Bäckerei Cafe Quasten in Kommern. All of these were kind enough to let me go "behind the scenes" to see how a German bakery works, and they also explained quite a lot to me about the different types of breads popular in Germany. And then there are the cakes. I tried quite a lot of those - for research purposes, obviously...

These characters from The Vanishing of Katharina Linden who reappear in this book, do they include Frau Kessel by any chance?

Well, it is about witches...

Did the book win anything?

Wish Me Dead was nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2012 and shortlisted for the Worcestershire Teen Book Awards.

What did the critics think?

"Wish Me Dead is the kind of book that makes you want to curl up on the sofa on a rainy day and devour it in one go."
  - Caroline, Chicklish Blog

"Helen Grant's third book is probably her scariest yet...This book had me too scared to turn off the light, but unable to leave the next page unread. The ending was unpredictable and the characters were believable, responding to Steffi's "ability" in a realistic way. Overall, very, very scary and very, very good!"
 - Derby Telegraph

"The German flavour is what makes the story. That, and the gory horror."
 - The Bookwitch

My Dad also votes Wish Me Dead as the one of my novels most likely to make a cracking film. So if there are any film producers reading this...

So did everyone love it?

Er, no. One Spinebreakers reviewer found the book "tediously average" ...but conceded that "The ending was made of pure awesome."

Who is the book for?

I know I keep saying teens and adults...Wish Me Dead is probably for slightly older teens than the previous two books. Owing to some of the content, I'd put this at 14+. And adults too.

Anything else to declare?

There is a high redhead count in Wish Me Dead. This is because whilst I was working on the idea for the book, I was outraged to read a newspaper article about yet another child who had been bullied very badly for having red hair. Grrr. Red hair is beautiful! So I decided to give the hero flaming red hair. Red Gertrud - the witch - also had red hair and is supposed to have been beautiful - infuriatingly so to the men who persecuted her. Finally, to even up the goodies and baddies, there is a nasty redhead too.

And finally...

If you'd like to see the book trailer, made by the fabulous Lumiere Productions, it's here:
Wish Me Dead book trailer
You can also read a sample of the book on Amazon's Click to look inside function: Wish Me Dead sample

This week I was part of a very interesting project by photographer Brian O'Neill, of Crieff Photography. Brian is taking a series of portrait shots of people from Crieff - ranging from the guy who works in the whisky shop to the lollipop lady to local artist June McEwan. You can see some of them on Crieff Photography's website, here: http://www.crieffphotography.co.uk/gallery/people-portraits/

Brian has also been posting these photos on Crieff Photography's Facebook page, which is where I saw the one of Alan from J.L.Gill the whisky shop in Crieff. I admired that particular portrait very much as it seemed to me to embody the difference between taking a technically good photograph (which is getting easier and easier with digital camera technology) and creating a real portrait.

Perhaps it was my effusion of admiration which prompted Brian to ask me if I would like to be featured too! I was absolutely thrilled at the suggestion but felt a wee bit guilty because unlike most of the other subjects, I haven't lived in Crieff for very long: only since 2011, in fact, when we moved over from Belgium in an epic seventeen-hour car journey from which my lower back has barely recovered. However, luckily for me, Brian didn't mind this. I'm still a resident of Crieff after all! So we had a chat about where to do the photograph and I came up with...Saint Kessog's, the ruined church near Auchterarder.

You'd think I'd have had enough of the place after being stuck there for hours in the rainy dark last time, but no; it still seemed like the perfect setting. I love poking about in old ruins and this one is a bit special. The east end, which was later converted into a mausoleum, is still fairly complete, with a skeleton metal roof and all the walls intact. Trees have grown up through the floor and creepers hang down from the ceiling. In the kirkyard, mossy gravestones abound and there is also a creepy-looking mausoleum. And it was in front of that mausoleum that Brian took the photograph you can see below.
A writer in her natural habitat, you might say.

Recently, I was asked by fellow writer Keris Stainton (left) to take part in a blog tour on the theme of What, Why and How I Write. I was thrilled to be asked by Keris because she is a super writer, all-round good egg and tireless supporter of UK YA writing.

This is how it works! A participating author answers four questions about their writing on their own blog, and then nominates other writers (ideally three) to answer the same questions on their blog one week later, and nominate further participants. This was Keris' contribution last Monday: What, why and how I write by Keris Stainton

Keris nominated me and Sophia Bennett - and today it's our turn to answer the questions! So here goes.

What am I working on?

I’m just about to start the edits on Urban Legends, the third book in my Forbidden Spaces trilogy (the first book was Silent Saturday, the second is Demons of Ghent, coming out in June 2014). For obvious reasons I don’t want to say too much about Urban Legends, but the book continues with the theme of urban exploration, this time taking the lead characters into more extreme and terrifiying locations. And of course there are some very nasty deaths!
Once I’ve finished with Urban Legends I’ll be starting on something completely new. It will be quite hard doing that. I love the characters in the Forbidden Spaces trilogy and I’ve really enjoyed writing about Flanders.

  

Above: Urban Legends doesn't have cover art yet so you'll have to imagine that one
with the help of this handy sign generator thingy.

How does my work differ from others in the genre?

I guess my genre is “YA thrillers”; I haven’t read tons of other books in the category so I can only really give my own opinion about what makes my novels different from any others. The big thing is the use of international settings. My first three novels were set in small-town Germany, and the Forbidden Spaces trilogy is set in Brussels and Flanders. So there is a lot of local cultural stuff going on – the Saint Martin procession in Germany, the Silent Saturday tradition in Flanders. This also means that I can put a different twist on the old “teen hero(ine) as outsider” thing: Pia Kolvenbach, the heroine of my first novel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, was half English and half German, which meant she was in both worlds and in neither.



Why do I write what I do?

I write the sort of thing I like to read. I’ve always been in love with the idea of “abroad” so I revel in foreign locations. Also, I like thrilling stories myself. I read a lot of ghost stories, crime, thrillers and apocalypse fiction. So it was not really on the cards that I was going to write domestic comedies.



How does my writing process work?

I’m always working on the next book or the one after that in my head whilst I am writing the current one. I like to mull ideas over for a long time – sort of like marinating them to allow the flavour to develop! By the time I actually sit down to start writing a new book, I like to have the plot mapped out in my head. I’m definitely not one of these people who sits down in front of a blank screen and just wings it. I like to know where the book is going before I write the first line.
The longer I’ve been writing, the keener I’ve become on having a detailed synopsis before I start work. It’s a great way to iron out any plot wrinkles. On the occasions where I’ve been under a lot of time pressure and have started with a less detailed idea of what was going to happen, I’ve inevitably ended up with a whole heap of rewriting to do.
I work Monday to Friday except in the school holidays when I work until my kids wake up! (So I don’t urge them to get up at 7am to go for a healthful run or anything…as far as I am concerned the teenage lie-in is God’s gift to writers). I have a set number of words that I try to write each day. If I get ahead of myself and have the week’s target done by Thursday, I take Friday off. This might sound mechanistic but it works for me. If you don’t have targets it is too easy to end up with nothing done at all thanks to the Scylla and Charybdis which are Facebook and Twitter…

I'm supposed to be taking a break this week but it seems I can't keep away from the keyboard. For a while I've quite fancied blogging about my favourite horror films - today I finally got on with the job. 

First up, I have to say that these are my personal top eight. I don't claim that they are the best horror films of all time - they are the ones that I personally like best, and I have watched each of them at least twice - in most cases half a dozen times. 

I like creepy films, but I'm not fond of extreme offal so most of these films are scary but not an absolute gore-fest. Dutch slasher film Sint is a bit of an exception but hey, it's my list; I can award myself the inconsistency badge if I like. 

The other thing is - obviously - the minute I'd finished compiling the list I thought of loads of other films that ought to be on it. The Hunger. Nosferatu. Sigh. I'm not adding any more, though, because otherwise I'll never get this posted. 

So here are my eight, and I'd love to hear what other people's fave horror films are, especially if they fall into the creepy-not-gory camp. 

If you happened to live in Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) and you also happened to live fairly close to a village church (as I did when we lived there), you would probably notice something this Saturday. Or rather, you would notice the absence of something. Those jolly church bells that ring every quarter of an hour during the week and a lot more on Sundays would be silent.

This is because the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter is Stille Zaterdag or "Silent Saturday," which soberly commemorates the time Jesus lay in the tomb. On that day, no church bells are rung in Flanders. Flemish children are told that this is because the bells have flown away to Rome to collect Easter eggs from the Pope (as illustrated in this airline poster at Zaventem, left!). I've sometimes wondered how they are supposed to do that - presumably they'd have to fly back upside down?!

When I heard about this tradition, my first thought was that if I were a little Flemish kid, I would be mad keen to get into the church bell-tower on Silent Saturday and see whether the bells really had flown away or not. After all, it'd be less of a grey area than say, the existence of Santa Claus, who was in fact a real-life historical character: the Bishop of Myra, no less. Either the bells would be there or they wouldn't. I'd be dying to know. And this is the starting-point for my book, Silent Saturday. When she is only seven years old, heroine Veerle De Keyser climbs the belfry of her local church with her friend Kris, in an attempt to find out the truth.

Of course, what they find confirms Kris' suspicions: the adults have been lying through their teeth, and the bells haven't gone anywhere at all. So the friends decide that while they are up the tower, they may as well take a peek out of the windows at the village below. What they see is shocking and bloody: the aftermath of an appalling murder, the worst thing that has ever happened in their little community. The killer was so unrelenting and savage that the press dub him The Hunter.

Ten years later, the teenaged Veerle runs into Kris again in unusual circumstances, and they embark on a series of audacious urban exploration adventures. But the past is about to catch up with them, as it becomes apparent that someone is, once again, hunting human prey - and they could be next.

If you fancy some seasonal reading, Silent Saturday is now out in affordable paperback - and in June it will be followed by the sequel, The Demons of Ghent. Watch out for more and higher bell-towers, and some very nasty deaths!

As readers of my various writings may know, I have moved around a bit. I enjoy travelling, and I've actually lived in Spain, Germany and Belgium. I've always been a little bit in love with the whole idea of "abroad", which is why my novels and some of my short stories are set in other countries.

One of the other great loves of my life is going to the cinema. Note, I do not just say "films". I love films too, but there is a difference between a DVD and a pizza at home and the whole experience of going out to the cinema. I started to think about this the other day because I took my daughter to see the new Hammer film, The Quiet Ones, and during the trailers she was excitedly asking whether we could see various other upcoming films. Some of them were films I fancy seeing myself, others not, but the fact of the matter is, I like going to the cinema so much that I will happily go and see films that aren't on my wish list.

I do draw the line somewhere; when we lived in Germany I told the children I would never, ever take them to see Felix - Ein Hase auf Weltreise, because I couldn't face the thought of two hours of sickly-sweet bunny-rabbit on world tour (luckily they shared this opinion otherwise there might have been trouble). But mostly I am very happy to go and watch anything. I've been to see films abroad a number of times, often without being able to understand any of the dialogue at all, just for the experience.

Anyway, musing on this subject, I decided to try to come up with my Top 5 foreign film experiences. Being contrary, I came up with six and couldn't decide which one to leave out. Here they are, in more or less chronological order.

Humanoides del Abismo (seen in Spain, 1980) 
According to the IMDb, this film was rated 18 in the UK, and given that I was 16 that summer, I probably shouldn't have been watching it at all. I was on holiday with my family and my best friend of the time in Sa Riera, so although I can't remember where the cinema was, it was probably Girona. The friend and I went to see the film; my parents didn't. Perhaps they thought we were watching a charming romcom instead. Humanoids del Abismo ("Humanoids of the Deep") was about disgusting-looking monsters with naked brains for heads, who came up from the sea to murder men and (to put it very euphemistically indeed) ravish women. After watching this delightful film, I was nervous about swimming for the whole of the rest of the fortnight. It was worth it though; if nothing else, it was memorable.

Footloose (seen in the Cevennes, France, 1984)
I'm not really a fan of dance movies but this was an interesting experience because we went to see the film in a little village cinema. We were staying near Lasalle but I am not sure whether it was there. The cinema had a run-down, rather unofficial feel to it: half the seats were broken, so you had to choose ones which weren't before getting settled, and the "screen" was a bunch of white sheets tacked to the wall at one end of the room, which also had a bicycle leaning up against it. The really exciting thing about this cinema visit was that there were scorpions crawling up and down the walls, so you never did quite know whether you were going to get to the end of the movie without being stung by more than a sudden passion for Kevin Bacon.

Beta (seen in India, 1992)
Possibly my favourite cinema trip of all time. I went overlanding from London to Kathmandu in 1992 and whilst we were in India I went to see the romantic musical Beta at the famous Raj Mandir cinema in Jaipur (see the pic at the top of this post - after dark it is lit up green). I went in a small mixed group, and as the queue for the ladies-only box office (wonder if they still have that?) was much shorter than the other ones, I volunteered to buy the tickets. Even being in the ladies' queue was a bit like being carried along by a tidal wave. The lady behind me, a very tall stout person, was leaning on me with all her weight whilst I was trying to buy the tickets, and the minute I had picked them up from the counter I was cast aside like driftwood. We bought popcorn, which was awful (that has surely improved since 1992). The screen where Beta was being shown was probably one of the biggest I have ever been in, and packed out, because part of the film was shot in Jaipur itself. Whenever any recognisable landmark appeared, there was wild whistling and cheering. When the heroine said anything pert there was pandemonium. People were standing on the seats. Fabulous. I was one of the best things I did on that entire four month trip.

Bambi (seen in Germany in 2004? thereabouts anyway)
I went to the cinema many times in Germany (we lived there for seven years, after all) but the most memorable experiences were not the visits to the Galleria in Euskirchen, which was our nearest "proper" one. Bad Münstereifel, where we lived, used to have a cinema but it closed down round about the time we moved there in 2001. However, every so often there would be Kinderkino (kids' cinema) in the Eifel Club meeting rooms in the Johannistor, one of the four mediaeval defensive towers that are dotted along the town walls. Generally these would be fairly old films - we once saw Bambi, made in 1942! However, the children were young enough to be happy with whatever they saw. The room where the films were shown was full of chairs and tables (somewhat unorthodox cinema seating) and the walls were lined with stuffed animals including a wildcat. The luxurious thing about watching films there was that you could order drinks - Apfelschorle (a kind of fizzy apple juice) or even Schnapps...



Sint (seen in Leuven, Flanders, 2010)
I've blogged about this seasonal slasher movie several times before, so I won't labour the point. I was very keen to see it on the big screen but nobody would agree to go with me (and my husband had to stay home with the kids, who were too young to see it) and for some reason which I forget, I couldn't have the car the day I wanted to go. So I got the bus into Leuven, which took ages (and even longer on the way back because I had a long wait for the next one going home). Totally worth it. Even better,  it was near the end of the film's run, so the screen was fairly empty. I spread myself out, ate my own weight in pick'n'mix, and enjoyed.

Thirteen Assassins (seen in Brussels in 2011)
Whilst we lived in Flanders, my Flemish friend Tom took me to the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival on two occasions. In 2010 we went to see Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec, which was fabulous because Luc Besson actually appeared on stage and talked for a bit, although I can't remember a word he said because of the intoxicating effect of fangirliness. In 2011 Tom suggested gory samurai film Thirteen Assassins. Generally I'm not a great fan of samurai films but I was quite happy to give this one a go. The most memorable thing about the evening was probably the combination of film and menu. Before we went to the festival, Tom and his brother and I went to a Flemish restaurant in Brussels where they talked me into trying the dish paling in't groen, which is fried eel in green sauce. In the interests of fairness I have to say that it tasted good, but it looked distinctly alarming, and before we even got to the screening I was feeling a little bit queasy about what I had just eaten. The film opened with a slow and very gory act of hara-kiri. As we were sitting in the middle of a row there was no escape. I am mainly proud of myself for not barfing.

There are certain questions that writers get asked quite often. Where do you get your ideas? is one. Do you write a set amount every day or just whenever you feel like it? is another. There is also the cheeky How much do you earn? which rates alongside Do you know J.K.Rowling? (Answers to those last two: i) not as much as you'd think; ii) no, sorry.)

One question that interests me quite a lot is How do you plan your book? - because although I know how I plan mine, it's a process that seems to vary widely from author to author. There's no single magic formula (sorry again). I have heard of authors who like to plan everything in minute detail before they start writing a single paragraph, and others who like to plunge straight in without planning anything at all, and see where the story takes them. I canvassed a few opinions amongst author friends, and this is what they had to say about book planning.
Emma Haughton writes thrillers for teenagers and young adults – the first, Now You See Me, was published by Usborne on 1st May 2014.

Emma says: "Once I have most of the chapters in place in the first draft I set up a spreadsheet with all the chapters in the first column, then in the other columns I put a brief description, characters in that chapter, location, date and time. I fill it in gradually as I go. It's just a handy way of checking you've got your timings rights, appropriate weather for that season, and making sure you don't repeat things like location too often.

"Excel is pretty easy to learn. It's also really handy for when you need to shift scenes around or add something in cos it gives you an instant overview of your story
. I love anything that gets me thinking about story in macro terms
. The thing is you don't have to be a planner to use it. I usually don't set up the spreadsheet till I'm into draft 2
.
"I like filling out the spreadsheet. It's a way of kidding yourself you're writing, like writing out revision notes for an exam.
"

Rhian Ivory is a writer of MG and YA, and a teacher of Children's lit & Creative writing.

Rhian says: "I do that too (see above) but use post-its and a massive sheet of paper which I stick up on the wall in front of me so I can see it all the time. I am more hands on and like to physically move stuff around and see all the different coloured post-its etc.
"

Lee Weatherly is the author of the bestselling Angel series, as well as almost 50 other books for children and teenagers. She’s originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, and lives in Hampshire, England with her husband. Her books have been translated into over 10 different languages.


Lee says: "I do LOTS of planning before I start to write. Then lots more planning as I go. Usually this is just notes to myself, rather than a synopsis-with-a-capital-S. And I do notecards at some point. And...that's kind of it. At some point, if I'm lucky, the storyline begins to feel sleek and simple in my head, and then I know I'm on the right track. Or else it feels like Gargantua the Octopus.

"I use notecards the way Rhian uses post-it notes. I use different-coloured ones for different characters/storylines, so that when they're all laid out on the floor I can see the story's spine at a glance."


As for me, well, although I do all my actual writing on my MacBook, I tend to do the planning the old-fashioned way: with paper and pen. I have a notebook that my agent gave me years ago when she first took me on. The notebook is invested with a certain OMG I ACTUALLY HAVE AN AGENT!!! quality; it's my magic book. I jot down ideas in it lest they slip out of my head to be replaced with other people's exam timetables and reminders to pick up cat litter from the Co-op. I also sketch out more detailed book plans in it, sometimes literally - the right-hand page in the photo at the top of this blog post shows a plan of the interior of the church from The Glass Demon. I created that so that I would never get mixed up and have a particular window in one location in one scene and then accidentally put it somewhere else later.

I also like to have a detailed synopsis before I start writing, because on the occasions when I have started work with only a vague idea of how events were going to unfold I have either written myself into a corner and had to rewrite stuff, or had actual continuity errors, the worst being the reappearance of someone who had been killed off earlier! Thankfully I noticed that howler before I showed the first draft to anyone, but it still makes me shudder. A detailed synopsis can also iron out all those annoying issues such as how am I going to get this character to do something as blatantly inadvisable as this? before you actually get to them.

All of us (above) are planners in some shape or form. I can't imagine sitting down and starting to write without some idea of where the story is going. I'd love to hear from other people about how they plan! Are you a Post-It note planner or a notecard user? Is there anyone out there with enough bottle to sit down and start writing with no idea of where it will lead? Have you ever done this, and how did it work out? I'd love to know...

Today is a first for me, because I am taking part in a blog tour for fellow YA author Emma Pass!
I was recently lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Emma's latest book, The Fearless, which I absolutely loved, so although I'm an author who blogs rather than a book blogger, I was very keen to take part in the tour. And why not, eh? I love to tell readers of my blog all about the things I like, whether it is ancient churches, horror movies or interesting books.

It's also fun to link up with another author. That means that today, instead of getting me all alone with my typewriter at the top of my ivory tower (cough cough), you are getting two of us!
You can imagine us sitting on a battered leather Chesterfield in Castle Grant if you like, sipping whisky under the watchful glass eyes of the stuffed stags' heads on the walls*, and talking about books.

If you haven't seen a copy of The Fearless yet, this is what it is all about:

"The Fearless. An army, powered by an incredible new serum that makes each soldier stronger, sharper, faster than their enemies. Intended as a force for good, the serum has a terrible side effect – anyone who takes it is stripped of all humanity, empathy, love. And as the Fearless sweep through the country, forcing the serum on anyone in their path, society becomes a living nightmare.
Cass remembers the night they passed through her village. Her father was Altered. Her mother died soon after. All Cass has left is her little brother – and when Jori is snatched by the Fearless, Cass must risk everything to get him back."

As The Fearless is all about an end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it scenario (squee! I love those), Emma (below) kindly agreed to share with me her favourite disaster movies. I've seen four out of the five and now I want to see the fifth one, Tomorrow... Here they are:

My Top 5 Disaster Movies, by Emma Pass

I love me a good disaster movie – I always have, and the scarier the better. Here are my top 5.

Tomorrow When the War Began
Based on John Marsden's hard-hitting and much-celebrated YA series, which was first published in the 1990s, Tomorrow… is about a a small group of teenagers waging a guerilla war on enemy soldiers after hostile foreign forces invade Australia. I loved the books, and the film didn't disappoint either, with tons of dramatic action and a great female heroine, Ellie (played by Caitlin Stasey).

Threads
I discovered Threads on YouTube. It was written by Barry Hines of Kes fame, and is one the most frightening films I have ever seen, with its unflinchingly realistic depiction of life after a nuclear attack. My early childhood was lived under the shadow of the Cold War (it ended when I was 11); I remember being told about the Four Minute Warning at school, and being genuinely afraid of the threat of nuclear war. If you want to see something else terrifying, here is a leaflet the UK government issued to all households in the late 1970s telling people what to do if there was a nuclear attack.

Wall•E
Some light relief after Threads! Wall•E, an animated film from Disney, isn't about a disaster, but rather the aftermath of a disaster – humans have polluted Earth to the point where they're unable to live on it any more, and one lonely robot, Wall•E, has been left behind to sort out the mess. But then he falls in love with another robot, Eve, and embarks on an adventure which will determine the fate of human- and robot-kind. I'm not the biggest Disney fan in the world, but even my Myazaki-biased heart couldn't fail to be charmed by Wall•E.

Independence Day
Aliens! Annihilation! Will Smith! Pretty much the perfect combination for a disaster movie.

But my very favourite disaster movie has to be…

28 Days Later
A virus has been unleashed; a virus which turns people into rage-filled maniacs, leading to the UK being quarantined from the rest of the world to prevent it spreading. 28 days later, Jim, a bicycle courier who has been in a coma in a London hospital, awakens to find the world is a very different place to the one he knew before…

If you've never seen 28 Days Later, go and watch it. Go and watch it now. Seriously. Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, it is quite simply the most chilling and believable zombiesque disaster movie around. The scenes showing the empty streets of London, or the abandoned M1, remain seared into your memory long after the end credits have rolled. Also, Cillian Murphy. What more do I need to say?!


* Well, okay, sipping tea out of chipped mugs and warming our hands on the single candle set up on an upturned crate...

This blog post is loooooooong overdue! Mea culpa - I've been far too busy recently watching rubbish shark movies and supporting exam-stressed teens. Anyway - ta daaaaa! Countdown to 5th June!

It's an initiative by blogger Jim Dean, who runs YA Yeah Yeah and YA Contemporary (check them both out if you love YA books and haven't already looked at them). Book bloggers are a major part of spreading the word about new book launches - in fact for those of us authors who don't have a massive marketing machine clanking about after us wherever we go, bloggers are pretty much our ONLY support! So we are always very keen to get our new releases into their hands.

And thus it happened that Jim looked towards the horizon one day and saw an absolute tsunami of YA book launches heading towards him. (It was just like that bit in Deep Impact where Maximilian Schell and Tea Leoni are standing on the beach.) About a trillion books all seemed to be coming out on 5th June.  So, rather than stand there with his mouth hanging open, waiting to be washed off his feet, he decided to organise a task force of bloggers and authors, and create a coordinated programme of online events to tell everyone about all the fabulous new releases. And (she says, in her best Hollywood action movie voice) that programme is COUNTDOWN TO 5TH JUNE.

You can read all about it on the Countdown to 5th June website: every week in the run-up to 5th June different book bloggers talk to authors with an upcoming release. An amazing THIRTY ONE authors are featured. There are videos, interviews, guest posts and all sorts of other things.

I'm delighted to say that my own June 5th release, Demons of Ghent, is being featured. Yesterday the fabulous Lucy of Choose YA posted an interview with me, which you can read here: Countdown to 5th June interview with Helen Grant



Lucy asked me some brilliant questions, such as If you could explore any abandoned or closed area in the world, which would it be and why? and If you could say anything to your teenage self, light-hearted or serious, what would it be? So if you'd like to know the answers to those questions, check out her blog.

You can also follow Countdown to 5th June on Twitter here Countdown to 5th June on Twitter for daily updates on all the blogging activity and new releases.

If you happen to read this post today, 19th May, there is also a Twitter chat this evening at 7.30pm BST with a chance to hear the views of readers who have already been lucky enough to get a preview of some of the new releases, plus authors too. Just use the hashtag #countdownYA to join in the fun!

This week I was delighted to be at a very well-attended book launch - not my own (hopefully that's next week) but that of the Perth Scribblers' first ever Anthology. Those are the Scribblers there, in the photo on the left. They are the "graduates", so to speak, of member Emma Hamilton's Creative Writing class at Perth College UHI.

I met the Perth Scribblers writing group because I offer an evening class locally: "Getting your book published." I didn't have a hand in the Scribblers' publication of their Anthology, which was already in hand, but I was glad to share all the things that I really wish I had known when I was first submitting my precious manuscript to literary agents - plus a lot more about the process of getting a book from concept to finished copies, and how to help promote it afterwards (health warning: Twitter will EAT YOUR LIFE).

Anyway, the Scribblers were kind enough to invite me to their launch party at Perth College and I was thrilled to attend as a guest speaker and interested audience member. They had multicoloured balloons, soft drinks and wine, music, lights, and a compère. I was envious! The evening kicked off with a short speech by Principal Margaret Munckton, followed by some words from Emma and myself, and then we listened to the Scribblers reading excerpts of their work.

As my evening course is about the nuts and bolts of submitting work, refining it and then promoting it afterwards, I hadn't actually heard or read so much as a single word of any of the Scribblers' work before. I am delighted to say that all the "turns" that evening were well-written, engaging, touching and often very funny. They included Island Hopping, Shaun Bartlett's description of a night spent camping on a traffic roundabout(!!), Carol Page's Mushrooms, which began in a deceptively contemplative manner and took a very unexpected turn, and Lorraine Callaghan's tour de force, George's Coffee, which I am not going to describe because it would be a huge shame to offer any spoilers. I thoroughly recommend the Anthology and I hope to see more of Perth Scribblers' work.

If you would like to buy a copy of the Anthology, it is available from Perth College library and AK Bell library at a cost of £5.00

Finally:

If you are based near Perth (NB Scotland, not Australia, for my international blog readers!) and would be interested in finding out more about Creative Writing classes at the college, tutor Emma Hamilton has kindly provided the following information:

"Introduction to Creative Writing

Having been employed as an English and Communication lecturer at Perth College since 2003, I first delivered an evening class in Creative Writing in September 2012. This led to the creation of Perth Scribblers, a Perth College writing group which published their first anthology of writing in May 2014.

The Introduction to Creative Writing classes are delivered over a 10-week period on Thursday evenings from 6-8pm. These classes are designed for anyone wishing to begin, improve or simply try their hand at creative writing. The classes, which are fairly informal in nature, take into account the individual goals of participants and are designed to both instruct and encourage new writers. The classes teach techniques for the writing of short fiction – both stories and poems – and there is a weekly ‘homework’ task to allow students to further practise these skills.
Successful completion of the course qualifies interested individuals for membership of Perth Scribblers, who are desperately seeking new members! The group meets twice monthly for mutual encouragement and support which provides a useful forum for discussion, guidance and feedback."

If you are interested in attending any of my (Helen's) future evening courses about getting published/using social media, these will be appearing in the Perth College prospectus; I will post details in due course. Future courses are expected to run at Crieff Learning Centre.

Today is the last day of my first ever blog tour, organised for the launch of my new thriller, Demons of Ghent, and it's time to say a big huge THANK YOU to everyone who took part!

As well as a whole week of demons(!) I'm pleased to say that the book was featured in Countdown to 5th June, with this interview on Choose YA

This was followed by Demons of Ghent's first ever review by The Bookwitch, who described it as "that strange thing, the perfect book." I hope Demons will be reviewed many more times, but it's hard to imagine topping that! 

On 2nd June the official tour began, with fellow author Emma Pass hosting a blog post about my Top 10 Kickass Heroines.

3rd June saw Tripfiction, the site that matches your holiday reading with your destination, hosting an article about Ghent and why it has provided me with so much murderous inspiration!

Next up was the Fantastical Librarian, who asked me some brilliant questions for her author interview. Like my heroine Veerle, the Fantastical Librarian is a native Dutch speaker, so hopefully she has some fellow feelings (and doesn't mind the rude Dutch words!).

On launch day itself, June 5th, it was back to the Bookwitch, who did an author profile of me. You can find out about my favourite Swede and my hidden talent in that one!

After that I was interviewed again for Project UKYA, which was a great thrill because founder Lucy Powrie does a huge amount to support UKYA books - look out for her latest project here!

On 7th June, Fluttering Butterflies hosted something a bit new - a group interview! I asked a group of UKYA authors to ask me one question each. Featured authors were Caroline Green, Lisa Glass, Rae Earl, Keren David, CJ Daugherty, Michelle Harrison and Leila Rasheed. They asked me some amazing questions!

Last but most definitely not least, today UKYA, the site that celebrates young adult fiction by UK authors, featured my Top 10 Things I Need To Learn About UKYA. I lived abroad for a decade which is why all my novels to date are set outside the UK, and my Top 10 is a list of some of the things I need an update on before I can set a novel back here in Britain! 

Thank you so much to everyone who took part - either interviewing me, hosting guest posts or kindly sharing my blog tour on social media. It is very, very much appreciated! The virtual flowers are for you. Thank you!

I've mentioned this before but here's a reminder for anyone who lives in or within travelling distance of Edinburgh!

I'm having a launch event for my new thriller Demons of Ghent tomorrow, Wednesday 11th June, at Blackwell's Bookshop (left).

The evening kicks off at 6pm with a glass of wine, and from 6.30pm I will be talking to fellow author Susy McPhee about the book. Anyone who has heard Susy talk before will know that she is great fun, so the evening is sure to be a sparkling one with a few unexpected questions!

Here's the address of Blackwell's Edinburgh, where the event is being held:
53-62 South Bridge,
Edinburgh,
EH1 1YS

This event is ticketed, but tickets are FREE. Tickets are available from the front desk at Blackwell’s Bookshop or by phoning 0131 622 8218.

For more information or if you would like to order a signed copy please contact Ann Landmann on 0131 622 8222 or events.edinburgh@blackwell.co.uk