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I remember my first residential school trip was both exciting and terrifying. We went to Humphrey Head, a windswept pinnacle overlooking Morecambe Bay. It was a somewhat bleak place where a young girl’s imagination could run wild. Our headmistress, an imposing, authoritarian woman, announced that she was going to be reading a bedtime story to the girls' dormitory. Surprisingly, she chose "The Whitby Witches" by Robin Jarvis. I'd class this as a horror novel, and probably not something I would have chosen to read to a group of excited, nervous girls just before bedtime. Nevertheless I am indebted to her for introducing me to this book which still remains a firm favourite.

She stood next to my bed as she read, so I had the demon dog on the front cover staring at me. Now, I am terrified of large, black dogs; yet, when the trip was over, I found myself going into a bookshop to purchase a copy since she didn’t finish the story. I needed closure, mostly because I need to know that the black dog was defeated and unlikely to come after me. I devoured that book, its sequels and all the other books Jarvis had written as well, but nothing comes close in my heart to “The Whitby Witches”.

The illustrations were a particular attraction because they were drawn by the author himself. I'd been able to dismiss scary pictures before since they were merely someone else's interpretation of the story. Having illustration by the author though gave the pictures and the story a terrible veracity, as if Jarvis had seen them in real life and simply copied them down. 

Chorlotte Bond has a special festive Gift for you all with her 13 for Christmas click here to read a special series of daily spooky stories for Christmas 

If memory serves, it took me a bit longer to take to reading than one might expect of someone who grew up to be an author. By and large I found myself uninterested or unimpressed with the gamut of available material fiction-wise, and there were still a few years to go before I would discover the likes of Stephen King as an adolescent. I dabbled with the Hardy Boys and Laura Ingalls Wilder (who I came to appreciate as an adult), but nothing truly seized me by the collar and hurled me face-first into a nascent love of literature like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ​

 
I thought that coming up with my favourite book as a kid would be easy. I'd write about my first favourite book and that would be it.
 
My first favourite book was: This Can't Be Happening At MacDonald Hall, written by the now very popular Gordon Korman. MacDonald Hall was Gordon's first book, written in 1978, when he was twelve years old.
 
Let me say that again: he was twelve years old. My first novel, The Skids, just came out and I'm forty-five. Sigh.
 
Nonetheless, I read the book when I was eleven and decided that if Gordon could do that at twelve, then, hey, me too. And I did. I wrote a novel when I was twelve. You will never read it. It's uh…well, it reads like it was written by a twelve year old. Still, it got me started on the journey I'm still journeying today, so I figured: great, that's what I'll write about. Good old Bruno and Boots.
 
But then I remembered Hitchhiker. ​

I remember my father reading the Weirdstone to me as a child. I didn’t read it myself until recently – I think I was afraid to, even, to spoil the memory of hearing it read. But scenes from it, the language, the sense of the world it creates…. these things stayed with me from childhood. Shaped my own writing, the way I’m trying to capture not just people and actions but the pyscho-geography of a world. There’s a section in the Weirdstone where the children are crawling through the mine tunnels beneath Alderley Edge, attempting to escape the Morrigan. The memory of that scene still makes me shiver. Claustrophobia. The terrible fear of darkness, of being crushed. The blending of the real world horror of these old mine workings where men have sweated and risked their lives with the folklore horror of what might be living down here in the dark beneath the ground.

The Weirdstone is a classic good versus evil fantasy, whereby two children hold it in their hands to save the world from the powers of dark. Its world is an eclectic mixture of Norse, Saxon and Celtic tradition, replete with wizards, elves, dwarves, goblins, trolls (female trolls, please note), prophecies. The language is the strange, entangled, poetic language of dark age literature, of Beowulf, the Mabinogion, the Gododdin, the Eddas. The enemy is ‘the Great Spirit of Darkness’. The warrior hero’s sword, gloriously, is called Widowmaker. There are some truly awesome fight scenes.

Yet these tropes exist within a vivid depiction of the Cheshire countryside and of rural mid-twentieth century working-class life. Garner is, indeed, pre-eminently a writer of the landscape. The places in the Weirdstone are real places. The mishmash of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic elements, Victorian romantic invention, ill-defined local ghost stories, is the real way in which folk tradition works. This isn’t the clean, courtly, well-defined world of High Fantasy. This is the numinous, dirty, ambiguous world of folk belief. There’s a haunting passage where the children are fleeing across a wintery landscape where scarecrows, ramblers, crows all seem to be spies pursuing them, even the trees seem a threat. The danger is there present in the landscape itself, is uncanny yet mundanely real. Who hasn’t felt like that, walking a country road alone at dusk? Garner loved the landscape of Cheshire, knew its legends, its history, the deep-rooted relationship between people and place, and the Weirdstone is saturated with this. Good wins in the end – this is a children’s story, after all. But one is left with a lingering sense of unease. Things are not ‘explained’ or even really resolved. We have witnesses one brief moment in a longer story of the old powers of the earth, that exist just beneath the veneer of the human world.

The Weirdstone is also a powerfully gendered book. Our hero is female, the girl Susan who guards the weirdstone itself. The weirdstone was stolen by a man; women, by contrast, protect it, keep it safe. The central force of good, the wizard Cadellin Silverbrow, is male; he guards the sleeping knights who are England’s last defence against the dark. Opposing Cadellin is the Morrigan, the war goddess of Irish mythology, Morgause/Morganna King Arthur’s nemesis, here, fascinatingly, portrayed not as the seductive enchantress but as the scald crow, the hag, the woman whom men fear because she is not sexually desirably, because she cannot be sexually objectified by men. The Morrigan is the villain of the book -  yet in my memory she is something other, an image of disruptive, ‘dirty’, uncontrolled female power in opposition to the clean, ordered, quasi-fascist masculine world of knights and kings. I found myself half on her side, listening to the story as a girl, and I still find myself half on her side now.

The Weirdstone can only considered ‘dated’. Its Cheshire dialect must be almost unintelligible to the Manchester wealthy who now live on Alderley Edge. The rural world it evokes is gone from most children’s experience – was gone, indeed, before I was a child. Alan Garner himself has described it as ‘a bad book’. But I will never forget hearing it read to me. It helped to shape my love of folklore, of the British landscape, and of epic fantasy.
 
Anna Smith-Spark’s novel The Court of Broken Knives will be published by HarperVoyager in June 2017. It is the first volume in the major new epic fantasy series Empires of Dust.
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Anna Smith-Spark lives in London, UK. She loves grimdark and epic fantasy and historical military fiction. Anna has a BA in Classics, an MA in history and a PhD in English Literature. She has previously been published in the Fortean Times and the poetry website www.greatworks.org. Previous jobs include petty bureaucrat, English teacher and fetish model.
Anna’s favourite authors and key influences are R. Scott Bakker, Steve Erikson, M. John Harrison, Ursula Le Guin, Mary Stewart and Mary Renault.  She spent several years as an obsessive D&D player. She can often be spotted at sff conventions wearing very unusual shoes.

Find out more about Anna at her website "Court of Broken Knives", on Twitter and on Facebook 

The Court of Broken KnivesWe live. We die. For these things, we are grateful.
The Court of Broken Knives is the first book in the major new grimdark epic fantasy series Empires of Dust. It will be published by Harper Voyager in June 2017, available in the UK and worldwide in hardback and e-book format.
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The Court of Broken Knives has already been compared to the works of R. Scott Bakker, Ursula Le Guin and Mary Renault. It has been described as ‘lyrical’, ‘powerful’, ‘gripping’ and ‘particularly bloodthirsty’ by early reviewers.  Pre-order a copy here 

BY TONY JONES 

With Christmas fast approaching and the dread of all that Christmas shopping ahead of you, why don't you let Ginger Nuts of Horror take some of the pressure of you? With our four part guide to purchase horror books suitable for your precious ones.

Our Festive 50 is designed as a buying guide for parents who would love to introduce their younglings to the horror genre, but who might be a little concerned with exposing them to something that might distress them too much.  The books featured here have all been vetted and deemed suitable for teenage readers.  

And as a special treat for you stressed out parents there is a handy click to purchase from Amazon.com and Amazon UK feature at the end of each of these articles.  

Ginger Nuts of Horror was honoured to have the opportunity to chat to Darren Dash, the alter ego of the  international best selling YA author Darren Shan.  His initial breakthrough was with an adult book, in February 1999, called "Ayuamarca" (later republished as "Procession of the Dead"), the first of a trilogy of books known as "The City". That was followed by "Hell's Horizon" in February 2000. Then, several years later, when the first two were re-edited and re-released, he published the third book, "City of the Snakes".

In January 2000 Darren's first children’s book, "Cirque du Freak", which he’d written as a fun side-project, was published. The first book in a series titled "The Saga of Darren Shan" (or "Cirque du Freak" as it’s known in America), it attracted rave reviews and an ever-growing army of fans hungry to learn more about vampires which were quite unlike any that anyone had ever seen before!

Darren loved writing for children so much that for the next several years he focused almost exclusively on his books for younger readers. First, he wrote a total of twelve books about vampires. He quickly followed up his vampiric saga with "The Demonata," a series about demons. Running to ten books in total, "The Demonata" cemented Darren Shan’s place as the Master Of Children’s Horror, and saw him score his first UK #1 bestsellers. He also wrote a one-off short book, called "Koyasan", for World Book Day in the UK in 2006.

As every parent knows introducing your child to reading is one one of the most important things a parent can do.  Igniting a passion for reading in your child will set them up for life.  However, in the early stages of this task finding a book that doesn't make this task unbearable for he parent is a tough call.  Too many of these books are just too twee, and far too often are filled with wimpy fairies, soft toys and precocious princesses.  

Thankfully M.T. Weber's I want to be a Monster When I Grow Up bridges the gap between engaging the young reader and the parent looking for a fun filled read that doesn't want to make them sigh with boredom.  

Hudson wants to be a monster when he grows up, and as nearly ever character in early reading books decides to explore this desire in rhyme.  Fascinated with the spooky side of life Hudson loves his mommy's bedtime tales especially the ones with skeletons and snails.  

This is a fun read written and illustrated by M.T. Weber, he touches upon such important issues as why monsters need to keep their teeth clean, why monsters and their brothers need to work together, and the importance of a good diet.  This little story will raise a smile on both your face and your child's face.  It brilliantly introduces  your child to monsters galore without ever running the risk of scaring your child.  

Aided by some great artwork, this book will become a firm favourite with with both you and your child.