Freaks & Monsters

Mystery Creature

2012-02-06T19:15:00.004Z

Can any reader identify this creature by its skull? This is a beast that is still alive in the world today. No other clues, not for a while anyway. Give it your best shot in the comments section below. Thank you.

Do you recognise this real beast?

Dark Side of the Moomin

2012-01-12T23:35:00.014Z

Most stories start with a kick-factor, an event that sets of the action. For example, detective stories usually start with the discovery of a dead body. Tove Jasson found a simple and haunting opener for Moominland Midwinter, my favorite of the Moomin books. Moomins hibernate during the winter and never normally see the cold season, never normally encounter the snow or long nights. However this particular winter young Moomintroll wakes up in the middle of his hibernation and is unable go back to sleep.

And so the tale begins. He leaves the family den and meets the winter creatures of the valley.

Moomintroll visits his sleeping mother.

One thing I love about this book is its atmosphere of cold-weather loneliness. Moomintroll meets lots of characters but they come and go with long periods between visits. Nobody talks much, everyone is isolated, traveling alone. His "friends" are not too friendly, they have other things on their minds. There is much reference to darkness, to everything being held in a kind of icy death, albeit a temporary one.

Moomintroll sometimes goes to his mother, who is still hibernating underground, and asks her questions. By talking in her sleep "from the depths of her womanly understanding of all that preserves tradition", Moominmamma is able to help her son. Here Jasson is softening the blow for younger readers. Without a few kind words from Moominmamma the book's atmosphere of winter melancholy could get genuinely upsetting. This indicates how well-written this book is.

The Groke.

The icy Groke is a wonderful creation. A lonesome wanderer, she is attracted to light and warmth but doomed to extinguish it by drawing close. Moomintroll at first fears her, but then comes to pity her. He learns a lot of other things that winter but Jasson steers away from putting big lessons in her plot. Moomintroll does not have any revelations, he does not seem overly changed by the time spring comes we reach the end of the story. His growth is slow and gradual, without high risk or climaxes, an ordinary childhood.

As the thaw arrives Moomintroll is at last able to see familiar things emerge from under the snow. In a beautiful bit of dialogue, he makes a complaint to an acquaintance, Too-Ticky. Moomintroll tells her that she should have been more supportive of him when he first found himself awake, alone and unhappy.

‘It’d have been such a comfort. Remember, I said once: “There were a lot of apples here.” And you just said: “But now here’s a lot of snow.” Didn’t you understand that I was melancholy?”

Too-Ticky shrugged her shoulders. ‘One has to discover everything for oneself,’ she replied. ‘And get over it all alone.’

Author of the Month

2011-12-05T14:14:00.005Z

My new book Deep Deep Down is now out and no doubt I will be talking about it with the pupils of Wellington College, Belfast, when I visit them on December 14th. Thank you to Tanja Jennings, librarian at Wellington, who has made me the school’s author of the month.

Rebecca Cullen's winning monster.

I first visited this school to be part of the Northern Irish heat of the Kid’s Lit Quiz. As part of this competition I offered one of my own drawings as a prize to the artist producing the most exciting sea monster. You can see my drawing and find out more about the Kid’s Lit Quiz on the last entry on this blog. Above is the winning piece of art, below is the runner up. I hope the Rebecca Cullen is enjoying her prize and has maybe hung it up somewhere.

Rebecca Jones came second.

Kid’s Lit Quiz

2011-11-01T11:03:00.006Z

I will be a guest at The Kids' Lit Quiz which will be held at Wellington College in Belfast on Thursday the 10th of November. It is an annual international reading quiz for students aged 10-13 years. 26 teams from 19 different schools across Northern Ireland will be competing for reading honours. I’m told that previous quizzes have had rounds on everything from “pigs, primates and publishers' logos to Harry Potter, Dr Seuss and famous first lines." All regions of the United Kingdom take part along with New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the USA and China. The regional heat winners will compete in the UK Final at Warwick University in December. The UK champions will then travel to New Zealand to take on the International teams who will be battling it out for the coveted World Title. There are all sorts of prizes to be won and, of course, there’s the glory.

I am bringing an additional prize for the Northern Irish quiz, it is a drawing in a frame and will be presented along with one of my books. It will be awarded to the winner of a Monster drawing competition. I drew this picture when beginning to write The Badness of Ballydog. When writing I often sketch props and characters to help me get a clear idea of them in my head. This particular picture is of May looking over the side of the Sunny Buoy at a certain leatherback turtle. A turtle who turns out to be important in the story.

I look forward to partaking in the day, testing my knowledge of youth literature and seeing all the student’s artwork.

Readathon

2011-10-27T12:44:00.009+01:00

Readathon is a scheme of sponsored reading for school kids. It aims to encourage reading among the young and, at the same time, earn money for charity. I think Readathon is a much better idea that sponsored walks we endured at school.

Everywhere Brough Girling goes, he brings cake.

Brough Girling, the founder of Readathon, was in Northern Ireland this week visiting some schools that have done particularly well in the scheme. Schools where the students read lots of books and gathered impressive amounts of money. I went with him to talk to the students about my work and life as a writer. We went to Ashfield Boys' School in Belfast and Cambridge House Grammer in Ballymena. In Ballymena I talked with my biggest group of young people ever, four-hundred and fifty.

Click here to visit the Readathon website.

Monsters in Meath

2011-10-21T21:07:00.006+01:00

It's Children's Book Festival time and this week I visited libraries around Co. Meath. I meet lots of school groups and enjoyed it a lot. Hope they did too.

Doing my thing in Slane.

One of the school groups I meet in Ashbourne.

One thing I love about meeting young readers is the surprising angles they take on my work. Often a boy or girl will have paid extraordinarily close attention to someone I considered to be a minor character. Or they will have thought hard about some fleeting detail. This is always an eye-opener for me.

Next week for the Children's Book Festival I am the Ballyroan Library in Rathfarnham, Dublin.

Yarn in Barn

2011-09-09T13:11:00.008+01:00

Here’s me talking to a gathering of young and not-so-young in Dublin lately. The event was held in a barn and everyone sat on hay bales.

Thanks to Aoife of Children's Books Ireland for the photograph

It reminded of when, as a boy, myself and a friend slept a night in a barn of a local farm. My friend told his parents that he was staying in my house and I told my parents that I was staying in his. We learned that, if you’re going to sleep in a hay barn, you should bring lots of water as all that straws dries out the air terribly. Our throats were dry as deserts by morning. For provisions, all we brought with us was a block of marzipan.

Dublin Events

2011-08-05T15:42:00.008+01:00

Bookworms Invade Airfield on 14 August. Airfield is in Dundrum, Dublin. I will be having book events in the Grey Barn at 11:30am, 1:15pm and 3:00pm. The events will be suitable for 9 years and up.

There’s plenty of other things happening on the day in Airfield, click here to take a look.

Paper Monster

2011-07-30T18:30:00.003+01:00

Top this. An origami kraken made from a single piece of paper 25 inches across. No cuts, just folds. The creator remarks (and I quote because I love the specialist terminology,) that the “sails are formed using trapezoid molecules.”

Kraken attacks!

The crease pattern shows where all the folds are.

You can see more of Brian Chan’s origami work at this link.

Sensitive Cyclops

2011-06-30T11:28:00.003+01:00

If you’re doodling a monster there is one quick way to ensure the viewer knows it’s a genuine out-of-the-subconscious monstrous creation and not just a badly drawn crocodile. Give your creature only one eye. Much of the animal life on earth tends towards symmetry in the arrangement of sense organs. A one-eyed life form seems to contradict some fundamental principle, causing unease. The viewer knows this beast is built to a completely different design than the rest of us. An entirely different form of life that sees the world in a wholly different manner. It is an alien. It is a monster.

Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, 1958.

All the one-eyed creatures of today are probably descended from the Cyclops, one of the cast of the ancient Greek myths. It is a lumbering giant that is outwitted by Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. This image of the Cyclops as brutal, dumb and fond of violence has been its stereotype ever since. The Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad could not even speak, it just lurched about and roared. I can think of only one exception to this sort of Cyclops in art, this painting by Odilon Redon.

The Cyclops. Oil on cardboard mounted on panel, 64 × 51 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Holland. Painted sometime between 1898 and 1900.

What kind of Cyclops is this? Peeking shyly at a sleeping figure in what feels like a misty Garden of Eden. One does not feel the sleeping figure is in any danger. This Cyclops just wants a friend. A constant problem for those attempting to depict the Cyclops is what to do with its nose? The artist sometimes plants the eye in the middle of the forehead, retaining a normal human nose with two weird patches of skin either side. Or they forcefully squash the nose down, like in the movie version above. Redon avoids the problem by simply withholding the nose. He makes his Cyclops a smooth faced creature, not some warped aberration. This helps make it seem childlike, innocent as a lamb. Painting the creature without a nose sidesteps blunt questions of anatomy. Such questions would ruin the soft magic of the image. This Cyclops is made seem even more harmless by the absence of its right shoulder. Where does the far shoulder go? It is just about feasible that it is curved out of view. It matters little, the effect is to make this Cyclops seem dainty and meek. This is Odilon Redon's vision of the Cyclops, at home in a dreamscape.

Monster Monks

2011-05-30T19:22:00.007+01:00

It has been a while since we’ve had a Japanese monster, so here’s one now. David Maybury of Children’s Books Ireland drew my attention to this modern take on an ancient spectre, it is the first image below. The beast is the Umibōzu. Or if you prefer 海坊主, a name that combines the character for sea with the character for Buddhist monk.

The illustrator is Shigeru Mizuki and the image is from the Yōkai Jiten, an encyclopaedia of traditional monsters published in 1981.

These spirits live in the sea and if you happen to come close to one your best defence is to look away and pretend not to see it. The Umibōzu are peaceable enough if you don’t hassle them. The worst thing you can do is try and chat with one. That will result in it sinking you and your vessel.

Some say the Umibōzu are drowned holy men, they have the shaven heads of a monk and when seen at sea they often appear to be praying. I read that they are sometimes described as having serpentine limbs like tentacles. These limbs, their big eyes and smooth heads make me wonder if the idea of the Umibōzu may be based on sightings of the Giant Squid. Such squid are rarely seen near the surface but this rarity might have made their appearances all the more frightening.

I got this image of a Giant Squid from here.

This well-known 19th century image of the Umibōzu was created by the wood block artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Dead or Alive

2011-04-21T12:50:00.012+01:00

Newfoundland is in North-East Canada. I have a friend from there and he recently sent me a copy of this poster. It could be found pinned up in Newfoundland towns in the 1980s.

Wanted! Big squid.

It was a serious attempt by a biologist called Frederick Aldrich to gather samples of the giant squid, Architeuthis dux. The chances of a live squid trashing around a coastline like in this picture are pretty slim, although it does make for an exciting poster. It was more likely that Newfoundlanders would find giant squid corpses or parts of corpses washed up on shore. A while ago on this blog I wrote about a different kind of big squid, the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni. We knew about that creature for decades before one was seen alive or even in one piece. That was because parts of its distinctive tentacles were occasionally washed up on beaches, biologists looked at them and knew that there had to be an undiscovered species out there.

Newfoundland has a long history with the giant squid. In 1873 the first complete specimen of a giant squid ever seen came ashore there and was photographed in the bathtub of the local reverend.

Giant squid found in Newfoundland in 1873, hung above the bathtub.

In the 1870’s many giant squid washed up on the shores of Newfoundland. No one knows why those years were a particularly busy time for strandings but many scientists believe that they happen in regular cycles and are therefore predictable. The length of time between mass strandings is not known, but Frederick Aldrich suggested it might be 90 years. Aldrich correctly predicted another group of strandings that occurred in the 1960s.

In both the 1870s and the 1960s most of the beached squid were dead by the time they were discovered. There was one massive exception. One giant squid was struggling in the shallows when fishermen came across it in 1878. I assume this discovery is the scene illustrated in the poster. They managed to hook the dying beast with a grapnel and stopped it from washing back out to sea. They measured it at seven metres or about twenty feet long. It might have been the biggest giant squid ever captured. We don’t know for sure because then, unfortunately, the fishermen chopped the creature up. They used it for dog food. Frederick Aldrich may have been worrying about this possibility when he offered a reward.

A Bit Deep

2011-03-20T15:57:00.005Z

Deep Deep Down will be published in the UK later this year. We have been working on the cover image recently. Once again Jonny Duddle has been doing a fine job. As a taster, this is just a little chunk.

The cover art for Deep Deep Down is by Jonny Duddle.

World Book Day

2011-03-02T18:36:00.003Z

The World Book Day, the 5th of March, I will be appearing with Colin Bateman at the Waterfront Hall, here in Belfast. We're one between 2 and 3pm. The tickets are 2 pounds, I hope we're worth it.

Sea Creatures from Queens

2011-02-26T21:28:00.020Z

Hello to everyone I got to meet during my events in a couple of Queens libraries this month. Some drawing was done and I include a selection of the creations below.

The Hydra Tooth.

Bell Jelly Monster.

Red Rose Rooted Monster.

I didn't catch any name for this, the stringy shark maybe?

The Monster of the Broken Heart.

Broomfish.

After this beast has eaten its fill it stores spare meat for later consumption. It stores it by sticking in onto one of those black hooks along its rear section.

The Hell Spike Fish.

I like the delicacy of this one. Didn't catch its name though.

The Red-Handed Looker has many eyes. It catches you red-handed, hence the name.

The Many-Mouthed Beast.

The Hand-Feet Beast maybe?

Monsters Attack New York

2011-02-02T02:27:00.019Z

New York has always been a popular destination for monsters on the rampage. I wonder if the monster in Cloverfield found the city’s towering skyline and affront to its own gigantism? The creature just had to go in there and wreck the place. In the movie Godzilla it was claimed that the monster had gone there to lay eggs, mistaking the city for some sort of forest. New York’s popularity among monsters is definitely something to do the tall buildings. One skyscraper alone, the Empire State building, has on more than one occasion attracted a very large monkey.

The Cloverfield beastie

King Kong

What was his name? The marshmallow man?

I will be in New York soon to give talks about my books and some true monsters of the deep. Here’s the schedule.

Wednesday 16th of February, 10:15am. Seward Park Library, Manhattan. ‘The Badness of Ballydog.’ This is part of the U.S. wide year of Irish cultural events called Imagine Ireland. It’s an initiative of Culture Ireland.

Wednesday 16th of February, 4:00pm. Flushing Library, Queens. ‘True Monsters of the Deep.’ This will be a writing and drawing workshop, taking as its starting point some real monsters that live in the deep oceans of the world. For children ages 9 - 13. Preregistration is required. Their events calendar is here.

Friday 18th of February, 4:00pm. Long Island City Library, Queens. ‘True Monsters of the Deep.’ Another story workshop, including a look at some of the real monsters that live in the deep oceans. For children ages 9 - 13. Preregistration is required. The Long Island City Library events calendar is at this link.

Monsters Also Attack Massachusetts
I am also looking forward to a trip to New England.

Me in action, at a book event lately

Before all of the above, on Friday 11th of February, 7:30pm. I will be meeting with everyone at The Irish Cultural Centre of New England, Canton, MA 02021. Thank you to them for inviting me. I will be talking about my work and life with monsters. This event is for everyone.

The Truth about Lighthouses

2011-01-30T13:35:00.009Z

Last week I meet with students in both secondary and a primary school. The secondary was Methodist College, Belfast. This school is more commonly known as Methody. Hello to everyone there.

May on her boat.

The next day I visited Crumlin Integrated Primary. The students there had done some drawings of Ballydog. I was particularly taken with these impressions of May, throwing fish fingers from the Sunny Buoy to her friend below.

Ballydog's lighthouse.

Quite a few drawings featured the lighthouse and I asked one boy why he, and everyone else, had given the lighthouse red and white stripes. “Because that’s how it is on the cover of the book,” he replied without hesitation. He was right of course, I had forgotten the illustrator had painted the lighthouse on the cover of The Badness of Ballydog in that way. I had asked the question because in reality Irish lighthouses are simply painted white from top to bottom. They are never red and white.

Sticks of Rock, also known as Candy Cane, and a barber's Pole. Sadly, lighthouses don't get painted this way.

Apart from the lighthouse, I also really like the big smoke filling the top of this drawing.

The young artist behind one of these drawings took the stripes one step further. The red and white bands have been thrown to 45 degrees. I wonder was the image of a barber’s pole mingling in her/his mind. Or maybe the sticks of rock sold at the seaside. I have definitely never seen a lighthouse painted like that in reality … although I’d love to.

Make Mine a Monster

2011-01-02T13:25:00.009Z

This is what I got for Christmas. It’s a wonderful monster kit. These kits are created by the knitting ninja Donna Wilson and it encourages, in fact requires, you to use your imagination. There is very little in the way of instruction or direction. Every kit is made up of a different selection of materials and threads. You use the bits and pieces to make your own original monster.

1.

2.

This central piece is pre-made and comes with the kit. Turn it inside out and stuff it (stuffing supplied) via the single opening. I did not like the shiny pink side that mine came with, preferring the carpet-like darker side. But this did give me an idea. The pink side would be my beast’s sensitive underbelly. The creature would be a crawler. Or, better still, a swimmer.

3.

I gave it flippers at each corner. Then some nasty teeth. My kit came with several red pieces. A tongue! Let’s call it the Big-Tongued Platy-Beast, distant relation of the Australian platypus (the platypus is in fact a very small monster that has evolved a shy temperament in the last four million years. Not many people know that).

4.

Eyes, fins, eyebrows … Done! But hang on … I still have a few pieces of red material left.

5.

Now I’m done. The Three-Tongued Platy-Beast. On the box Donna Wilson suggests you take a digital photo of your monster, email it to her and she’ll put it on her website. I wonder if she'll like it.

Physical Curiosities

2010-12-29T17:38:00.003Z

Physica Curiosa was a reference book of bizarre animals and nightmarish humanoid creatures that, in 1662, were thought to be living out there somewhere in the world. Not too nearby luckily. Its creator was a priest called Gaspar Schott. It is believed that he did not do much fieldwork but relied on the reports of other people.

Left: "Monstrum biceps cum altero capite in ventre,” two-headed monster with another head in its belly. Right: "Monstrum septiceps,” seven headed monster.

The original book is in University of Iowa’s digital collection. You can look at it at this link. I first read about Gaspar Schott’s monster collection at the brilliant blog Res Obscura.

Monster Minds

2010-12-07T13:47:00.010Z

Hello to all the kids of Belfast’s Lower Ormeau who I meet with recently. They were all taken out for the morning to Queen’s University and shown around its hallowed corridors. It’s just like Hogwarts, was the general consensus. In the university’s Great Hall I gave them a presentation on … what else? Monsters.

Thanks to Paul Maddern for this photograph and the next two below. This is me, being asked a tough question.

In the week leading up to their visit two staff members had been leading creative writing and drawing classes with them. The theme was monsters and they created whole books of brilliant drawings. It was great to see them.

One example from the student’s own monster book.

Another example. A monster with a pet monster. What a good idea! I may have to steal it. It is a quick, scrawled, drawing but I think that makes the creatures seem even scarier. Maybe the kid who drew was so frightened by their own creation that they just couldn’t colour it.

On the internet, an artist called Dave Devries has started a website called Monster Engine. The galleries there began with this one simple question. “What would a child’s drawing look like if it were painted realistically?” Below are some results.

Boo! Example one.

Another strange beast.

A dangerous ninja, with what looks like a vicious side-kick in a box. Or is she a prisoner?

Dave Devries's version. Not a prisoner, she kicks her way out.

Click here to visit Monster Engine.

A Monster Calls

2010-11-15T19:57:00.012Z

Siobhan Dowd only started writing books towards the end of her life. A Swift Pure Cry came out in 2006. It’s a compassionate story of teen pregnancy. The London Eye Mystery was a hit of 2007. She died of cancer in that same year with two more novels written and the beginnings of a third. Bog Child, which is my favourite, won the Carnegie Medal. Solace of the Road came out in 2009.

The notes for the third were handed over to Patrick Ness. He was given the job of forming a story from them. The book he has written will be out next year. I like the title, a lot.

Siobhan Dowd’s battle with cancer seems to have arisen in the story of A Monster Calls. From the blurb:

The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming... The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild.

Patrick Ness has been getting loads of fans for his Chaos Walking trilogy. Read his hard-driven, violent, stories and Ness might seem a strange choice to handle any project begun by the more restrained, contemplative, Dowd. But then, wonderful things can result when contrasting favours are mixed.

Lost Dogs Let Loose

2010-10-25T18:23:00.005+01:00

I should be working on Deep Deep Down but instead I spent the day making fliers for the launch of Lost Dogs this weekend. If you happen to be in Belfast please join us in No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, on Saturday, October 30th, 2pm. Please note the early hour of this event. All welcome. There will be doggy biscuits!

1, Lay them out and 2, print them out.

3, Cut them out and stick them to the wall for a photo. 4, post to your pals.

The book review website thebookbag.co.uk has been the first to read Lost Dogs. Read their opinion here.

Drawing Ballydog

2010-10-17T22:02:00.006+01:00

I visited with the older kids at Kirkistown Primary School in Cloughey, Co. Down lately. We had a good discussion, I talked about my own writing and writing stories in general. Before my arrival the students had been creating drawings based on The Badness of Ballydog. They filled a whole corridor wall and it was wonderful to see them.

Miss Grope does not really appear in the book, she is only mentioned in relation to the fact that Andrew and his pack tap electricity from the mains supply in her garage. One student at Kirkistown felt poor Miss Grope deserved more attention.

Miss Grope. That’s the Villa in the background, a bit taller than I’d imagined it.

There was also a drawing of the fish finger factory, complete with a poisoned seagull dropping from the sky. That looks like the janitor in the foreground, about to scoop up the dead bird and throw it in with the rest of the fish finger's ingredients.

This is pretty much exactly how I’d imagined the fish finger factory. The janitor also happens to be May’s dad and I think he looks about right in this drawing too.

Thank you to all the artists and to everyone else at Kirkistown for the very enjoyable visit.

If anybody else out there has any drawings based on my books or characters I’d love to see them. It would be great if you could take a digital photo or scan them in and send them to me. I will try to put them on this blog.

Ballydog has a Good Day

2010-09-29T22:30:00.013+01:00

The Badness of Ballydog has been shortlisted for the Heart of Hawick Children’s Book Award 2011. Hawick is in the Scotland/England border region and deciding which book wins the award involves ten schools in the area. 600 students will soon begin reading and reviewing the shortlist and will vote next year.

A brilliant addition to the usual book prizes is that students are able to win awards for the best-written reviews. Next May someone will be voted “Best young reviewer of the year.” So everybody gets a go at entering their writing for honours.

Students also make short animations based on the books they’ve read. Last year children from six primary schools worked with an animator at Hawick Public Library to make the above trailer. It is for a book called Dog Lost by Ingrid Lee. In a month I happen to have a book coming out called Lost Dogs, that’s a good enough excuse to show their trailer on this blog.

Here’s the whole 2011 shortlist:

Meteorite Strike by A G Taylor.
Wilma Tenderfoot and the Case of the Frozen Hearts by Emma Kennedy.
The Chess Piece Magician by Douglas Burton.
The Great Hamster Massacre by Katie Davies.
The Badness of Ballydog by Garrett Carr.

Thank you to everyone involved for the nomination of my book. Click here to visit the award’s website.

Hot Spots of Britain and Ireland

2010-09-06T18:08:00.032+01:00

I have a few solid weeks of writing ahead of me, then I am back on the road. My next events are a couple of appearances at the Wigtown Book festival, in Scotland. I will be in praise of monsters at the Quaker Meeting house on Saturday the 2nd of October. The organisers tell me they have something else planned for me too, I’m not sure where or exactly when.

Wigtown is in south-west Scotland.

Cloughey.

I look forward to meeting some of the pupils of Kirkistown Primary School in Cloughey, County Down on October 6th. At the moment they are having a ‘Narrative Month,’ which sounds like a great idea to me. Such things did not occur in my school when I was a kid. I recall we had a "Let a Bigot Teach History” month when a rather elderly reserve teacher came in and cursed the English for four weeks.

But I shouldn’t complain too much because the following week I return to my home town. County Donegal is having ‘Wainfest,’ with venues spread throughout the county. My first event is in Ballydog … opps, I mean Killybegs. Come along to the town library at 10:30am on the 11th of October if monsters are your thing. If I get out alive I will then be going “in through” (as we say in that part of the world) to Kilcar for an event at 1:30pm.

Rush hour, Kilcar.

The following day, the 12th of October, I’ll be having two events on Aran Island, taking the 10:00am ferry from Burton Port.

13th of October, find me in Moville Library at 10:30am and Buncrana Library at 1:30pm.

14th of October, Na Rosa Library, 10:30am.

Last, for the moment, I will be joining the Children’s Book Festival in Dublin on the 19th of October. I'll having events in the County Library Tallaght at 10:30am and 12 noon.

Phew …

Review Round Up

2010-09-02T20:02:00.005+01:00

Lost Dogs will be released on the 1st of November. The book website Bookbag has been the first to review it. Read their opinion here.

There are plenty of reviews of The Badness of Ballydog floating around online. To keep things handy and tidy I list and link to many of them below.

The Times, Verbal Magazine, Ireland 4 kids, The Irish Times, Write Away, The Irish Independent and Bookblabbers. Readers have also put up reviews at Goodreads and on Amazon.

You, Hero

2010-08-14T17:53:00.011+01:00

There was a series of adventure game books I loved when I was young. They were presented and occasionally written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I arranged them neatly on a bookshelf, their regular green spines lined up in the correct order. My interest waned around number 35 and the series itself seems to have closed down around number 50. Still, fifty books is not a bad run.

In the books the reader directs the action, choosing where to go next out of a few options. As they say on the cover, “YOU become the hero.” The books were somewhere between a story and a game. You were supposed to use dice too but I think most readers bent the rules plenty. I know I did. Most of the adventures were set in a kind of Middle Earth type world called, if I remember correctly, Titan. Dragons, orcs, hobgoblins, that kind of thing. However science fiction stories were sometimes thrown in too.

It was the illustrations that I was interested in as much as anything. I loved this sea monster, drawn together from discarded bones. Look at the strange fish-with-arms beasts coming out of the shadows either side of it. Cool.

I think the best storyline was Slaves of the Abyss, that book would make a good movie. Some of the game books were themselves based on movies, not in their plots necessarily but in their atmospheres or general feel. Starship Traveller was like Star Trek and Freeway Fighter was like Mad Max. In retrospect I realise The Rings of Kether was based on Bladerunner and the work of Philip K. Dick. This story, number 15, was set in a seedy future, where technology has not saved the human race but rather given us even more ways to be bad.

In The Rings of Kether your mission is to crack an intergalactic drugs cartel. You travel around and sometimes go undercover. There were drug dens inhabited by genetically-adjusted slobs. There were weird mutants, one like a worm with a woman's face and a long tongue. And these books were supposed to be for kids! I recalled that some of the illustrations to The Rings of Kether scared me a bit. But it did not matter, I was hooked.

Reading and Workshop

2010-07-19T12:14:00.005+01:00

Last night I put down the final word of book three. However it might change, as might many of the words that came before it. It is still untitled.

Downpatrick, getting attacked by a zombie worm, the real ones aren’t so big.

On 7 August I will be doing an author visit and workshop in Downpatrick. It will be part of their Imagine Festival. Come along if you can. It will be fun and a tiny bit educational. There will be some drawing, some writing and some monsters, many of them real sea creatures you may enjoy learning about. Fact is stranger than fiction, they say, and it’s true. Did you know that at the bottom of the sea there lives a creature called a Bone-Eating Zombie Snot-Worm? Imagine. Come along and I'll introduce you.

Please click here for the Down Arts Centre page.

Two Hells

2010-07-05T10:44:00.016+01:00

Gustave Doré was born in 1832 and taught himself to draw as a child. He went on to become a famous illustrator. He had a particularly good eye for monsters.

Perhaps the most famous etchings he produced were illustrations for the Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. This long poem describes a tour of hell and was written late in the 13th century. People have continued to read Dante’s Inferno to this day, there are many modern translations to choose from. Far more people read the Inferno than the Paradiso, a tour of heaven that Dante also wrote. This is because badness is more interesting than goodness.

Gustave Doré’s Geryon, 1857.

In part 17 of Dante’s Inferno the visitors to hell meet a monster called Geryon. This creature is a symbol of lies and deceit. It has the face of an honest man but (beware!) the tail of a scorpion. However Geryon helps the visitors on their way, carrying them down to the next level of hell. It flies with them on its back, drops them off and quickly flaps away. A 1843 translation describes the scene like so:

Thus, grounding in the bottom of that pit,
To foot o’ the ragged cliff did Geryon bring
Our human freight, and, of his burden quit,
Sped off, like notch of arrow from the string.

A 2004 translation of Dante’s Inferno modernises it, setting the story in a collapsed and tortured American city. The same part of the story is told like so:

… Greyon finally set us down at the bottom of that rocky cliff. As soon as we climbed down from his back, he was off again like a bullet.

Very 21st century but perhaps not as rich. It is odd that the translator changed the name of the monster, Geryon to Greyon. Why do that? But I love Sandow Birk’s illustrations to this 2004 version. He has modernised Gustave Doré’s work, showing that not only words are open to translation. He has reset the illustrations in the dangerous city, where arrows have become bullets, and portrayed it as a sprawl of parking lots and fast-food joints. One of the most striking illustrations is his retelling of the monster of deceit. It has been transformed into a military helicopter.

The new flying montser.

The Minotaur: “Who when he saw us, as with cankerous rage. Inly consuming, his own flesh ‘gan tear.” John Dayman, 1843.

The Minotaur: “When he saw us, he freaked out by biting himself, growling at us and going psycho.” Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, 2004.

In other illustrations Birk has kept much of Doré’s original composition. Elements are arranged in the same way although with a twist or two. In part 12 the visitors meet the half-man-half-bull that is the Minotaur. It has been sent to the seventh circle of hell because of its violent life. Doré drew the Minotaur in a way befitting an artist embedded in the classical tradition. Birk lives in California and his Minotaur is a brash logo. It is spot lit and standing on top of a food stall next door to a petrol station. In the background skyscrapers loom where Doré had drawn mountains.

In all these pictures Sandow Birk captures what people mean by the term ‘urban hell'.

Monsters in Monaghan

2010-06-22T11:39:00.003+01:00

At the Flat Lake Festival I managed to herd together a bemused gang of youngsters to tell them about sea monsters. Instead of chairs the audience sat on hay bales. They stayed reasonably bemused, I think. Thank you to everyone who came along.

Thanks to Niamh for this photograph

My next big day out will be a reading and a workshop at Downpatrick’s Children’s Festival on the 7th of August.

Let's Get Lost

2010-06-02T21:13:00.011+01:00

Thank you to everyone who came along to my event in No Alibis bookstore during the Belfast Children’s Festival. My next outing is to the Flat Lake Festival in county Monaghan this weekend. Visit their website to get a sense of what an unusual, varied and hay-barn style carnival it will be. Bring your wellies. I will be showing and telling in the children’s tent twice over the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. The theme will be The Badness of Ballydog and the ideas behind it. I will also be giving a short lecture about some real sea monsters in the HURL pavilion.

Jonny Duddle has done it again with the cover for Lost Dogs. It is time to reveal his work.

This is the illustrator's portfolio.

I like the image a lot. Mr Duddle has captured May’s new look very well and, as you can see, another character has joined the trio for this book. When presented with the cover a certain Ms. S. commented that, “Ewan looks like he’s in a boy band” but that's fine by me. I think that's just right. Lost Dogs is the sequel to The Badness of Ballydog and will be out in November. I am still trying to think up a title for the third book.

Help me find the third book's title

2010-05-07T16:47:00.007+01:00

The titles The Badness of Ballydog and Lost Dogs were both dreamed up in minutes. But the search for the title for the third and final book of the trilogy has been going on for months. So now I am asking for any ideas you might have. I would welcome and appreciate any suggestions.

The setting looks a bit like this

The last book is set in a valley high in a Northern Irish mountain range. In the valley is a lake with a village by its shore. The village is the opposite of Ballydog. Their community is a utopia, everyone is sweetness and light. The citizens are all blessed with long and contented lives. But they have a secret, revealed early in the plot. The lake is home to a monster.

Here are some titles I like, although not quite enough:

Last Days of Legend
Trial by Water
The Last Days of Lough Linger
Dark Water
Monster Rise
Human Soup
Lost Soul Lake

You could build on any of the above or be original. No suggestion too crazy. There’s a prize for the winner. Not sure what yet.

About Me (No.1)

2010-05-04T15:40:00.010+01:00

My name is Garrett Carr. I grew up in a town a bit like Ballydog and now live in a city a bit like Hardglass. I was born in the summer of 1975. By the time I was ten I was obsessed with monsters. Day and night I would be found drawing them.

A drawing from my childhood that I discovered in the attic

This is me a few weeks ago, hunting a monster

Professionally, I come from a background in illustration. I specialised in the creation of visual tools for education in health and law, using images to reach out to the young, or across language barriers. I did that kind of work for governmental agencies in my native Ireland and for development agencies in Latin America.

There is more random information about me on my page on my publisher’s website.

At this link is a recording of an interview with me about The Badness of Ballydog. It is quite long, early 20 minutes. I am sorry to say about half of that time is me going, ‘ummm.’

Here is a video of me reading a short extract from The Badness of Ballydog.

Festival Events

2010-05-03T16:04:00.016+01:00

Apart from school visits I have a plenty of festival events lined up for the next few months. I will be making a couple of appearances at the Children’s Book Festival, Tallaght, Co. Dublin later in the year. Those events are being organised by the library service. I am looking forward to a trip to Scotland to be part of the Wigstown Festival at the end of September. HURL, Home University Roscommon Leitrim, are going to have a tent at the Flat Lake Festival in Co. Monaghan. I will be there to give a lecture on a true monster of the deep. The last time I spoke for them I focused on the Colossal Squid but this time I am not sure what I will talk about, there are plenty more monsters in the sea.

My first festival appearance will be later this month. I’ll be at No Alibis on the 22nd of May as part of the Belfast’s Children’s Festival. It is free but places must be booked.

Dreadful Dragon Dreamed

2010-04-27T12:24:00.008+01:00

If you were paying attention in class you’ll know that alliteration is the repetition of sounds at the beginning of words, often just the first letter or two. I go in for a bit of alliteration myself, hence the title The Badness of Ballydog and phrases in it, “Borrowed barrels” and “a rock rolling” for example. I like to put a bit of music in my writing.

King Arthur and Merlin watching dragons fight.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure took the style to the extreme, using alliteration at almost every opportunity. It is a poem of over 4000 lines written in Middle English. It is about the life of the legendary King Arthur. Nobody knows when it was first written down but it seems likely that it was during the 14th century when using alliteration was very popular. Reading Middle English is hard work so it is good to know that, at the moment, the English poet Simon Armitage is working on a modern version. What he produces will flow better to today’s readers and we will be able to enjoy it next year.

I’m sure Mr Armitage is doing a better job but in the meantime here’s my version of one small section, where King Arthur has a vision of a dragon. Describing a dragon as a shrimp is odd to today’s ears but I kept that in from the original. I tried to stay true to plentiful alliteration, changing whatever else was necessary to do so. It is probably more fun if you read it out loud.

He dreamed of a dragon, dreadful to behold
Come driving over deep to drown his people
Driven directly from the west, a wanderer unworthy
Covered completely in silver scales
This shrimp was enamelled in shinning shards
Its womb and its wings were wondrous colours
In this marvellous mail it mounted the sky
Whoever it lashed was lost forever
Its feet were flourished in fine fur
Such fierce flame flowed from its lips
The sea itself seemed seared with fire

Here’s the original I worked from, I got it from this online resource. The notes on the website helped me too, as you can see many of the words are no longer used and I needed the translation the site provided.

Him dremed of a dragon - dredful to behold,
Come drivand over the deep - to drenchen his pople,
Even walkand - out the West landes,
Wanderand unworthyly - over the wale ythes
Both his hed and his hals - were holly all over
Ounded of azure, - enamelled full fair
His shoulders were shaled - all in clene silver
Shredde over all the shrimp - with shrinkand pointes;
His womb and his winges - of wonderful hewes,
In marvelous mailes - he mounted full high.
Whom that he touched - he was tint forever!
His feet were flourished - all in fine sable
And such a venomous flaire - flow from his lippes
The flood of the flawes - all on fire seemed!

The description of the dragon starts at line 760 of the Alliterative Morte Arthure. It is followed by the description of a giant bear charging from the east. The two beasts do battle. It's like a 15th century King Kong. These days we have talented animators and special effects to bring monsters to life. In the 14th century writers were using alliteration to make their monsters live and flow, sweeping the audience away.

Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni

2010-04-12T21:39:00.010+01:00

Recently I discovered something called the Home University Roscommon Leitrim. HURL events consist of members of the public giving a lecture on anything they know about. You get ten minutes to talk about the subject of your enthusiasm. The basic idea is that people come together for some relaxed learning. “Soft knowledge” one member called it. Last week in Cootehall village, Co. Roscommon they had an event. I was one of the speakers and I think my show went down well. There were a few laughs even though we were discussing a real monster.

The Colossal Squid, copyright; www.deepseaphotography.com

Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni, or the Colossal Squid, is a creature we knew about for fifty years before one was caught or even seen by humans. We knew they existed because parts of tentacles were occasionally washed up on shore or found in the stomachs of dead whales. The Colossal Squid’s tentacles are very distinctive, they bristle with weapons. Little teeth in the suckers and revolving hooks on the ends of its tentacles mean that once a Colossal Squid has grabbed you, you stay grabbed. The biggest Colossal Squid ever caught was 8 metres long but it is reckoned they can grow to twice that.

This is hard for us landlubbers to grasp just how alien this life-forms is. Its brain is the shape of a donut. Its throat passes through the hole in the middle. Anything it eats has to be broken into small pieces before they swallow it, otherwise it can give itself brain damage. It mouth is a beak, like a parrot’s beak. Its blood is not red, its blood is blue. It has three hearts.

The Colossal Squid’s eyes can be the size of beach balls. These are the biggest eyes in the world and possibly the biggest eyes that ever evolved on this planet. About 80% of its brain is dedicated to its optics. That goes to show how important vision is to the Colossal Squid. Most species of squid have their eyes on the sides of their heads so they can watch all around them. This proves a certain wariness, most squid watch their backs. But the Colossal Squid’s eyes are positioned forwards on its head. Having eyes to the front of the head is a characteristic of predators. In this way Colossal Squids are like wolves, like hawks, like humans. It is a hunter.

Many scientists and researchers agree that squid, of all types, are both getting physically bigger and getting bigger in numbers. Dr George Jackson of Tasmania's Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies thinks large squid are the new "big players of the ocean." Many of their natural competitors and enemies have been overfished, by us, and this has triggered a population explosion. Furthermore global warming has warmed the ocean to temperatures that suit them better. Squid are now growing and breeding quicker. "You just heat them up a little bit and everything just ticks over that much faster,” says Jackson.

So the Colossal Squid is big, it is nasty and it is mysterious. Those things alone would qualify the creature for true monster of the deep status. But look at Jackson’s research and we can add another issue, they’re coming. As I told the audience at the HURL event, be afraid. They laughed at that, it was nervous laughter though.

Links:
HURL's blog.
More information on the Colossal Squid at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Rough Sea on a Rough Draft

2010-03-22T18:28:00.008Z

Thank you to every one at Sullivan Prep, Holywood, who made me very welcome last week. I meet with two large groups. Several students asked me about The Badness of Ballydog’s cover illustration. It’s a small coincidence that the very next day the illustrator himself was writing about the job on his blog. He posted up the first draft of the work.

The Badness of Ballydog, rough cover.

Click this link to go to Jonny Duddle’s blog. Click this link to go to his portfolio where you can see other examples of his work.

Elephant Versus Dragon Versus Wyvern

2010-03-02T11:44:00.010Z

I have begun school visits and giving presentations at bookshops. I enjoy meeting readers and hearing their views. I am sometimes surprised by what attracts the attention of young people. In The Gutter Bookshop, Dublin, my audience were completely fascinated by the jobs I’d done in fish factories when I was a teenager. One girl wanted to know how much I was paid for writing a book. When her friends made it clear they thought that was an impolite question she became indignant. ‘I just want to make sure the man’s making a living,’ she said.

In the Gutter Bookshop, Dublin.

A Bestiary. c. 1255 - 1265. Harley MS 3244, f.39v.

During my presentation I talk about the history of monsters. I often show the young people this image. It is from a 13th century English manuscript called a Bestiary. It shows a dragon threatening an elephant. It is an interesting image because the person who drew it would never have seen either creature. It is hard to know which of the two beasts would have seemed more freakish.

Bestiary’s were a popular in those times. They were a kind of dictionary of nature. The fantastical monsters seemed more credible by being placed along side commonplace creatures, sheep for example. According to the book Monsters & Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts, by Alixe Bovey, Bestiaries can be seen as a foretaste of what grew, over creatures, into natural history. However Bestiaries seek moral drama in the creatures of the world and even an insight into the mind of God. In the story illustrated by the above image the elephant represents good and the dragon represents evil.

But is it a dragon? During my presentations several young people have told me that the creature is in fact a wyvern. ‘You can tell because it’s got two legs,’ I was assuredly told. The students of Wesley College were especially expert. It seemed the whole crowd, and there were over an hundred and fifty present, knew what a wyvern was and how to distinguish it from a dragon. It turns out that the Wesley has a wyvern of its own. It is on the school crest.

A section of the Wesley College crest. The wyvern's legs are to the front but the creature uses its tail to support its hindquarters.

In Wesley, I stuck this photo together from three different images.

Thank you to everyone who came along and made my shows possible. I hope you enjoyed the monsters.

Lesser Spotted Bookstore Turtle

2010-02-07T21:45:00.006Z

The Lesser Spotted Bookstore Turtle was in attendance last Thursday night in No Alibis Bookstore, Belfast. The get-together was to launch The Badness of Ballydog. A crowd of people came along and I did a lot of signing. Thank you to David for the use of his bookshop and to Fiona for creating the cake. This leatherback is made of layered sponge and has green icing for a shell. As you can see it was quite big but there was none left by the end of the celebrations.

True Monster of the Deep

2010-02-01T10:00:00.006Z

200 million years ago much of the dry land on earth was gathered into a supercontinent called Pangaea. The waters surrounding it could be called a superocean. This vast body of water has been named Panthalassa. A big ocean deserves a big reptile and, sure enough, it was the home of the Ichthyosaur. Some of these creatures were vast bodies themselves. The bones of a giant ichthyosaur unearthed in Canada lately add up to the largest marine reptile ever found, like an articulated truck … with fins.

Note the scale of the person in the image. However not every species of Ichthyosaur reached the monstrous size of this example.

Big eyes indicate Ichthyosaurs were probably deep divers, used to being deep in the dark sea. They probably ate squid, shellfish and other reptiles and were at swim for around 150 million years. That is a long time by any standard, therefore we can say they must have had a wide-ranging diet. One sure way for a species to die off fast is to focus on only one type of food and refuse to eat anything else. If your source of food disappears then you are bound to follow. The Ichthyosaur was not fussy and the giant Ichthyosaur in particular was able to eat virtually anything it meet. Few of us would not like to meet one when going for a swim.

A set of fossils from the United States adds more to our vision of this awesome predator. In Nevada dozens of Ichthyosaurs were found fossilised together. They were all pointed in the same direction and this has lead some to suggest that the creatures went about in pods, like dolphins do today. Imagine a dozen of these giants swimming at you through the blue Panthalassa.

Know the Kappa

2010-01-07T22:23:00.017Z

In Japan, parents warn their children about the Kappa. The Kappa is a water imp that smells of fish, eats cucumbers and has a head shaped like a bowl. Parents may have invented the creature in order to keep their children from wandering too close to dangerous lakes and rivers. Or perhaps the Kappa really is there, watching from among the reeds.

"Skin like a catfish." A 18th Century Kappa.

It may have been there a long time. The Kappa in the above image was captured and then sketched sometime about 1770 near present-day Tokyo. According to the text that accompanies the illustration it was two feet tall and had skin like a catfish.

See the whole document here.

An illustrated guide to twelve types of kappa was produced, based on sightings and reports. The crawling creature in the above image is one. Later, in the 1850s, a well-known Kappa lived in the Tone River. Its name was Neneko. It moved along to new locations along the river each year, taking lives wherever it went.

Neneko.

Most portrayals that I have seen of the Kappa show it as a smallish beast. This might explain its specific targeting of children, Kappas are not big enough to take an adult. Once claimed, the child is dragged under the water and either drowned or, some say, converted into a Kappa themselves. The victim becomes amphibious, grows scales and soon cannot be distinguished from its surrogate family. It embarks on a new life, grubbing around riverbanks and watching for opportunities to gain a brother or a sister. One wonders how long it takes for the kidnapped child to forget its previous life. Perhaps it never does, and this sense of loss and loneliness it what has it leaping from rivers at human children who wander too close. Maybe it just wants to play, but whatever the reason another child is dragged under and the cycle continues.

Wooden carving of a Kappa, observe the bowl in its head. Collection of the National Museums of Scotland.

Should you encounter a Kappa it is vital to remember the following defence: The Kappa is a water creature and needs to maintain contact with its native element or it will become feeble. It has a bowl shaped head so it can retain some water as it emerges on a kidnapping mission. This aspect of the creature can be seen clearly in a small carving I found in a museum lately. But its water-bowl head is not really the Kappa’s weakness. Its weakness is politeness, it Japanese culture of respect. If you are to survive an encounter with a Kappa you must quickly bow to it. The Kappa will be immediately compelled to bow back at you. With its head bowed the water will spill from the bowl and the Kappa will become weak. It will immediately have to dive back in the river, or die.

Inside Godzilla

2009-12-15T12:36:00.008Z

A Japanese illustrator has offered this suggestion on how Godzilla’s anatomy might work.

The illustration reveals huge lungs so the monster can hold its breath an extremely long time as it walks the ocean floor. Serious leg bones and muscles support its 20,000 tonne weight. It has a sophisticated system, featuring a uranium sack and a nuclear reaction sack, to produce radioactive fire-breath. However do not expect any sophisticated opinions from Godzilla. It has a very small brain.

Ugly Beastie

2009-12-08T19:16:00.005Z

Pity the Blobfish, who has almost no muscle and is frequently called “the ugliest thing alive.”

They live deep deep down in the waters around Australia. The female of the species is unusual among fish in that after laying eggs she sits on them until hatched. Then again, it might just be lazyness. Blobfish don’t move much anytime. They only eat when something edible happens to float by.

In the Hall of Bones

2009-11-21T13:10:00.009Z

As a place to visit in Paris, the Natural History Museum beats them all.

The ground floor of the Natural History Museum, Paris.

As soon as you walk in you can do nothing but stare. Staring right back at you is a chorus of skeletons, the bare bones of the animal kingdom. Whoever set up this display had a keen scene of the theatrical. Most of the skeletons are facing the same direction, at you, and there isn’t a single preserved skin or display panel to break the march of boniness. The iron ribs in the roof have been painted suitable colours to compliment the skeletons. Colour-wise, the whole huge room and all its contents fall into a small range of creams and browns. There are giraffes, walruses, horses and whales. There are deer, rhino, snakes and turtles. Many have been there for over a hundred years and it seems, as you walk in, that they have been waiting for you.

Skull of a two-headed calf, Veau Iniodyme.

At the back of the room are some strange cases. They are the kind of freak show that museums would not put on display nowadays but have been allowed to remain in this old museum. There are skeletons of human babies, set up in creepy standing positions. There is a cyclops pig preserved in a jar and the skull of a two-headed calf.

A Green Turtle, Tortue Verte.

Many natural history museums have stuffed animals on display. Taxidermy has been used to preserve the impression of life in the corpse. In those museums we are able to examine the skin of the creature, look into its artificial eye. Perhaps a stuffed animal is better at making us understand how the creature looked in the wild but, for me, something vital has been lost in the process. It might be dignity. In this museum in Paris we see the bleached bones, the raw structure of life, and our imaginations flesh them out. Strange but true; these skeletons suggest the grandeur of life much more a room of stuffed skins would.

What Fright Looks Like

2009-10-28T19:03:00.008Z

The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch lived from 1864 to 1944. Walking in Oslo one evening as the sun was setting he was struck by a vision. He wrote, "looking out across flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and city [ … ] I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature."

The Scream, 1893, oil on cardboard, 36 x 29 inches, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo.

The Scream was Munch's record of his experience that evening. Now the painting has become an icon of anxiety. This is largely down to the powerful simplicity of the face. The face is framed by the palms pressed to its hallow cheeks and contains almost nothing but mouth and eyes, wide-open and aghast. Here is a primary image of fear. It was a primary image of fear before Munch even painted it.

The Scream is world famous image and has gone on to be reproduced, copied, messed-with and recast in countless ways. The pop artist Andy Warhol had a go, as did The Simpsons. The murderous lunatic in the Wes Craven’s Scream movies wears a mask based on the face in the painting. The same mask is always a big seller at this time of year, Halloween. So, independently of the original painting, The Scream lives.

The painting also had a pre-life. Munch heard an “infinite scream pass through nature” but how did he find a face for it? He went to the museum. During his time in Paris an Inca mummy went on display there, Munch went to see it. The body had come from Peru. It had been bound and buried in a jar.

The mummy is still in Paris, in the Musée de l'Homme.

It can be imagined that, when Munch looked upon the mummy, he had found what fright might look like. He painted its portrait and he sent it out into the world. It is still with us today.

The Girl With Many Eyes

2009-10-08T10:43:00.018+01:00

Tim Burton is the director of Ed Wood, Planet of the Apes and the 1989 version of Batman. My favourite of his movies is probably Edward Scissorhands. It’s the standard 'boy meets girl' kind of story, but instead of hands this boy has scissors on the end of each arm. These unusual appendages come between him and his beloved.

Edward Scissorhands is typical of Burton’s work, he is interested in outcasts, oddballs and teenage freaks. Apart from making movies he has also written and illustrated a book of poems featuring a wide range of strange youths, all struggling to belong. It is called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories and it is a very funny collection of rhythms. Here’s an example:

The Girl With Many Eyes

One day in the park
I had quite a surprise
I met a girl
who had many eyes.

She was really quite pretty
(and also quite shocking!)
and I noticed she had a mouth,
so we ended up talking.

We talked about flowers,
her poetry classes
and the problems she’d have
if she ever wore glasses.

It’s great to know a girl
who has so many eyes,
but you really get wet
when she breaks down and cries.

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories is published by Faber and Faber.

You can watch the trailer for Edward Scissorhands here.

Goya's Witches

2009-09-05T21:19:00.026+01:00

Francisco Goya was a Spanish painter who lived between 1746 and 1828. He knew about monsters and witches.

Section of The Spell 1797-98. Oil on canvas, 44 x 32cm. Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.

In The Spell a coven are ganging up a terrified man. What a line-up of witchy wickedness they are! One is sticking a pin into a voodoo doll. Another is carrying a basket of dead babies. In this painting, from around 1798, you can see how old the typical image of a witch is. They could be trick-or-treaters dressed in today’s Halloween masks and costumes. All they lack are pointed hats and broomsticks.

That is the problem with the painting. These are nasty witches certainly, but are they really scary? Don’t they look like they are trying too hard? I think this painting has lost its power because it is now an old-fashioned idea of what witches look like.

Goya could do better witches than them …

Witches in the Air 1797-98. Oil on canvas, 43.5 x 30.5 cm. Musea Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Witches in the Air still rates high on the fright-o-meter. These witches wear pointed hats but are unusual in most other ways. They fly but need no broomsticks, they are young and, most importantly, they are male. I don’t know where the idea of witching being a purely female pursuit came from, it is by now the common idea, but it was not accepted in Goya’s time that only girls could grow to be witches.

In the painting a few witches have flown down and have scooped a man away from his friends. One survivor is making a run for it with a sheet over his head. He has his thumbs stuck out between the index and second fingers of each hand. This gesture is called the figa and it is to ward away evil.

This painting is not only scary because it features different kinds of witches from those we are used to. It is the way it is painted. It seems the victim has been picked-on at random. The picture feels like the snapshoot of a crime-in-progress. The witnesses and the inclusion of a commonplace donkey make it seem like a rural scene that has gone suddenly wrong. The witches are not frail wispy things cackling in the shadows. They are painted brightly. They are healthy, they look like they work-out. This coven is solidly real. The have man-handled their victim into the air. He is kicking and screaming. The witches are leaning in and —the horror— they are eating him.

They came from the Deep

2009-08-18T19:10:00.028+01:00

Have a look at this fella. It’s Teuthowenia pellucida or, perhaps more catchy, a Googly-Eyed Glass Squid. It lives in the ocean. When alarmed by a predator, or a photographer, it inflates its body up with water until it has become a semi-transparent sphere. If its extra size doesn’t discourage the predator then the squid fills its water-balloon body with ink. In this way it’s camouflaged in the darkness of its surroundings. What if it’s threatened during daylight hours? That’s not a problem. This squid lives deep down, beyond the reach of the sun.

The Googly-Eyed Glass Squid. You'd probably look weird to it. Copyright; www.deepseaphotography.com

But not as deep as the seafloor. The Googly-Eyed Glass Squid lives in the zone called 'midwater.' It floats between the sea surface and the bottom and keeps away from shores, those are all places fatally dangerous to this delicate creature. It's kind of spooky when you think about it, it lives in a world without walls, without edges and without ground. It just hovers in an endless void. Everywhere is the same. It is always exposed. This is why it has to be able to hide while still in view. There is nothing to hide behind.

Shy, but with a good sense of humour, the Dumbo Octopus.

This Pokémon-looking critter does live on the ocean floor, even when it's as deep 5000 metres. You and I would be squashed flat as pancakes at that depth. It is called Grimpoteuthis or the Dumbo Octopus. According to a book called The Deep, where I have been finding out about these and other creatures, the Dumbo Octopus is something of a mystery. “They are often observed resting on the bottom, with their mantle spread around them,” the writer says. “What are they doing there, sitting so quietly in the dark? Nobody knows.”

Thank you to Claire Nouvian who wrote The Deep and the lovely Ms. S who give me a copy of it for my birthday.

Something is coming ...

2009-08-18T17:40:00.026+01:00

The Badness of Ballydog will be published by Simon and Schuster next February. It will be followed by Lost Dogs later in the year. There will also be a third, I am still thinking about the title for that. I already have one I like but the publisher thinks it is too long. We will see.

The cover illustrator is Jonny Duddle. Looking at his portfolio I see that he is fond of pirates so The Badness of Ballydog, which contains no pirates but does have plenty of boats and high waves, probably suited him. He can also draw a leatherback turtle excellently, but you’ll have to wait to see that. It’s on the back.

Ballydog is a bad town on the road to nowhere. It's also home to Andrew, the boss of a school gang; May, an outcast for her strange ways and ability to understand animals; and Ewan, a newcomer, hiding out in Ballydog under the witness protection scheme. Now these three teenagers are under threat as a vast ancient creature marches along the seabed towards their town, intent on destroying it. Can they save Ballydog? Is it worth saving?