My 5 Favourite Darkmouth Legends By Shane Hegarty (Author the Darkmouth series)

Shane Hegarty is the author of the wonderful Darkmouth series, the third book of which, Chaos Descends, was published last week. Today Shane has very kindly topped by at MGSB to tell us about his Top 5 favourite Darkmouth Legends:

The Orthrus

When I saw a picture of a two-headed dog with a snake for a tail, I just knew I had to find a place for it in the Darkmouth universe. After a while I decided to lose one dog head so that it became a double act on a single body, and I tried to imagine what it would be like for that snake to spend its entire life between the back legs of a dog. Especially if that snake had bigger ambitions in life. The result is Cornelius and Hiss, two conjoined animals with individual personalities. The snake talks a lot. The dog only says one word: “sausages”. That’s based on an old TV show that once featured a dog who said sausages and became a huge poochy celebrity as a result.

Illustration by James de la Rue

The Basilisk

Every hero needs a foe they struggle to defeat. And in the first Darkmouth, Finn gets the Basilisk. It’s a small, shuffling Legend that thinks its powers of hypnosis are so strong it will paralyse its victims. But in this case, it is self-deluded and no more dangerous than a baby’s giggle. But Finn is so incompetent he struggles even to capture this fellow. When I show his picture at reader events, they always want to take the Basilisk home in some stuffed, cuddly form. If the books fail, I’ll do a line of these toys for sure.

The Hogboon

The great thing about working in the worlds of Legends is that every culture has them. While many seem to work off familiar templates (giants, shapeshifters, scary older women who really got a raw deal by storytellers), within that there are creatures particular to a place such as the sprite-like, twisted, knobbly-knuckled Hogboon from Scottish myth. In Darkmouth, the main Hogboon we meet is Broonie, a poor little fellow who plays an important role in the story, but does so while awful things happen to him. And keep happening. And never stop happening. I feel cruel doing it to him. But I can’t stop.

The Hydra

When you look first at the Hydra, you see a huge, seven-headed creature, with snapping jaws and a bad attitude. But if you look at it and think, well what if those seven heads didn’t get along with each other? Or what if one had bad gas? Or two wanted to go in in different directions? Suddenly you’ve not got one character, but seven on one body. And better, chop a head off and suddenly you’ve got eight characters. I kind of kept it in the shadows for two books, but in Darkmouth: Chaos Descends the Hydra finally gets its day. And I had so much fun writing it.

 

Fomorians

They are not particularly well known Legends - certainly not when compared to those of Greek and Roman myth - but these Irish giants have proven fantastic bad guys. Huge, brutish, ugly (unless you’re Fomorian yourself, of course) they enjoy dishing out disaster. Maybe it’s because of their Irishness, but I use Gaelic words as names, because they sound unusual to English speakers but have a hidden meaning. So, the ruling Fomorian in Darkmouth, Gantrua, gets his name from the Irish for “Without mercy.”

Can you identify these children's fantasy books?

Here's a teaser to ponder over the weekend. No googling allowed!! Can you identify these well-known children's fantasy books from the extracts given? The extracts are all from somewhere in the first few pages.

And by the way - the pictures are there just to confuse you. They don't bear any relation to the books from which the extracts are taken. (Or do they??)

Good luck!

1.  Everything about the school was dark and shadowy. There were long, narrow corridors and winding staircases - and of course there were the girls themselves, dressed in black gym slips, black stockings, black hob-nailed boots, grey shirts and black-and-grey ties. Even their summer dresses were black-and-grey checked.

2.  Tom was cleaning the exhibits in the London Museum's Natural History section when it started. He felt the tell-tale tremor in the metal floor, and looked up to find the model whales and dolphins that hung from the gallery roof swinging on their cables with soft creaking sounds. He wasn't alarmed. He had lived in London for all of his fifteen years, and he was used to its movements. He knew that the city was changing course and putting on speed.

3.       'You want to get rid of that in your hand? It's condition is bad - any price would be too high'.
          'Oh no, you misunderstand,' Pidge hastened to say. 'I found this package in the back room. How much do you want for it, please?'
          'Ah,' the man said softly. 'An old pledge from far off days. Are you sure you want it?'
          'If it doesn't cost too much,' said Pidge.
          'Cost - ah, cost,' said the man, thoughtfully. 'The price could be great, as I've said before. But money isn't the thing, is it?'
          'No,' Pidge answered, not quite understanding his meaning.
          'All that will burn in that back room is for burning, but we don't want that burned, do we? You would save it from the fire?'
          'Yes, I would,' Pidge said.

4.  For the past two years, my business enterprises have thrived without parental interference. In this time, I have sold the Pyramids to a Western businessman, forged and auctioned off the lost diaries of Leonardo da Vinci and separated the fairy People from a large portion of their precious gold. But my freedom to plot is almost at an end. As I speak, my father lies in a hospital bed in Helsinki, where he recovers after a two-year imprisonment by the Russian Mafiya.

5. The woodtrolls had many types of wood to choose from and each had its own special properties. Scentwood, for instance, burned with a fragrance that sent those who breathed it drifting into a dream-filled sleep, while wood from the silvery-turquoise lullabee tree sang as the flames lapped at its bark - strange mournful songs, they were, and not at all to everyone's taste. And then there was the bloodoak, complete with its parasitic sidekick, a barbed creeper known as tarry vine.

6.   In the nursery a young girl was impatiently dancing up and down before the great window, fourteen feet high, which faced out over the park and commanded the long black expanse of road. 
          'Will she be here soon, Patten? Will she?' was her continual cry.
          'We shall know soon enough, I dare say, Miss Bonnie,' was the inevitable reply from her maid, who, on hands and knees in front of the fire, was folding and goffering the frills of twenty lace petticoats.

7. The theatre lay in the heart of what had once been the most glamorous part of the City, the Arts Quarter, now fallen into decadence and ruin. The other acts that performed there were by and large terrible. The crowds would eat and drink and talk and laugh throughout the evening, paying little or no attention to what passed on stage. They had come for one thing. Many came night after night to see the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion. Others, new arrivals in town, travellers from distant parts maybe, were about to see it for the first time.

8. I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon. It was the day after we moved into Falconer Road. The winter was ending. Mum had said we'd be moving just in time for the spring. Nobody else was there. Just me. The others were inside the house with Doctor Death, worrying about the baby.

9.  If you went into a school nowadays and said to the children: 'What is a gump?' you would probably get some very silly answers.
          'It's a person without a brain, like a chump,' a child might say. Or:
          'It's a camel whose hump has got stuck.' Or even:
          'It's a kind of chewing gum.'
          But once this wasn't so. Once every child in the land could have told you that a gump was a special mound, a grassy bump in the earth, and that in this bump was a hidden door which opened every so often to reveal a tunnel which led to a completely different world.

10.  Mrs Sharp's hat rattled as she bent swiftly over the earrings. 'Those are diamonds!' she said. 'You Ma must have had money! Now if I took those to Mr Nostrum - But we'd get more for them if I took them round to Mr Larkins.' Mr Larkins kept the junk shop on the corner of the street - except that it was not always exactly junk. Among the brass fenders and chipped crockery, you could find quite valuable things and also a discreet notice saying Exotic Supplies - which meant that Mr Larkin also stocked bat's wings, dried newts and other ingredients of magic.


Answers in the comments below - and all will be revealed on Monday 8th June.



Cecilia Busby writes fantasy for children as C.J. Busby. Her latest book is The Amber Crown.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

Rings, Wardrobes and Magic Mushrooms

Magical Objects in Middle Grade Fiction

I am lucky enough to be spending quite a bit of time in schools at the moment, talking to children about creating magic in writing. One of the first things I ask them to do is to shout out their favourite magical object in any book they’ve read. I stand poised to write the answers on the whiteboard and often there’s a hesitation – not because no one can think of an answer, but because they’re wondering where to start. A fraction of a second later, when I hear that first cry of “Harry’s wand!” or "the Wishing Chair!" the flood gates open and the workshop is carried away on a tide of fantastical artifacts.

Often the first in that flood are those from the titles of the classics, like the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the ring of The Lord of the Rings and the Faraway Tree in, well, The Magic Faraway Tree. Sometimes there are other iconic objects from the classics like the magic mushroom in Alice in Wonderland, the grandfather clock in Tom’s Midnight Garden and the book in The Neverending Story. Usually there are more recent ones like the Alethiometer in His Dark Materials or Percy Jackson’s sword, Riptide. Sometimes we get lost in the wondrous inventory of a single title, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I’ll be kept busy at the whiteboard with chocolate waterfalls, Television Chocolate, Everlasting Gobstoppers and the like. Of course one title – or set of titles – offers the best hunting ground, and normally the session contains a deluge of objects from the pages of Harry Potter, from the Invisibility Cloak and broomsticks, to the Marauder’s Map and Horcruxes. Very soon I am running out of whiteboard space, and I call for mercy.

And then we look at my scrawl, and congratulate ourselves on knowing an awful lot of magic. I try to make my fledgling magicians feel even more chuffed with themselves by telling them that if I had done the same thing with a room full of adults, the list would be no longer (perhaps shorter), and it would contain many of the same artifacts. Why? Because literature for this age group – our very own Middle Grade – excels at magical objects. Middle Grade is the heartland of the fantastical Thing. This is where we find the looking glasses and glass elevators and boxes of Turkish delight that fire our imaginations and refuse to leave us, that create an impression so vivid and fond that they enter our very definition of magic. Try it on your parents, I tell them, try it on your teacher! Ask them to name their favourite magical objects, and I wager that many if not most of them will come from books written for you.

Isn’t that exciting, I say, that it is the books written for you that create some of the most powerful magic. What does that say about your imaginations? Your capacity to create magic in your minds?

And isn’t that exciting for us, we who write some of these books, and work with them, and teach them, and read them with our children. Of course all this raises the question, why is Middle Grade so good at creating these magical objects? And how does it do it?

Well, I’m not sure there are definitive answers to those questions, and I wouldn’t presume to try to offer any, but I do of course have some thoughts on the subject. I have to have some thoughts – I’m still only half way through my workshop. It strikes me that Middle Grade occupies that happy and fertile ground between the unfettered imagination of young literature and the more sophisticated and realistic stories of YA and adult literature. Middle Grade can do imaginative – our lists prove that beyond a doubt – but the genre marries the richly imagined with sophistication and realism. Let me give some very quick examples.

Consider the moment Lucy first enters Narnia in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lucy’s journey through the wardrobe is simply but carefully described so that it is immersive and real. As she enters the wardrobe, Lucy uses almost all of her senses, feeling the furs against her skin, smelling the mothballs, hearing the crump of snow under her feet, seeing the light of day somewhere up ahead. The whole episode is skillfully created to feel plausible, so that the magic itself is almost undeniable. It is an example of how even here, towards the younger end of Middle Grade, a more sophisticated narrative and a healthy dose of realism lift the magic to new heights.  

While we’re here in the wardrobe, it’s worth reflecting on the types of object that make the best magical artifacts. The wardrobe is a very good example of how something very everyday and real can be developed into something of extraordinary power, both in terms of magic and literary importance. It may be harder to make a wardrobe seem magical – and that’s where the skillful writing is very important – but when done as brilliantly as Lewis did it, it places a portal to another world in every house across the land. The wardrobe made Narnia seem close and accessible to us all. It is the very humdrum realism of wardrobes, mushrooms, rings, rabbit holes, looking glasses, peaches and train platforms that make them the ideal starting point for immersive magic. If the writing is good enough – and in Middle Grade it really can be – these real things make the magic immediate, tangible and very nearly true.

 

Realism can be achieved in other ways, of course. Take, for instance, the Alethiometer of His Dark Materials. Here the object is superficially ordinary: it is described as “very like a clock, or a compass, for there were hands pointing to places around the dial”. But in every other way, it is peculiar and extraordinary. The hands reveal the truth to the bearer by pointing to symbols around the dial, each of which has several meanings. The symbols are reminiscent of those from the Tarot and other cultural and historical sources – and so in combination they give the impression of the authority and wisdom of the ages. In this way the Alethiometer commands a very powerful and compelling magic not only for Lyra but also for the reader. In its sophistication and sense of heritage, it feels as though it really could be telling the truth. Other Middle Grade writers use complexity and heritage to give the sense of realism. Take for instance the construction and history of the Elder Wand in Harry Potter, or the very long and involved history of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. Again, the wonder of these objects is not only in what they can do, but also how in real they seem. And with such a rich and seamless history, how could they not be real?

And so, back in the workshop, we have talked about all this for a while, and it’s the kids’ turn to make some magic. This is where I bring out my prop: a box of Things. Now this is no ordinary box, it is a box from The Shop of Things, a creation of my own book The Bell Between Worlds. As such, the shop isn’t actually real, but those powerful imaginations are already hard at work and when I produce my old crate overflowing with straw, it hardly matters whether the shop is real or not, or indeed whether or not the class has read my book! They’re ready to believe. And then they come and take out their strange objects (which my family and I have collected from around the world), take them back to their tables and get to work. What do they have to do? Well yes, they have to imagine its magic, think about what it might do if spoken to, rubbed, sniffed, blown, dropped or thrown. But when they come to write this down, they also have to make it real. They write down what it looks like, sounds like, smells like – all those things – but they also capture its heritage, its story. They ask themselves who made it? Where? Why is it dangerous? Who is trying to steal it? Whose life has it saved? And suddenly, right there beneath the tip of their pen, the magical Thing starts to come to life.

It has been such a privilege to see what those imaginations are capable of – creations conceived so quickly and effortlessly, and yet many of which are worthy of the best Middle Grade fiction. As a writer in the field, it’s a reminder of how hard I need to work to be worthy of this inspired readership. The next time I sit down to create my own magical Things, I know they need to be very, very good. 

www.ianjohnstone.com

Danny Wallace - Hamish and the Worldstoppers - Book Review (Simon & Schuster )

Book Blurb: What would YOU do...if the whole world just stopped? Yes the WHOLE WORLD. Birds in the air. Planes in the sky. And every single person on the planet - except you! Because that's what keeps happening to ten-year-old Hamish Ellerby. And it's being caused by The WorldStoppers and their terrifying friends The Terribles! They have a PLAN! They want to take our world for their own ...Oh, and they hate children. Especially if you're a child who knows about them. Hang on - You know now, don't you? Oh dear. Can Hamish save us from the WorldStoppers? Only time will tell!

Book Review: Thinking back to his childhood provided a great inspiration for the comedian Danny Wallace to write his first children's novel 'Hamish and the Worldstoppers'. It is a book that will stay with you for years to come; a book that will leaving you feeling better. In my opinion, nothing makes you feel better than laughter and this book has it in spades. 

From the very first page, you can tell that the author has had so much fun in writing and breathing the world of Hamish (a ten year old boy). Hamish starts to notice something very unusual happening when the world just keeps stopping. This leads to a world of many possibilities - just imagine that you are the only person in the world not to be affected by it? What could you get up to? Unfortunately, the only problem are The Terribles, who are monsters that can move through stopped time with deadly consequences....

It's a fantastic trip into Danny's childhood imagination. Rooted in his own reading experiences from Richmal Crompton to PG Wodehouse, you can see the influences injected into the story with some Dahl-like moments also included. This is a quirky read which is really quite different. It's definitely not what I was expecting, but enjoyable all the same. 

The plot is surreal. It has some scary moments and slightly bizarre incidents which younger readers will absolutely love. It's a non-stop rollercoaster full of action and adventure. It is a very cool read, in my opinion. The characters are fantastic and the monsters full of originality which leave this adding up to a story to be remembered. 

The story is set in Starkley, the fourth most boring town in Britain, but that all changes in the blink of an eye. With grown-ups mysteriously disappearing, and those that are left acting very odd, the world soon comes to a stop. No one moves. Nothing. Except the story, which comes to an explosive ending that will leave you wanting much more....

Fuelled by many silly moments that leave you smiling from head to toe, this story is a brilliant read. The sweet shop encounters will leave your senses on overload and your brain frazzled by the sugary delights. 

The outstanding illustrations in the finished copy are by Jamie Littler. They are incredibly cool and provide another feast for the eyes and imagination. 

This is another amazing and unexpected read. Hopefully, it will find the readers who love a good story whatever age they are....

Published by  Simon & Schuster Childrens Books (12 March 2015)