Then: I’m quite a big Neil Gaiman fan. Have I mentioned?

I read Sandman out of order and a bit too young, but I loved them. I can’t remember if I read Neverwhere before I read American Gods, but either way, American Gods came with a lot of strings attached as Gaiman’s magnum opus, and a work of literary genius. I’ve normally got a lot to say in these ‘then’ sections but I’m finding myself oddly at a loss to think of anything this time. I can’t really remember what I thought of American Gods. I remember thinking it was big, and sprawling, and I remember that I missed most of the references to the gods and only had them dawn on me over the years afterwards. I remember the chapter with the taxi driving djinn who has gay sex and being quite shocked that there was gay sex in a mainstream novel.

And that’s it. I wrote an essay in my first year comparing the treatment of godlike characters between this and I, Lucifer and realised with four hours to the deadline I couldn’t remember anything about American Gods and had to call my friend Kat (an aficionado of Norse mythology) to be reminded of what the hell I could write about. (I got a 2.2 for that one.) Since then, I’ve read everything else by Gaiman. I regard him as a slightly godlike presence whose writing is about 90% as good as the myth of how good his writing his.

Now: This is a very long book. If I’m honest, this is my main observation. In 500 pages, a man crosses America, stops off for a bit in a nice village, and then doesn’t have a fight on a field. Gaiman’s prose makes this work–despite a lack of action, he’s always interesting to read. The highlights of the book are actually the short interludes about the forgotten gods journeys to America; these are diverse and fascinating (though that gay sex scene… tame!) It’s a good book but it’s undoubtedly a victim of it’s own hype — American Gods could never be as good as it’s supposed to be.

​The concept is the killer, of course, but once you’re over that – or once the concept has been around for more than a decade – it’s not the be-all-and-end-all of the book. In fact, it feels like most of the action of the book is happening just over the hill, whilst Shadow putters around not quite being part of it. I’m not the only one to think this, I believe. All reports on the TV show in development indicate that Shadow’s story will be one facet of the show, and that they will explore all the stories of the other gods. The TV show will take on what is happening off the page and put it on the screen, which should make for a great series.

Then: There’s a few writers I’m a bit crazy-obsessive about. Glen Duncan is one of them, and it’s all because of Death of an Ordinary Man.

I may have mentioned the fact that at around the age of fifteen or sixteen, I broke out of genre reading and began to explore the literary world. Death of an Ordinary Man was picked up in a library, and I don’t think I anticipated quite what a shot in the arm it would be. Glen Duncan’s prose is very literary, and very savage, and brutally honest. Little happens in Death of an Ordinary Man: Nathan wakes up at his own funeral, able to feel the thoughts and memories of those near him, but unable to remember how he died. The novel takes place over the rest of that day, examining his family and picking apart the past events that lead to the start of the novel.

It’s a novel purely about the interior lives of its characters. When I first read Death of an Ordinary Man I don’t think I’d ever really encountered a novel that was so completely about this, that unapologetically had nothing much really happen. Of course, since then, I’ve read far more of those sorts of novels than I care for, and I’ve come to realise that this format is as jaded and hackneyed as any other, but fresh from wizards and elves, reading Glen Duncan was like having icy water dumped over you. And then slapped.

I compulsively read his entire oeuvre: I analysed the blackly hilarious I, Lucifer for an early university essay; I read his grim emotionally-surviving-the-rape-and-brutal-beating-of-your-wife-by-having-anal-sex-with-men-in-New-York opus Love Remains at a sunny music festival (bad choice, and his weakest book), and the why-obsessively-viewing-of-pornography-is-bad-but-not-as-bad-as-thinking-porn-actually-is-bad book Hope on a nice Christmas break. His strongest is Weathercock, which is a dark bildungsroman that benefits a wide scope where his books are normally myopic in their focus. His weakest is A Day and a Night and a Day which I couldn’t finish, and The Bloodstone Papers was an oddly-marketed family saga that wasn’t really a family saga at all.

Now — quite surreally, because despite how hipster this sounds, I knew him before he was famous — he’s reinvented himself as a horror writer with the critically lauded The Last Werewolf and its sequels, which are great (although compared to his earlier novels, they feel – pun unintended – toothless, though still a far-cry from many of the rest of the anodyne entries in the genre.)

Now: Thank fuck this one still stands up. I was worried: a literary novel that I read before I knew what a literary novel was. What if it turned out that what I mistook for originality was just another bunch of critic-baiting wank?

But no: Glen Duncan still writes prose in a way that burns to read. His skill is in articulating thoughts and feelings that immediately ring true, but that the reader has been unable to find either the words or the courage to express. Admittedly, there is a faint sense that this transgressive approach to dissecting human motivations and feelings is calculated; in Death of an Ordinary Man, whilst exploring the family dynamics, there are numerous references to sexual tensions between family members. Not that this is ever a subject of particular focus, but Duncan is ruthless in his presentation, and is expert at illuminating humanity through its most sordid, repressed desires, but reading with a decade’s more experience, there is occasionally a faint touch of deliberately over-stepping the line.

But that said: 95% of the time his excoriating eye strikes the nerve, and still more so than any writer, his books are peppered with lines that cut straight deep to core of an experience I thought impossible to so keenly express. Death of an Ordinary Man has more than its fair share of these; my love of the book is not lessened, and neither is my love of Duncan as a writer. With the benefit of having read all of his works, it’s clear that Duncan has a pattern to his female characters (unknowable, often cruel and removed, and thus sexually devastating, and always possessing of power over male protagonists), and Cheryl in Death of an Ordinary Man hold shades of Deborah in Weathercock.

​Most vividly from my first reading of the book, I remember an exquisitely tense scene in which Nathan, suffering an emotional breakdown, meets the teenage friend of his daughter (who was abducted and later murdered, it is revealed over the course of the book.) Nothing happens in this scene beyond conversation, but the tension of potentiality created by Duncan’s intense portrayal of Nathan’s self-destruction is monstrous and gripping. Ten years laters, this scene (despite knowing the outcome) is equally absorbing, as is, thankfully, the rest of the book.

Then: I was big-time hooked on this series. The desperately-waiting-for-it-to-come-in-on-order kind of hooked. A lot of the books I discovered in my teenage year were through luck (or the pull of good cover art) at the library. I went pretty much every week, and would always leave with ten books. Invariably, I read all ten in the week. I went through the three Tales of the Otori as fast as humanly possible (though if I recall, when I started, only the first two had been published, and I had to wait an agonisingly long time for the final volume.)

Tales of the Otori is set in a faux-feudal Japan a sidestep into a fantasy world. The protagonist, Takeo, has preternatural hearing, and can turn invisible. After the murder of his family by the villainous Lord Iida, he is adopted by Lord Shigeru and trained to be an assassin in order to exact revenge. Along the way, he meets and falls in love with Kaede, a beautiful hostage promised in marriage to Shigeru.

Even now, I’d be hard-pressed to name a YA fantasy series that does quite such acute world-building. The sense of the Japanese heritage that underpins it is radically different from a Western fantasy (the clans, the arranged marriages, the honour of suicide, etc.) and I remember Across The Nightingale Floor as a rich, thrilling adventure.

Now: It still is, though with some caveats. There are some oddities amongst the world-building that with ten years extra knowledge of Japanese culture (such as, for example, the single deity worshipped by the Hidden). Looking at some reviews after I had finished reading, it seems I’m not the first to notice, but given that this is fantasy and not history, this is pretty minor.

The second caveat is how exceptionally irritating the love-at-first-sight trope is. Kaede falls in love with Takeo the seconds she claps eyes on him, and it is their romance that is meant to carry the weight of all three books in the trilogy. Equally, despite murdering a rapacious guard in her first chapter, Kaede is startlingly weak and powerless throughout Across The Nightingale Floor, and the only true example of female strength, Lady Murakama, is murdered off-handedly in the finale in a manner not befitting the presence of her character throughout the book. The saving grace is that, if I recall, the second and third volumes somewhat redress the balance of this slightly sexist presentation.

​The third caveat is that despite the above caveats, its still a damn good adventure, and the cliffhanger ending retains all the potency it did for me at fourteen. Sufficient time has passed that I have no idea what follows in the later volumes, and I find myself moved to continue re-reading the trilogy. (But still not moved to read The Harsh Cry of the Heron, a sequel of sorts that, by dint of being thicker as one volume than the entire preceding trilogy, can’t help but look self-indulgent on behalf of the author. Correct me if I’m wrong though.)

Then: Star Wars was my fandom when I was a teenager. Not the films so much, but the expanded universe. Over several years I amassed a massive collection of books, so many that when I go into a second-hand bookshop now I can still pick out a Star Wars logo on the spine of a paperback in seconds. Lucasfilm put a great deal of effort into keeping the Expanded Universe ordered and cohesive (or at least, it talked that game, and at the time it seemed to succeed. Looking back, it was actually unwieldy and frequently contradictory, especially after the prequel trilogy came out, but more than any other series it offered an enormous, explorable world that all made sense.)

I like fantasy worlds that are endlessly detailed. When I read Harry Potter, I wanted to build an encylopedia. Star Wars already had encyclopedias: encylopedias of characters, planets, weapons, etc, and I voraciously collected those (they were hard to come by in second hand bookshops, and thus golddust.) With Star Wars, the fun for me was in the planets. A basic planet map existed, which I copied up onto a2 paper, and every time I encountered the name of a planet in a book (even if mentioned just in passing), I would add it to the map. I redrew it four or five time over several years.

I was the era into which the New Jedi Order series was released, with a hardback that I got every Christmas without fail — my boxing day was always spent speed-reading the enormous volumes — and four paperbacks spaced out over the year. The New Jedi Order was designed to shake up the expanded universe, in which despite decades of character and universe development, any sense that the hero set of Luke, Leia, Han and Chewbacca, et al, were ever in danger of losing. New Jedi Order opened with Vector Prime in which Chewbacca controversially died, and began to disassemble everything that had gone before in the Expanded Universe. It was ridiculously exciting.

In the latter years of college, I began to both collect and read the books less, unable to keep up with the speed of new releases and slowly losing interest. At university, I read none (of Star Wars, or much of anything at all, really) and decided to sell my complete collection of books, which I still bitterly regret because even if I thought I’d grown out of them, they were still the fictional accumulation of seven years of adolescence.

Now: Understandably given the number of authors who wrote for the expanded universe, the quality is varied. There were a few that stuck in my memory as great series (the Thrawn trilogy, the front half of the X-Wing series…) but I always remember A.C. Crispin’s Han Solo trilogy being the best, and the second in the series, The Hutt Gambit, being bloody brilliant.
So: it kinda still is. It’s still good, and it still has all the things I remember — the woman-swapping antics, the sketchy dives, the inventive smuggler hideouts, etc. It also has a barnstormer of a space battle at the end (which are hard to pull off on the page without being thuddingly dull.) It also nails the characters of Han and Chewbacca pretty spot on.

It also has some grating weaknesses, such as the slightly twee idea that a whole bunch of space pirates will talk and act like something out of Bugsy Malone. There’s also a ham-fisted ‘here’s what went before’ first chapter that does double duty for how Han meets Chewbacca (which I’ll let go because reseaech reveals that Lucasfilm, despite commissioning Crispin to write the Han Solo origin story, wouldn’t allow her to write how Han and Chewbacca actually met.) The women are barely two-dimensional (although Crispin gets in one nice little dig at the expense of Han’s ladykiller ego when two of his exes meet). Plus characters appear with a paragraph of back-story shortly before either dramatically dying or dramatically surviving, which doesn’t particularly lend itself to the reader caring, especially when it would have been easy to thread their characters throughout the book to actually build pathos. (Han has an adoptive son too, who barely figures, which seems a bit… pointless.)

But that all said, it works. It’s an adventure story, and it’s fun as hell, which is what you expect from a Han Solo story after all. It has the old-school serial vibe of the original films, and it also has plenty of rich detail and inventive world-building. The prose style occasionally clunks as badly as the Millennium Falcon, but it doesn’t particularly matter, because it makes up for it with energy and entertainment.

​And somehow, like a sleeper agent, its kickstarted my programming: in a bookshop I’ve started looking for Star Wars logos on the spines again, and feeling the antsy desire to build a collection again. (I won’t, because my partner will murder me. But I might find the time to re-read a couple more favourites from the expanded universe – sorry, Legends – in the next year.)

Then: I guess I’m the internet generation, with all the eras of my youth marked by the transition of dial-up, to broadband, to facebook-smartphone-eternal-interconnection. During primary school there were a series of children’s books that, whilst thrillers on the surface, were (looking back) transparently designed to educate its readers about the internet. (One of them features a bomb attack on a theme park foiled by someone downloading a map and emailing it as an attachment!)
 
A few years later, The Web series was created, bringing together established names in science fiction to write YA stories in a shared universe in which the internet has become the Web, an online virtual reality matrix accessed through bodysuits that generate the stimuli.

There were two series, 2027, and 2028, with six stories in each. 2027 was preoccupied with the Sorceress, a woman who had made herself immortal by uploading herself to the Web, and who preyed upon the unsuspecting. 2028 concerned an imminent alien invasion. I read them out of order, and incompletely, grabbing any title of the series that I could from the library whenever I spotted. As a result, I have a slightly confused sense of the chronology of the collections, but I remember them being addictively brilliant, believably high-concept and creepily threatening.

Now: I picked the first of the 2027 series, Gulliverzone by Stephen Baxter to read, partly as it was the first, and partly because I remember that one the strongest. In it, Metaphor and her younger brother Byte visit a VR-theme-park Gulliverzone, based on Gulliver’s Travels, only for everything to go very wrong when they’re shrunk to Lilliputian size and forced to fight Golbasta, the evil spider queen.

Thoughts:

• The sci-fi stands up. It would be very easy for these books to have dated badly, but the Web world is a believable extension of where we are now, and somehow all of the invented slang still makes sense. Which is either luck or immense skill.
• The sci-fi stands up, but this isn’t really a sci-fi book, it’s a fantasy book with a sci-fi skin. By placing this book in a Gulliver-themed world, it effectively turns it into a quest fantasy with monsters and evil queens. I can’t decide if this is a very smart or very odd move for a book that’s meant to be establishing the series, but perhaps publishers thought a soft open was a good move. If I recall, later entries are far more cyberpunk.
• Would teenagers really be desperate to visit a theme park based on Gulliver’s Travels? In fact, would the real-life teenage readers of this series at the time been particularly hooked by the reference either?
• The trope of older sibling learning to get along with nagging younger sibling through traumatic adventures is done, done, done, and although everything else going on is great, the handling of this particular dynamic is rubbish. As is the dynamic of learning to accept the nerd girl with whom Metaphor has been saddled; the nerd girl barely appears in the book (such that I can’t remember her name) and is utterly redundant and a little insulting.
• One of the 2028 books features ‘The Net’, which is the dark side of the Web in which there are no restrictions. The teenage protagonist discovers a carnival sideshow in which he can torture avatars with whatever face he chooses; he is offered his father’s face. This is as dark as it gets; none of the Web series really seems to explore much about the idea of either transgression or safety within this virtual reality world. I mean, I know this is a fairly sanitised YA series, but seriously: has no-one considered how the porn industry would react to this kind of tech? (I mean, even a parent wagging their finger about ‘none of THOSE sites’ and setting parental control would at least acknowledge that element.
• When I was a teenager I knew none of these authors. Now I do, which means I’m quite intrigued to read Graham Joyce’s story, which I had never read before. Also Eric Brown’s story, Untouchable, which features an Indian protagonist amongst a caste system, promises to add an interesting diversity to what (when I think about it) was a fairly exclusively white middle-class set of main characters.

Then: I remember buying this from the visiting book fair that came to our school once a year. The book fair always promised much, and I was always excited for its arrival, and disappointed when it rolled around, as it was three cases of reading-age-divided cases containing a handful of books I’d nearly always already read. I don’t know what made me pick this book, because at the age I read this – around about eight or nine, I think – I was almost exclusively reading detective stories. I suspect there may have been some heavy promotion behind the book, or perhaps it was that I remembered the author from The Demon Headmaster.

I read the book many times over. It was unlike anything I’d ever read: wild, savage and mysterious. It never quite told me what was happening, but I understood its strangeness all the same, and when it reached its conclusion I was gripped with terror. Even if I couldn’t remember much else, there’s a chilling aside in the final chapter that, eighteen years later, I could quote without thinking — their skulls are fragile -- and vividly picture the image of a cricket bat coming down as he bends to protect… well, I’m not going to say what. Read the book.

Now: Mother of god, did this book stand up to my memory. It is exactly as I remember, if not better, because this time around I found a whole raft of new things to appreciate. The wildness, and the shot of strangeness that ran throughout it is intact, but I was also thrilled by the sympathetic and realistic depiction of all the characters: Charlie, the Luttrell family, his own family, and his cousin Zoe who becomes the chief antagonist. It’s rare that a bully character is written with that level of insight, and the descent into violence at the end is palpable and believable.

There were new things I loved: the depiction of the library as the place of escape; the presentation of the flawed adults dealing with things beyond their children’s worlds; the wild and beautiful hinterland of nature colliding with a city; Charlie’s discovery of a passion for art and photography; and, the nature of Charlie and Jennifer’s relationship (a friendship, essentially asexual; I’d be reaching if I said there was a queer subtext to the book, but I’m a fan of the YA stories that don’t push the male lead to have a romantic interest in any of the female characters. The blank space leaves space for everyone, not just a heterosexual male reader.)

Of my entire re-read project, this has been the finest to return to. It was very nearly not part of the project, as the title only occurred to me at the eleventh hour; I promptly ousted another book from the list to make way for it. Pictures In The Dark is wonderful, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Then: A bit of a different re-read today, in case you can’t tell: My Biggest O, edited by Jack Hart. When I was fourteen we went on a family holiday to Hay-on-Wye, whereupon my dad set me loose with £200 for the week to root around the many bookshops of the town. Somewhere around mid-week I found myself in an enormous, warehouse-size warren of a bookshop, which contained – like a strange exotic kingdom I hadn’t thought could exist – a section of gay fiction.

To put a little context in place: at fourteen, I knew I was gay, and had probably even managed to frame it into something resembling a sentence and definition. I was at a relatively nice comprehensive school, but that relative was to Scunthorpe, so homophobia was rampant. There was one out gay, my friend since primary school, who came out more by accident than design. A year or so earlier, I had gotten hold of an issue of Gay Times and been surprised to discover that it talked to its audience as if gay was perfectly normal (the back page started with the sentence, ‘We all know what we are…’) but a full shelf of LGBT fiction was an unlikely extension of this oddity: brazen, unashamed gay. Right out in the open.

I don’t know why I selected this book, other than for the obvious titillating reasons, nor can I remember what the selection to choose from was like. Chances are I probably overlooked a whole bunch of classic gay fiction that might have changed my world in favour of a slim book of erotica. With it’s flagrant naked torso on the front, I didn’t have the nerve to buy it: instead I shoplifted it (but felt so guilty I bought at least another 20 books in the shop to make up for it).

It spent the rest of the holiday at the bottom of my bag, occasionally sneaked out to read. There are about twenty stories, each theoretically the tale of the author’s ‘best sex’, but I don’t actually remember reading many of them; instead, I picked out a few favourites and stuck to them like, uh, glue. They were mostly the coming-of-age, first-time stories that mirrored the vague fumblings of my own experience at the time. The book made it all the way home and then, petrified it might be discovered and unable to take the stress, I threw it in the dustbin.

Now: I was actually quite surprised that I could even find the book at all (and equally surprised that it’s name and author jumped straight to mind without any trouble). I think I’d assumed it was obscure ephemera, but it was successful enough to warrant a second printing (with a cover ten times as godawful as the already fairly rubbish torso cover). It was nowhere near as long and thick as I remembered (pun intended) and, more noticeably, was startlingly unerotic.

I’m not quite sure how, even as a sex-starved teenager, I managed to glean any frisson of eroticism from it, because the stories are singularly wooden and unimaginative. The sex is mechanical and the emotional content not much better, and, given the lack of author names and uniform prose style, I’m inclined to believe that the so-called ‘true stories’ were in fact fabricated solely by the author to provide a handily marketable range (a range which includes some *very* dodgy pairings too, btw…) This isn’t some sniffy indictment of erotica from the mouth of someone who’s been through a literature degree either; I’ve spent the last year cultivating quite an admiration for writers of good erotica. Unfortunately, Jack Hart and his mysterious contributors are not members of those ranks.

​Still though, it’s surprisingly powerful to re-read the stories at fifteen years remove. The book is a minor stone in the topography of my adolescence, and despite its objective awfulness, it’s hard (unintended this time, sorry) not to find the re-reading spiced with the illicit thrill of covert pornography — you know, the kind you hide under your bed, sneak out to read late at night, and then later dispose of surreptitiously.

Then: I discovered Phil Rickman thanks to the wonder that is the local library. At fifteen, I was trying to expand my literary horizons beyond epic fantasy and teen detective fiction, and so I would randomly select books from the adult section that I liked the look of. This wasn’t always a very successful method, but The Wine of Angels, with its gothic street and gaslamp, looked just my thing (although the book I expected within is probably not what I got — I can’t remember any more.) And so I discovered Merrily Watkins, vulnerable-but-tough female priest; Jane, her volatile, passionate daughter; and of course Lol, the gentle, damaged songwriter. I was totally hooked.

In fact, The Wine of Angels was probably perfectly timed for me to fall in love with. I was old enough to know that the evangelical christian community in which I was brought up was not the only world that existed, and to have no tolerance for the kind of YA stories that ventured into the topics of religion, as they were invariably black and white in their approach (i.e. church-sanctioned novels in which the received wisdom was either ‘religion-is-TRUE-therefore-the-only-good’ or edgy YA novels in which ‘religion-is-BAD-and-will-only-destroy-you’) and both of these types of novel tended to write as if Christianity was the only religion in existence. The Wine of Angels presented a character with religious convictions who was neither fanatical nor even particular certain about her own beliefs, and placed that narrative within a myriad of alternative faiths; in other words, the way that the church really fits into the world. It was almost shocking to discover a book that plainly walked on both sides of the line, without treating one side or the other as ridiculous.

Not only that, but it might have been one of the first books I read that felt like it had living, breathing characters from the real world. Sure, I’d read plenty of fantasy series that I’d bought into the characters, but Merrily felt like a real person that I might meet in my normal life (say what that will about my normal life.) Jane, with her teenage angst, I clung to. I bought Radiohead CDs, and researched Mondrian. And one further, Lol: through him, I discovered Nick Drake, whose music I am in love with to this day.

In some way, this was my first experience of taking a book and exploring the places it leads to. Sure, I’d had my generation’s Harry Potters and Lord of the Rings, which led to huge shared fandoms, but that was different. The Phil Rickman’s books felt like they belonged to only me, and so (with an adolescent solipsism) I felt like I was the first teenager to ever discover Nick Drake, or Radiohead, or music. I single-mindedly collected every book of his I could find, and to this day in a secondhand bookshop I automatically look to R on the shelf, even though I have multiple copies (all the different covers, plus hardback and paperback!) of everything that precedes Merrily Watkins.

At some point, I realised that there was more Merrily after The Wine of Angels, and bought the full series. At that point, I think three or four of them were out in paperback, and when the new hardbacks came out my parents — who knew the authors I hankered after but tended not to examine the content too carefully anymore — would always buy them for Christmases or birthdays. The developing of the story into Deliverance, taking in the politics of the church, country gothic, and the alchemy of songwriting in obscure country recording studios, gripped me (in the same era that I was also writing stories about demons in Whitby, and writing songs every time I learnt a new chord on the guitar.) I developed a burning desire to visit the Welsh border, which my father happily indulged, and we spent a week on holiday near Hay-on-Wye in a remote cottage. Whilst driving aimlessly through the country with me in the front seat studying the map for locations for the books, I spotted a sign for Cascob and screeched like a banshee. My dad executed what was effectively a handbrake turn, and we found our way to the tiny village where I was disappointed to find the church closed. But — in a manner far more friendly than anyone in the books ever was — our poking around was noticed by the church’s caretaker, and they let us in to poke around. I have a number of photographs of me in the church from the book, searching out the details I could remember, and another of me looking solemn and exorcist-like next to the Cascob road sign. (However, I was fifteen, and several stone over weight. This photo will NOT be seeing the light of day.)

My point here is that my love of the books had spilled well beyond simply reading them; even my family happily trekked around the borders in search of places they had never read about, simply because I was excited to see them. I found joy in interacting with the books beyond simply reading. A few month later, I went a step further.

At school, I harbored delusions of becoming a rock star. I desperately wished to learn to play electric guitar, and the trade-off for my parents paying for lessons was that I had to start to learn with an acoustic. When I finally graduated to electric, I hated it, and traded it back in almost immediately. At the same time I was building a love of delicate singer-songwriters (a la Nick Drake) and fancied myself something of a troubadore. I couldn’t sing, but my friend Hannah could, and together we formed a duo called Trespass (terrible name). We performed only once, a memorable occasion in which I forgot how to play one of the songs (terrible gig), but we also recorded a whole bunch of songs using a cheap microphone and some free recording software (terrible recordings). Around about this time, I think we’d reached the release of Lamp of the Wicked, and one Christmas holiday I scoured through all of the Merrily books and pulled together all of the lyrics to Lol’s ‘Sunny Days’ that I could find. It was mostly the chorus, and so I created verses to go with it, and Hannah and I recorded it on our tiny laptop, set to a free drum backing track we’d found. When I think back, the song bore little resemblance to how Sunny Days should have sounded (what with the pop drum track, female vocalist and lack of any folk-y guitar work) but I was quite proud of it, and so we sent the recording on CD to Phil Rickman.

I’d only once done something like this before (sending fan fiction to J.K. Rowling who sent back a nice but clearly stock letter) but it felt incredibly exciting, actually sending out my own creative work to the person who originally inspired it. For someone who wanted to write books, and dreamed of having people read my stories, it was a powerful feeling to know that I as an insignificant reader could reach out with my own work to the writer of something I held dear. This feeling was compounded when Phil wrote a letter in return. He liked the song, and his wife said that Hannah sounded a bit like Neil Young (quite charitable, that). A couple of days later, the song was mentioned on his website. And when I recently posted about sending this song in on the Phil Rickman Appreciation Society facebook group, I was informed that the song we had sent was the seed of the idea that eventually became several albums worth of Lol’s music composed and recorded.

Sadly, though, I fell away from the series. Sixteen to eighteen is an enormous gap, and when I went to university I found I hadn’t the time to keep up. (Or read anything, in fact – a conundrum which I’ve documented before on this blog.) Many of the things that obsessed me through my adolescence became things that I no longer followed, and from 18 to 21 I spent a lot of time shedding the things of my youth, which unfortunately included plenty of things I loved and shouldn’t have. But that still didn’t stop me automatically looking to R on the shelf of the bookshops.

Now: Shortly after I conceived of this re-read project, the TV adaptation of Merrily Watkins was announced, and so it seemed a no-brainer to go back to Merrily. I had originally planned to re-read The Wine of Angels, but when the TV show adapted Midwinter of the Spirit, I opted for that instead.

The TV adaptation was a thorny subject for quite some months, online. The fans, whilst mostly excited for it, weren’t enormously happy with changes to their beloved series. (The casting of Doc Brown as Lol was… controversial. Myself, I was surprised, but didn’t mind.) It was a curious experience watching the group; in my personal headcanon I still thought of Merrily as one of my favourite series despite being several volumes behind, and had anyone brought up Phil’s books in conversation I’d have declared myself a big fan. But when placed in contrast with the society of readers, I felt like a completely ‘amateur’ fan in comparison; it burst that bubble of feeling as if Phil’s books were ‘discovered only by me’. But still, I awaited the TV show with some anticipation. I won’t go into a review of the show except to say that I enjoyed it on its own terms, but found the horror aspect to be more text than subtext as I remembered from the books, and missed the soulful songwriter aspect of Lol’s character.

Then I came to re-reading Midwinter of the Spirit, (after watching the show) and discovered, thank god, that I still absolutely loved the series. Which perhaps is not surprising, but I was deeply concerned that (like my recording of ‘Sunny Days’) with ten years distance it might be a bit… well… crap.

Anything but, though. The strength of the Merrily series is the characters, and those remained as subtly characterised and deeply flawed as I recall: Merrily with her doubts about her faith and her path in Deliverance; Jane with her developing views on spirituality and the tensions it creates in her relationship with her mother; Lol and his tentatively gained strengths. The aspect that I loved the most about the series is front and centre in Midwinter: that the ‘horror’ elements remain perfectly balanced in the hinterland between actually happening, or being imaginary, or being a mixture of the two, but always speaks more about the people that believe in it than about the events themselves. (It’s a perfect mirror for my feelings as an adult about Christianity; I am not eager to dismiss religion as absurdity, but neither can I buy into it. Rickman’s treatment of spirituality is spot on as far as I am concerned, with a sharp understanding of the power of faith of any kind in people’s lives.)

Interestingly, Jane felt like a different character than the one I remember. Watching the show I thought her teenage stroppiness had been played up, but it was pretty accurate to the book. Perhaps at fifteen I read her angst as a little less irrational or teenage, but one way or the other it is monstrously realistic.

Chief amongst the triumphs of Midwinter is that I have once again been reignited with my fandom for the books: I want to trek off to the wild hills of the Welsh borders and search down obscure churches; I want to pull out my guitar and try to piece together Nick Drake songs; and I most certainly want to catch up on the series, re-reading those I remember and discovering the ones I haven’t read. Merrily marks one of the first series that felt like my own discovery (which as any reader knows is one of the beauties of reading and loving a book), and one of the first series through which I extended my love of the thing to create other things. There would be more of those, but Merrily was really the first, and I am so glad the books stood up to my re-read.

​(*Also, an additional comment that’s sort of about Midwinter, but not entirely. Something I loved then, though possibly without understanding why, and love now with some sense of analysis, is the presentation of beta male romantic heroes. You don’t come across them often, but putting Lol – damaged, sensitive and creative – front-and-centre as a love interest makes me giddy-happy. But in fact it’s Eirion on whom I’ve had a longstanding crush: I mean, he’s welsh, a bit stocky, and plays the guitar, which is pretty much a textbook description of my type. I’m going to have to read more of the series, just to get more Eirion.)

Then: Thanks to my bizarrely selective memory, I can tell you exactly where I bought this, right down the book-shelf, but I can’t tell you when. The where is a second-hand bookshop in Lincoln, in sight of the cathedral, from a narrow bookcase directly inside the front door, practically on the street. As for when I bought this: not the foggiest. I would guess sixteen or so, but the important thing is that I read this book before I went to university. It tells the story of Kit, a young student at Leeds university. That’s effectively it: the book covers his efforts to fit in, the various friends he meets, and his eventual realisation that he suffers from depression. That last plot point arrives abruptly out of nowhere at the end without much in the way of preamble across the rest of the book; meanwhile, the rest of his friends are their own mess of issues and dramas.

At the time of reading, it leap-frogged directly into my favourite books list. Freshers was probably first amongst a handful of books I read that was pretty much just about people being people. The book was frank, funny, and more importantly, seemed like a promise of things to come.

Now: It’s a little over a decade on since I read the book, and in the meantime, I’ve been to university. Going back to re-read Freshers, I was half-expecting this to be the biggest let-down of my list, and that I would realise that the novel only managed to sound convincing if you were a young, naive reader who had never experienced any of what the book was about. I read a few reviews of the book, including one that completely eviscerates it in such a way that it’s hard not to simply hear a sense of sniffiness (and/or envy) that the book is about (ugh) students.

​On re-reading, though, Freshers still works, and with the benefit of experience, I found it stuffed full of twinges of recognition: the awkwardness and fronting of first meetings; the borderline-absurd mechanics of redefining yourself; the exaggerations of the stories people tell about themselves; the grey days on the flip side of the reveling; the sense of both loving and not-quite-liking your peers; being both isolated and surrounded. The reviewer I mentioned might be right: everyone here is self-involved, confused and obnoxious, but if I recall, that sums up university students, and Freshers does a fair job of painting their foibles with a measure of insight. That said, the ‘reveal’ of Kit’s depression and the events that caused it, whilst they had far more foreshadowing that I caught in my first reading, do still seem to arrive abruptly, and as a finale is actually a less interesting issue than some of the other extraneous plot threads that are glossed over at the end. Still, though, Freshers was a surprisingly agile bit of storytelling that rang completely true to my own memories of university life, though there is every chance that any reader for whom the fun of recognition isn’t a part of the reading experience will still hate it.

Then: I have one particularly prevailing memory of The Magician’s House. When I was in my first year of secondary school, the TV show of the book came out. I managed to watch a few recorded for me on VHS by friends (my parents permitted a video player, but not actual television signal). One particular morning, a succession of us were called out of an IT lesson to be cross-examined by our Head of Year about incident involving the bullying of a pupil on our school bus. As it turned out, none of us had anything to do with it, or in fact had any clue what the incident was, but the truth didn’t seem enough, and thus we developed a complex lie about how we hadn’t seen anything because we had been together at the opposite end of the bus (which end was that? No idea! Lie, quickly!) discussing television.

“Oh yes?” says my Head of Year, tightening the thumbscrews and preparing the water torture. (He was a very nice, mild-mannered man, actually, but I was eleven, shy and terrified and never been in trouble before. I might as well have been in Guantanamo.) “What was that?”

I, the only pupil in the school actually without a television, and thus completely unqualified to answer, supplied the only show I knew: “The Magician’s House.”

“Oh okay!” he said. “I’ve heard it’s very good.” 

Not that it was any help in the situation, but he was quite wrong about that.

I’m well aware that this doesn’t really have any bearing on the book itself. In fact, it’s not even about the book, but about a sub-par television adaptation. But I am of the psychological make-up that minor embarassments from twenty years ago can still wake me up in fear in the middle of the night, and thus when my re-read copy of The Magician’s House arrived, I found myself moist-palmed, experiencing flashbacks. Thus, consider these paragraphs therapy, so I can enjoy the books on face value.

Now: I read the books from the library in a beautiful hardback edition that I couldn’t find when I came to re-reading. I remember the cover illustrations vividly, specifically the second volume, The Door in the Tree. All the versions I can find now are childish and heavy-handed, but the ones I remember were curious and wild, much like the books. That is my predominant memory of them; I read them when perhaps a little too young, and thus the plots are vague and probably confused, but I have a strong sense of what it evoked. The isolated wilderness; the darting, unpredictable nature of inhabiting animals minds; the skittering filth of the rodents: The Magician’s House was not a book that suited cartoon covers. I have never forgotten a particular scene in which the children inhabit the mind of a badger who is being hunted down. It was primal, and frightening.

The Magician’s House remains so. If you boil it down to a precis, the plot is fairly standard: a mystery from the past threatens to invade the future, and only the children can stop it. But in his execution, Corlett layers so much more over it. His world seems cut-off and fragile (something the TV shows fails utterly to evoke, with nintendo games and jeeps), and crucially, the three siblings have a complex and believable relationship with both themselves and the partner of their uncle with whom they are staying. (Partner is a relevant choice of word: a plot point is the children failing to understand why the couple do not marry when they are having a child, but what might have come off like a deliberately educational sermon on modern relationships plays instead as subtle character drama that doesn’t play to any moral issue. Likewise, there are shades of oddness – such as the older of the sisters flirting with any man, including her uncle – that lend a more adult, nuanced tone to what might otherwise be stand children’s fantasy fare.) The siblings do not always like each other, and not in a learn-to-love-each-other-by-the-end-of-the-book sort of way either, and consequently the characters are immediately sympathetic and engrossing.

The book retains the wild strangeness I recall, although it doesn’t venture fully into that realm until the conclusion in which the children realise they can cross into the mind of animals, and the past begins to bleed into the present. I imagine the sequels take this and run, although I’ve yet to re-read them. It’s perhaps interesting that these books so specifically captured my imagination, for two reasons. One is the aforementioned atmosphere; I hesitate to repeat the words wild and strange yet again, but when I look at the books that have stuck in my memory, this feeling is something that they share (see: Brendon Chase.)

Secondly, it turns out that William Corlett is also the author of two minor lost gay classics, and knowing this it was hard not to look for some form of queer subtext in The Magician’s House. Frankly, there is none, but at the same time there isn’t an assumption of heteronormativity (I’ve talked before on this blog before about the children’s books that leave the sexuality of their male protragonists deliberately unstated, thus allowing all us soft proto-queers to map ourselves onto them) and Corlett clearly has some desire the undermine the traditional gender roles of children’s literature that has gone before.

​Some of my re-reads have withered under adult inspection, some have stood up, and a few have surpassed my memories, and Magician’s House is one of those. Just, for the love of god, do not watch the TV show. It has some wonderful moments (Ian Richardson as the wizard, for example) but otherwise is simply an exercise in rendering the magical mundane (and making terrible character choices like making the older sister an American cousin.) Which is nice for me, really: now I can associate my traumatic cross-examination with the TV show, and leave the books to grow their own roots.