Silent Saturday by Helen Grant - Reviewed by Tamsyn Murray

The bells are not ringing in seven year old Veerle de Keyser's Flemish village. It's Silent Saturday, the only day of the year when the church bells don't ring, and she's running away from an argument at home. She creeps into the church next door and is dared to climb the tower by schoolmate Kris Verstraeten. From there, they see the most horrific sight - a blood-drenched killer, exulting over the body of a child. Veerle starts screaming.

Fast forward ten years and Veerle doesn't think about that day much. She's too busy trying to cope with her anxiety-ridden mother, whose obsession with everything Veerle does is both oppressive and suffocating. So when she meets Kris again, and he invites her to join a secret group called the Koekoeken, she doesn't need much tempting. Exploring unoccupied properties gives her the kind of rush she hasn't felt for years and the fact that it's illegal only raises the thrill factor. But there's a killer on the loose: someone is stalking the Koekoeken, picking them off one by one. He is The Hunter and it's only a matter of time before he turns his attention to Veerle and Kris...

Silent Saturday is the first in the Forbidden Spaces trilogy, aimed at teens (and adults - oh yes, adults) aged 14+. It had me hooked from the very start - Helen Grant's prose is beautifully spare, not a word wasted but still deliciously elegant and descriptive. For example, when she first introduces Kris, she writes:

'The local telephone directory was full of Verstraetens but everyone knew who you meant if you talked about those ones...'

which sums his black sheep background up perfectly. He's exactly the kind of character I love: mysterious, brooding, daring and flawed. He brings out the best and the worst in Veerle, with whom I had huge sympathy and liked very much too, as she struggles against her mother's tightening cocoon. Kris and Veerle make some very bad choices but they are always logical, always plausible, even if I was willing them not to do some of the things they do. And the killer made my skin crawl - a truly terrifying monster.

I originally wanted to review all three books in the trilogy - The Demons of Ghent and Urban Legends are both just as thrilling and make the kind of breathtaking journey I wanted to begin again the moment I'd finished. But I couldn't review all three without spoiling the first and so I've settle on Silent Saturday as a taste for the other books. They are all equally brilliant. I especially enjoyed knowing that there were two more books to come - quite often, I don't want to reach the end of a story because I don't want my time with those characters to end. With Silent Saturday, I found myself gobbling up the pages, desperate to know what happened next, with the delicious safety net of knowing there was more to come. I read Urban Legends with a kind of sadness, unwilling to say goodbye to its characters. But the moment I picked up Silent Saturday to write this review I was hooked again, so I know I'll be revisiting them, admiring the unusual settings that made me want to visit Belgium and no doubt shivering with fear all over again. And of course I'll be recommending these books to everyone over the age of fourteen - although I don't like to stipulate an age normally, there are a lot of exquisitely described but by their very nature quite graphic crimes in the books which I feel makes them unsuitable for younger teens.

The Forbidden Spaces trilogy is published by Random House.

Tamsyn Murray writes for all age ranges, from picture books to teens. Her latest book is Completely Cassidy: Star Reporter and her website is tamsynmurray.co.uk




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The Sea Change & Other Stories by Helen Grant: reviewed by Gillian Philip

Honestly, that Helen Grant looks such a sweet girl. I'd like to say that The Sea Change is a delight, but of course that wouldn't be the right word. Creepy, menacing and addictive: those would be more appropriate.

I was never a fan of ghost stories as a child, because I was too much of a coward for them. I'd read them with the lights on, at noon, but I'd always regret it when the sun went down and the house started to creak. Nowadays I like to think I'm way too big and tough and cynical to be frightened by stories, but there's a certain kind of tale that can slink under your skin in a very unnerving way, no matter how grown-up you think you are. Michelle Paver's Dark Matter is one of them, and this collection is another.

This effect starts right out of the gate with Grauer Hans, a story inspired by a German folk tale of Santa Claus's less benevolent sidekick. He, it seems, is the one who deals with the naughty children, and Helen Grant presents him as a sweet, apple-cheeked little man to whom any young child would be happy to open the window. And Grant's protagonist would love to invite him in, if only her mother did not lull her to sleep with an old song each night. His friendly scratching on the window is the aural equivalent of Michelle Paver's wooden post; parents, this is a reminder never to forget the songs your own mother taught you.

All the stories have this same slow-burn, understated menace that grows quietly at the back of your mind. A scuba diver becomes so obsessed with an old wreck, he begins to disregard that immutable rule of never diving without a buddy. A pair of climbers, too young and brash to heed local superstition, decide to tackle a local crag with a bad reputation. A man goes to Slovakia in search of his vanished brother, and finds a lonely abandoned calvary and a very eerie painting. In many of the stories, the landscape itself is a part of the threat, and since you can't fight or escape the Earth itself, the terror seems all the more inescapable. I turned the pages with a mounting sense of dread each time, and I was never disappointed (and never reassured, either).

Helen Grant even completes an unfinished MR James story, The Game of Bear – a work that won her a competition in the MR James Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter and has the blessing of the James estate. In her notes to that story, she mentions the 'tinge of wrongness' that make MR James's inventions so frightening. That's a very good way of describing the horrors that haunt Grant's own creations here.

It's a truism that the most frightening stories never show you the horror, but let it fester in your imagination until it's worse than anything explicit. The Sea Change & Other Stories is so true to that, I started to worry about my creaking house all over again.

The stories in The Sea Change first appeared in various magazines and journals and have now been published in a limited edition by Swan River Press. It might be sadly difficult to get hold of a new copy – and the used ones on Amazon are pricey – but the collection is well worth tracking down if you can. It would also be well worth a second edition. Hint hint, Swan Press. And if you can't find The Sea Change, you can console yourself with Helen Grant's equally disturbing and frightening novels The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, The Glass Demon and Wish Me Dead.

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THE VANISHING OF KATHARINA LINDEN by Helen Grant

Review by Gillian Philip

The atmosphere at the beginning of this heart-stopping novel is oppressive, and it only grows more claustrophobic as the story unfolds. THE VANISHING OF KATHARINA LINDEN is a kind of hybrid thriller-fairytale, and Helen Grant treads the line between the two with delicate skill.

The narrator of the story is, unusually for a YA novel, a 10-year-old girl – though she’s looking back on events from the age of seventeen. Surprisingly, this works very well on all kinds of levels; Pia’s voice is a blend of wide-eyed innocence and horror with the knowingness of later experience – and the first-person narrative does nothing to diminish the tension.

Girls are vanishing in the small town of Bad Munstereifel and Pia, like any self-respecting heroine, is determined to solve the mystery, win the admiration of the whole town, and erase her family’s reputation as The Ones with the Exploding Grandmother. Woven into this very contemporary mystery are local legends of ghosts and witches, as told by the genial Herr Schiller to Pia and her only friend Stefan. These are terrific self-contained tales (though they are of course very relevant to the denouement) and until close to the end of the book, I was still wondering if the puzzle’s solution would have an occult element. That’s how seamlessly Helen Grant weaves her story threads, and she does it in a poetic writing style that echoes fairytales.

Grant is also a genius at evoking a small and isolated community – the closeness and mutual supportiveness, and the perilous gossip and groupthink. Despite its prettiness Bad Munstereifel made me shiver, and not only because of the terrible events that take place. It’s a real place and Helen Grant used to live there – like Pia’s exiled English mother, who rages against her restricted options in this small town – and I’d love to know how Bad Munstereifel has reacted to its depiction, both positive and negative.

The denouement kept me up very late, piling horror upon ghastly horror, but the ending was entirely satisfying without being simplistically ‘happy’.

A final mystery: why doesn’t the Amazon listing display the very beautiful cover that’s on my copy? Never mind. Wearing any outfit, Katharina Linden is a gripping, terrifying, and lyrical read.

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