VERDIGRIS DEEP by Frances Hardinge: reviewed by Gillian Philip

So Frances Hardinge has the coolest style, especially when it comes to hats and gorgeous long coats. I was at the Fantasy WorldCon in Brighton last year when I met her. The convention happened to take place over the Halloween weekend, and Frances was laughing when she turned up one evening, because someone on the street had congratulated her on her Halloween costume. When she wasn't actually wearing one.

Hmm. I don't know; I think there's some kind of sorcery on the simmer here. Verdigris Deep was her second novel, and I picked it almost at random from her Amazon page because I was intrigued by the blurb: One evening, Ryan and his friends steal some coins from a well... Then the well witch appears, with her fountains for eyes and gargled demands. From now on the children must serve her – and the wishes rotting at the bottom of her well.

If you think it sounds as much like horror as fantasy, you'd be right, and yet there are moments of sinister comedy. Who'd have thought shopping trolleys could be sentient creatures of dread and terror? I was completely convinced, and I'll never pass the Tesco trolley stacks again without looking at them askance and wondering if they're watching me.

The witch at the bottom of the well is herself an extraordinary creation, seen initially in Ryan's visions after the three children steal her coins to pay for bus fare. She is introduced stealthily but horrifically: via Ryan's reflection in his own bathroom mirror, or in the eyes of a smiling model on an advertising hoarding. When the witch's true nature is at last revealed, there's something tragic about it despite the horror. She's doing what she was always meant to do, after all; but three twenty-first century children can't possibly have known just how deep a simple wish can go.

Ryan is the terrified, ultimately brave young hero, but his friends Josh and Chelle are if anything even more complex and engaging. All of them go through more changes than the reader expects, and they do so through challenges that are far deeper, darker and more twisted than they (or the reader) could foresee. Their happy expectations of being wish-granting Angels are gradually destroyed by the true natures of the wishes and the people who make them – and, of course, their own. Their peril lies as much within themselves as in the supernatural forces around them.

I never felt confident of a fully happy ending, and I feared most of all for Josh, who begins the story as the arrogant, charismatic leader of their small gang but falls apart, morally and psychologically, with every chapter. That genuine uncertainty is not too common in children's fiction, and it kept me reading into the small hours. (And no, I'm not going to tell you.)

It's a dark, intricate tale of fantastical but convincing danger, and it's written with stylish beauty, too. It's mysterious magic, is what it is.


Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan Children's Books, 2007), £6.99

www.gillianphilip.com




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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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Vampire Dawn by Anne Rooney: reviewed by Gillian Philip

Real Vampires - as the ageless Spike would tell you in many a fetching internet meme - Don't Sparkle. Anne Rooney's don't, that's for sure. Nor do they disappoint.

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The Vampire Dawn saga is a cleverly constructed series of short novels in the hi-lo style, ideal for the reluctant reader but no small fun for the enthusiastic one, either. The stories are compact and bijou - ideal for devouring on a bus journey to school, say - but packed with incident and character, not to mention blood and guts. If you know a teen or a slightly-pre-teen who isn't particularly keen on romance but likes a decent bloodsucker, point them in the direction of Vampire Dawn.

The books are readable in any order, but it would undoubtedly help to start with Die Now Or Live Forever. The whole story begins here - in the fine tradition of horror movies, with a group of mildly bickering friends on a hike in the woods. In this case it's the Hungarian woods, which seem to be populated by especially big and Hungary mosquitoes (boom boom).

This is the lonely spot where Juliette, Omar, Finn, Ruby and Alistair stumble across a dead body that doesn't stay dead for long. They also run into the (temporary) murderer: a downright panicky Australian called Ava, who doesn't understand why she's just had to stick a tent peg through the heart of her beloved boyfriend.

And in the morning the appeal of sandwiches and ginger beer seems mysteriously to fade, and the group begins to look peckishly upon the bewildered Ava...

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The other books in the Vampire Dawn series focus on each individual member of the group, and what happens to them in the aftermath of their ill-fated camping trip: Juliette (Drop Dead, Gorgeous), Finn (Life Sucks), Omar (Every Drop Of Your Blood), Alistair and Ruby (Dead On Arrival) and Ava herself (In Cold Blood). Pretty much at random I chose Ava's story: some time after the events of Die Now Or Live Forever, the bewildered Australian girl is stumbling around Kosovo in a borrowed fur coat, with no memory of how she got there. All she knows is that she's hungry, and that she doesn't feel as jittery around a creepy and dilapidated circus as she normally would. In fact it could be a source of raw meat of several kinds...

Given the tightly restricted word count of each book (around 6,000?), the various characters and their relationships are briskly and efficiently drawn. Alistair, my particular favourite, is an OCD boy who likes to count things.

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For the teen who's especially keen on traditional vampires, there's even a guide book: Bloodsucking For Beginners. Like the mysterious Ignace, a handsome stranger who seems to have strolled into the group's lives out of a 1930s black-and-white horror movie, it's full of advice for perplexed immortal newbies...

These books are terrific fun, and they're a great, snappy read. I adore the device of giving a book to every character, and Anne Rooney (who apparently doesn't eat meat in case she gets too much of a taste for blood) has clearly had a lot of fun with the genre's tropes and traditions. Yet she never loses respect for the primal, terrifying ferocity of vampires. There's romance and teen angst here, and the delights and agonies of friendship, but there's plenty of blood too - just as there should be.

I can't imagine many teens who wouldn't love a brief trip to the world of Vampire Dawn. I had a great time. (Also, the covers are fabulous.)


Die Now Or Live Forever
Dead on Arrival
Life Sucks
Every Drop Of Your Blood
Drop Dead, Gorgeous
In Cold Blood
Bloodsucking For Beginners

By Anne Rooney; published by Ransom Publishing, April 2012

I mean, that guy's scary. He just IS.

www. gillianphilip.com

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