Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Charlie Bucket and the Random Malarky In this episode we talked about Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl. Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com [stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com] and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com Transcript Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I'm Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we're talking about Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl. (Intro music plays) Ren Hi, Adam. Adam Hello, Ren, you rascal. How are you doing? Ren I'm doing alright, are you in the mood to talk about a weird book? Adam Yeah, I don't know what I'm going to say about this book of random malarkey! Ren Yeah, Charlie and the random malarkey. Adam Yeah, it's an interesting one, and considering what an impression it made on me as a kid, I could hardly remember any of it. Ren Well, same. Well, same. Yeah. This is Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl from 1973, illustrated by Faith Jacques. Adam What? Oh, I've got the Quentin Blake illustrations. Ren Oh do you? Oh, okay, so I was going to do the cover check first because I deliberately got a vintage edition. Adam Oh, no, I've got the new edition. So I assume there’s some edits. I mean, it still seemed pretty offensive to me, so I can't imagine. Ren Oh, OK. I'm curious to see. Adam Yeah, I don't think it's been that edited, if it has been. You know, after all this farago about editing Roald Dahl to make him politically correct and so on. They left a lot in there if so! Ren Yeah, we'll come to that. What's your front cover? Adam My front cover is definitely a scritchy Quentin Blake illustration and it's of Willy Wonka, Charlie and Grandpa Joe ascending in the elevator above the planet Earth into space. Ren And yeah, your interior illustrations are different too, that's interesting. OK, so mine is from 1978 and it has a full colour illustration on the front that shows the the whole crew: Willy Wonka, Charlie, Grandpa Joe, Charlie's parents and then the rest of the grandparents in their bed, crammed into this glass elevator, but they look quite jolly about it. And they're descending into a green pastoral landscape and being hailed by the Oompa Loompas. Adam And and what do the Oompa Loompas look like? Ren The Oompa Loompas are just small white people wearing loincloths. Adam Yeah. I mean, that's similar to Quentin Blake's illustrations of them, I would say. They've got very sticky up hair, but that's pretty much how Quentin Blake does hair anyway. So what is your memory of this book? Ren My memory of this book is just vermicious knids and Grandma Georgina becoming a minus. Adam Yeah, same here. Ren And that is it. Adam And a general ambience of dread and confusion. Ren Yeah, exactly. A general sense that it is a bad book, not in terms of quality, but in terms of being malevolent. Adam Being a wrong book. Which it is. Ren Yeah, that you might hide. Like you might not want it to look at you on your bookshelf, that kind of book. Adam I felt like that about The Witches. But this is a much weirder book than The Witches. The Witches is straightforwardly scary, you know, it’s basically a horror book for kids. Now this is ostensibly science fiction, I suppose? A kind of fantastic Jules Vernes-esque romp, perhaps? But it's probably more deeply unsettling, like existentially unsettling than The Witches. Ren Yeah. Adam And I think especially if you go into it expecting anything like Charlie the Chocolate Factory, because structurally it's so different because Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a really satisfying narrative progression in which you have Charlie, the good kid, and then a bunch of naughty kids going through trials which expose the naughty kids as naughty and they receive some kind of comeuppance, and then Charlie is rewarded with the Chocolate Factory at the end of the book. Whereas this, the plotting of this book is really weird. And I think it's really hard to describe because basically it's a book in which simultaneously a lot happens, like things happen of ontologically and philosophically, massive proportions like reality- warbling proportions in terms of what's happening, and yet simultaneously it's a book which nothing happens at all and there is zero narrative progression. Like completely zero, like it's a book of complete stasis even while this elevator is zooming up into space and then into the bowels of the earth. And I think — and that's the kind of highbrow way to explain it — but I do think that gets to why it's so disturbing as a child, this weird sense that a lot is happening and stuff is happening that makes you kind of question the way reality works, in a way that's confusing and strange. And yet it's really hard to remember what happens because really nothing happens. Does that make sense? It's hard to explain. Ren It does make sense. Yeah, it doesn't feel like a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It doesn't feel like a proper book. Adam It doesn’t feel like a proper book. Ren It feels like Roald Dahl had a weird night's sleep and jotted some stuff down and turned it into a book. Adam Oh, yeah, it feels like if you're watching an improv show, and the improv show had gone on for 24 hours and all the performers were really sleep-deprived. And they were still trying to be funny, and some of it was kind of funny, but other bits are just confusing and scary. Ren Yeah, it does feel like that! Adam And stuff was happening, but it didn't really make sense. Ren But also it's it's doing that using these characters who have become quite beloved, but just putting them in these alarming and nonsensical situations that feels quite frightening for them. Adam And I think you'd also expect more of the Chocolate Factory. Ren You would. Adam You get some of the Chocolate Factory, but also it turns out that this Chocolate Factory contains a minus land, which seems to be the realm of the not-yet-born. Right. OK. So that's an astral plane. So somehow, a Chocolate Factory owned by an eccentric billionaire contains an astral plane. That is quite a lot to accept as a reader, I think. Ren It is, I think it's a big ask. Adam It’s like the Twin Peaks, The Return. If Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is original Twin Peaks, this is Twin Peaks The Return, where it's like: right, you wanted weird, now this is going to be weird! Ren So this book begins pretty directly after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left off — Adam Oh, immediately! Yeah. Ren With Charlie's extended family being collected by Willy Wonka and his glass elevator as Charlie's been chosen to inherit the factory. And there's his parents and there's still these three other grandparents who refuse to leave their bed, so the bed comes with them, too. But Willy Wonka insists that in order to re-enter the factory, they have to go higher first. Adam Why? Why? Ren Yeah, so they keep going higher and higher and, I think reasonably, Grandma Josephine panics at Willy Wonka's erratic behaviour, but it prevents Wonka from pressing the correct combination of buttons at the correct moment and oops, they are in orbit. So, they're spotted by the pilots of a transport capsule for Space Hotel USA. Which is a a vast hotel that's that's about to be furnished with crew from this capsule. And Willy Wonka decides that it would it would be fun to beat the shuttle to the space hotel and get on board before they do. So they do. And this is where they encounter — Adam But before the encounter, right, there's quite a long a long chapter with the president and various members of state. And I don't understand how Roald Dahl thought this would be appealing or interesting to kids. It's really odd. It reads like this kind of strange political cartoon or satire of American politics, kinda aimed for children. But what it's doing in this book, I have no idea. Ren Yeah, who knows? The President of the United States is quite an important character in this book for no reason. And he's a very stupid and emasculated president. I don't know if this is meant to be aimed at Nixon, who I guess would have been president at the time? Adam It doesn't feel like if it's a parody of Nixon, if it’s a parody of Nixon it’s a really weird parody of Nixon! Because if you're going to parody Nixon, right, he needs to be kind of weasley and conniving and grotesque. And this president is just a soft boy. And there's a whole bunch of comedy business between him and his nanny, Miss Tibbs, who is, to quote: “The power behind the throne. She stood no nonsense from anyone. Some people said she was as strict with the president now as when he was a little boy.” And she even gets a strange, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll style song about the president. Ren She does. It's all entirely baffling. Yeah, I think the bit that has probably been somewhat edited between our versions is the exchange with the the Prime Minister of China? Adam No, no, I don't think it's been edited. Ren Ah, okay, cool! Adam I mean, it's funny because I like to see myself as someone who's against too much censorship or so on. But yeah, it's not on, to be honest. It's a rough read. It's basically the kind of most corny, cringey jokes about how Chinese people stereotypically speak. Over like two pages. It's pretty bad. Ren It's pretty bad. Adam It's like you've just wandered into some awful Bernard Manning or Ken Dodd routine, basically. Ren Why? Adam And also not only is it offensive and rubbish, but also why? Like, there's no reason for it to be there at all. On any level. Narratively the whole chapter doesn't need to be there. Why is there this chapter about this soft boy president? It’s completely inexplicable. Ren So yeah, I completely forgot all of that. I guess I probably didn't really read it very thoroughly, it probably wasn't very interesting to my 10 year-old self, unsurprisingly. Adam After Roald Dahl's got that out of his system, then our intrepid band of explorers do arrive at the Space Hotel. Ren And there is some malarkey where NASA is listening in to their exploration of this hotel, so Willy Wonka pretends to to speak Martian? I don't know. Adam It's not Spike Milligan quality, this, I have to admit. You know, it's a bit like On The Ning Nang Nong, but it's basically just silly noises. Ren Yeah, silly noises. And then when you think this book might just be a bit boring, it becomes terrifying. I kind of want to read a fair bit. Adam Feel free to basically read Chapter 7, frankly. This is where the children's horror really suddenly hits. Ren OK. "In the lobby of the Space Hotel, Mr Wonka had merely paused in order to think up another verse, and he was just about to start off again when a frightful piercing scream stopped him cold. The screamer was Grandma Josephine. She was sitting up in bed and pointing with a shaking finger at the lifts at the far end of the lobby. She screamed a second time, still pointing, and all eyes turned toward the lifts. The door of the one on the left was sliding slowly open and the watchers could clearly see that there was something… something thick… something brown… something not exactly brown, but greenish-brown… something with slimy skin and large eyes… squatting inside the lift! Chapter Seven Something Nasty in the Lifts Grandma Josephine had stopped screaming now. She had gone rigid with shock. The rest of the group by the bed, including Charlie and Grandpa Joe, had become as still as stone. They dared not move. They dared hardly breathe. And Mr Wonka, who had swung quickly around to look when the first scream came, was as dumbstruck as the rest. He stood motionless, gaping at the thing in the lift, his mouth slightly open, his eyes stretched wide as two wheels. What he saw, what they all saw, was this: It looked more than anything like an enormous egg balanced on its pointed end. It was as tall as a big boy and wider than the fattest man. The greenish-brown skin had a shiny wettish appearance and there were wrinkles in it. About three-quarters of the way up, in the widest part, there were two large round eyes as big as tea-cups. The eyes were white, but each had a brilliant red pupil in the centre. The red pupils were resting on Mr Wonka. But now they began travelling slowly across to Charlie and Grandpa Joe and the others by the bed, settling upon them and gazing at them with a cold malevolent stare. The eyes were everything. There were no other features, no nose or mouth or ears, but the entire egg-shaped body was itself moving very very slightly, pulsing and bulging gently here and there as though the skin were filled with some thick fluid. At this point, Charlie suddenly noticed that the next lift was coming down. The indicator numbers above the door were flashing… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… L (for lobby). There was a slight pause. The door slid open and there, inside the second lift, was another enormous slimy wrinkled greenish-brown egg with eyes! Now the numbers were flashing above all three of the remaining lifts. Down they came… down… down… down… And soon, at precisely the same time, they reached the lobby floor and the doors slid open… five open doors now… one creature in each… five in all… and five pairs of eyes with brilliant red centres all watching Mr Wonka and watching Charlie and Grandpa Joe and the others. There were slight differences in size and shape between the five, but all had the same greenish-brown wrinkled skin and the skin was rippling and pulsing. For about thirty seconds nothing happened. Nobody stirred, nobody made a sound. The silence was terrible. So was the suspense. Charlie was so frightened he felt himself shrinking inside his skin. Then he saw the creature in the left-hand lift suddenly starting to change shape! Its body was slowly becoming longer and longer, and thinner and thinner, going up and up towards the roof of the lift, not straight up, but curving a little to the left, making a snake-like curve that was curiously graceful, up to the left and then curling over the top to the right and coming down again in a half-circle… and then the bottom end began to grow out as well, like a tail… creeping along the floor… creeping along the floor to the left… until at last the creature, which had originally looked like a huge egg, now looked like a long curvy serpent standing up on its tail.” Here we get an illustration, at least in my edition. Adam Same here. What does your illustration look like, is it coloured? Ren No, it’s black and white, it’s a line drawing of this creature in the door of the lift, in the shape of an S, with it’s one eye looking out. Quite textured. "Then the one in the next lift began stretching itself in much the same way, and what a weird and oozy thing it was to watch! It was twisting itself into a shape that was a bit different from the first, balancing itself almost but not quite on the tip of its tail. Then the three remaining creatures began stretching themselves all at the same time, each one elongating itself slowly upward, growing taller and taller, thinner and thinner, curving and twisting, stretching and stretching, curling and bending, balancing either on the tail or the head or both, and turned sideways now so that only one eye was visible. When they had all stopped stretching and bending, this was how they finished up:” And here we see the full display of them, spelling out: " 'Scram!' shouted Mr Wonka. 'Get out quick!' People have never moved faster than Grandpa Joe and Charlie and Mr and Mrs Bucket at that moment. They all got behind the bed and started pushing like crazy. Mr Wonka ran in front of them shouting 'Scram! Scram! Scram!' and in ten seconds flat all of them were out of the lobby and back inside the Great Glass Elevator. Frantically, Mr Wonka began undoing bolts and pressing buttons. The door of the Great Glass Elevator snapped shut and the whole thing leaped sideways. They were away! And of course all of them, including the three old ones in the bed, floated up again into the air.” Adam I think maybe why it's so effective is because things have been quite slow and sedate up to that part. And then, I mean I love the suspense built up by all the elevators coming down, that's terrific. Ren It’s effective horror! Adam Yeah. And it's just such a weird image these egg-like shapes. I think maybe when you think of eggs, you think of that perfect smoothness and hardness and then the fact that they're also bulging and pulsing underneath, that they’re kind of liquidy? I mean that encapsulates my Texture of the Week. Ren Yeah, shall we? Adam Shall we sing? I mean I was thinking there's the oompa loompa diddly do song from the film. Ren and Adam, to the tune of the Oompa Loompa song Texture, Texture, Texture of the week. Texture, texture, texture of the week! Ren Yeah, I mean it is basically the vermicious knids, but I got an extra one which is later when they are re-entering Earth's atmosphere with a vermicious knid wrapped around the elevator and it starts burning up. And it says it made a noise like bacon frying. Adam How horrid. So Willy Wonka explains to them that these are these creatures are vermicious knids. Ren They're dirty beasts! Adam Yeah, he tells Charlie: “If they'd have got them, you'd have been a cooked cucumber. You'd have been rasped into 1000 tiny bits, grated like cheese and flocculated alive. They'd have made necklaces from your knuckle bones and bracelets from your teeth.” And Charlie, in what feels a bit like an editorial insert says why would they tell us to scram if they want to kill us and eat us? And Wonka says, well, it's the only word they know. OK. Adam But while they don't kill and eat Wonka and and Co, they certainly do kill and eat a lot of subsidiary characters who aren't important. Ren They do, the poor space hotel stuff get thoroughly chomped upon. Adam Not the astronauts, only the working class stuff, I note. Ren The bellhops and the maids, etcetera. Adam Yeah, which is broadcast, or the sound of it is broadcast live across the entire globe. Ren It is. But before that the great glass elevator is chased by an enormous vermicious knid. Adam That butts itself against the elevator with the pointy end of the egg, which turns out to be its butt. Yeah, and then there's a whole song about it’s butt. At times this is a weirdly butt-centred book. Ren Yeah. So we can politely pass over that, I think. And then we get the nurses song, which is about the president. Adam I don't know what the tune is, maybe I should go for it. Might be fun. (Squeakily) "This mighty man of whom I sing, The greatest of them all, Was once a teeny little thing, Just eighteen inches tall. I knew him as a tiny tot. I nursed him on my knee. I used to sit him on the pot And wait for him to wee.” And so on. Ren And so on. Thank you. Yeah, it is very like the: "Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes” from Alice in Wonderland, yes. Adam Yeah, it is. “He only does it to annoy —“ Ren “Because he knows it teases” Yeah. Adam And then we get an epic space battle! Ren And then we get an epic space battle! A squadron of vermicious knids attacks the transport capsule and the great glass elevator has to tow the survivors to safety. Adam It's like something out of HG Wells crossed with a really obscure stupid adventure game puzzle. Ren Yeah. And then one of these vermicious knids turns itself into a snake and wraps itself around the elevator and then the rest of them form a chain, and they're trying to to hook onto the elevator and the space capsule and draw them back. But Wonka manages to find the downward acceleration button and they end up streaking through the Earth's atmosphere and burning up all the vermicious knids. And then they crash back into the Chocolate Factory! Adam Halfway into the book. Halfway into the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl’s best known book. Ren Yeah. And then we sort of get reset. Adam So basically, that first half of the book might as well not have happened. It's kind of a prologue, I guess. Ren Yeah. So if you're feeling suitably discombobulated. You're like, oh, okay, now we're back in the Chocolate Factory. We're familiar with the Oompa Loompas, we know them. But the grandparents will still not get out of bed. Adam And Willy Wonka has kind of strange plan to have them work in the factory? Like his main reason for wanting them out of bed is their labour, as far as I could tell, which is quite odd. Ren Yeah, quite odd. Adam So Charlie now owns the Chocolate Factory, and of course Charlie is going to get his bedridden grandparents to labour away in the factory until they die. I just found that completely inexplicable. Ren In case you're wondering, Charlie's parents have next to no bearing on anything. They are just about there. Adam Yeah, only just about there. They're quite eerie, actually. Ren Yeah, they’re so void, it's a bit odd. Adam They're given so little dialogue, and when they do, it's all very generic. It's really strange. Ren So Wonka’s plan is to use his de-ageing medicine Wonkavite on the grandparents. Adam Yeah, yeah, and if you didn't think that Willy Wonka possibly offing or killing off young children or at least putting them into perilous situations in Chocolate Factory was bad enough, here it turns out that he's been conducting experiments on the Oompa Loompas that seemingly are so horrific he won't even directly talk about them, even when pressed repeatedly by other characters. He’s like: “It took hundreds of experimental attempts." And when they’re like: “OK, what happened”, he’s like: “No, not going to talk about that.” Ren It's really ominous. Adam It’s so ominous! Which I guess that's sort of the character. Like that's how Gene Wilder obviously played him in the film. I think it tips the balance from eccentric billionaire into genuinely terrifying evil scientist. Ren Yeah. Genuine madman. Adam It's quite disturbing. Ren Yeah, but despite this, the grandparents do decide that they will take these pills and in fact become so keen that they each take four. Oh, an Oompa Loompa comes and sings them a song about it. And they take four of these pills each despite the Oompa Loompa quite clearly singing that they will each reduce their age by 20 years. Adam I guess this is a bit of a callback to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which the Oompa Loompas sing about the dangers of say gluttony, and then a child commits gluttony, or the danger of watching too much TV and then a child watches too much TV, that kind of thing. So it's a little bit of an anti being greedy thing maybe? It feels like there was really half-hearted edutainment bits in this book. It's like Roald Dahl's editors or his publishers have said, look, Roald, you've got to put in some stuff to keep the kids on the right track because some of this is a bit, you know, keep it clean, mate. And so he's like, alright, so he just adds in a random stupid poem out of nowhere about not taking medicine from the cabinet. Ren He does, yeah, about not taking laxatives. And I didn't design to remember that at all. So that took me by surprise. Adam I don't know when Dirty Beasts was published, the collection of poems, but it really feels like a B side, you know, a poem from one of his poetry collections that was not very good and it's just shoved in here. Ren Yeah, so they take these four pills, which means that Grandma Josephine and Grandpa George become babies, and Grandma Georgina, meanwhile, becomes a minus. Adam Nooo. That's what child me goes: “nope.” Ren I know it's so wrong, it's so horrible. And as you mentioned this means that Wonka with Charlie in tow have to go to the hellish astral plane within this Chocolate Factory that is minus land. Adam I hate it so much. Even as an adult I still hate it. It's awful. Ren Yes, to administer Vita Wonk, which is the antidote. So shall I not get you to read this chapter? Adam What, the description? No, I think I should. Okay, I'll read some of chapter 17, Rescue in Minus Land. Ren Maybe from: “Charlie stood at the open door”? Adam Alright. "Charlie stood at the open door of the Elevator and stared into the swirling vapours. This, he thought, is what hell must be like… hell without heat… there was something unholy about it all, something unbelievably diabolical… It was all so deathly quiet, so desolate and empty… At the same time, the constant movement, the twisting and swirling of the misty vapours, gave one the feeling that some very powerful force, evil and malignant, was at work all around… Charlie felt a jab on his arm! He jumped! He almost jumped out of the Elevator! 'Sorry,' said Mr Wonka. 'It's only me.' 'Oh-h-h!' Charlie gasped. 'For a second, I thought…' 'I know what you thought, Charlie… And by the way, I'm awfully glad you're with me. How would you like to come here alone… as I did… as I had to… many times?’” Waurrrghh. Ren Waurggghhh. I don’t know what he was up to! Adam I don’t know, we’ve suddenly gone into like Clive Barker territory or something. Ren Absolutely deranged. So they see the ghostly figure of Grandma Georgina, in the vapour, and because she doesn't really have a human form anymore, she's a minus. Adam And to be fair to the illustrators, this is a hard task. So Quentin Blake, I think cops out a bit and basically draws a ghostly grandma. And it's like, no, that doesn't make sense because she's aged backwards. She's aged into a child and then she's the other side, so you can't draw her as old, it doesn't make sense. Ren Yeah, this one is still — I mean, her features are very obscured by the mist, but she does still look fairly grandma-esque. A tricky job. Adam She needs to look like some kind of impossible foetus. Ren Yeah, he has to administer the Vita Wonk with a spray gun, to ensure that she gets enough. Although he does overdo it. Adam He loves it, doesn't he. He's a trickster. He knows what he’s doing. Ren He says that she may be “a teeny tiny bit over plussed” But when they leave the hell dimension and go back up, they find out that she is 358. Adam Can I read the awful description? Ren Yeah, Thanks. Adam “Her tiny face was like a pickled walnut. There were such masses of creases and wrinkles that the mouth and eyes and even the nose were sunken almost out of sight. Her hair was pure white and her hands, which were resting on top of the blanket, were just little lumps of wrinkly skin.” Ren And I've got an illustration to go with this which makes full use of the cross-hatching texture in these wrinkles. I don't think I liked this illustration as a kid. Adam Yeah, I really like Quentin Blake. I think Michael Rosen's sad book as illustrated by Quentin Blake is one of the peaks of children's picture books. At his best, I think he is remarkable. But he doesn't quite work for Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It might be ‘cause he doesn't tend to go in for texture as much, he mostly does line work. His illustrations for The Witches are perfect, but I don't think he’s quite the right illustrator for this. Ren So we're getting towards the end of the book. Adam What is this plot? What is the plot?? Ren And then they age the various grandparents back to the age that they started with, so, cool? And then Mr Wonka gets a letter from the president Inviting them all to a special celebration for saving, some of the people. Adam Yeah, good point. They save some of the people. They save the astronauts. Ren And that is enough to finally get the remaining grandparents out of bed. Adam And I hate the fact that a visit to the White House is treated as more extraordinary, more exciting, more wondrous than going into space and meeting aliens, venturing into an astral plane. It's like, oh yeah, we've transcended space and time, but the really big deal here is meeting the president and getting a medal. Ren Yeah, and that's it. Adam That's it. That’s the book. OK, so it ends: "A group of extremely important-looking gentlemen came toward them and bowed. 'Well, Charlie,' said Grandpa Joe. 'It's certainly been a busy day.' 'It's not over yet,' Charlie said, laughing. 'It hasn't even begun.’” Like what? What do you mean it hasn't begun? That's the end of the book! Ren Yeah, why did you just tell us all of this! Adam And there's not a sequel to this book. So it definitely has begun and finished! You know, we don't get ‘Charlie and the American President’. Ren No. Or even another book where we experience the whimsy and wonders of the Chocolate Factory. Imagine that. Adam We've just had monstrous egg aliens and some kind of weird astral realm based on mathematics and that's it. That's it. And some really, really pointless songs that aren't very good. Ren So yeah, thanks Roald that was — Adam This is a hot mess of a book. Ren It really is. Adam I think I knew something was up with the book as a kid, but I don't think I made a quality judgement. Now as an adult, I’m like, what is this? Come on. Ren Yeah, as a kid I was just like, this makes me feel bad. Now I'm like no, just on every level. I feel like it would be out of print if that wouldn't create more demand for it. People need to collectively ignore it, I guess. Adam Yeah, it's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing. Like, it’s so odd because he can write really good stories, right? He is excellent at plotting. Matilda has excellent plotting and Matilda's late, right. So it's not as though he started good and tailed off, Matilda is one of his last books, and Matilda is perfectly plotted. I know some of the early one, like James and the Giant Peach is very much one thing after another, but it makes sense. The only thing I'm glad of is that now the Netflix own the right to all Roald Dahl, someone presumably is going to have to make a film of it. Someone, probably right now, is crying as they try to make this into a screenplay. Who would direct this, do you reckon? Ren Oh umm, Ari Aster, I don't know. Adam That would be great, actually. Yeah alright. I’d be up for that. Maybe Ari Aster can collaborate with with Jan Svankmejer for his final film. Ren Let them loose on it. Adam But yeah, as I say it's a hard to illustrate book and I suspect a remarkably unfilmable book, which makes me really want a film of it. Ren I mean, watch this space. We're going to be we're going to be straight on the scene if there is a film of this. Adam Yeah, the Netflix adaptation. Ren I mean, we said they wouldn't do The Swan and apparently they did The Swan. Adam That's a fair point. Ren Which I haven't seen yet. Did you? Adam Did we talk about the Netflix versions? No? Oh, Oh, I did see it. Yeah. It's all right. Ren OK, maybe you just said that. Maybe you're just like, oh, it's alright. Adam The Wes Anderson ones? Yeah, he's just a really odd choice for Roald Dahl because he's so deliberately textureless. I mean, I quite like some Wes Anderson, you know, I love Royal Tenenbaums and Grand Budapest Hotel was great. And so, you know, I do like him, but obviously it's all very particular and just so and clockwork-like, and that's why it's pleasing a lot of it. And the emotions just kind of show through the cracks, But he's a very odd choice for Roald Dahl because Roald Dahl tends to be too much. It tends to be grotesque and over-textured and a bit unruly and odd. So a very strange person to be doing the adaptations. I mean, I don't know if there's any more Roald Dahl for us to talk about. You know, the BFG scared me quite a lot as a kid, and we could always talk about the animation, obviously. Ren It is quite well-trodden territory. Adam True, it’s more well-trodden. Ren I think we will come back to Roald Dahl. Adam I mean, I don't think even we could make a case for The Giraffe, The Pelly And Me being a horror. Ren Aw, that's nice. Let's cap this off by thinking about The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me. Adam Which is a lovely cozy book that children will actually enjoy rather than just be confused by. Right, let's finish. It's a bad book. Ren That I had a good time talking about. Oh yeah it’s a bad book but fun to talk about. Do you have a sign off for us, Adam? Adam Not not really. I normally do, but I just like, I don't know, just read The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me, creepy kids, do yourself a favour. Ren See you next time! Adam Bye! (Outro music plays)

A Blood-red Hydrangea In this episode we talked about the anime and in passing the manga of The Promised Neverland written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu. Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com [stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com] and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com Transcript Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I'm Ren Wednesday, my cohost’s Adam Wybray and today we're talking about the anime The Promise Neverland. (Intro music plays) Ren Good evening, Adam. Adam Good evening, Ren. That was a very gentlemanly way of saying it. I feel like I've been delicately introduced. Good evening. How are you feeling? Ren Umm. (sceptical noise) I am not the most prepared I've ever been. I have just finished watching the series that we're talking about, so on the one hand, it's fresh in my mind. On the other hand, it was a bit last minute. Adam You made the exact sound I imagine a squiggly face smiley makes. Ren Yeah (repeats sceptical noise) Adam And when I got back into my laptop -- I've talked about Frankenlaptop before, it’s really being held together by plate metal as put into place and screwed on by my dad, after the hinge broke, and this laptop really is on its last legs now so the screen just goes black occasionally as it fancies — But, I feel generally quite guilty about buying electronic devices even though I try to get them second hand, so I'm really putting off getting a new laptop. But anyway, what happened listeners, is that my laptop screen went black. I said to Ren that I had to put the screen down, which meant disconnecting the call and when I reconnected Ren was — I don't want to say squawking, that sounds really rude — but it was. It was an arresting sound. You say you were doing your Duolingo, which I don't think means doing an impression of Duo, I imagine. What were you practising? Ren Well, German as ever. We're currently talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Adam Oh wow. I mean, your German must be pretty advanced because I remember you reading Goethe in German when we were at universities. Like slogging through Elective Affinities. Ren Yes, uh, I wouldn't say I understood every word. It was more of an overall impression of the Goethe that I was getting, but I did read a fair bit of Goethe in German. Adam It’s much better than my Czech where I could probably say like: I have a potato. I mean, it's all you need, but still. Ren Speaking of potatoes, I don't know. I don't, I don't think there are any potatoes. Sorry, Adam I think that's an audacious transition! Ren If we were watching Attack on Titan, I know there's like a potato subplot and there's one of the characters who's really into potatoes. Like her whole thing is eating potatoes. Adam Cool. Maybe I have to watch Attack on Titan. Ren I’ve been thinking about it because it also has a high wall in it. Adam Yeah, I should probably mention in my animated horror book because, like, those giants are pretty grotesque, right? The cannibal giants. Ren Oh yeah. I mean, I actually kind of stopped watching it because I found I found it too grotesque. Adam Wow. OK, so has it got BFG energy? Attack on Titan? Ren I would say it has BFG energy, yeah. Adam Yeah, so we are we are talking about another anime. It's been a while. And manga, so I've read quite a few volumes of the manga. Did you just watch the anime? Ren Yes. Adam Of the promised Neverland! Ren The manga ran from 2016 to 2020 apparently, and the anime started in 2019. We've only watched the first series because apparently it gets bad. Adam Yeah, it's almost universally slated. I think it tries to compress a lot of the latter part of the manga into just one season, and that can really kill an adaptation. Like one of my favourite visual novels of all time is Umineko which I think probably is the best visual novel. It’s quite a claim, but to be honest, there are a lot of bad visual novels. It is a bit like saying what's the best PowerPoint presentation, which is Daniel Hayes PowerPoint adaptation of Jeff Brundle's computer in The Fly, where he replicated the whole computer in PowerPoint form, creating a PowerPoint that was too big for his laptop to load without crashing. But still, it was the best PowerPoint I have ever seen by a long, long way. Like, I think about it quite regularly because it’s the pinnacle of the form, frankly. But anyway, Umineko is the pinnacle of visual novels but the anime is rubbish because the visual novel’s about as long as — I think someone worked it out and it's basically the same as reading The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings 2 1/2 times through or something. Ren Wow. Adam It's very long and the anime is not, and I think the same to a lesser extent with The Promised Neverland. It's a long manga and I think it compresses a lot into the second season and as such kind of flattens out a lot of the nuances of the characters and rushes the plot, apparently. So I know a bit of what happens later. But I'm actually not that interested. I think this works as a really good self-contained, almost prison break narrative. So do you want to explain what the Promised Neverland is about? Ren Yeah. So spoilers for the whole of the first season, we always kind of spoil things. Adam We do. Ren I never really mention it, because I don't really care about spoilers. Adam I think we're similar. I used to really upset my my film students and I upset my secondary school students actually with it too. Really annoys me because it upset them with Romeo and Juliet. They're like: Oh, he said they're going to die! It says it in the prelude! It says it in the introductory monologue! These star crossed lovers are going to die. Pay attention. Ren So our settings is this orphanage with thirty-eight siblings. They're not actually related, but they grew up together as siblings. They're all numbered with a five digit tattoo on their necks. And all of them will leave before they turn twelve. But no one who leaves the orphanage, ostensibly going to a foster family, ever writes back. And they never hear from them again Adam Because they're having such a nice time. Ren Because they're having such a lovely time. Yeah. And it's this quite pastoral setting, these scenic grounds. But also their learning system is quite high tech and a bit Minority Report-esque. So it's a combination of some old fashioned setting alongside technology. Adam But they seem to be having quite a lovely time. And I guess the manga takes slightly longer with this than the anime and so it's maybe a bit more convincing on this front, but like, a lot of the kids look small. I mean, one thing I appreciate here is that the toddlers look like toddlers, right? There are some pretty adorable chibi little kids in this. Ren Aw yeah, the little chibis. Adam And yeah, in the opening chapter, they're frolicking about playing games and tag and hide and seek, and they're really affectionate with each other. I think it does a pretty good job establishing this as at first, a safe and happy place. Like, you never quite buy into it because you know you're picking up a horror manga, but, I don't know, it worked for me. There's something seductive about it and the kids look so cute. Yeah, I don't know. To me, even knowing that something bad was going to happen. I kind of bought it. Ren Yeah. And I feel like maybe the setting of the house can go both ways because in one sense it’s quite gloomy and it's all dark wood and corridors and heavy doors. But on the other hand it can be quite charming and sort of farmhouse. The protagonists are the oldest kids. They're eleven, Norman, who is white-haired and intellectual, Ray who is dark-haired and cynical and Emma who is orange-haired and enthusiastic. And they are the top of the class. They have these tests, something to test their intellectual capacity and those three are always top of the class. They have been told never to go to the fence or the gate that’s past the woods where they live because it's dangerous. Adam Yeah, it has a very clear kind of boundaried setting that you know is going to get crossed in the same way that you get in fairy tales, right? A bit like Bluebeard. Oh, there's one room that the wives cannot go into and you know that they're going to try to get into that room - or don't stray from the path and the kids stray from the path. Ren Yeah. But when they start, it doesn't seem like they have, but then little Connie who’s about six, is being adopted. So they're saying goodbye to Connie, and she promises to write when she leaves. She'll never forget about them. And she's dressed in her little boater, and her little blazer. Adam And you know, it's important here, right, that the artist and the animators in the anime really sell Connie adorably cute and they do. Ren Yeah, yeah. But she's forgotten Little Bunny. Adam Oh no, it’s awful! This really cute bunny teddy! Ren So Emma and Norman run after them so that Connie doesn't leave without little Bunny. And they go past the gate and they find an extremely dead Connie in the back of a truck. With some kind of flower growing out of her chest, it was a kind of blood-red hydrangea I think. Adam And holy heck, that's my texture of the week. So let's just get out the way Texture of the Week because that there is mine. Adam and Ren (scraping noises) (grotesque voices) Texture. Texture of the week, of the week. Adam And listener, I gasped. So I read the manga first before I watched the anime. So you get, I believe, I'm trying to remember if it's a full splash page, but you turn the page and you see a very young, very dead child with a flower rupturing, sprouting really unpleasantly out of her body. And I don't know, I just wasn't expecting something that nasty! And obviously I've read The Drifting Classroom which was also written for young teenagers and they had a lot of child deaths. So like I was aware going into it — The Drifting Classroom is from the 1970s. So I was aware that there's been decades of manga, you know, written for pretty young readers, or at least young teenage readers that probably go harder than you would expect in Western comics. Basically that are more graphic, or certainly more willing to kill off young children. But it still got me. Like, I don't know why, but I just wasn't expecting such a cute, young child to be killed that quickly. And to see it like that, it genuinely shocked me. How about you? Ren Yeah, no, me too. I think it's just so abrupt. There’s no ceremony. Adam No, I think that's it. It's just it's there, there's a really vertiginous moment, but. Yeah, it's not even the most gory image, but I genuinely found it very shocking. And that's partly why I do think this is a horror series. Narratively, as I say it works more like a kind of prison break narrative, you know. It's quite thriller-y, I suppose, despite these supernatural elements. But because that happened so early, it just feels like all bets are off after that. You're like, right, any of these characters can get killed and it can get nasty. And so after that, it just creates this incredible sense of fear and tension because you just know it's a completely merciless universe they're living in. Yeah, possibly a bit of an exploitative narrative mood, but it basically makes the whole rest of it work, I think. Ren Yeah, I can't remember what the film was, but I remember watching a film where the rich people have gone to live on a moon or something. And down on Earth everything's very dystopian. But there was a point in the film where a child was about to die, and they didn't kill the child. And it was like a real narrative cop out. It was like, this would have been so much stronger if you had just killed that child. So, I mean, I've got to respect the absolute willingness to just kill the child. Narratively. Adam Yeah. I think narratively it can be really effective because it can give you that sense that this is unsafe, right? That it’s not going to play by rules that certain characters are too young to die, like for me seeing Hereditary in the cinema, without wanting to spoil it too much for anyone who hasn't seen it, but there's the only film where I've sworn out loud in the cinema. And if people have seen it, they'll probably know which scene. Ren I haven't seen it, but I know the moment. Adam Yeah. And I just wasn't expecting it. You know, I thought that the film was playing by certain rules, and then it wasn't. And after that I found it so much scarier because I was like, I have no idea what's going to happen, I don't know what set of rules this is playing by now. And yeah, I think for me. That's why the mother and the other adult figures, or seemingly adult figures, you know, whether they’re adults or they’re demons, it’s kind of unclear from the reader's perspective for a lot of it. But that’s why they're so frightening. I mean, that does get resolved, but at first you're not quite sure exactly what or who these adults are. But you know that they are willing to kill our main characters. I don't know. For me, say with The Demon Headmaster, which obviously I love. You're never quite sure if the demon headmaster would be willing to do that. I feel like he's clearly willing to do it indirectly, to put the kids, say with the shovelling snow, he's clearly willing to put the kids in very unsafe situations. And his minions are willing to do it, but with the demon headmaster you get the sense that he doesn't want to get his hands dirty. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I guess it's it's an interesting question: how threatening should you make the antagonists in a piece of children's horror? But yeah, at this point the demons are also introduced. So do you have a texture? Ren Umm. Yeah, it’s a bit of an odd one, but Sister Crone’s evil pirouetting? We'll talk about her. She's very flamboyant in her movements and talks to herself about her plans and she's obviously meant to come across as a bit insane. But while the mother is very buttoned up, Sister Crone is much more flamboyant. Adam Yeah. It's very much like a lawful evil and chaotic evil, who end up somewhat plotting against each other. But the mother, as you say, is very much this sort of fascist authority figure, whereas Sister Chrome is clearly meant to be unhinged, basically, and is much more of a cackling villain, I suppose. Ren Yes, the way she dances and pirouettes in this sort of reverie of her schemes I guess I found quite… Adam She's kind of appealing! It's really tricky because, I mean, we will talk about her more, but she's a really problematic character. But she's also kind of likeable for some reason. I mean, how do you feel about the kids here? I like Emma. I guess it's that sort of enthusiastic tomboy kind of character. Like, you know, you get in Enid Blyton. Or what's that awful one that I had been interviewed about as a kid and I said I didn't like it very much — Swallows and Amazons. She's kind a bit of a classic children's book character, you know, like Anne of Green Gables or Pippi Longstocking. This red-haired, enthusiastic character who can be a bit brash, but her heart's in the right place. And she's a likeable character. Ren Yeah, I agree. Adam I mean the three main kids are archetypes and the impression I get from the manga is that their characters get a lot more interesting as the manga progresses because they're put in more difficult, compromising moral situations and some of them have to make some very difficult decisions and then the characters become more complicated. But at this point they're very much little kids still and I think, I think they're fairly straightforward. Ren Yeah, Norman's quite preternaturally intelligent, he's a genius boy, and pretty selfless as well,. Adam Yeah, he's a pretty lawful good, you know, pure good character, basically. Ren And then Ray’s sort of a bit of an edge lord. Adam A bit of an emo, yeah. Ren But. Yeah, he's all right. Adam Yeah. I mean, the characters are fine. I don't think at this stage of the series it's really about character, I think it's about plot. And that's unusual for me to like because I'm not normally that interested in plot. But I feel like this plot is so well paced and so well structured that I just found it really addictive. So this is the point obviously, where you realise, right, they're going to have to get out of this fake orphanage, right? Ren I don't think we've mentioned, yeah, the kids are being killed by demons. They are a luxury good. They are human meat. Raised on this farm and sold, well their brains in particular, are sold as a delicacy to demons and this demon that they overhear says there will be some high quality ones soon which means Norman, Emma and Ray. So that's just quite a lot for them to take in, in this first episode. But even from the beginning, Emma is adamant that they're all going to survive. All of the kids are going to get out of this orphanage, this fake orphanage. Adam What did you think of the demon design? Because they're weird looking creatures. Ren Yeah, what do they look like? Longue tongues. Adam Yeah, they’re kind of elongated. They look quite stone-like, almost. They have these fleshy tongues, but their heads kind of look like these elongated or ovoid stones. Sometimes their eyes are positioned oddly, like one above the other one. And then they have these very long, slightly tendril like claws. Ren Oh yeah, you don't see a lot of them in the anime. Adam I think you see more of them in the manga. They're quite odd looking, like it's an unusual design. I think they are quite creepy. I like that they look alien. They seem like they are a completely different species to the humans, I think that's important. Did you ever read the novel Under the Skin, the film's based on, the Michael Farber one. Ren No. Adam OK, so that's about aliens harvesting humans to eat, basically. It follows the main character who's an alien disguised as a human woman as she harvests humans. And then, you know, we get the farm where the humans are kept and it works very effectively. It's vegan propaganda, basically. But one thing I liked about that is you get a description of the aliens and they’re four-legged, I don't know, it's hard to quite imagine them, but they seem almost like a shaggy haired deer or something. But with longer legs. And then the main character, this alien, has to undergo these surgical procedures in order to allow her to go undercover as a human. And it'd be interesting if they'd done something similar with the demons here, maybe if the demons had to bridge the gap. The demon realm at this stage, at least in the manga and you see less of it in the anime it’s, kept very separate from the human realm. And on one level I think that works because you get the idea of the demons as this sort of shadowy ‘them’. Like this conspiratorial force who are far above the humans and that these kids are like mice in a maze and the demons just so far above them. But at the same time, to a degree it removes them as a threat. There isn't actually that much in the first season of the anime, after that first terrifying moment where they have to hide from the demons as they discover the corpse. There's very little of the kids and the demons in close physical proximity at this stage. I think there's quite a lot of that later on, and the demons are more complicated and you get factions and some demons who are ideologically opposed to eating humans. Like you get vegetarians and vegans and so on. But you don't really get that at this stage. Ren Yeah, the main antagonists here are these two adult humans. So the mom, the mother, she has this very neat uniform. You're not quite sure if she's human at first because it does sort of seem like it could be a costume. But outwardly very caring to the children, but at the end of episode 2, Sister Crone turns up for more security. Because the mother realises that Emma and Norman went to the gate. So should we talk about Sister Crone? Adam Yeah. So is Sister Crone the only black character? Ren I think so. Adam I think so too, and to be fair I haven't read all of the manga so it might be that there are more characters of colour introduced. I say characters of colour, I mean obviously this is ostensibly set in Japan. I think that becomes more apparent later. But you know, it's a Japanese series. But yeah, Sister Crone is the only black character. Ren So there's a certain grotesquery to the animation at times, and particularly to the animation of her. She looms a lot, there's a lot of views of her from from underneath and she's shadowed a lot. But also the way she's drawn her lips are very big, her eyes are very big. And watching it, you're like, well, that is pretty, reminiscent of racist caricatures. Adam And I think that's also maybe reinforced by the fact that she's in this mother role and she has a maid or nanny costume, almost. And I think for a western viewer it maybe recalls the mammy stereotype. But then I don't know whether that would be something a Japanese viewer would be aware of, you know, obviously there's going to be some Japanese viewers who have seen say — Umm, what’s that film I've never actually seen — Gone With the Wind. Yeah, but definitely there is anti-black racism in Japan and blackface and it does feel at least visually like the character is a racial caricature. Ren Yeah, I think probably visually more than in terms of her behaviour. She’s quite flamboyantly mad and she has this little baby-face doll that she talks, and at one point she’s talking to the kids, and it’s kind of singing, like talk-singing. So she's quite an exuberant, villainous character. Adam Yeah. On some level she's the character I — ‘like’’s not quite the right word, but she brings a lot of energy. The mother character doesn't because she's so still. And also she becomes perhaps at times more sympathetic. With Mother — I mean, there's some plot revelations that make her maybe a pitiful character, but still, she's a hard character to feel much sympathy for. Whereas I think with Miss Crone, you do. Ren You find out in episode 7 that she has the tattoo on her neck and she tells Emma and Norman and Ray that girls who live to twelve have the chance to become a mother themselves, but they can never step outside the farm because they have this auto-destruct device implanted in their chest. She’s an interesting character, she's shown to be intelligent. She's scheming, she wants to be a mother herself. So she's scheming against the mother of the house saying that she'll help the kids in exchange for getting ahead. And I think she becomes pretty sympathetic in her last episode, in which the mother realises that sister Crone made this bargain with the kids and tells her, oh, you're going to be the mother at Plant 4. Adam You're getting promoted. Ren You’re getting promoted, yeah. But in fact she goes to the gate and is the second, well, the only person we actually see being impaled with this flower through the heart. And then as she's dying we get flashback of her life in this world and she says: Oh, they were in it together, I had no chance of winning from the beginning. And I wondered if there was an implication about race there because it shows her in these flashbacks and how she's always been the only black person in her class, in her orphanage, in the mother training or whatever. And all the striving she's had to do to get to the point of where she was, and how that's broken her I guess. Adam Yeah, I found that episode quite affecting, it's definitely the episode I found the most moving. So you know, I don't want to outright defend it because if someone else watches it and says: “Nah, this is racist and unpalatable” or just finds it offensive or unpleasant, I wouldn't argue against that. But I think there is an argument that it's trying to do something. Whether it succeeds, I don't know. But I think that at least might be deliberate. Ren I think that visually it is like pretty dodgy — Adam — And it's a shame, because it doesn't need to be right. Like it would be perfectly easy to have her as a character and and not use any racial caricature. Ren Yeah, I thought it was interesting that when you see her when she's younger in these flashbacks, she looks much more straight forward. She just looks like a kid. Adam Yeah. She looks like the other characters, basically. The style isn't different. Ren Yeah, so it's it's like: Oh, you can do it. Adam I guess the other main narrative is that the three kids and they recruit some other kids, but our three characters are working out the lay of the land, like exactly what the rules are, the geography of the house, there's a lot of map work basically. And precisely how they're going to escape. Ren Yeah, they realise they have trackers, quite early on and discover because a new baby gets delivered to the house and they check on the baby where this tracker might be and find it's behind the left ear. So they know that they're being tracked and where it is, but they can't do anything about it. But Ray is working on something that will disrupt the trackers. And there's a lot of back and forth about whether they can really escape with all the kids, which Emma is adamant that they need to but Ray thinks is impossible. And Ray himself is an interesting character, he has an interesting position. Norman realises that there is a traitor in the house somewhere, someone's feeding information to the mother, and Norman lays a little trap and finds out that it's Ray. But then it turns out that Ray's an extra-double-inside-traitor where he's giving information to the mother, but he's only doing that so they can get more information on how to escape! Adam Yeah, that stuff's pretty fun. And then they start to train up the younger kids under the guise of just play in order to get them ready for the escape, which I quite enjoyed. You get montages of them obstacle coursing their way through through the forest. Ren Yeah, it's good. There's bits of 3D animation in the series, like in the house. This dark, shadowy house with its doors and corridors. Which I think works pretty well. Adam I think it's a space that you end up knowing quite well and it is an eerie space. I like the way that it both feels like the kind of boarding school you might get idyllically presented in a kids book, but also very sinister. Maybe like some of the school spaces in Diana Wynne Jones or something like that. Ren And they find a secret cellar room at one point that’s full of the children who’ve been killed keepsakes, like Little Bunny, which is very upsetting. Adam I mean, I think that's why I find the series interesting, right? So the drifting classroom, I guess, is different in as much as, the film's obviously very strange, but in the manga there's just peril all the way through. There's not much time for hijinks in The Drifting Classroom manga, because it's just peril upon peril upon peril. It never lets up. Ren Upon elaborate time travelling schemes. Adam Yeah, relentlessly dense. And on some level that's amazing. I love it because there's something really hysterical about that and ridiculous and bizarre and I love that. Like it's always turned up to 11. But it also takes the edge off the horror, because it's just constant. Whereas what I find interesting about The Promised Neverland is that it’d almost be easy for the kids to slip into pretending like everything's still OK — and that's what they have to do for the little kids. So they have to present this scheme to escape to the little kids as though it is just fun and games. And so the little kids are still adorably cute and they're still laughing and smiling and having fun. And so. I feel like there's this really interesting tension created between the facade, which they have to on some level still keep up. And so on some level you're still getting quite a lot of cute imagery all the way through. So you have that, and then you have moments of really quite upsetting horror, like you say, this basement room with the keepsakes of murdered children. So I don't know, I find that really interesting, tonally, because — Ren It's got range! Adam It kind of does like because on some level it's a bit of a cosy watch, but it's also really super dark, like quite shockingly dark for something clearly aimed towards a teenage or young teenage audience. So I find that quite interesting. It's sort of of a piece with other modern young adult fiction. Like I think you could say the same thing really for The Hunger Games, which on some level is a kind of classic adventure story, in as much as it's got characters working together to overcome odds and it's got obstacles and fending of yourself in the wild, but it's also really, really bleak and upsetting and violent. Ren Yeah. It's got some weird, nasty stuff in there as well. Like I remember, like I think it's in the first book, Katniss and Peter are trying to escape from flesh eating hounds that have the faces of the dead kids. Adam Yeah, yeah it's really upsetting, like wild, unhinged body horror moments. And when one of the characters I think slowly gets ripped to pieces, I can't remember, that's the first or the second book, but it's nasty. Like properly nasty. And I guess I found that interesting because I think it used to be that you’d get that in Stephen King, say clearly that's what Stephen King is doing in something like It. Inasmuch as yes, there's the horrible Pennywise, really nasty stuff with kids being murdered, but also there's a lot of kids on bikes nostalgia. But with Stephen King, OK, teenagers like Stephen King, but he was always marketed essentially as an adult writer. Whereas Hunger Games and Stranger Things, say, are clearly really sold to a teenage audience, like, lots of kids love Stranger Things. And it's interesting because I'm now finding, and there's been a fair amount of moral panic over this, but lots of kids love Squid Game. Loads of kids in my school watch Squid Game, but in a way that's not surprising, right? Squid Game is only really one step up from The Hunger Games. Ren Yeah, I mean, it's got this addictive structure, it's not surprising. Adam Yeah, so I don't know, I just find it kind of interesting the position that stuff aimed at a teenage audience now occupies. I mean, same with films, right? I can't remember, did you see The First Omen? It's a prequel to The Omen, which came out last year. Ren No, I haven’t. It was really good. Well, I thought it was really good. That's not the complete consensus, but personally, like, it was one of my favourite films of the year, I thought it was brilliant. But there were some scenes in that, and one scene in particular where I couldn't believe it was 15 rated. I was like, what? What are the BBFC thinking? That's wild. I was astonished it wasn't 18 rated. Not quite to the degree of writing a letter to the BBFC, but almost. So, it’s not something I'm massively concerned with, like I listen to Evolution of Horror and lots of listeners on there who seem like well-adjusted happy individuals talk about watching adult horror films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, et cetera, at a very young age. So I don't think it's a massive concern, but I do find it interesting in terms of marketing and what is aimed towards a younger audience because I would have found The Promised Neverland very disturbing as as a 12 year old, maybe even as a 13 or 14 year old actually, just in terms of how unsafe it feels at times. But then, you know, hypocritically, well, maybe not, I've got copies of the manga and I have copies in my classroom and, kids have borrowed them and like it. It's totally popular with the kids. So yeah, what did you think of it overall? Like overall, do you like it? Ren Yeah. I enjoyed watching just the first season as a standalone thing. I feel like I don't really need to watch anymore. They escape. But it's a very satisfying escape narrative. Adam No, I feel exactly the same. It's funny. Like I know that there is a lot more world-building in terms of how the society came about, that there's been some kind of war between the demons and the humans, and then there's a pact that was made that the demons leave the humans alone as long as a certain number of them are harvested, basically. And some demons are on board with this, others aren't. There's the rich family who came up with the pact and run the farms, etcetera. So, you know, all of this is kind of fleshed-out and the characters get more complex. But I'm not actually that interested in finding out about it. And I don't know why, because I do like it. It's not like, you know, there's something like Twin Peaks, for instance, which obviously, has more going on, it's a more complex series. But Twin Peaks for me, you know, David Lynch obviously died a few weeks ago and. For me there's never enough Twin Peaks, you know, I've watched the series multiple times, but also Mark Frost’s books, I’ve read The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. I've listened to whole podcasts on Twin Peaks, I’ve read countless think-pieces and essays. It's something that I I have spent hundreds of hours thinking about. And I want all that lore. Whereas I don't feel like that with The Promised Neverland, even though I do like it. It's good. Ren Yeah. I mean maybe it’s something like a short story, 'cause I write short stories sometimes and in speculative fiction short stories you don't have a lot of space to do a lot of world-building and all the stuff you would do in a novel, but you want to get enough to get a sense of what this world might be like and to tell your story within that kind of thing. And I think this first series does that quite well. It's like I have a sense of this world, I don't know the details of it, but — Adam It's enough. Ren That's enough. Yeah. Adam So it's available on Crunchyroll here in the UK, if you're willing to put up with some short ads or obviously not if you subscribe to Crunchyroll and I would recommend it. I think it's a satisfying thing. Ren Yeah, I would agree. I realised — this is not related — that they did a remake of The Witches in like 2020. Adam Didn't we discuss it? Ren No, no, I don't think so. Did we? Adam Didn't we? I've seen it. I didn't like it that much. Ren Maybe I thought you were talking about the original, because I didn't even realise there was a new one. Adam I quite like the original. I mean it's flawed, but I like it. Like the one of Anne Hathaway. Yeah. Yeah, it's all right. It's not great. Ren We don't need to do it for the podcast then. Adam I don't know. I think there's always more obscure Roald Dahls, we need to do The Minpins, or the Great Glass Elevator. Ren I’m actually quite no looking forward to going back to The Great Glass Elevator, it's such an atmosphere. Adam I know, it's so weird! It's proper existential and ontological horror. Ren Yeah, it is. But we absolutely should talk about it. Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam? Adam Oh, yeah. Mám bramboru, creepy kids. I have a potato in Czech. Ren Ich habe ein Kartoffel. See you later creepy kids, bye! (Outro music plays)

Get Gooped! In this episode we discussed the 2022 novel The Honeys by Ryan La Sala. Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com [stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com] and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com Transcript Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Wybray. Today we're talking about the young adult novel The Honeys by Ryan La Sala. Enjoy! Ren Good evening, Adam. Adam Good evening, Ren. You know, one of these days we're going to do our countdown and we're going to say those numbers at the same time. Ren I thought we were quite close this time. Adam I think we got closer. I was thinking that is closer. So maybe by the time we get to episode 100, we'll be able to do our our countdown together and we'll be totally In Sync. Ren Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a process. You can't rush it. Adam No, no, that's a fair point, yeah. Ren So— Adam Oh so, I watched — the possession, no the violation, um, the package? Ren The Substance? Adam Yes, The Substance! I watched the substance. Ren Oh, it's horrible, isn't it? Adam Oh, it's so horrible I was air-punching with glee by the end of it. Yeah, yeah. That last half an hour was exquisite. Ren Yeah, I loved it. Adam When she goes all starfish face at the end. Ren I thought you'd enjoy the paper cut-out just slammed on her face — Adam — and the fact that this disguise works perfectly, it made me howl with laughter. So it's really funny because quite a lot of reviewers are like: “Oh, it's a bit long, You know, that last half an hour—“ And I was like, no, why? I wanted more like the last half hour, I was just like, yeah, keep going, keep going. It found its groove! Ren Yeah. Can she do it again?! Adam Yeah, yeah. Keep transforming! Break through to the other side. Ren I went to the cinema to see it. I didn't really know what it was about, I’d just seen a brief synopsis and I was like, I need a distraction. I was kind of having a hard time and being in the cinema watching this and just all the noises of the audience — there’s just something really beautiful about a whole audience going: “Euuurgghhh”. Adam Oh yeah. By the end of it, I was totally on board and thoroughly enjoyed it. So yeah, recommended for those with a strong constitution. And stomach. Ren Yes, seriously, heed that warning. Adam Yeah, don't watch it if you're feeling a little queasy. Ren But speaking of goopy horror, we’re here today to talk about The Honeys by Ryan La Sala, which on the the e-book I had it was like: “The Honeys: The hottest new queer YA horror book”, as its title. From 2022, I believe. Adam Yeah. So we're probably coming in after any discourse now, which is good. You know presumably Goodreads, has settled down and we can come in, you know, see the damage that's been done, inspect the bodies and do a cool and calculated assessment. Ren Yeah. This is another one that I found in the YA horror section of my library app and was like: “That sounds good.” So I read it last year and it was good, so I suggested it for the podcast. Adam Yeah. I think you're quite a rambling reader. I like the fact that you take things that take your fancy. I was trying to work through a few years back that “1001 books you MUST read before you die”. And those books tend to have a terrible hold on me. You know, it's like effort grades when I was a child. You must work as hard as you can at all times. If the list says you mustread all these books, like, well, I mean, I really don't want to read American Psycho, but I guess if I must — Ren I guess you must. Adam I guess I must. So yeah, I'm trying to actually read things I enjoy these days, so that's nice. I think this is pretty strong. It has a really startling and quite horrific opening. And then I think it gets a bit vibes-y in the middle, the vibes are — not Immaculate — but the vibes are are pretty delectable. But it does meander a little I think, and then the ending is really strong again. So I think it could have done with a little bit of an edit, but overall I recommend it. Ren A little prune in the middle maybe, but yeah. So yeah, this beginning. It starts with protagonist Mars, short for Marshall, being viciously attacked by their twin sister Caroline, crawling through their bedroom window. Mars is a gender fluid character so uses variously he, she or they pronouns. So Caroline crushes Mars's hand with a big vintage calculator. Adam Not an abacus, it's not like crushed between the beads of an abacus. Ren No, it's heavier than you would think for a calculator. She slashes them across the ear, there’s a massive tussle and both of them end up falling through the bannister and through the chandelier. Adam As happened in the 1950s Nicholas Ray melodrama Bigger than Life. So a real deep cut for you melodrama heads there. Ren So yeah, they fall through a bannister and through a chandelier and Caroline lands underneath Mars and dies. And in this opening sequence, we learn that they previously been very close and had drifted apart and that Caroline has just come back from Aspen, which is this summer camp. And in the aftermath of her death, we learn that there are the children of of a state senator and part of a wealthy family who are devoted to keeping up appearances. And so no sooner has Caroline died than her body is whisked away and the bannister’s repaired and a new chandelier is delivered. And the word gets out that she died of a brain tumour. But Mars is made to hide their injuries and kind of pull their hair over their ear at the funeral and nothing about the attack gets out. Adam You know, maybe this just shows a limited imagination when it comes to American politics, but I did just imagine the parents as Hillary and Bill Clinton. Ren Yeah, I don't have a huge grasp on state senators. It's like Nancy Pelosi is that who I am imagining here? The mother well known, you know, there's a scene later where some waitresses are like, “Oh, it was her in, in the diner.” Adam Yeah, that iconic senator. Ren Yeah, so maybe imagining Hillary and Bill Clinton isn't too bad an idea. Adam But yes, they treat Mars with noticeable coldness. And I think it becomes quickly apparent that Mars felt like the less-favoured twin. And this might be related to some mysterious incident that occurred at the summer camp, of which more details are revealed gradually. But I think we're told early on that Mars had gone to Aspen when a young child or a younger child and then has not returned since. Ren And then three beautiful girls from Aspen come to the funeral. And in this kind of trio of femininity, they ask Mars if they would ever come back to Aspen. And we learn a little bit about the mystery of Cabin H, which is the part of the camp that these girls are from and where Caroline was as well, and it’s set across from a wildflower field, and they're responsible for the apiaries and the bees. And as they come to look at Caroline's body, Mars sees a bee crawl out of her ear. So this is the first indication of something — well, Caroline had been acting strange. Adam Has she been stuffed full of bees? Ren Has she been stuffed full of bees? Adam Is she just puppeteered like the Oogie Boogie man? Not by bugs, but by bees. (Clip from Arrested Development: Lindesay: Beads Gob: Bees?! Lindesay: Beads! Gob: Bzzzzz. We'll see who brings in more honey!) So Mars decides they need to go back to Aspen to find out what happened. Like, why did Caroline attack them? Why had she been acting so distant? Why did a bee crawl out of her ear? Adam Yeah, why bees? Ren Why bees? What's with these girls? So yeah, as you said, we have a sense that last time Mars was at Aspen, something happened and some boys ended up getting kicked out as a result and. So one of the dynamics of Mars and Aspen is that they’re gender fluid and they’re entering, entering this very gendered world of the camp. Where there’s a lot of girls versus boys rivalry and gendered cabins and Mars, in order to get in there and to be able to try and find out what's happened, they're just like, no, just put me in with the boys. You know, I'll do the boy thing. They cut their hair. And this is one of the dynamics of the book, the gender fluid character in this gendered world and this upper-class gendered world, because Aspen is this kind of wealthy facsimile of ruggedness where Mars turns up and realises that the water in the huts is filtered, because there's all these touches of luxury even in this fantasy of wilderness. Adam A bit like, I guess, trying to live out in the woods, but in Centre Parcs. Well, probably more exclusive than Centre Parcs. That's quite middle class and these are very upper middle class. So I wouldn't know, I don't know what these exclusive resorts are, but I'm sure they exist. I mean, it's not Butlins, that's for sure. Ren It's not Butlins, no. So what we get is Mars trying to assimilate into the camp and also trying to investigate the honeys, which is the the name of the group of girls who who stay in Cabin H and have this. sort of spell over them. Adam They're very talked about and they clearly have some high status within Aspen, but it's quite enigmatic exactly what their role is. At times they seem like a kind of sorority and some of the boys speak quite nastily about them, but we don't necessarily get the sense from Mars’ experience with them that they’re necessarily stereotypical Mean Girls. You know, they seem like in some ways they can be quite welcoming and have genuine concern for Mars. So I like the fact that it's not clear as readers how to feel about them. You know, they're intriguing, but I think it's kept very open for a long time, arguably until the end of the book, really, exactly what to make of them. And I like that a lot. I think it would have been far easier to just go down one side or the other to be like: “OK, the honeys are just this sinister hive of evil heteronormativity and they represent everything that's wrong with the dominant paradigm", or that they're wholly sinned against and they're this powerful matriarchal force and actually maybe it's doing both. There are things to like and admire about the honeys and there are things to side-eye and I think that's very deliberate. Ren Yeah, it's very subtle. I really enjoy how the magic of their realm is set up. Because their cabin is quite far away from the rest of the camp and they've got this meadow with the beehives and it's on the other side of the lake, which is full of lily pads. One of Mars’s early interactions with them is kayaking over, and they're sort of entering this feminine land. Adam Yeah, it’s sort of like a fairy or a fae realm. I liked the curious game they play. Ren Yeah. So I was highlighting passages and then I ended up losing most of my highlights, but I do have a bit about the game. So this is later in the novel, but Mars is over in the realm of the honeys, and there it says: “The game they’re playing is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Between Bria and Mimi is a system of circular coasters and saucers made of thick ceramic and painted in bright, radial designs. Upon each is a cluster of tiles, all different shapes, like piles of candy. There’s some system to their placement, I sense, but that’s it. The objective of the game is unclear. There doesn’t even appear to be a board. “Resume,” Bria says. A girl off to the side lifts one willowy arm into the air, holding up a faceted crystal cup. She moves it from side to side until it catches the sun just right, projecting a flurry of rainbows onto the blanket. They skim over the saucers and tiles. Slowly, she twists the etched glass, and the rainbows resolve into warping shapes. Ovals and arcs that overlap in abstract patterns. It’s a board for their game, I realize.” Yeah. And Mars plays this game, the honeys won't tell them how to play it they have to intuit the placement of stones and tiles and the shapes of light and shadow. It's quite interesting. Adam It’s one of my favourite bits of the book. I want more intuitive games, like walking along the other day I was playing an intuitive word game to myself, just trying to link words partly through the sound of their endings, like barbarossa… now I just want to say skibbidi! These darned children have colonised my mind with skibbidi toilet! Dear me. Well, anyway, I like the idea of this intuitive game with these half-formed rules that you have to fill out, and it's it's really crisply but enigmatically described. It's just the play of light and shadow and reflections through the glass. Ren Do you think there's a resonance there with Interstellar Pig? Adam Oh, maybe, actually! Yeah, I mean, there's definitely something appealing about a kind of game that's evocatively but only half-described and so you have this sort of strange half-formed image in your mind imagining the game. I don't know, there's something really cool about that. Ren Yeah, that's a much earlier episode we did, Interstellar Pig by William Sleator which also had an obscure but atmospheric game, but much more central to the plot than in this. Adam Yeah, I mean shall we do Texture of the Week? (Distorted gargling: Texture of the week) Beak, beak, beak like a bird beak! Yeah, so, mine is from the honey's realm and it's reading a hive as if twere a book. I really like the idea of a beehive being readable like a book is readable and taking out part of the honeycomb and that being a page which is then readable like a page of a book. I thought that was a really pleasing texture, a honeycomb book. Ren It is beautifully written I should just say. There is some lovely descriptions in this book, lots of textures actually. Adam So yeah, my texture is divinatory honeycomb book. Ren Excellent. Yeah, I did have one, which was a sort of description of this hazy summer atmosphere of the honey's Meadow. But I've lost that. Imagine that. But I don't have the quote anymore. Adam So my understanding is you borrowed this? Like did you borrow a digital copy from the library? Ren Yeah, I had a digital copy from the library and I was making highlights in it and then my loan lapsed and I was like, “Oh, it's OK, I can just re-borrow it and finish this book”, but then someone else borrowed the book, which I didn't anticipate. Adam Presumably they don't get access to your highlighting, no? OK. Ren So, I lost those highlights and I could have anticipated that, but I didn't. Adam So do you have a replacement texture? Ren I mean, there is an obvious texture. Adam What, the really horrible one later? Ren Yeah… Adam I mean, it's really horrible. Ren So I don't know if we should just cut to the chase or… you’ll know it when we get to the horrible one. This book is like, a lot of the time it's not horror. And then when it's horror, it is horror. Adam Yeah. No, I really agree with that. Like there are times where I don't know if we should be doing this one, oh, this is more of a mystery. And then when it, gets to the body horror sections it really earns it. Ren Yeah. So I'll just pause my texture for a little bit. So there's these struggles between Mars and the boys going on, Mars wins a fencing match against this boy, Callum, and then there's this midnight game called Manhunt where Callum comes back for revenge and assaults Mars. Adam They do the kind of games that terrified me when I was in the scouts. I think they were called wide games or field games. Like having to get to a base or something, while running the risk of being tackled. Ren Yeah, there's a lot of semi-illicit games that happen at Aspen, Wendy, who's the camp director, talks to Mars when they first arrive and is like: “You know, we have this very hands-off approach here at Aspen. You have to work out your problems amongst yourselves”. So there's a lot of room for people just being each other up in the night in the woods. And that's what happens. But but Callum is beaten up in return by the honeys, who then purge the memories of Mars and Callum. Adam Yeah, like the Men in Black. Ren Yeah, and Mars has this dual consciousness where they're sort of aware that this happened and they're sort of not. And they come back to this mantra of “Earth to Mars”, which is what Caroline used to say to them. And they use this to ground themselves, when reality is slipping. Adam I like the fogginess, actually. Because I've complained before about how modern young adult writing is often slightly too clear to me in characters always knowing what they're doing. And it's very directed, almost like an action film. I tend to feel like that's the influence of The Hunger Games, particularly on dystopian teenage literature. But one thing I really liked is the fogginess of some of the sections, there are bits which do become really odd and hallucinogenic and there will be these shifts in space and time, which are quite disorienting at times in the book, and which I really liked. Ren Yeah. And Mars zones out a lot. They go on a three day hiking trip and Mars zones out on the trail, thinking of bees and death and kind of ends up way off the path. Wyatt, who’s one of the supervisors — Adam Is Wyatt related to Wendy? Ren Ye-es, Wyatt’s Wendy’s son. Adam Or something like that. There’s definitely a lot of tension as to whether Mars should trust Wyatt or not. Ren Yes. But he's definitely the more sympathetic of the slightly older, I guess early 20s guys who kind of supervises the The Hut of Boys. Brayden is the other one and he’s very on board with any, I don't know, insults? Assaults? Adam Insults and Assults, yep. Ren So Wyatt is the closest thing that Mars has to an ally among the boys. Another weird thing that happens on this hike is that Mars has another showdown with Callum and ends up punching him and hurting their their own hand in the process. But they find a small jar of honey at the bottom of their pack and they eat it with Wyatt, 'cause they're like, oh, this will attract bears, we can't have this. And they share this moment of eating this honey in the forest and find that the honey has healed their hand. Adam There isn't any moment after this where he says to any of the boys, “Killing me won't give you back your goddamn honey!” But you know I did think of Nicolas Cage shouting that. (Clip from The Wicker Man: Nicholas Cage: Ahhh not the bees! Not the bees!!!) I mean, you just sent me a nice Nicolas Cage Wicker man drag performance. Ren Yeah, it's an Australian drag king called — I need to credit this because I love this so much — Randy Roy, who posted an Instagram reel of clips of them doing a drag act inspired by Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man remake, including Not the Bees to the tune of Let It Be and it's very good, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Adam Do you think there was more room for bee puns in in this novel? Ren I mean, I don't think there were any bee puns. Adam No, I think there weren’t. Ren That was not the the vibe, really. Adam When they go to a kind of dance, like the formal dance party no-one says, “Oh, is this going to be like a Buzz-bee Berkeley dance?” for instance, because they could have done! Ren Bee my, bee my baby. Adam Yeah yeah. None of the characters made bee puns, despite ample opportunities to be honest. Ren We did read another bee thing, didn't we, though? The Roald Dahl one — Adam — with the royal jelly! Ren It was the royal Jelly. Yeah, yeah. It’s not the first appearance of bees. Adam Bee horror. I mean, we're not going to do a spin off podcast because, you know, we struggle enough getting episodes out of this one. But there could be a bee-based horror podcast. If any listeners want to start one, I think that's a good idea. Ren So yeah, there's another sort of midnight ritual thing — Adam They don't get much sleep in this book, do they? They're always up at night doing secret dangerous games and I did think, oh God, these poor teenagers, they are sleep deprived. Ren Yeah. And Mars hears Carolines screams from a Bluetooth speaker in the woods, but no one will admit to doing it so. Mars tells Wendy about it and she's very dismissive but they end up threatening her with legal action over over what happened four years ago. Which we eventually learn is that the boys tied Mars to the victory board, there’s the Victory Cup which is this big tournament that was previously called Battle of the Sexes and is renamed to the Victory Cup after this incident, when the boys tied Mars to the Victory board and set fire to it. There were no consequences of this — Adam Well, it’s just banter, isn't it. Harmless banter. Ren But Mars does bring this up to Wendy. Adam Quite reasonably, I think. Ren Quite reasonably, yeah. And Mars is getting closer to the honeys, they swap clothes with them and are invited into their circle at the party. Adam Yeah, it's quite a heartwarming scene that, it's not a book with many heartwarming scenes, but that is quite sweet. Ren And there's this anecdote about how Caroline and Mars used to swap clothes at parties when they were little and dance together. And this was their little childhood protest against the stuffy atmosphere of their home and having to be nice and proper little children for their parents. Adam Death to the heteronormative paradigm, as as our mutual friend Ali had inscribed on their iPod. Which I always remember because Ali then had to describe this to a police officer after their iPod was nicked, who said “Hetero what now?” Ren As I'm sure Mars's parents would. Adam Yes. Yes indeed. Ren Mars is allowed to to major in apiculture, i.e. bees. And so they go to the Meadow, but it turns out that no one knows who Sierra is anymore. She's one of the honeys, one of the ones at the funeral, and when when Mars first kayaks over through the lily pads, she takes them up to to her bedroom and paints their nails with this blue colour that was Caroline's favourite nail polish colour. So they've had this quite tender moment, but now no one knows who Sierra is anymore. And, and this is where this strange psychedelic game comes in. They play this game with Mimi and Bria and the others and through this game, it uncovers the truth about Sierra. She's dead in the woods and Mars sees this vision of her, and then they wipe Mars’s memories again. So there's quite a lot of this back and forth and push and pull of Mars slowly figuring things out and then un-figuring them a lot of fuzziness. Adam Yeah, I liked it. I've not really experienced that quite in that way in a book before. It made me think of some video games where you have to re-do the same sequence get it right. Like Adam Cadre’s Varicella for instance, which is a game where you have to get the sequence right to kill off various characters, you have to keep replaying it to get it right. Old Sierra games could be like that too, like the Colonel’s Behest, which is a murder mystery one which you would end up reloading and reloading to get it right. It just made me think a bit of a video game, almost like a reloading basically. Ren Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it does mean that the middle section of the book has this quite meandering structure. Adam Yeah, which I feel divided on because I do think it works atmospherically. Overall, I do like this book. Sometimes I guess it feels in the middle section like it's more focused on the mystery than the horror, and it does feel like there's not much being uncovered. Or maybe it's just not working as mysteries tend to work, like there aren't that many clues in a traditional sense and. I mean, there are characters who reveal things, but Mars doesn't go about things in the way that a detective would, right? It'd be interesting to see if this was adapted, and you can totally imagine it adapted for Netflix, very easily as a six episode or eight episode series, it would be interesting to see how they would manage the middle section. Ren I enjoyed the journey of the book, I enjoyed all the atmospheric meandering. But there is quite a long section in the middle where you don't really feel like you've gained a lot more information about what's going on. Just like, OK, there's something weird with the honeys and the bees. But as we get towards the the end section things do start picking up quite rapidly. We get the Victory Cup, with all these tournaments and Mars's memories have been wiped, so they're quite happily joining in with the tournament — Adam — Happily playing Ultimate Frisbee. Ren Yeah. Until at the end of the cup, a bunch of them dive into the lake at night and they’re splashing about in the silvery moonlight and the honeys ask Mars to swim back with them to Cabin H, and they do and stay the night on the porch and they all share stories about Caroline in this very sweet moment. But after that, Mars remembers Sierra again, and again goes on another midnight mission, steals Wyatt's keys and breaks into a computer lab and starts doing research on missing people. They find that there have been people going missing around the woods for years, in summer, in this area and they think, “Oh, Cabin H has something to do with this”. And the next morning they find out Brayden's missing. So. Mars is determined to find out what's happening now and Wyatt follows them like out to some derelict hotel on the edge of the camp. The ceiling’s caved in and the carpet is mushy with mould and the wall is swelling and they go down into the basement and the whole basement has become a hive, it's just filled with honeycomb. And this is where my texture comes back in. Adam Oh, this is where your delicious texture comes. Ren My delicious texture comes back in. As is that. They find Braden OK. “Wyatt flicks the flashlight into the corners, back and forth, until it snags on something moving along the honeycomb near us. A fluid twist, like many small bodies crawling over one another. But under the glare it’s just honeycomb. Until it opens its eyes. “Help me,” it says. “Please help me.” It twists again, something huge beneath the comb. Encased in it. A mouth, a nose, a strangely bent arm, a crumpled hand. A person. “Brayden,” Wyatt whispers. “Please. I feel—” Brayden shudders, and the honeycomb creaks. “Please,” he begs. I hack at the comb with my hive tool and Wyatt just uses his hands. The light whips around us as we pull down the delicate, sticky structure, digging until we find the naked body below. Brayden whimpers. He’s badly hurt, though I can’t see where. But I can smell the hurt. Blood and a darker odor. Sweet and rotten and thickening as we pry him out. I hear the bees and know they’re angry. Their drone rises into an undulating siren, then a crackling threat. I drive my hands into the sticky shards, desperate now. Honey fills my nail beds, webs between my fingers, drips to my elbows. But Brayden is nearly free. Just another chunk and . . . Brayden’s weight does the rest. He slides from the comb, falling into Wyatt and blotting out the flashlight. I go to help but then freeze. The flashlight has become a harsh glare caught between them. For a moment it appears to pass right through Brayden, taking on the golden- scarlet hue of his flesh, embryonic and quivering as he clings to Wyatt. Within him I see a squiggly network of veins twisting together into a mass that, quite clearly, pulses. His heart. “Wyatt,” I say. “Help me with him,” Wyatt snaps, and I rush forward. I grab Brayden’s arm, and when I pull, his flesh slides right off the bone. I scream until I get the flopping sleeve unstuck from my hands. Brayden has crumpled between us, golden threads strung between him and Wyatt. Wyatt fumbles until he recovers the flashlight, aiming it at Brayden. Holes. Everywhere, Brayden’s flesh is pocked in holes, clean and precise and weeping with honey. He cradles the bones of his hand with his remaining arm. His bones are soft, too, like warm rubber. He looks at us and his eyes are scoops of yellow jelly in his skull. “I don’t feel—” He jolts and gags. A tooth drips from his lips and lands without a sound in the honey pooling around him. “I don’t feel so good. I don’t—” “We’re gonna get you to a doctor!” Wyatt yells. He has to yell. The drone from the hives is loud now. Furious. I feel a prick, then a needling pain in my neck. I’ve been stung. Another one gets my knee. I pull at Wyatt’s back. “Wyatt, we need to—” “DON’T LEAVE ME!” Brayden leaps at us but his legs buckle beneath him and he falls. His skeletal hand drags over Wyatt’s chest, catching on the keys, tearing them off. The flashlight thuds into the honey, aimed upward into Brayden. The light passes through him. Like a jack- o’- lantern, he glows an eerie gold, his bones black and twisting below his viscous, dotted flesh. Brayden screams again, his lower jaw yawning wide until it falls to the floor. Brayden implodes with it, smothering the flashlight. The light flickers beneath the quivering mass, flickers again, then goes out.” Ahhh. Adam Eurgghhabbuuhh. It didn't even make me want to enjoy a nice, delicious pot of honey. Ren No? You don't want to enjoy a delicious pot of man honey? Adam Of which there's plenty! That's the revelation that follows from this, right? Is that everyone's hooked on man honey. Ren Yeah, this is this is one of their most holy rituals, what they did to Brayden, to fortify the hive. And it produces this deep red honey. And you know Mars asks the honeys: “What did you do?” And they're like, well, it’s very Little Shop of Horrors: “The guy sure looks like plant food to me.” The guy sure looks like bee food to me. This is a bit of a revelation, is that he deserved it, right. He was sexually harassing one of the honeys over the last year. And, you know, getting her to send him photos — , Adam Thoroughly dirtbag, basically. Ren Yeah. And this is why he's become bee food. The honeys get Mars to eat the cannibal honeycomb and they have this cannibal honey feast of these shapes of honeycomb. It says: “But my eyes are stuck on the edge of the closest platter, where within the comb I can see the clear impression of a nose. I follow the slope up to a brow bone. The socket is empty, the eye melted away.” They have this cannibal honey feast. It's very similar to, or very reminiscent of a memorable scene in Yellowjackets. Adam Oh, OK. I still haven't seen that. Ren You'll know the one, if you've seen it. Very similar atmosphere there. So they draw Mars into this, interconnected honey network called the lace. And that's where Mars sees the girl that Brayden was tormenting and interconnects with everything. Adam Yeah. So the honeys are like the Tralfamadorians, the aliens in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. In that that they can see all of the past and all of the future and all of the present simultaneously. And so they're being used by the deep state, for prophecies to help the economy? possibly? So it was Bill and Hillary all along! Ren Yeah, it was! So Mars escapes, when they realise that the hive wants them to be its next queen. And Wyatt and Mars have had this romantic tension, and they escaped to an abandoned barn and they're kissing, but then Wyatt is taken over by the bees! Adam It was funny. It was like, “Oh, you're going to get some tender young adult romance stuff” and then it’s like, no, more bee horror! The last quarter, maybe fifth of this book just goes into all-out unhinged horror. It becomes really wild. Ren Yeah, so, the honeys rescue Mars from Wyatt and they're about to kill Wyatt, because they realised that he killed Sierra. But then Mars tells them that Wyatt’s a drone and it turns out it's a rogue swarm led by Mimi, who was mad about Caroline being made queen of the hive and about Mars being let in at all because they're gender fluid. So Mimi gets incinerated by bees. Adam cackles Ren Mars runs away to to the Applebee's — Adam Ah, Applebee’s! I get it now! Applebee's like a bee! Amazing. Ren Oh, it's all coming together! And she calls their parents to come and get them, they're like, “Please, Bill and Hillary, come and get me.” But when the parents turn up it turns out they have Caroline's mummified corpse in the trunk of the car! Adam (gleefully) Yes they do! Ren And Mars is kidnapped and wakes up in the honey basement. Or, they're in honey anyhow. They are encased in honey. And there are a cult of adults in the building, all in their robes and veils, who have grown rich from the predictions of the honeys. Some of which include like winning the lottery, I think, they can't all be the lottery, right? That would get suspicious. Adam Yeah, that would be a bit suspicious to be honest. Ren But various financial predictions have ensured the wealth of the baby boomers. And so, only right at the end we finally learn the true position of the honeys in all of this, which is that they're being used by the adults. Adam The evil baby boomers, yeah. Ren And Wendy and Mars's parents are talking about how Caroline wasn't a fit vessel for the Queen of the Hive and her reign failed, but that Mars is is going to be the next vessel and so the Queendom passes from Caroline to Mars. And Carolin and Mars meet in the honey realm. Adam Yeah, it all gets really astral at this point. Ren And she explains what happens that her reign failed and her parents were putting all this pressure on her to keep the honey confederacy going. And what happened on the night that started the book is that they bought her back from Aspen and locked her in a room in the basement and told her to kill herself, basically. But don't hurt your body too much because we need it for Mars to be the next queen, all right, see you kid. Adam It's really grim! Ren Yeah, but instead she managed to crawl out the window and up the side of the house and through Mars's bedroom window because she wanted to save them from from all of this. Adam Yeah, but it's a happy ending because Mars gets to be the new queen, queen of the bees, and that sounds pretty cool. Ren It is pretty cool! Mars's first task as the Queen is to kill Bria, but instead they fling the hive tool at one of the veiled figures which turns out to be Wendy. And the last chapter is them in their Meadow with the bees and the honeys and some police come and tell them that unfortunately their parents houses burned down and incinerated their parents and we know from the narration that this was Mars’s doing somehow. And Mars and the honeys are ready to fight against the baby boomers and the Honey Confederacy. So yes, it's a cracking ending! Adam It's funny because obviously you mentioned the substance at the start of this episode. And actually it's kind of similar in that I was enjoying it well enough, but then the last quarter or so I was like, “Yeah, now this is the good stuff!” And it just became more wild and strange. Ren I appreciated how much it went for it with the honey horror. The yawning honey jaw. Adam And, you know, I've seen jaws drop off before in films, but never with strands of honey so that's good. It's good stuff. Ren So, thanks for thanks for coming along with me on this honey journey. Adam Thank you, it was delicious. Ren As ever, don't know what we're doing next time. Adam Oh well I was thinking, have you watched or read any of the Promised Neverland? Ren No… Adam Okay, because it's pretty popular with the kids and it's a manga and and anime. Although apparently the second season is atrocious so I've only watched the first season, which is brilliant. And read the equivalent manga volumes. It's about kids in an orphanage that isn’t what it seems, and it's definitely horror for teenagers. Ren Oh yeah. OK, maybe we could do that then! Adam Yeah, it's good,I’m pretty keen. And it has obvious similarities with The Drifting Classroom, which we've done before and I'm confident is an influence. Ren Excellent. I mean, I do love it when we can make connections between things. Do you have a sign-off for us Adam? Adam Yeah, I’ll just say Let it Bee, creepy kids! Ren Let it bee! See you next time, creepy kids. See you next time.

Munchity-Crunchities! In this episode we discussed The Black Cauldron from 1985, and briefly, the Sierra video game of the same name. Many thanks to our guest Mattie! Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com [stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com] and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com Transcript Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Hororr, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray, we’re joined today by my boyfriend Mattie — Mattie Hullo! Ren — And we’re talking about The Black Cauldron, the first PG rated Disney film, from 1985. Enjoy! Adam Good evening, Ren! And happy halloween! Ren Ohh yeah, this is going to be our Halloween episode! Adam Let’s be real, this is going to be our Halloween episode. I’ve already got a great halloween decoration from TK Maxx — Ren The home of Halloween decorations. Adam I know, they come in so early. It’s a skeleton toad but the toad skeleton has warts, the bones of the toad have warts! Ren I need to introduce our guest, Mattie, so he can react! Mattie Your toad has bone spurs! Your toad cannot serve in the military! Mattie But yes, hello, I’m Mattie and I’m here! Ren Mattie is here and in the same existing zone as me, sitting at the same countertop. Mattie About 2ft away. Ren New experiments in podcast recording. Adam I’m existing in the same zone as a broken shoulder, my broken shoulder, not just any broken shoulder, that sounds quite sinister. Ren So yeah, give Adam lots of sympathy. Adam Yes thank you, I came off my bike. I feel guilty about having a week off teaching, though I know my students will be like: “Yeah, cover teachers! We can run riot! Destroy the room!” They’ll be having a whale of a time. One of the cover teachers did message me and say that the kids have been behaving badly so I’ve put a note with tomorrow’s cover lesson that says, “Look your Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol stickers have arrived and you won’t be getting them if you treat the cover teacher badly.” I didn’t think they’d go for them, but I guess it’s nostalgic for that generation of teenagers. Mattie Beautiful. Adam But nevertheless I did manage to watch this weeks film and play this weeks game: The Black Cauldron! (Trailer for The Black Cauldron. “Legend has it there was once a king so cruel and so evil, that the gods feared him. Since no prison could hold him, he was trapped forever in the form of a black cauldron. Walt Disney pictures presents: The Black Cauldron! Escape into a world of darkness! A world of excitement! A world of dreams! Through the magic of 70mm photography and six track Dolby sound. You will be transported to a fantasy event for the entire family. In the great tradition of Disney animated classics, the newest spectacle of them all: The Black Cauldron.”) Ren Adam despite being injured has gone above and beyond and played a game for this! I have not, I’ve just watched a film. Adam You mean you didn’t play an ancient Sierra game with punishing deaths and almost no way to complete it without a walkthrough! Ren No, I didn’t! Mattie Broadening the horizons of the podcast. Adam I will say that to play this I had to blu-tack down my function keys, because in an exciting innovation this doesn’t work by text prompts, it works by the function keys, those keys that normally control the volume and other things. But it’s quite a strain, especially with a broken shoulder, to stretch your way across to the function keys with your little finger to interact, I bluetacked it down. I will say I only lasted ten minutes in the game, but I’ll go back to the game, it is a faithful adaptation so I played the equivalent of the first twenty minutes of the film. Ren Okay. Mattie Do you get the impression that it is like playing along the film where if you make choices that diverge from the plot of the film, you die? Adam Well, I died of dehydration and not drinking enough water and I didn’t see much water consumption in the film so I think there was a hard survivalist element that wasn’t present in the game. Mattie Simulationist Black Cauldron game. Adam And also the goose was far more agressive. In the film the geese are quite scared. Mattie Those are some unrealistic geese! Adam Me and Ren have lived on York campus, and they were some unrealistically fearful geese, the Sierra game did a much better job of stimulating geese, because there was a goose that kept knocking me down, again and again. Mattie Awww. Ren When we did live in York, Adam would get particularly picked on by the geese, for some reason. Adam I’m glad you recognise that, my dad gets picked on by chickens, it’s in the family. Ren They really went for you. Adam And I don’t even eat them! Ren You don’t even eat them! Mattie Yeah, but do they know that? Ren This is The Black Cauldron from 1985, it’s a Disney film, it didn’t do very well — Adam It managed to earn back about half of its production budget? Ren Yep. And was consequently banished to limbo for quite some time. Adam It’s not even an offensive one like Song of the South, which is rightfully banished because it’s horrendously offensive and racist, this was just banished because it didn’t make Disney enough money. Clearly the greater sin in Disney’s eyes, let’s be honest! Ren They were still advertising Song of the South on videos I had as a kid in the ‘90s. Adam Yep, whereas I didn’t hear anything about The Black Cauldron, I never heard about it as a kid! Mattie See this is where I reckon The Black Cauldron is to Disney what Earthsea is to Studio Ghibli, they wanted it to be something and then too many cooks made it not a good film so they had to mind hole it. Ren Adam I still get quite cross about Earthsea, because the great Ursula Le Guin was lied to about it - they told her that Miyazaki would direct it, and obviously she didn’t think ‘that’s his not very good son’, it’s a bait and switch! You can’t do that! Mattie This is a much lighter version of that situation, when asked about it Lloyd Alexander who wrote the books said: “It’s a great film, I enjoyed watching the film, not much like the books, hope you read the books, but it’s fun”. We’ll take that. Adam He wasn’t bitterly disappointed — Mattie — Profoundly offended Ren You’d seen it before, Mattie? Mattie Loved it as a kid! Ren I’d not seen it until two days ago — Adam I watched it for the first time ever today! Ren — What were your feelings about it as a kid Mattie? Mattie Watching it yesterday for the first time since I was about 7, I was struck by the fact that I remembered nothing of the interpersonal relationships whatsoever, and mostly just remembered how cool the horned king was and that the pig was having the time of her life. So I was watching it going — I don’t remember this romance, who’s this dude, what’s going on. So presumably as is classic little kid Mattie was just like ‘the horned king is awesome, look at all those corpses coming out of that cauldron, this is a great time, I want to watch this again’ Adam My understanding is that the final cut is quite censored, quite a lot of footage was cut out. Mattie I had a four hour train journey, so there has been research! From what I can gather twelve minutes was cut out, on the 25th anniversary DVD eight of those minutes were put back in as bonus, but what we didn’t find out wether the version on Disney plus is that one or not. I think it’s the original cut, because you’re watching it and someone will say something and it will never be referred to again, and it’s like: “ah, I see, cuts". Adam I don’t understand the censorship on Disney Plus! They get rid of the Simpsons joke: “That’s not a knife, that’s a spoon, I see you’ve played knifey-spoony before then,” — Mattie I didn’t know that! Adam Yeah, that’s completely cut! Mattie Gutted. Adam But then the whole Cartridge Family episode, where Homer gets a gun is on there. I don’t know, and obviously all of American Horror Story is on there, which is not just queasy and unpleasant but often quite aggressively problematic in its cheerful kind of way! Ren So the setup for the Black Cauldron — We watched the intro again just before this, because it does go by quite fast. There’s some kind of ancient evil king, and in order to depose him he’s thrown alive into molten iron at which point he becomes a cauldron, which is the black cauldron which can then be used to bring forth the deathless army of the undead, at a future date. Adam So the king is the cauldron? Ren I believe so, yes Adam Because I thought the spirit of the king had been trapped in the cauldron, but this explains why the cauldron had a face. Ren I think he is meant to be the cauldron. Mattie There’s also a few scenes later on when the climax of the film is occurring and the cauldron’s face looks so judgemental! Adam “That’s not cooking a hotpot!” Mattie “They don’t evil king like they did in my day!” Ren I haven’t written a summary of this so it might be a bit erratic — Adam Well, Mattie watched this as a kid so he knows this plot inside out by the sound of it. Ren So we have a boy, Tarran, who’s like the twin brother of Arthur from the sword int the stone — Mattie — Same actor Ren — Same actor. He’s an assistant pig keeper. I’ve written: ‘The child craves war’, he wants to be a solider, there’s a war going on and he wants to be involved — Adam Yeah, he wants to kill. Ren But his mentor is like “you’ve got to look after the pig, she’s very important”. Adam He’s very jealous of the pig, a lot of his anger is coming from the preferential treatment of the pig. What’s her name? RenHenwen. Adam Penguin? Ren Henwen! She’s having a bath and she starts squealing and is frightened, and they realise that — the pig can see visions and they realise that the horned king is searching for the pig so he can find the cauldron, right? Mattie I think the horned king is searching for the cauldron but he’s aware of the pig as a route to the cauldron. Adam How do you discover that you have an oracular pig? Was it traded as an oracular pig or were there weird coincidences, like the pig makes a scuff mark in the dirt that looks like an acorn and then you go into the field and it’s full of acorns? Does this pig come from a long line of pig oracles? Mattie I mean, the method of drawing visions from the pig is getting her to look at some water and swirl it and say an incantation, so I do wonder if at some point the pig was stood next to a pond and a duck swims by and it’s suddenly full of visions of the future, and they were like: “Ah, that would be an oracular pig.” Adam I don’t know about the incantations, they might just be in an almanack. Mattie I like the idea that they’re not necessary, they’re just a bit of razzle-dazzle. Adam Yeah, maybe! Ren So the Horned King has this flowing purple cloak and these curling horns, he wants the Black Cauldron to raise this army of deathless warriors, he is thirsting to be a god among mortal men. So Tarran, the boy, has to take the pig and go — Mattie Go and sit in the woods with the pig, his mentor will come and get him at some point — Adam I thought he was taking the pig to the fae folk because they’re invisible and could invisible the pig? Ren Is that what he’s doing? Adam I think so, he says goodbye to his mentor so I think he’s setting out on a journey to get the pig to safety with the faeries. He just fails really quickly! Mattie He really does! He goes to hide in the woods, that he’s lived in his whole life, and within the distance that it takes for a pig to run away there’s a giant ominous castle that apparently no-one knew about! Adam That’s about as far as I got int the game, I fed the pig some gruel and then the pig follows you and runs into the cottage and you get the divination and you’re told to lead the pig to the fairy folk, and then one of those huge pterodactyl creatures swoops down and picks up you and the pig, you’re thrown to the ground and then I just kept being told: “You’re really thirsty’,” went to the water trough that the pig uses, “nothing to use here”, and then I died of dehydration and then being a Sierra game it lectured me, and told me I really should make sure my character drinks water, and I thought: “I’m too old to be lectured by a Sierra game”. Mattie “I’m not having this.” Adam I’m not having this Ren Fair. Did you meet Gurgi in the game? Adam Yes, he just pranced in, he’s a little beast man, asked for some food and then I didn’t have any so he pranced away again. That was the best part of the game. Ren Tarran - in between losing the pig and the pig being taken away by dragons meets this hairy little creature who steals an apple and has a little Gollum voice — Mattie Kind of a a cross between Gollum and a Fizzgig — Ren Does anyone want to do the Munchings and Crunchings? Mattie “Munchity crunchity!” Ren “Munchings and Crunchings in there somewhere!” He’s trying to steal the apple. Mattie Gurgi has no friends but Gurgi wants friends to steal food from. Ren So Henwen’s taken away, and Tarran’s like “Oh well, I need to go to the castle to get my pig back.” and Gurgi’s like — Mattie “You will absolutely die and I'm not getting involved.” Adam Yeah, I rather liked the desolate vision of Gurgi on the clifftop edge, saying: ”I’ll never see my friend again" Mattie Yeah, so sad! And he’s not wrong, don’t go to that castle! Adam Oh yeah, by all rights he should die very early. The game is far more realistic to be fair, there’s a lot of close scrapes in this film. Ren There’s definitely peril! Adam It’s not even mild peril! Ren Moderate to severe peril, I’d say. In the castle poor little Henwen is in shackles, it’s very sad. Mattie Very tragic. The worst party imaginable is happening. Ren There’s goblins, I thought it was a two-headed dragon but it’s actually just two dragons sitting next to each other, which is less exciting, and there’s a fat dancing lady of the kind that Disney enjoys animating. Mattie She’s having a blast! Adam Disney himself? Ren Yes, I will make that claim. Mattie There’s really good flags. All the drapery at this terrible party is great, and the people at the party are the worst. Adam I think there’s actually a real difference in quality in this film between the backgrounds and the character animation — Mattie and Ren Yes. Adam Because there’s some astonishing background work and some pretty shonky character animation. Mattie Yep. Ren The backgrounds are beautiful. Adam Yeah! The backgrounds are, there are times in the game where I didn’t know what I was doing and I was like: “huh, this is like a walking simulator.” But with the film I probably would be just happy to look at it, there’s not much of a storyline, go full slow cinema. Mattie Ren Shall we do Texture of the Week? Adam Oh yeah, okay, let’s do it. (Medieval chanting style: Texture of the Week, of the week, of the week, Texture of the week) Ren Lovely, thank you. Yes, because mine is the mossy craggy interior of the castle — Adam Oh come on! We keep having the same textures Ren! Ren We’ve been doing this too long! Adam We keep doing this! It was cute at first but now it’s starting to feel a bit odd, it’s starting to freak me a bit! Yeah, same here. Mattie Mine was the delight of that pig having a bath — Ren and Adam Awwww Mattie The soft pink skin, the bubbles and the scrubby brush, that’s just a really good pig bath. Ren I did also really like the skeleton of the former band, that was just really nicely painted. Adam Some gorgeous backgrounds in this. I wrote ‘moss and lichen’. Ren There’s all these blue-greys and orange-browns, really good backgrounds. Mattie The red of the sky around the Horned King’s castle, if you’ve ever seen a sunset somewhere with a lot of air pollution, it was really well done, like yeah, that’s a bad place to be breathing, do not be there! Ren So in this castle in this bad-vibes party, Henwen refuses to show the Horned King where the black cauldron is, she’s threatened — I couldn’t quite tell if the Horned King’s henchmen were orcs or if they were just bestial humans? Adam They definitely seemed like beings you would encounter in a Fighting Fantasy game book, they have this slightly generic dark fantasy vibe, and I know this was an attempt to appeal to a more teenage audience and I do wonder if this was trying to ride the DnD coattails a bit actually — Mattie — Right in the middle of the satanic panic. Which probably didn’t help at the pictures. Adam Too many parents who were like: (Suffolk accent) : ”You’re not going to see that!” Mattie “It’s got a devil in it!" Ren It’s John Hurt who plays the Horned King with some relish, and when Tarran falls out of his hiding place he says: “Boy are you the keeper of this oracular pig!” Adam That’s quite a good John Hurt impression! Ren Oh, thank you! Tarran’s like “No, she’s not going to tell you where this cauldron is,” but then they get the guillotine out and he’s like: “Alright, Henwen, tell him,” but then some kind of commotion happens, he runs away with the pig, I might have lost the timeline a bit because there’s the bard — Mattie There’s a chase scene through the castle — Adam Well, we’re in the dungeon, right, and we get the two other characters in our plucky trio — Mattie I think that before that we have to punt Henwen into the moat for a fall that would absolutely kill a pig. If you hit water at that height it’s like hitting concrete, but she’s a magic pig so it’s fine. Adam “It’s just a little aireborne, it’s still good, it’s still good!” Mattie It’s fine, water’s soft! Because yeah, he gets the pig away and then is caught and goes to the dungeon. Ren And in the dungeon there is a bard who has a Welsh name that is not pronounced Welshly. Adam So how should it be pronounced? If you were pronouncing this Welshy Mattie, how would you pronounce it? Mattie (with correct Welsh pronounciation) Fflewddur Fflam? Ren And the way they pronounce it… Mattie It’s not quite “Floody Flum”, but it’s not far off. Ren You were telling me a bit about the author and the background — Mattie So is this kind of Welsh-flavoured several times removed, because The author is an American called Lloyd Chudley Alexander, who writes as Lloyd Alexander, and he was a soldier in the US army during World War II but he wasn’t in any combat roles, because he couldn’t combat role so good. He was a cymbal player in a marching band for a while, and a chaplain’s assistant and he was stationed in England and Wales for a few months and just got really into Welsh folklore and the Mabinogion and then used a lot of that as background for the books. But it’s flavour, and then that going through the Disney machine, and then voice actors who don't know Welsh, it’s beautiful, I love it. I am personally delighted to see my culture get mangled because it’s really funny, and it’s just nice that people know we’re there. Ren Yep, so there’s a bard — Mattie Who has a harp that has a string on his harp that breaks when you lie, which is implied but never really gone into, and he’s also King of his own Kingdom, which is also mentioned in passing and never touched on again. Ren And the other member of the trio is Princess Eilonwey who just wanders into the attic where Tarran’s being kept? Adam I found that quite odd, is she mid-escape herself? Ren I think so, she does seem to have a lot of free rein for a prisoner. Mattie You don’t really get a sense of if she’s in the process of escaping or if she’s just like ‘I’m going to live in the walls and do people’s heads in, this is fun’ Ren But she was captured because she has a mote, a floating bauble thing, very similar to what Link has — Adam Yes, Navi! Mattie She’s got Navi! Ren The Horned King captured her because he thought that her bauble could tell him where the black cauldron is. Adam I quite like the idea that the Horned King is going through the random divination objects locally, just — “Special shaped stick, yeah, have ‘em in the dungeon, we’ll see if that works”. Mattie I also like the idea that the Horned King’s got the equivalent of when someone has a hamster and it lives in the walls — someone let her escape and now we can hear her, but we don’t quite know where she is. Ren She leads Tarran to escape and on the way he finds a glowing sword, which is quite handy — Adam It’s a bit too handy, isn't it. Mattie It’s basically a plasma cutter! Adam Uh-huh! It’s like the equivalent of playing a video game with a game genie, basically. Ren And they have a little fight and a chase across a drawbridge, and they run away — Adam What’s really cool about the sword, which is cool but also removes any heroism at all, is that the sword isn’t just powerful, it knows what to do — so the sword cuts the rope of the drawbridge, he doesn’t think to do that, the sword just always attacks the most useful thing to attack. So the sword has some kind of intelligence or it’s just so lucky that it can bend space-time? I quite like that idea, it’s not explained, but the idea is that it’s not just a powerful sword but it’s a cheat code, the sword always lets you win, somehow. Mattie It’s the intelligence of a magical weapon that’s been stuck in a basement for a long time. It’s like: “You’ll do, just get me out of here”. Ren I get a similar sense to The Mouse and his Child that this would make more sense if I read the book — Mattie’s shaking his head. Mattie This is two books of five, and the Horned King is a very minor character — Adam The Horned King is just this guy, you know. Mattie He’s just this guy, he’s a weird little guy. I don’t remember very much about the books - I was going to try and read them but then I realised that I knew about doing this two days ago and that was stupid. But I don’t think the books would help. Adam My main enjoyment — you said Mattie that your main memory of the film isn’t plot-based, the plotting is just one thing after another, and the characters aren’t that memorable, but it does have a certain something! I can see why it didn’t do very well, but it does have quite a lot of peril, and a certain atmosphere, and some of those backgrounds are gorgeous. Mattie It’s beautiful and it barrels along really well, certainly as an adult who’s been diagnosed with ADHD I can certainly imagine my child self phasing out to look at the background and then being barrelled along with the action. You don’t really need to know what’s going on. It’s a good film but not in the way that films are meant to be good. Adam Yes, yes. Ren There’s some amazing set-pieces, The Horned King is so captivating. It must have been so scary. You have a friend, Hywel, who — Mattie He may have been taken to the pictures to see it, and he may have been hiding because it was not a good time. And this film was made in the armpit between classic Disney and Disney resurgence, so that old guard had left and the new guard hadn’t settled in yet. So there was a lot of turbulence at the studio. Adam It’s directed by the same people as Fox and the Hound, isn’t it? Mattie Yeah, and basically all of the edits that were taken out of the final footage, all the work had been done. Usually you’d cut things about when you were still in storyboard but part of it was just that when they tested it, people were too scared! It was previously, more frightening, and they were like ‘No, you need to cut a bunch of this’. I think there’s more of the army, but I'm really curious about this because as a story there’s no world-building. The only people who we know exist are Tarran, the fae folk and the castle — so who was the Horned King going to kill? What is he conquering? And I don’t know if some of that footage was people getting absolutely ganked by a lot of skeletons. Adam Ray Harry Hausen skeleton war. Ren Ah, I want the horror cut! Adam Yeah, because it is still pretty dark but I do feel like it could lean into it a bit more. I looked up Tim Burton’s initial character designs that were rejected— Ren Ah, that was this one! Adam Yeah, they were just as you imagine: sharp teeth, ridiculous body proportions, scraggly hair. Mattie That would have been brilliant. And there was a whole soundtrack done, but because of the cuts they made none of the soundtrack lined up anymore, so they had to cobble something else together, so there’s clearly an amazing film that didn’t quite happen. * Adam Yeah, I agree, I think it's one of those death by a thousand cuts films where it’s been butchered in production but you can still see there was something great there. Mattie And there was an animator’s strike halfway through, which obviously absolutely support strikers, but also that can have an interesting effect on production, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. So we don’t really know how that affected things. Ren So the boy and the princess and the bard escape, Gurgi turns up again and points out tracks that could be Henwens that they follow to a pink and purple whirlpool which they fall in and there’s these cutsey baby fairies, and this is the fae folk! They’re not all babies, some of them have beards, but they live under this whirlpool, and one of them asks: “Is the burning and the killing still going on up there?”. I’m not actually sure what burning and killing they’re referring to. Adam I just took that to be humans being humans. Mattie I also quite like that we know that the fae folk are magical fae folk because they’re the only ones with American accents in the whole film. Which I found very sweet. Ren I didn’t notice that, that's funny. Adam They also glow pretty nicely. Apparently this is the first animated Disney film to use some CGI, and I assume that was with the elemental effects. There’s a really odd cloud that looks very composite early on, and I wondered if the glowing was done with CGI, because I always thought the glowing in Fantasia must have taken a ridiculous amount of time. That always looks so labour intensive. Mattie Later on, around the cauldron when it gets all green and bubbly, the smoke on that they matted in dry ice, it looks really good, you wouldn’t notice. It’s so cool! Adam There’s some really great compositing actually. Ren So the faeries say that the cauldron is hidden in the marshes of Morva, so they go there and find some swamp witches in a cave of frogs, both me and Mattie made a note of a quite overly-long shot of the bard being turned into a frog and bouncing in one of the witch’s cleavage. Adam I’m glad you pointed that out because I did think Texture of the Week, and then I thought: “No, I’m not, that’s not becoming.” Mattie Would you like a Welsh language fact? RenYes! Mattie Morva is a fen or a saltmarsh, so the marshes of Morva are the Marshes of Saltmarsh. Welsh facts! Adam It could be a recurring segment! Ren We should get you back on if we do Diana Wynne Jones and Howl’s Moving Castle. Mattie Champion. Ren The book of which is significantly more Welsh and the studio Ghibli film, unsurprisingly. They ask the witches about the black cauldron and they say that they’ll trade the magic sword for the cauldron. And they’re like: “Ahaha we’ll get the sword and then they won’t be able to do anything with the cauldron so we’ll have that too!” Adam I didn’t really get the logic there, did they just think that they’ll get the cauldron and then go: “Oh, we can’t do anything with this, have it back.” Ren I think so, yeah. So Tarran gives up the sword, they get the black cauldron and they learn that it requires a sacrifice. Someone has to be consumed by the cauldron, to stop it. Mattie And specifically they have to go into it willingly, you can’t just punt someone in. Adam If you put unwilling sacrifices in it just creates more evil power — Mattie — Yeah, the cauldron would be pretty into it. Adam But then if you put a willing sacrifice in, it doesn’t like it. So I did wonder whether at the end of the film there would be a back-and-forth, where one character willingly sacrifice themselves, and then the Horned King throws someone else in, and then it’s this awful tit-for-tat, when will they learn. That didn’t happen, but I did wonder if it would be some horrible balancing act. Mattie Or that one hand on the other hand slapping game that you play with little kids, but with death. Adam I probably over-thought this, but what if you willingly sacrifice yourself to the cauldron and then change your mind half a second before hitting the water, does that not count? Mattie Buyer’s remorse — Adam If you’re like: “No, actually --“ and the Cauldron’s like: “Haha, I do like this now!” Mattie Good question! Adam Yeah, I was really trying to work this out. And remember the cauldron is an evil king who’s become a cauldron with a face, so presumably he makes his own rules. Does it mean that the more scared you are, the tastier you are? The demon king, the Horned King, does not want to go into that cauldron, right? He’s a very unwilling sacrifice. But the cauldron likes unwilling sacrifices, so surely by that logic the Horned King going in to the cauldron should give the cauldron more evil power and bring the skeletons back to life. Mattie It’s kind of a question of whether the magical objects in this world have an intelligence, like that sword and that cauldron. Because if that cauldron is the last vestiges of the consciousness of an incredibly evil king, that’s just been dug out of a hole periodically by every one who wants to try and be an evil king, do you think at some point he’s just like: “Can I die?” I’m done, I’ve seen every mediocre Johnny-come-lately villain for eons uncounted and I’m just done, I don’t want to do this anymore, give me the little fluffy guy. Adam And to be fair, while the cauldron has a frozen evil face, maybe he’s changed, it’s been a long time. Mattie The cauldron’s done the twelve steps and is moving away from eating people. Adam It might be a Manny rat situation all over again. I want to learn more about this cauldron because the title is The Black Cauldron and the fact that he’s a king, I need to know more what’s going on with this cauldron. Mattie Yeah because we have a whole section that Ren quite rightly skipped over, presumably because you forgot about the ‘romance argument making up’ section in the woods. Yeah, we didn’t need that! Like you, Adam, I want more cauldron. Adam Yeah, the cauldron’s the good stuff. Mattie It’s a big lad. Adam It makes this great composition, they’ve been given the cauldron by the witches and it’s our little trio sat around the fire and this cauldron in the background looming large, and they don’t know what to do with it. Mattie And the fairy who bought them there being like: “You’re a bunch of idiots I’m going home. This is why I don’t deal with people.” Ren And they are quite swiftly captured and strung up in the dungeon, and the Horned King really goes to town with the cauldron. He’s got his hood back now and you can see his skull face — Adam — He’s gone full Skeletor Ren There’s this great bit of animation where he lowers this skeleton into the cauldron to reanimate the army of death, and as the skeleton is reanimating there’s this effect that looks like double exposure — Adam — Yeah, it does look like double exposure and I was trying to work out how to do that with animation and whether that it is something to do with the film itself. Ren It’s very cool. Adam Some of this is like the end of Fantasia, actually, in terms of doing interesting things with animation. Ren I don’t think I ever got to the end of Fantasia, I just watched the broom bit and then I was good. Adam I thought that Fantasia was edifying and it was my moral responsibility as a young child to watch this educational film, even though I didn’t like large parts of it, I made myself watch it. Mattie I feel like I can relate to that, not necessarily with Fantasia, but I feel like child you and child me had some things in common. At some point we hit puberty and were like: “Hang on, I don’t have to do that!” Adam Yeah! I still have a lot of fondness for edutainment, but a lot of reasons why I played educational games like Mavis Beacon’s teacher typing was I thought it was a morally good thing to do: “I’m not playing silly games, I’m playing educational games!” Mattie “And I’ve started so I’ve got to finish.” Adam One of the lines I’ve highlighted here was from the bard, when there’s this raising of all the skeletons and everything looks very grim, he says: “I wish I’d stayed a toad” Ren Bouncing in some cleavage? Adam I mean, yeah, I’m sure that would be one of the perks for him, potentially, but I just mean I get that, life and having to live and have consciousness, it would nice to be a toad probably. Mattie Presumably we’ve found the inspiration for the Cornershop hit Brimful of Asha, this is the original bosom pillow, it was a toad all along. There is also a very good skull made of lava. Adam Oh yes, good mention, thanks for mentioning that. It was really good. Ren I don’t know how far Hywel got through this film. Mattie I should have asked him - I wasn’t going to saw owt but I didn’t say anything to you! Adam It hasn’t had lasting reprecussions, has it? Mattie He’s alright, he just doesn’t want to watch Black Cauldron. Adam I hid in the toilets in the cinema during the bit in Empire Strikes Back when R2D2 gets swallowed by the snakey-sand-worm thing. Mattie Aw darling, that’s fair! Adam I remember I just went and hid in the toilets until I was sure that bit had passed. And Hunchback of Notre Dame I think I lasted five minutes full stop! I was out of that cinema! Ren Hercules really got me, there’s an animation where someone goes into the underworld and I found that very disturbing. Mattie Bambi got me, the mum getting shot. Adam I quite liked Bambi, and I found that a bit scary and sad but not to the degree I would have imagined. My mum got really upset as a kid seeing Pinocchio in the cinema, which is fair. We could do Pinocchio, it’s not really children’s horror, but the donkey scene is just remarkably horrifying. Mattie There is a bit where they’re all tied up and the Horned King is doing his villain monologue, and he’s like: “The pig keeper, and the slightly rubbish bard,” and he called Elionwy a scullery maid, which is never mentioned before and is never mentioned after, she says she’s a princess, he says she’s a scullery maid, and no point is she like: “Oh, I’m so embarrassed to be called a scullery maid”. Adam I thought that was really interesting, I wonder if she’s just like “I’ve said that I’m a princess and I’m keeping to it, if my friends aren’t going to mention it, I’m not going to mention it.” Mattie Perfect, that’s spot on. Ren So Gurgi jumps into the cauldron, in this sequence that’s very visually reminiscent of the end of Lord of the Rings and Gollum falling into Mount Doom but Gurgi goes willingly. Mattie He turns up, releases his friends as this army are going to murder apparently no-one. Ren You said that Andy Serkis says that Gurgi is an influence — Adam Oh what! Mattie Yeah, apparently so! That weird little guy! This film overlaps with so many different things. Adam Yeah, that’s really interesting! Ren So Gurgi jumps in, and then the cauldron is still active — Mattie The army all falls down, the king is cross. Ren But the cauldron demands more— Adam “Feed me Seymour!” Ren Yeah, and the Horned King is torn to shreds as the cauldron sucks him in. Adam It’s quite gruesome. Ren It’s really quite nasty. Mattie Yeah, he really gets flensed! Ren And our heroic trio escape by boat as the castle falls apart around them, and the witches turn back up and they want to take the cauldron back, and the bard says they need to have a bargain, and they reluctantly offer the sword back up, but Taran says: “I’m not a warrior, I’m a pig boy” and he says he has no use for the sword but he’d trade the cauldron for Gurgi returning. And my final note is: Gurgi’s alive and he’s enforcing heteronormativity. Mattie I do particularly like the witches, because they’re like: “Nah mate, he’s dead, that’s not how things work, would you like the sword?” but Fflewddur Fflam is like, “Ah, I knew you weren’t real witches” and they’re like: “Right. I’m not taking that from you.” The laws of metaphysics broken by peer pressure! Adam And then we get a very nondescript credit sequence. You can tell that all is not right at the house of mouse, because Disney tend to go all in, particularly from the ‘70s onwards, they tend to have all the characters you know and love and little things in the margins, and there's not much of that in this one! Mattie Nope! I do particularly like right at the start when we’re getting Taran’s character established and they’re fantasising about the king of the country being such a hero with his sword, but at the end there isn’t any: “Cheers for saving the world”, it just ends. And I like to imagine that backs up the idea that there is no-one else. There’s just Taran, the weird old man who’s like: “Go and live in the woods, I won’t give you snacks or water”, and some fairies. Adam It is a weirdly empty film! Ren Oh they do get reunited with the pig. Adam It’s like the whole of society is living within the castle. Maybe it’s post-apocalyptic. Mattie They might just be in mid Wales, its pretty sparsely populated. Adam It’s definitely a curio, but I didn’t hate it! Ren The background art is lovely and that really sustained me, some really good backgrounds and animation. Adam I feel like both of us were watching it going “Ooh, that’s some nice moss, look at that nice moss”. Mattie And the art direction is really interesting, in the opening sequence we’re looking through the trees at this iron-age inspired farm, the trees are old and gnarly, nothing’s cute. Adam You can tell it’s from the same period as Fox and the Hound because that has the odd disjunction between the cutsey character designs and the oddly naturalistic craggy background art . Mattie I wonder if that’s partly because if someone from the studio came to Britain and went to the New Forest or something and saw real old oak trees and was like: “I want to draw these forever.” Adam It does look quite dismal at times, which is interesting. Some of the old Disney films do spooky or creepy, like the wood in Pinocchio or Snow White, but these aren’t spooky trees, they’re dismal trees. I imagine there’s some people out there for whom this is their favourite ever Disney film. I can totally see how you enjoyed it as a kid, Mattie, I can imagine some kids totally imprinting on this film and I expect I would have liked it quite a lot if I’d watched it at the right age. Mattie You can imagine it would get kids to want to be an animator, like: “That King is terrifying, I want to learn how to do that.” It is a credit to the people who worked on it, because right at the end when they’re making their escape there are some weird wobbly wooden towers that fall onto them and I’m pretty sure that’s stop-motion animation. There’s no context for why they’re there, just there to make for a dangerous workplace presumably. And there’s loads of stuff like that, where watching as a child and being able to be selective about what you care about, it just looks awesome. Ren “Art direction by Don Griffith uncredited” Seems a bit rude. Mattie I think he might have left the company. Adam There were definitely times where I thought that this looked like a Don Bluth film, to be honest. Mattie That’s a good point, it did make me think of All Dogs go to Heaven. Adam Secret of Nim, I’d say. Ren Do you have any notes that haven't been addressed, Mattie? Mattie The voice actor for Elinowy, Susan Sheridan: Noddy. Ren Noddy! Mattie Noddy. I thought you’d make that face! Adam And apparently the voice of Trillian in the Hitchhikers Guide original radio series. Mattie I knew I recognised that voice! Never! And the narrator at the start, John Huston, this is another weird connection, he was the voice of Gandalf in the weird ‘70s animation. Not the Bakshie one, the other one. And he’s also Angelica Huston’s dad. As in Morticia Adams. Ren And The Witches! Mattie More connections to your podcast. Well, Noddy’s not a connection. Ren Noddy is horrifying though! Adam There’s definitely a troubling Current 93 album about Noddy. We could do a Noddy episode, I’m pretty sure it freaked me out as a kid. Ren Genuinely quite scary. Adam I think I had Noddy on a video with Greenclaws, Mattie do you remember Greenclaws? Mattie No, I believe you. Adam Okay, look up Greenclaws, if you’re listening to this podcast look up Greenclaws. He’s a gentle soul, but he does look like the Michelin Man has fallen in a swamp. Mattie Oh that is a situation, that's a situation. Adam I don’t know what we’re doing next but I’m sure we’ll get another episode in before Christmas. Ren But if this does come out on Halloween that will be our seventh anniversary! Adam We’re so old! Mattie The consistency is astounding! Adam Something no-one’s ever said about this podcast before, thanks! Mattie You exist, what else could anyone want! Adam That’s a high point to leave on, I think. Ren Thank you Mattie, for joining us! Mattie Thank you for having me, it’s been great to be here. Ren Do you have a sign off for us, Adam? Adam Yes, I hope creepy kids that you can remain as consistent as we have! Mattie Just keep existing!

Migrants Yes In this episode we talked about The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban, published in 1967, and the 1977 animated film of the same name. Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com [stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com] and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com You can experience some of Stuart's work at: https://www.failbettergames.com/ [https://www.failbettergames.com/] Transcript Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I'm Ren Wednesday like co-host is Adan Wybray and today we’re joined by special guest Stuart Young to talk about the Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban and the associated film. Enjoy! (Intro music plays) Ren Hi, welcome to Still Scared, I'm Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and our special guest is Stuart Young, who is a senior producer at Fail Better Games and a friend of Adams from the past! And we've come here today to talk about the Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban, both in book and film version. This was a suggestion from Stu, who presumably watched it as a kid or encountered it in some way? Stuart Oh, hi, I’m Stu, by the way! No I've never watched the film, although I'm quite intrigued! I've only read the book, as an older child. My mum only gave it to me when I was about 10 or 11, which I think is probably quite wise. Adam So is it something that your mum had read when she was young? Stuart I think she'd read it. I think she read it as an adult because if you think about it, this is published in 1967 so she'd have definitely been a teenager when it came out, at a minimum. So I think she probably read the book as an adult. Ren And this is Russell Hoban who I only knew for Ridley Walker, which is his kind of post-apocalyptic novel from 1980, which is written in this imagined dialect that's developed in England 2000 years after a nuclear war. So I didn't really know what to expect from a from a children's book by him — Stuart — Basically the same thing! Yeah, yeah. I would hate to be reductive but yeah, it's quite a similar sort of journey, you know, a kind of picaresque wandering book, isn't it? Adam There's a fair amount of wandering, but also there's quite a lot where they don't get to wander right, I think. For a book about two clockwork creatures that are set on the journey as tramps and get wound up to go or wandering from one place to another, there's a lot of times where they're stopped in their tracks — because they aren't self winding. And their mission is to try to become self winding. So there's long sections where they get stuck and they they can't move forward. So it's as much a journey through time and stillness as it is forward movement, which I thought was really interesting. Because normally, whether it's a road trip movie or say, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or other children's books that take place from one place to another, the character will get to move on on their journey when they want. Whereas with the mouse and his child because they're both clockwork they don't get to move forwards when they they want, they're completely at the whim of nature and beholden to other creatures, which is really interesting. Stuart Yeah, that's very true. It does sort of compare with Ridley Walker differently there because that takes place in about a couple of weeks, I think. I think there's one major time shift in it. Whereas this, one of the things I did notice, like you, was that there are these sort of like huge time shifts where they just get stuck. And they just have to, you know, live with their sort of locked in syndrome, basically. Adam Yeah! I think that's what I would have found most disturbing myself as a kid. Stuart I mean, that’s the real kind of body horror of it and it really is quite like something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or something like that, where it gives you an insight into just how terrible it would be, not having any agency. Ren Yeah, I think if we come back to the horror of it and I'll just give a little introduction to the story to situate people. So the mouse and his child are a joined pair of wind up toys. The father swings the child in his arms and they dance and they sort of attain consciousness in a toy shop with this ornate dolls house. There's a tin seal with a ball on her nose and and a plush wind up elephant who sings a lullaby to the mouse child when he cries. And they're sold and placed under a Christmas tree and they dance until they're broken by a family cat, then rescued from the dustbin, repaired by a tramp who sets him down on the side of the road and tells them “be tramps.” They're then intercepted by Manny Rat, who's a dubious fellow who commands an army of windups who he's repaired. He sends them on a mission with one of his rat lackeys to commandeer treacle brittle, but the lackey botches it, gets eaten by a badger, and the mouse and his child escape. And Manny Rat takes this as a personal affront. And from from then on, there's this kind of push and pull where the child's determined to find the seal and the elephant so they can be a family; the mouse father’s determined to become self winding so he's not dependent on being wound up, and the two of them are pursued by Manny Rat, who's determined to smash them to pieces. That’s essentially the setup. And I think we can go back to the to the horror of it because that does come in quite early with the the condition of being a wind up toy and what that means. Adam I think sometimes this feels very much like a Victorian children's book, and sometimes it feels like it's drawing from much older traditions, like some kind of early modern allegory. And I guess that's just because Victorian kids books drew on older traditions themselves. But it starts out with this very Victorian image of a toy shop, everything brass and gleaming and shining, and then the figure of a homeless man, this tramp outside looking in and the kind of sort of tragical image you'd see on a Victorian biscuit box. So you immediately have this contrast between the haves and the have-nots and this sort of easeful life inside the doll's house, with these proper little gentlemen and gentlewomen who seemed disturbingly mindless because the tin toys can talk, but the little doll inhabitants of the dolls house just talk in newspaper mumbo-jumbo. Which immediately is quite disturbing because there's this real confusion of agency. Like, OK, these clockwork toys can think for themselves, but they possibly don't have free will because they’re wind up and they could go through their rituals and movements over and over again. But then these other toys who are in the dolls house, they don't seem to be able to think at all. And there's this clockwork elephant and it says on page six of my copy: “It was the elephant's constant delight to watch that tea party through the window, and as the hostess, she took great pride in the quality of her hospitality. ‘Have another cup of tea,’ she said to one of the ladies. ‘Try a little pastry.’ ‘HIGH-SOCIETY SCANDAL, changing to cloudy with a possibility of BARGAINS GALORE!’ Replied the lady. Her Papier-mâché head being made of paste and newsprint, she always spoke in scraps of news and advertising, in whatever order they came to mind. 'Bucket seats,’ remarked the gentleman next to her. Power steering optional, GOVERNMENT FALLS’.’” And yeah, that immediately freaked me out. This idea that these dolls just kind of talk minced-up random nonsense words from newspapers. Ren Yeah, and it makes it in the film, it's quite nightmarish off the bat with with these dolls spouting nonsense and the clock with a face that tells them it's midnight. Adam Yeah. OK, so the film is worth watching. It's available on YouTube, albeit in quite diminished quality, but it's directed by Murakami Wolf and Sanrio — Ren — of Hello Kitty fame. Adam — of Hello Kitty fame, and the sticker books that I give cutesy stickers to my students when they behave well fame. And yeah, you have a certain cutesy design with the the mouse and his child, but it's also got that, I don’t know, ‘70s kids’ animation has this specific hippie-dippie style that is like really hard to pin down but that you recognise it immediately. It looks really ‘70s anyway, you would be able to immediately tell this is 70s animations. It's from 1977 and the most jarring thing about it — I don't know if you feel the same, Ren — is the sound design and music is batshit. Ren It is arrestingly interesting. Adam It is wild. It is one of the weirdest soundtracks to a kids film I've ever heard. Like pretty much all my notes are just about the sound design and soundtracks. It's so strange. It starts off with this really awful tuneless existential theme song sung by a child, quite badly. (Mouse and his Child theme tune plays) Ren And then there's this big jazz influence because Roger Callaway the composer, was also a jazz pianist. So we got all this kind of jazz stuff going on. And then there's these songs that kind of narrate what's happening in this operatic style, but it’s also really odd. (Jazz music playing) Adam Yeah. I'll put an excerpt in. And then when you get to the kind of sewer, well, the junkyard where the rats live, you've got this, I’ve written “swamp jazz”, basically swamp jazz funk. It's this kind of weird Louisiana jazz. (Swamp jazz funk playing) And it's pretty avant-garde and discordant. Yeah, really, wild music in places. So worth watching if only for that. I mean, there's other good aspects to it, but the sound design is is really freaky. Ren Yeah. So yeah, Stu, when you read it as a kid, were there bits that that gave you the horrors? Stuart Yeah, I mean, I didn't know if you would particularly want to even cover this because it's not ostensibly a horror book, but I think it's probably one of the most horrifying children's books. So like we were saying earlier, there’s the fact that all of the wind up toys can't move unless somebody winds them up and then they can just become trapped for very long periods of time. They have consciousness and they're unable to move. That's pretty horrifying. There was a lot of it to me that was almost body horror because there's some really quite grizzly descriptions of these wind up toys being smashed, and parts being put back into them and it's never quite clear as to when consciousness enters and leaves their bodies. So you've got them being smashed and disassembled and then being put back together with, you know, in a kind of crap way and they can't move properly. And some of that imagery is really quite horrific. Ren Yeah. I mean, particularly there was a bit that I was going to ask you to read Adam, which is the elephant’s encounter with Manny Rat on page 27 in my edition. Because I thought you could do a good Manny Rat. Adam Yes, I think so. Is this where he meets the elephant? ‘Good evening, Madame?’ Yes, OK. "'Good evening, Madam,’ said Manny Rat. 'Do we find ourselves quite worn out and thrown away? Do we lie here lonely in the wintery waste, and rot? The pity of it!’ The elephant said nothing. ‘Be of good cheer,’ said Manny Rat. ‘Rejoice. Help is at hand!’ Still, the elephant preserved her silence. ‘Surely you can speak,’ said Manny Rat. 'You have heard the striking of the town hall clock, and the hour is long past midnight.’ ‘We have not been introduced,’ murmured the elephant, almost inaudibly, as if she hoped to create the illusion that the words had not actually come from her. ‘Ah, but we shall be!’ said Manny Rat. ‘We shall become moreover, close friends and intimate associates.’ He tried the elephant's key but could not turn it. The spring was tightly wound and thick with rust. ‘What better introduction could there be?,’ he said, ‘than to take you apart and repair you so you can work for me?’ He produced a rusty beer can opener from within his robe and undead the tin clasps that held the elephant together. ‘Nothing more to say, Madame?’ He asked as he pried apart the two halves of her tin body. ‘Not so much as a how-do-you-do?’ But the elephant was silent. She had fainted.” Ren Oh that really gave me the shivers. Stuart That was an excellent Manny Rat, I think. Adam Thank you. Stuart I think Manny Rat is genuinely one of the great villains. I think he's up there with like Richard the Third or Fagin. Fagan is the closest sort of famous villain, I think that he resembles, but he's of his own. His own rat. Yeah. And it's very difficult to even figure out what makes him tick. Adam Yeah, I mean, he often doesn't seem to know himself what makes him tick. As you say, a lot of the book with Manny Rat there are sections when you move away from the mouse and his child and you've just got Manny Rat on his possibly pyrrhic journey to smash the mouse and his child. And at times he starts thinking to himself: what am I doing? You know, I've been trudging across the wintry wastes for months following this clockwork mouse and child, what was happened to me? You get these really interesting moments of self reflection, but yeah he is my texture of the week, so. I heard you've got a marimba. Ren Oh, OK. Stuart Yes, I thought this is appropriate. Ren, Adam Texture, Texture, of the week. (accompanied by Stuart playing on the marimba, and Adam shaking a shaker) Ren That's lovely. Thank you. Adam OK, so I've got one from quite early on in the book, which is the first description of of Manny Rat and I have to say I love the drawings, I think they were by Lillian Hoban, so Russell Hoban's wife at the time, who actually illustrated a plethora of children's books, more prolific actually than Russell Hoban. I really love the illustrations. In my edition, they've got a really nice fine kind of skittish line work, like really sort of skitty little lines. And Manny Rat looks really horrible. “A large rat crept out of the shadows of the girders into the light of the overhead lamps, and stood up suddenly on his hind legs before the mouse and his child. He wore a greasy scrap of silk paisley tied with a dirty string in the manner of a dressing gown, and he smelled of darkness, of stale and mouldy things and garbage. He was there all at once and with a look of tenure, as if he had been waiting, always just beyond their field of vision, and once let in, would never go away. In the eerie blue glare he peered beadily, and father and son and his eyes, as passing headlights came and went, flashed blank and red like two round tiny ruby mirrors. His whiskers quivered as his face came closer; he bared his yellow teeth and smiled, and a paw shot out to strike the mouse and his child, a rattling blow that knocked them flat.” And one thing I like in the book is that you get these sort of progressive textures of Manny Rat as his dressing gown becomes more tattered as he progresses on his journey, but also the mouse and his child who sound rather handsome at the start of the book and slowly become corroded and eroded away and. All their fur gets — Ren OK, I can come in there with my texture. Adam Oh no, I failed to guess your texture! So, Ren, I was convinced that your texture this week was going to be the frog glove. Ren Oh well! I did love the frog glove! Adam I saw the frog like wiggling away and I was like, oh, that's going to be Ren's texture, surely! Ren I mean, yeah, that's an honourable mention for sure. But the one I've gone with was the description of the mouse and his child after they have been. At the bottom of a pond for quite some time. And have eventually escaped and says: "The mouse and his child lay in a puddle on the stone as the water drained out of them. They were spotted, streaked and pitted with rust at all their joints, and the arms they stretched out to each other were naked, rusty wires. What fur remained was black with rot and green with moss and algae. Their tattered ears stood bent and crooked on their heads, their whiskers hugged in limp dejection.” Adam And what child would want that for a Christmas present! So Stu, do you have a texture? Stuart Weirdly, OK, so so I I actually wrote down as a quote, but not as a texture: “He was there all at once and with a look of tenure, as if he had been waiting. Always just beyond their field of vision and once let in would never go away.” Which was, I think, part of the extract you read out, right? I think that's one of the defining quotes of the book. I think it's so creepy. And then the the other thing that I've highlighted was going to be my texture was. “They were spotted, streaked and pitted with rust at all their joints, and the arms they stretched out to each other were naked, rusty wires. What fur remained was black with rot and green with moss and algae.” Adam I'm glad we anticipated you! Ren Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean strong textures, you've clearly got got an eye for textures. Stuart But I think the last one really gets to the horror of it for me that, you know, this idea that obviously even though their bodies are these mechanical bodies, it feels to me like body horror. Like it's thinking about how terrible it would be to have something like that happen to you, and how behind their layers of plush and and velveteen they’re just wires, you know, in the same way as if you strip back ones skin, you just bones underneath. It gave me the same kind of feeling. Ren Yeah. Particularly the naked rusty wires. Adam I think it's also there's that horror of not knowing where their essence resides, which is a human horror as well. Like when you try to meditate and work out where exactly your consciousness is. Oh, is it between bridge of my nose or is it at the back of my head. And it starts feeling very weird when you try to really delve into where the ‘I’ is coming from. Like I've mentioned before, something I really like in Henry Sellick’s works, like Coraline but also Nightmare before Christmas is this confusion about where the consciousness is coming from. So like with Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas, is he a singular being with a kind of single consciousness, or is his consciousness like a group consciousness of all the bugs he's made out of? And then when he falls apart at the end, does that mean his consciousness splits apart? Do each of the individual bugs have like a little Oogie Boogie in them? And the same as in Coraline, there's the other Mr Bobinski who's made-up of rats, and again, it's like, OK, where is he? Where's this selfhood coming from? And you get the sense with the characters in this, their sense of self being quite at odds often with their external appearance. There's a lovely and strange bit which is I think a character that's completely cut out of the film called Miss Mudd. The mouse and his child are at the bottom of the pond and Miss Mudd at first just seems to be a little kind of squiggly organism, basically. It says: “‘Maybe I could help you look”, said a small and gentle voice, and maybe you’d talk to me and and not eat me up. Would you, do you think, not eat me?’ 'We don't eat anybody,’ said the mouse child. ‘Where are you?’ 'Here,’ said the voice, ‘by your feet. I don't have anyone to talk to. It's depressing.’ 'Who are you?’ said the father. 'I don't know,’ said the voice. ‘I don't even know what I am. When I talk to myself I call myself Mudd. That’s silly, I know, but you have to call yourself something if you've got no one else to talk to.’ There was a stirring in the ooze at the mouse child's feet, and an ugly little creature rose up and leaned lightly against his leg. ‘What are you?’ it said. 'We're toy mice,’ said the child. ‘Is it Miss or Mr Mudd? Please excuse my asking, but I can't tell by looking at you.’ 'Miss,’ said the little creature. She was something like a misshapen grasshopper and was as drab and muddy as her name. ‘I’ll be your friend if you'll be mine,’ she said. ‘Will you, do you think? I'm so unsure of everything.’ ‘We'll be your friends,’ said the child. ‘We're unsure too, especially about the little dogs.’ 'I know,’ said Miss Mudd. ‘It's all so difficult, and of course everyone bigger than I tries to eat me, and I'm always busy eating everyone smaller. So there isn't much time to think things out. As she spoke she flung out what looked like an arm from her face, caught a water flea and ate it up. ‘It's distasteful,’ she said. ‘I know it's distasteful. I've got this nasty sort of huge lip with a joint in it like an elbow, and I catch my food with it. And the odd thing, you see, is that I don't think that's how I really am. I just can't believe I’m this muddy thing you see crawling about in the muck, I don't feel as if I am.’” And it turns out that - is she a Dragonfly? Yeah, in chrysalis or pupae. Stuart But again, when she hatches, even that moment is quite horrific. But then, you know, she does have this happy ending where she flies off as as this dragonfly. Adam Yeah. I mean, quite a lot of the characters actually do end up, delightfully, with fairly happy endings. But some of the minor characters definitely don't. I don't know if that's something that disturbed you as a kid, Stu. There's very much this depiction of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. Ren The weasels, for example. **Adam ** You'll find that minor characters are often dispatched, like Animals of Farthing Wood style. Stuart Yeah, it's very unafraid, particularly for a children's book, to just outright kill characters a lot. And what's interesting is that you know, you were talking a little bit before about the sentience of the clockwork and where that sentience originates, but the animals in the story actually think of themselves as above the clockwork — they don't think the clockworks are even really alive. They regard them as sort of robots or something like that. But the animals are also very mortal in a way that the clockworks have some kind of level of robustness or, semi immortality if you fix them. So the animals, the flesh and blood animals are constantly eating each other and killing each other. So I actually wrote down a list of them — I’m not going to read them all — but I've written a list of all the terrible violence. Adam Oh, please do. Stuart But it's really quite shocking. So on page 31, we have an explicit use of the word ‘slaves’, which isn't, I suppose, violence, well — it is in a way but nobody dies. Then on page 34, this is our first real death where Ralphie, who's Manny Rat’s useless sidekick is killed unceremoniously by being eaten by a badger. On Page 51 a very sympathetic child shrew character is killed by a spear through the throat. Which Russell Hoban explicitly details, that it’s through his throat. And that is very similar to Ridley Walker and this kind of sudden and shocking violence. There are other shrews killed during the shrew war as well. Oh, here are some lovely, haunting descriptions of the dead. “Their open eyes, fast glazing in the moonlight. The mouse child stared beyond his father's shoulder at the astonishing stillness of the dead.” This is after the aftermath of the shrew war. Then all of the shrews, even the victors, are suddenly killed by weasels. And then the weasels are both killed by an owl. Ren And the way the description of the weasels being killed, is “They nuzzled each other affectionately as they ran, and their heads were so close together that when the horned owl swooped down out of the moonlight, his talons pierced both brains at once.” Stuart Yeah, because these weasels, you know, again, the weasels are weirdly depicted in this quite sympathetic way where they're like a married couple and they're like, oh, this is a good place for hunting these delicious shrews. And so the perspective zooms up to the weasels who've just eaten all of these shrews, the shrews who are very violent and warlike themselves and are killing each other. But then your sympathy turns for a moment to these weasels who've just committed this shrew genocide. And then suddenly they get destroyed by this owl. And the perspective shifts to the owl. And then later on — I mean, I really can't go on because there's just so much of it. But it's it's as brutal as Watership Down, but explicitly a children's book. I thought particularly reading this is a child, some of the humour I got — like, you know, the dolls speaking in newspapers or the elephant being pretentious and house proud are things that did register with me as a child. But on page 62 there's a bit where a theatrical troop appear called the ‘Caws of Art’, caws spelt like — Adam (Richard Herring voice) — CAWS like a bird! Like a bird! Stuart Like a bird! Would you like to to explain that niche reference? Adam No, no, I have to make a reference to This Morning of Richard Not Judy every episode. So it's fine. Listeners should be on board with it by now. Stuart OK, but yeah, the Caws of Art, as in crows’ caws of art, are a theatrical troop who perform what appears to be a parody of Samuel Beckett. Adam What, you didn't get the extended parody of Endgame as a child Stu? Come on. Stuart No, I didn't at all. Obviously! Which turns out to have been written by another character in the book, which I think is the turtle at the bottom of the pond. Adam Yes, snapping turtle. Stuart There's a riot, there's more violence there. One of their performers, the rabbit, is killed. I'm pretty sure that quite a few of the rest of them are killed. The rest of the audience abandon themselves to the general riot and thereby purge themselves of all remaining pity and terror. A reference to Aristotelian catharsis. And of course, none of this you get as a child, obviously. Ren And this comes across completely inexplicable in the film. I think the film is quite faithful to the book, but in a way that makes it just quite bewildering on a number of levels because you don't get any of the context. And it's just a big platter of oddness. So I watched the film first and it was like: ‘Well that was very strange.’ Then I read the book and I was like: ‘OK, now I'm starting to understand what's happening’ and then watched the film again and it made a lot more sense. But just the film on its own is a very strange experience I found. Adam Yeah, I mean, one of the comments on YouTube referred to the play and the tin of dog food that inspires the play, so the play is called The Last Visible Dog. Um, and Ren, do you want to sort of explain what the last visible dog is? Ren Yes, so. So there's a can of Bonzo dog food, and it has, oh, I'm sure I wrote down a page number for the description of the Bonzo dog food. Oh, page 92 OK. I'll read the description of the dog food. “Bonzo Dog food, said the white letters on the orange label and below the name was a picture of a little black- and-white spotted dog wearing a chef's cap and apron. The dog was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which there was another can of Bonzo Dog food. And the label of which another little black-and-white spotted dog, exactly the same but much smaller, was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which was another can of Bonzo Dog food. And so on until the dogs became too small for the eye to follow.” Very much like the the Slush Puppy logo, actually. In the 90's the Slush Puppy cups had had another Slush Puppy cup on them and I remember sitting in a cafe and looking at the Slush Puppies on the Slush Puppy cup and trying to see the last the last visible Slush Puppy. So it's very relatable to me, but. Adam But you didn't write an existential Samuel Beckett like play called ‘The Last Visible Slush Puppy’. Ren No, no, I didn't. Stuart But obviously that's sort of philosophical exploration as a child was effective and it did strike me as being, you know, a thought provoking meditation on infinity and recursion and stuff. But obviously the things like the Caws of Art scene is supposed to be humorous, right? There's lots of bits of it that are humorous. I think they are quite funny. But the things with the cause of the Caws of Art scene in particular, the idea is that they're performing this philosophical play based on the last visible dog that is a sort of Beckett parody. And the idea is that they're performing it in front of these ingrate, rough and ready groundling animals who just turn it into a literal riot, which is quite a funny idea, but to me as a child, it just horrific and motiveless, very sudden violence. I didn’t get any of these jokes. Adam I think there's an autobiographical element to it as well, because reading Russell Hoban's Wikipedia entry it said his father was the director of the Drama Guild of the Labour Institute of the Workmen's Circle of Philadelphia. Stuart I'm sure they were a rough crowd, but I don't know if they ever actually murdered the performers! Adam Yeah, I mean, I don't know how how the Labour Institute of the Workmen Circle of Philadelphia responded to Samuel Beckett, but I did wonder if this was, you know, the young Russell Hoban seeing his dad put on Endgame in Philadelphia. And maybe that's how the crowd responded. Stuart I did find his background quite interesting because another thing I assumed as a child was that this was British. Like, it's got a very British sensibility to it. Adam Because it has, it does. That's why I said it remind me almost of Victorian literature. Obviously there's Alice in Wonderland aspects, like the sense of whimsy and dread, but also these little philosophical thought experiments that are peppered throughout it, which is very much like Alice in Wonderland, but also even Water Babies weirdly. And Water Babies obviously has this finger-wagging Christianity to it, whereas this is much more existentialist, but again, has these characters who are quite vulnerable and lost at sea. And pathetical, you know, pathetic in a kind of pitiful heart-string tugging way, being put out into the world and having to encounter these different strange characters. That just seems like a really English Victorian kids literature thing. Stuart And he did emigrate to England. So Ridley Walker is set in Kent, I believe, post apocalyptic Kent, but I think it is somewhere halfway between an American and a British sensibility. Although it is actually set in America, which I didn't realise as a child. But when you actually like look at things like the fauna, chipmunks and things like that, it's clear it must be America. Adam Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because I, I took George to see a film called Hundreds of Beavers a few weeks ago. Have you seen it, Stu? Stuart No! Adam It's thoroughly recommended. It's— OK. So it's done in the style of — You're not going to believe this film exists — it’s done in the style of the 1910s photoplay. OK, like an early silent film. It's set in Canada. And it's about it's about an apple jack salesman who gets drunk on his own cider and ends up lost in the woods. And to marry the love of his life, this woman, her father will only let him marry her if he brings him hundreds of beaver pelts. And from there on in, in the style of a 1910s photo play silent film, it goes into an adventure game/platformer style thing where you've got a kill count for the Beavers in the top right corner of the screen. And he's got to create Wiley Coyote-style traps from the objects around him to kill the beavers who are just people walking around in beaver costumes. Stuart OK, I think this sounds brilliant. Adam — Until he's killed hundreds of Beavers. It's very good. But having watched that, during the whole scene with the beavers and the beaver dam, I kept picturing it as this damn film. Basically. It's just quite distracting. But basically they come across this muskrat. They're told by the frog — we’ve mentioned the frog, he starts off as a kind of con-frog who pretends to be a fortune teller but seemingly has some kind of revelation — Stuart — Professor Trelawney thing where this person is a total fraud most of the time but has this one true prophecy. Which seems to concern the mouse and his child. Sorry, don’t want to interrupt your getting to the muskrat bit, but I am very interested in in what you thought of the philosophy or the theology of the film and the book, because I think that's very unclear as well or at least thought provoking. At least you know, maybe a bit in the eye of the beholder. Adam Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, that's why it sort of reminded me of like some kind of mediaeval allegory or morality play, but with a sort of strange existentialist bent. Stuart It's almost Christian, isn't it? Not in a very explicit way, more: here's the suffering you have to go through on earth in order to get into heaven. That's one reading of it. Adam The characters they meet, obviously, and the different sort of scenes or tableau they pass through. I guess I'm reminded of a mediaeval allegory, right, because of the way that they seem to stand in for the vagaries of human experience, right? All the different kind of modalities of human experience. So you've got the War with a capital W with the the shrews fighting, and then you have the Caws of Art, so you have art as well. And then you have philosophy. So they seem to move through these different, increasingly rarefied modes of experience and being in the world before they could reach the happy ending. But so on some level, it feels like some kind of Christian allegory. But it also does feel quite absurdist and almost like Samuel Beckett, just one damn thing after another. Like there's that line in one of Beckett's later works, “I can't go on. I'll go on”, it’s like that. So the impossibility of moving forwards, but then they still move forwards. Ren Yeah. I thought there was like an almost like a Buddhist resonance with contemplating infinity through the medium of the last visible dog and then the mouse child eventually realising there's nothing on the other side of nothing but us, there's nothing beyond the last visible dog but us. Stuart Almost on a literal level, they go through multiple lives, right? Because they keep on getting destroyed and put back together again. They go through these stages illustrating different parts of the experience that Adam was alluding to. So yeah, you could also read it as a Buddhist allegory, really. Adam But yeah, I could see as a child it must have felt really kind of weird and profound without always being able to make any sense of it. Stuart I still don't think I could really make any sense that it's an adult!I think it is almost nihilistic, you know, but then it has a happy ending and it seems to have like, true prophecy in it in a way that seems almost religious or spiritual in some way. It's very hard to pin down or put into a box what its grand philosophy of the world is, or what Russell Hogan's views on the world are. Ren I think the thing that I came away with from the book in particular is this quiet sort of dignity and perseverance of the wind-ups in their suffering and you know, eventually reaching this happy ending which is quite a thorough happy ending. Adam Unlike in the film, right, even Manny Rat is redeemed. Stuart Yeah, sort of. Is he though? Ren Oh, well. He was redeemed, then he lapses and then he's sort of redeemed again. Stuart For the benefit of the listeners, just to summarise, but they eventually find their way back to the doll's house, which has been abandoned. They manage to use their allies, their friends they've met along the way in order to fight a war against the rats who've taken it over and are using it as some kind of bawdy house or something. It's a bit of like the end of the Wind in the Willows where they take back Toad Hall. But they use all their allies to take this back and repair the house and everything like that. And all of the clock works get to live there happily. And Manny Rat gets to live there happily, even though he's the antagonist and he's a person they were fighting against. He gets all of his teeth knocked out. Again, in another sort quite horrific little incident, but he's this sort of broken rat who appears to be completely harmless, so they allow him in. And the mouse child with his infinite trust and goodness even refers to him as ‘Uncle Manny’ because he refers to all of these male friends as uncles. And Manny appears to be redeemed for a little while, but then he starts getting his old thirst for vengeance against these clockworks who've bettered him back and he comes up with this horrible plot to blow them all up — because he's a talented fixer and electrician. So he rigs the whole house to blow when they connect the fairy lights. But due to complete random chance, this plan is foiled. Something moves the gunpowder out of the way or something like that and the plan doesn't come to fruition. It only electrocutes him. He thinks this live wire is going to destroy the whole house by blowing the gunpowder, but it actually electrocutes him. And then he comes to consciousness. And at that point, he appears to be eventually redeemed and gives up this vengeance. He sort of takes it as a sign that he was not meant to get the vengeance and that he's meant to be living in harmony with them. But because it's Manny Rat you're never quite sure. Russell Hoban had an unfinished sequel called The Return of Manny Rat so maybe he's back up to his old tricks, who knows? Adam No, no, I don't think so. I think it's return of the good and kind-hearted Manny Rat. And Manny rat returns to spread joy and benevolence. OK, I won't ruin it for you. I'll let you believe that. But yeah, you can get hold of it though. There's a publication that collected some of Russell Hoban's novels, like some of his novels for adults, I think. And along with this collection is The Return of Manny Rat in its unfinished state. So I am quite intrigued. Ren And they decide to to make the house a hotel at the end and call it The Last Visible Dog. And they have a sign that has the the picture of the dog and then underneath it says “Migrants Yes” Which is just really lovely. I thought that was great. And so they welcome in all the migrating birds and it becomes a music venue and a theatre where the play The Last Visible Dog is finally performed in full and the snapping turtle comes out of the pond to see it performed and it's it's quite a lovely ending! Stuart And I believe the Caws of Art get through it in full without any members of their company being eaten or being brutally murdered. Yeah. Ren But all of that's quite truncated in the film, you don't get any of the Manny rat redemption stuff — Stuart — which kind of makes more sense as a narrative arc, right? It's a bit unwieldy, it's not a classic structure, right. But I also like that it leaves that ambiguity of not knowing if Manny's been fully redeemed. Ren I think we would be remiss to talk about the film without talking about the donkey. I just feel like it's important we get the donkey in there. Adam OK, so this is quite an early scene. Of proper children's horror, actually. So you were already talking about the horror of the clockwork animals being disassembled while still conscious and this is done to a pretty upsetting end early on in the film, where Manny Rat has a band of enslaved clockwork toys who he forces to scavenge for him. Ren And so we mentioned Coraline earlier, but there's this very Coraline echo where the mouse child sees this band of windups and says: ‘Papa are they wind ups like us?’ And the father says: ‘Not anymore.’ Which is also what's said about the Other Father in Coraline the film when he's turning back into a gourd. But yeah, the donkey, this is in the book as well, but it's more memorable in the film. The donkey says: ‘I just can't do it anymore’, you know, it's falling to bits and Manny Rat says ‘Ralphie, my boy, he’s spare parts unhinge him.’ And then we see shadows on the wall of the donkey being taken apart and the mouse child says: ‘That was horrible.’ Which yeah, yeah it was! I feel like I've seen that clip before in some kind of compilation of children's horror. Adam Yeah, yeah. The only other thing I wanted to mention from the film is we have mentioned briefly the muskrat, who was this working-class muskrat who become elevated or possibly has just become quite pretentious and irritating and has become this philosopher, who used to repair clockwork toys but says he's above this now and works in the pure realm of abstraction and ideas. But he resents the beavers who he sees as beneath him but who are able to do rather more and get stuff done. So the muskrat basically says that he'll help out the mouse and his child and help them become self winding, but only if they help him on this problem he's got, which turns out to be the problem of cutting down trees in order to beat the Beavers at their own game. And there's a song that the muskrat sings, I guess, or is sung about the muskrat, which is like baroque harpsichord music with this operatic voice singing bizarre logic philosophy nonsense. Ren Yup! Stuart I should watch the film. Ren Yeah. Yeah. It's only 84 minutes, it's pretty condensed. Adam As Ren said, it doesn't make much sense. It's pretty incoherent, but I can definitely see if you caught it on TV as a kid it would be one of those things where you would think for years later: ‘That can't have been real. I must have dreamt that. I must be misremembering that.’ Because the experience of watching it especially — I watched it after reading a fair bit of the book, but definitely like you said when trying to watch it without having read it, I don't think it makes much sense. Ren Because there's a lot of parody and play with words in the book and the film is also quite wordy, just, devoid of context. It's quite bizarre. Adam Well, yeah. There's a lot of puns, right. And these quite schizophrenic word associations at times, and playing on words. And in context you can make some sense of it and it's funny, but out of context when this is just dialogue characters are saying it's really confusing. Stuart You mentioned muskrat, in the book, I don’t know if this makes it into the film, where he has this cod philosophy thing where he will phrase things as equations, things like: dog minus how equals why. And things like that, right? As if this is some sort of formal logic, which is a funny joke and kind of makes more sense in the book. Although again, I guess it's something that probably confused me a lot as a child. But if the character in an animated film is just spouting that, I don't know if he just spouts that — Adam— he doesn't just spout it, he sings it! This is the stuff that becomes a song. So it's like: (Adam sings operatically) Dog times Why equals Howwww! Stuart Just to emphasise, this was marketed as a children's book. It's not a case like Watership Down or something where it's like often mistaken for a children's book, but I don't think it was published as one. It was marketed as a children's book. I've written down a little list of words: Chafing dishes, velveteen, cornices, guidons, catatonic, accretion, demiurge, warp and woof. I think this is one of those things where thank God for the ‘60s because I don't think that you would get away with publishing this as a children’s book now, an editor would make you take all of these words out and probably try and make you simplify the philosophy. And it's a weird one to categorise — Ren — Do we need the Beckett parody? In this children’s story? Stuart Can we cut the full twenty pages of Beckett parody from this? No, we cannot! What about this bit where they're stuck motionless at the bottom of the pond for six months just contemplating infinity. Nope, that’s staying in! Adam Yeah and it really slows down at that point. You really have to sit with them stuck at the bottom of the pond. It made me think a bit of Pinocchio at times and the Disney version. Stuart It fits in that place of stories about created people, you know? So there's Pinocchio, and it reminded me a lot of AI, the Spielberg film. And this is almost like a retelling of Pinocchio, it very much fits into that tradition. And you see it in earlier fairy tales and Pinocchio and things like that, you know, this homunculi, this created thing coming to life and this horror of well, we've said it before, you know, where is the consciousness? What's the moment of consciousness? It's very interesting at the start because it's very unclear as to when the moment of consciousness is. Whether it's the toy being taken out of the box or being wound — what's the spark of life? There is something existentially horrific about that. Adam What was interesting as well is that for all there's toys, we don't get any — Ren — Children. Adam Well, yeah, we don't really get any children. We don't get any happy playing with the toys. We get accounts of how the toys are disregarded, bust up, damaged, thrown away. It's almost like the opposite view that Toy Story has. Obviously in Toy Story it's all about, you know, the toys could only be self-actualized when they're somebody's toy, right? And the whole purpose of being a toy is to be loved by children, and that's what imbues them with life. Whereas here it seems like the worst possible fate for a toy is to be sold to a kid because they're probably just going to leave it outside to get rained on or throw it down the stairs or sit on it or something. Stuart Yeah, they get through the bit where the toys are abandoned really quickly at the start of the book. So they're in the lovely toy shop to begin with, then they get sold. We never hear about any children by name or even whether there are children in the household where they are. But they're Christmas ornaments, right? They're taken out every Christmas, the children are told not to play with them, they're delicate or whatever. They get put back in the box and this is quite horrific in itself, for six years or something like that. They have a long period which is dealt with in a matter of a few pages where they're only ever getting their moment in the sun for a couple of weeks a year and then they're getting locked away back in the attic. And eventually they get thrown out in the in the garbage by adults. There’s no children's love redeeming them in this, they only have themselves, you know, again, it's kind of humanist. I think that's where I landed with it. But it's almost like, the love of the child and the father and their love for the elephant who the child wants to be his mother, you know, and their love for all of their uncles who are this sort of motley crew of dodgy frogs and you know, people who wanted to eat them but were persuaded not to and stuff like that. I think that for me, ultimately that message, is kind of a message of self-sufficiency and that this is all there is and we may as well be kind to each other. Adam Yeah, there's a kind of hard won humanism, although not human, ‘toyism’ or whatever. Yeah. Or stoicism, I suppose. Like you said, Ren, there's a lot about them being dignified in their suffering. Ren Yeah. And right at the end it says. “The mouse and his child, who had learned so much and had prevailed against such overwhelming odds, never could be persuaded to teach a success course. Popular demand was intense, but they steadfastly refused. The whole secret of the thing, they insisted, was simply and at all costs to move steadily ahead, and that, they said, could not be taught.” Adam Yeah, so no easy answers, kids. It’s just got to suck! Stuart Do you think that's what's in The Return of Manny Rat? Do you think he becomes an influencer with a multi-level marketing scheme? Manny's protein shakes or something? He's selling rat milk to people. Adam Yeah, thank you for suggesting it, Stu, because I I don't know if it's one we would have come across otherwise. And yeah, it's a really interesting, really strange book. Ren Yeah. I really enjoyed it. And I feel like it should be more well known. I mean, I don't know — I'd never heard of it at least. Adam Yeah, you have to e-mail us American listeners if you'd heard of this before, because I don't know if this is better known, if this is like a children's classic in America and it's just not one that's as well known in the UK maybe. Stuart I think it's probably just too dark in the final telling, you know, for it to be mainstream. Basically. Ren I wonder if Robin Jarvis read this and was like right, hold my beer. Like because The Deptford Mice goes further. Adam “But what if after they died, the enemies wore their skins? That would be worse!” Stuart Yeah. I did want to, read one quote which was not from the book, but rather from a Guardian article about it, about somebody saying it's their favourite book they didn't read as a child. But the top comment was “People are always trying to tell me what a great book The Road is. And I always want to tell them that The Road is just a really boring version of The Mouse and his Child.” Adam Yeah, that's pretty accurate. I did like The Road. Did we see The Road together, Ren? Ren We did see The Road and we laughed for a full five minutes at the Coca-Cola product placement. Stuart I forgot that! Adam Is it as good as the Coca-Cola product placement in The Drifting Classroom? I wonder how many post apocalyptic films did Coca-Cola place products in? Stuart You know, everybody's got to make their way in the world. And even Russell Hoban’s taking bungs from the Bonzo Dog Food Corporation. Adam That's true. OK, well, let's wrap it up. Ren All right, I just wanted to shout out Alex on Twitter. Who said after listening to our recent Goosebumps episode, “Justice for Kruger and the Puppet Carnival.” Adam Awesome. Ren Yeah, yeah, I agree. Adam Hard agree. I'll give updates. You know I'm back to school in in just over a week so if Kruger resurfaces I will let everyone know. I hope Kruger hasn't been thrown out in a skip to go on his own Mouse and his Child-like Odyssey of suffering across Ipswich. Ren Intro music is by Maki Yawazaki, outro musics by Joe Kelly, artworks by Letty Wilson. I have the details in the show notes along with the transcript. Stu, you want to promote yourself at all to our listeners? Stuart I don't think I've really got anything to promote. I mean, this is not a work activity, but I probably should give a little bit of a bung to the company I work for: Failbetter games. We make games all set in this dark Victorian gothic fantasy universe called Fallen London. The titular Fallen London is a browser game that you can play for free without installing anything. And we also make sort of console and stand alone games like Sunless Skies, Sunless Sea and our latest Mask of the Rose, which is a romance game with a bit of murder mystery set in the same universe. Ren Excellent, thank you. Adam So I think Sunless Sea is my second top played game on Steam, or possibly third. It was after the Small World board game, which surprised me because I didn't think I liked it that much, but apparently I do. I think Sunless Sea is better, definitely much better and works really well when played to the Silent Hill sound tracks, I'll say. Though they’ve got good soundtracks though. Stuart They've got lovely soundtracks. But you know, the Silent Hill they're doing a full full HD remake. Yeah. Sorry, this is completely off topic. Adam No worries. OK, let's thank you for listening, everyone. Don't lose hope until you see the last visible dog! Ren Oh, yeah. Thank you for coming on, Stu. It's been great to have you here to talk about The Mouse and His Child. And I'll catch you later, spooky kids. Stuart Thanks for having me! Adam Bye!