When I was a kid, Lewis Barnavelt was one of my best friends.

We were introduced by Mercer Mayer. Mayer had done the illustrations for a series of books featuring one of my other best friends, J.D. Fitzgerald and his older brother T.D., The Great Brain himself. I had pretty much exhausted my relationship with J.D. (though I would, of course, revisit our shared early adventures pretty regularly) and was looking for a new companion in my elementary school library when I stumbled across The Figure in the Shadows. The artwork was familiar, Mercer Mayer at his best, and a description of the book sounded promising -- if scary -- so I knew I had to check it out, both literally and figuratively. The trouble was, The Figure in the Shadows was the second book in the series, and I knew, even at that young age, that you had to start with the first, even if it had pictures by some guy named Edward Gorey, rather than Mercer Mayer.

That night, I devoured the first three books in John Bellairs' series, and met the boy who would change my life: Lewis Barnavelt.

From our first meeting, Lewis and I seemed destined to be friends. After all, we had a lot in common. I wasn't an orphan like he was, but I was growing up in a small town much like New Zebedee, where Lewis is sent to live with his Uncle Jonathan as The House with a Clock in Its Walls begins. (Truth be told, my hometown bore absolutely no resemblance to New Zebedee, but why let a little thing like objective reality interfere with a new friendship with a fictional character?) More importantly, Lewis and I were both loners, given to reading and moping, fairly unpopular with our classmates, poor at sports and a little, well, chunkier than we should have been. And we were both cursed, oddly enough, with "purple corduroy trousers, the kind that go whip-whip when you walk."

It was easy for me to become friends with Lewis; I didn't even have to imagine it. When you're that age, the friends you make in books are more real than people in the "actual" world... I'm not sure that feeling ever changes, to be honest, but that's a thought that might require therapeutic intervention if I pursue it much further.

I will say this, though: friends like Lewis Barnavelt? J.D. Fitzgerald? The Three Investigators? Meg Murry and her brother Charles Wallace? Those are some of the best friends I ever had: always there for me. Always willing to hang out. Reliable. Resolute. Wonderful.

As I grew up, though, I didn't treat them particularly well. I discovered girls, and other friends, like Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone and Paul Atreides from Dune. I kind of forgot about Lewis, and his Uncle Jonathan, and their neighbour Mrs. Zimmerman, and, of course, Rose Rita...

I forgot, that is, until I had child of my own. I was wandering through the kids' section of a bookstore when we were on holiday and was stopped in my tracks by a chunky hardcover collection of those first three John Bellairs' novels: The House With a Clock in Its Walls, The Figure in the Shadows, and The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring. Of course I bought it. And of course, that night, when everything was quiet, I read those books.

I had forgotten just how scary they were. Bellairs apparently wrote the novels with adults in mind, then shifted the language somewhat to suit younger readers, while doing nothing to curb the at-times overpowering dread. And I had forgotten a lot of the specifics, of course: I had spent thirty-odd years reading horror novels, and the sounds in the walls and the curses on the jewelry had, I admit, blurred together a bit. I did realize, though, that it was the Bellairs novels that gave me my first taste of horror, and, in their way, shaped my future career. And my nightmares.

And my friend Lewis was there, on the first page, riding that bus into New Zebedee, wearing his purple cords and freaking out about the future.
​
He might not have known where he was going, but for me, it felt like coming home.

Robert Wiersema

BIO
Robert Wiersema is the author of five books, most recently the short story collection Seven Crow Stories. But he also worked in bookstores for over 20 years, coordinated author events for Victoria, B.C.'s Bolen Books in Canada and is one of the country's busiest book reviewers.

In a complimentary feature to Our Festive Fifty series of articles, we are proud to bring you The Books of Their Childhood, Where authors tell us about their favourite book or books from their childhood.  Today we feature contributions from Kate Harrison, Moira Fowley Doyle and Jeremey De Quidt

With Christmas fast approaching and the dread of all that Christmas shopping ahead of you, why don't you let Ginger Nuts of Horror take some of the pressure of you? With our four part guide to purchase horror books suitable for your precious ones.

Our Festive 50 is designed as a buying guide for parents who would love to introduce their younglings to the horror genre, but who might be a little concerned with exposing them to something that might distress them too much.  The books featured here have all been vetted and deemed suitable for teenage readers.   So read on for the final part of this massive countdown of the best YA horror fiction out there...

As  complementary feature to our exciting Festive 50 countdown, we bring you The Books of Our Childhood.  

We all have that one book that we hold dear to our hearts.  That one book that stands out in the mists of our memories as the book that first ignited our passion for reading.  For this reviewer, the book that springs to mind is Douglas Hill's The Galactic Warlord.  Yes on hindsight it was clearly cashing in on the Star Wars craze, but this tale of the last of a species of humanoids who thanks to generations of training and selective breeding became the most feared fighting force in the Universe. However, unlike so many other examples of this the Legionnaires as they were known as where a force a good, fighting tyranny and corruption throughout the cosmos.  Which is why The Galactic Warlord decided to wipe them out, with only Keill Randor surviving the initial assault but dying from a lethal dose of radiation, he is picked up by a mysterious race and cured of the radiation poisoning and given an indestructible skeleton and an enhanced healing factor.  

You can all stop shouting "Wolverine" from the cheap seats.  To a kid in growing up in St Andrews, it would be another 15 years or so before Wolverine would even make an appearance.  

The scope of this series of books and their simple moral code fanned the flames of an already burning desire to read.  Even now after close to forty years since first opening the pages of the books I still think about them.  Keill Randor I salute you. 

Read on to discover what other books have inspired some of our finest YA authors.  

With Christmas fast approaching and the dread of all that Christmas shopping ahead of you, why don't you let Ginger Nuts of Horror take some of the pressure of you? With our four part guide to purchase horror books suitable for your precious ones.

Our Festive 50 is designed as a buying guide for parents who would love to introduce their younglings to the horror genre, but who might be a little concerned with exposing them to something that might distress them too much.  The books featured here have all been vetted and deemed suitable for teenage readers.  

And as a special treat for you stressed out parents there is a handy click to purchase from Amazon.com and Amazon UK feature at the end of each of these articles. 

​ 
I remember my first residential school trip was both exciting and terrifying. We went to Humphrey Head, a windswept pinnacle overlooking Morecambe Bay. It was a somewhat bleak place where a young girl’s imagination could run wild. Our headmistress, an imposing, authoritarian woman, announced that she was going to be reading a bedtime story to the girls' dormitory. Surprisingly, she chose "The Whitby Witches" by Robin Jarvis. I'd class this as a horror novel, and probably not something I would have chosen to read to a group of excited, nervous girls just before bedtime. Nevertheless I am indebted to her for introducing me to this book which still remains a firm favourite.

She stood next to my bed as she read, so I had the demon dog on the front cover staring at me. Now, I am terrified of large, black dogs; yet, when the trip was over, I found myself going into a bookshop to purchase a copy since she didn’t finish the story. I needed closure, mostly because I need to know that the black dog was defeated and unlikely to come after me. I devoured that book, its sequels and all the other books Jarvis had written as well, but nothing comes close in my heart to “The Whitby Witches”.

The illustrations were a particular attraction because they were drawn by the author himself. I'd been able to dismiss scary pictures before since they were merely someone else's interpretation of the story. Having illustration by the author though gave the pictures and the story a terrible veracity, as if Jarvis had seen them in real life and simply copied them down. 

Chorlotte Bond has a special festive Gift for you all with her 13 for Christmas click here to read a special series of daily spooky stories for Christmas 

If memory serves, it took me a bit longer to take to reading than one might expect of someone who grew up to be an author. By and large I found myself uninterested or unimpressed with the gamut of available material fiction-wise, and there were still a few years to go before I would discover the likes of Stephen King as an adolescent. I dabbled with the Hardy Boys and Laura Ingalls Wilder (who I came to appreciate as an adult), but nothing truly seized me by the collar and hurled me face-first into a nascent love of literature like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ​

 
I thought that coming up with my favourite book as a kid would be easy. I'd write about my first favourite book and that would be it.
 
My first favourite book was: This Can't Be Happening At MacDonald Hall, written by the now very popular Gordon Korman. MacDonald Hall was Gordon's first book, written in 1978, when he was twelve years old.
 
Let me say that again: he was twelve years old. My first novel, The Skids, just came out and I'm forty-five. Sigh.
 
Nonetheless, I read the book when I was eleven and decided that if Gordon could do that at twelve, then, hey, me too. And I did. I wrote a novel when I was twelve. You will never read it. It's uh…well, it reads like it was written by a twelve year old. Still, it got me started on the journey I'm still journeying today, so I figured: great, that's what I'll write about. Good old Bruno and Boots.
 
But then I remembered Hitchhiker. ​

I remember my father reading the Weirdstone to me as a child. I didn’t read it myself until recently – I think I was afraid to, even, to spoil the memory of hearing it read. But scenes from it, the language, the sense of the world it creates…. these things stayed with me from childhood. Shaped my own writing, the way I’m trying to capture not just people and actions but the pyscho-geography of a world. There’s a section in the Weirdstone where the children are crawling through the mine tunnels beneath Alderley Edge, attempting to escape the Morrigan. The memory of that scene still makes me shiver. Claustrophobia. The terrible fear of darkness, of being crushed. The blending of the real world horror of these old mine workings where men have sweated and risked their lives with the folklore horror of what might be living down here in the dark beneath the ground.

The Weirdstone is a classic good versus evil fantasy, whereby two children hold it in their hands to save the world from the powers of dark. Its world is an eclectic mixture of Norse, Saxon and Celtic tradition, replete with wizards, elves, dwarves, goblins, trolls (female trolls, please note), prophecies. The language is the strange, entangled, poetic language of dark age literature, of Beowulf, the Mabinogion, the Gododdin, the Eddas. The enemy is ‘the Great Spirit of Darkness’. The warrior hero’s sword, gloriously, is called Widowmaker. There are some truly awesome fight scenes.

Yet these tropes exist within a vivid depiction of the Cheshire countryside and of rural mid-twentieth century working-class life. Garner is, indeed, pre-eminently a writer of the landscape. The places in the Weirdstone are real places. The mishmash of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic elements, Victorian romantic invention, ill-defined local ghost stories, is the real way in which folk tradition works. This isn’t the clean, courtly, well-defined world of High Fantasy. This is the numinous, dirty, ambiguous world of folk belief. There’s a haunting passage where the children are fleeing across a wintery landscape where scarecrows, ramblers, crows all seem to be spies pursuing them, even the trees seem a threat. The danger is there present in the landscape itself, is uncanny yet mundanely real. Who hasn’t felt like that, walking a country road alone at dusk? Garner loved the landscape of Cheshire, knew its legends, its history, the deep-rooted relationship between people and place, and the Weirdstone is saturated with this. Good wins in the end – this is a children’s story, after all. But one is left with a lingering sense of unease. Things are not ‘explained’ or even really resolved. We have witnesses one brief moment in a longer story of the old powers of the earth, that exist just beneath the veneer of the human world.

The Weirdstone is also a powerfully gendered book. Our hero is female, the girl Susan who guards the weirdstone itself. The weirdstone was stolen by a man; women, by contrast, protect it, keep it safe. The central force of good, the wizard Cadellin Silverbrow, is male; he guards the sleeping knights who are England’s last defence against the dark. Opposing Cadellin is the Morrigan, the war goddess of Irish mythology, Morgause/Morganna King Arthur’s nemesis, here, fascinatingly, portrayed not as the seductive enchantress but as the scald crow, the hag, the woman whom men fear because she is not sexually desirably, because she cannot be sexually objectified by men. The Morrigan is the villain of the book -  yet in my memory she is something other, an image of disruptive, ‘dirty’, uncontrolled female power in opposition to the clean, ordered, quasi-fascist masculine world of knights and kings. I found myself half on her side, listening to the story as a girl, and I still find myself half on her side now.

The Weirdstone can only considered ‘dated’. Its Cheshire dialect must be almost unintelligible to the Manchester wealthy who now live on Alderley Edge. The rural world it evokes is gone from most children’s experience – was gone, indeed, before I was a child. Alan Garner himself has described it as ‘a bad book’. But I will never forget hearing it read to me. It helped to shape my love of folklore, of the British landscape, and of epic fantasy.
 
Anna Smith-Spark’s novel The Court of Broken Knives will be published by HarperVoyager in June 2017. It is the first volume in the major new epic fantasy series Empires of Dust.
​

Anna Smith-Spark lives in London, UK. She loves grimdark and epic fantasy and historical military fiction. Anna has a BA in Classics, an MA in history and a PhD in English Literature. She has previously been published in the Fortean Times and the poetry website www.greatworks.org. Previous jobs include petty bureaucrat, English teacher and fetish model.
Anna’s favourite authors and key influences are R. Scott Bakker, Steve Erikson, M. John Harrison, Ursula Le Guin, Mary Stewart and Mary Renault.  She spent several years as an obsessive D&D player. She can often be spotted at sff conventions wearing very unusual shoes.

Find out more about Anna at her website "Court of Broken Knives", on Twitter and on Facebook 

The Court of Broken KnivesWe live. We die. For these things, we are grateful.
The Court of Broken Knives is the first book in the major new grimdark epic fantasy series Empires of Dust. It will be published by Harper Voyager in June 2017, available in the UK and worldwide in hardback and e-book format.
​
The Court of Broken Knives has already been compared to the works of R. Scott Bakker, Ursula Le Guin and Mary Renault. It has been described as ‘lyrical’, ‘powerful’, ‘gripping’ and ‘particularly bloodthirsty’ by early reviewers.  Pre-order a copy here