And the answer is. . .

This chirpy chap is, of course, Edgar Alan Poe. He is a writer most people have heard of without having necessarily read his work. If you haven't read his short stories, then you really should. I would recommend The Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson or the Tell-Tale Heart to get you going. Edgar in Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is named in his honour and Pitch in Tales of Terror from the Black Ship is a deliberate homage to the great man.

This is H H Munroe, who wrote as Saki. His short stories often feature child protagonists who are tormented by maiden aunts, just as Saki was as a boy. Unlike Saki, though, his characters wreak their revenge.

This is Robert Louis Stevenson. I am a huge fan of all his work, but The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is what gets him a mention here. Again it is a work that everyone 'knows' without having necessarily read it. If you haven't, you should.

This is the great M R James, sitting in his study at King's College, the scene of his Christmas Eve ghost story sessions. That's King's College Chapel through the window. Uncle Montague is named in his honour and he set a kind of gold standard for the art of telling creepy stories.

This woman should be instantly recognisable given the incredible fame of her creation. She is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and teenage author of the amazing Frankenstein.


This is another person whose face really ought to be more recognisable than it is. He is Bram Stoker, author of Dracula.

Name that author

I was on another school visit today - to Parkside School, here in Cambridge.

Parkside sits next to the big green space of Parker's Piece and is the school my son now attends. I was doubly pleased therefore to find that the children were incredibly attentive and well-behaved. It was an early start - my first session was at 9.40am - and it was horribly hot and stuffy, but they were great. Thanks to all the children and staff, particularly Ms Minett and Ms Andre for organising the visit and looking after me so well.

Of course, my PowerPoint didn't work here either. After much Googling I have discovered why: you have to have the movie clips in the same folder as the PowerPoint and reinforce the links by erasing the clips and then reinserting them. Sounds more trouble than its worth, mind you.

I read The Black Ship from Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, as it is a story about storytelling and you could have heard a pin drop both times. I then went through some of the slides in the Powerpoint. I showed the children some of the authors who have inspired me to write creepy stories. They are at the top of this post.

See how many you can recognise.

Answers tomorrow. . .

Night of the hunter

Another hot and sweaty day, made all the sweatier by my being sat over a computer - or rather two computers.

My laptop has finally come back from Dell. Having replaced the DVD drive some time ago, they have replaced it once again, replaced the touch pad, the hinge with its touch sensitive buttons and the microphone socket. They also replaced the hard drive so I have spent all of today replacing the software they wiped when they took it off.

And when I wasn't doing that I was looking at my PowerPoint show and trying - with the input of my son - to figure out why it seems to work perfectly well on my computer at home. It must have been the computer at Oundle, I figured and rejigged it for my talk at Parkside School tomorrow.

I watched Night of the Hunter last night. I bought the DVD ages ago but have only just got round to watching it. Night of the Hunter had a big impact on me when I first saw it - I'm not sure how old I was. The sequence of the children drifting downstream in that boat has stayed with me all these years. It is magical - more like animation than live action. Charles Laughton sadly only directed this one movie. The critics hated it and he never recovered from the disappointment.

Night of the Hunter is always teetering on the edge of going completely over the top. Robert Mitcham's performance is bizarre (but fantastic at the same time) and the filming is so stylised it is almost like a silent movie from the German expressionist era. This is emphasised by the presence of silent screen star Lilian Gish as the force for good who stands in the way of Mitcham's demonic preacher. If you haven't seen it, I'd urge you to grab a copy and see something truly original.

Oundle

I went to Oundle School today, in Oundle, Northamptonshire. It was a horrible drive - very hot and along the hideous A14 for a lot of the way, with its roadside billboards stating just how many people have died in accidents in the previous months.

I had never been to Oundle before. It is a pretty little town that had a bit of a Cotswold feel about it. The school library I was visiting is in the churchyard of a lovely spired medieval church. All rather different to my own school experience I have to say.

I gave a talk to a large group of Year 7 and Year 8 children. I had spent a lot of time on a PowerPoint presentation and had made little videos in Photoshop and embedded them in the slides. It was going to be amazing.

But of course it didn't work.

I still went through the slides and the talk went well enough. The children seemed engaged and certainly asked a lot of very good questions. But it was annoying all the same. The thing is, you just have to forget something like that and move on. Never make your whole show based on something that might not work. You have to be flexible.

After the talk I signed and sold copies of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship and then did a couple of workshops in the library. We talked about creepy stories and how they work and what kind of things you have to consider when writing one. Then we tried to come up with one.

I had a chance to have a brief chat with a boy whom my son used to know when we lived in Norfolk, but missed his twin brother. It was lovely to see him and triggered a bit of nostalgia I have to say.

All in all a pretty intensive morning but it is always a privilege to meet bright children and hear what they have to say. A pleasure too to meet another great librarian in Leigh Giurlando, who I had assumed from the name during our email conversations to be a man, but is in fact a woman - and an American at that. As always I feel I have to point out how lucky any school is to have a good library and person like Leigh who knows about and cares about books.

Once again - librarians rock.

Booktrust teenage prize

It is very hot and sweaty here in Cambridge. Or at least it is hot and sweaty by Cambridge standards. Victorian terrace houses are not made for such conditions and become insufferably airless very quickly. Adding a glass-roofed extension – as has been in done in this house – only exacerbates matters.

I am blaming the heat for my addled brain today. Every task I have set myself has proved too much for me and I would have achieved as much had I sat with my feet in the Cam all day. Except I would have been cooler. And happier.

On the upside, I heard from Ian Lamb, via Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury, that Tales of Terror from the Black Ship has been longlisted for the Booktrust Teenage Prize. We find out next month if it has made the shortlist. Fingers crossed.

You brought them into the world. . .

We watched The Orphanage tonight. Here is the trailer, with the most ridiculous voice over you are ever likely to hear. It was a good film - though I'm not sure the story would bear too much analysis. There are so many horror movies in which children are the threat; so many in fact that it must surely point to some deep-seated fear of children.

The Innocents (based on the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James) has creepy children in it, as does Village of the Damned (based on the Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham). The 1970s M R James adaptation, Lost Hearts, absolutely freaked me out when I saw it, with its blue-skinned ghost children. The Omen revolves around the sinister boy/Antichrist. The Shining has a sympathetic child (who is creepily gifted) but also has scary twin girl ghosts. The Ring has that terrifying boggle-eyed girl ghost.

As well as The Orphanage recently, there has been Let the Right One In with its girl vampire and I saw a trailer for a what looked like a spectacularly awful horror movie actually called The Children. It had the unintentionally hilarious tag line (adopt gravelly voice): You brought them into the world. . . .Now they will take you out.

Cripes!

It is all of interest to me, of course, because I have been writing so many creepy stories with child protagonists. It is different though. These movies seem to tap into an adult fear of children not behaving as children should. The children in the Tales of Terror books are often reprehensible, but they are usually victims of creepiness, rather than creepy in their own right - at least at first.

It is harder to sell a story to a child on the basis that children are inherently creepy, for some reason.

Rocking in the free world

I watched the film of Atonement yesterday. I am still not quite sure what I make of Ian McEwan as a writer, but I certainly enjoyed the novel when I read it. But watching the movie, I found myself wondering a lot of the time what someone would make of it had they not read the book. I'm not sure it stands entirely on its own merits.

That said, the tracking shot of the chaotic scenes on Dunkirk beach was great. My father was at Dunkirk, so I am always interested in trying to visualise that event. Ian McEwan wasn't there of course and neither was the director, so authenticity is a moot point. It felt right, is the best you can say. The film as a whole just seemed a bit rushed though, somehow. It is nearly always the case that a novel has too much going on (if it's any good) to be easily translated into a movie.

Not that I would want to put anyone off who is thinking of making a movie out of one of mine.

I caught a bit of Neil Young's set on the BBC's Glastonbury coverage. Neil Young's stage persona always reminds me of an orangutan who has just found an electric guitar and can't quite decide whether to eat it or mate with it.

I don't mean that in a bad way, you understand.