Mean creek

Following on from I'm Not Scared and The Boy With the Striped Pyjamas, I thought I'd talk about another couple of movies I watched recently that have child protagonists but are not made for the children's market.

Again there are similarities between the two. They both feature a group of young people separated from their small town community by the adventure they set out on. In one, the adventure is to find the dead body of a child. In the other they are intent on punishing a bully. Both movies feature troubled and dangerous older brothers and young men. Both movies try to show how children behave together, when apart from adult society. They are both set in Oregon.

Mean Creek is a movie that I was keen to see when it first came out, but which, like so many others, I missed and have had to watch much later on DVD. I actually bought the DVD some time ago, but it sat on the shelf because, to be honest, I was a little nervous of it, imagining it to be more violent than it actually is. It is superbly written, shot, cast and acted.

The theme of the movie is bullying, but had it been made for children - with that lucrative 'provoking-discussion-in-the-classroom' category in mind - then it would have been far more concerned with delivering a 'message' of some sort. Because it was made for adults it allows itself to be a much more complex and thought-provoking movie. It is more honest.

How many stories or movies feature an odious bully who gets his comeuppance? It is a device that must go back to the dawn of storytelling and is incredibly common in children's fiction. What is clever about this film, is it takes that simplistic wish-fulfilling notion and turns a spotlight on it. What exactly would that mean in the real world? What is a bully anyway? If you pick on a bully, what does that make you? Does a victim have to be nice for us to care what happens to him?

The bully is unpleasant and almost wholly lacking in our sympathy. And yet, because he is a child - and a child with his own problems - and we know that he is being set up and we are (hopefully) not bullies ourselves, we can't help but fear for his safety. Jacob Aaron Estes doesn't make the bully reveal himself to be lovable. That would have been too easy.

The tension in the movie is almost unbearable. We share the tension of the other children who are in on what they believe is a prank, but we also know that this is headed towards a far darker climax than that.

It is an essay on the limits of vigilantism, whether the target be an odious school bully or an odious Iraqi dictator. There is a wonderful line in A Man For All Seasons where Thomas More says he would give even the Devil the benefit of the law. His interviewer has said that he would 'cut down every law in England' in pursuit of the Devil. 'And when the last law was cut down,' says More, 'And the Devil turned on you - where would you hide?'

Justice is there to protect the accused, but also to protect the accuser should the tables turn. It is also there to protect us from ourselves.



I remember really enjoying Stand By Me when it came out and I enjoyed it again this time. It is from the novella The Body by Stephen King. I haven't read The Body - though I keep meaning to - but I do know that Rob Reiner made several important changes.

For one thing, he changes the location - from King's beloved Maine, to Oregon. Sadly he also softened the story quite considerably. Admittedly the resulting Tom Sawyerish quality is a big part of its considerable charm.

Keiffer Sutherland's character is the main problem for me. Leaving to one side the fact that his appearance makes little concession to the 1950s - he looks like he has stepped straight out of a 1980s pop video - and that he has clearly been rehearsing his Jack Bauer cocked head, staring psycho shtick for far too many years, Sutherland's character is not allowed to have the level of threat that the delinquents in Mean Creek have. Ace seems more like Biff from Back to the Future.

In Mean Creek you feel the older characters are capable of anything. You need to believe that for the story to work. In The Body, the boys return to a vicious beating - surely the realistic consequence of having pointed a gun at the local hoodlums. Fingers and ribs are broken. In King's story, those bullies are real. In the essentially nostalgic and sentimental Stand By Me they are simply another version of the scrap yard dog - another trial to be overcome. It is that very seductive myth of the little guy standing up to the big guy and coming out on top. They still stand up to the bullies in The Body, but in the novella they have to suffer the consequences. Perhaps that simply doesn't have the same box-office pull.

Having said that, the cast of children play their parts very well. River Phoenix is a particularly charismatic presence and the opening and closing narrations concerning the subsequent lives and deaths of the other characters seem now to have an even more poignant edge to them.

CDs of terror

This arrived in the post today. It is the BBC Audio version of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship. Bill Wallis did a very nice job of reading Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, so I look forward to hearing this.

I'm not scared

When I saw Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart the other day, I was telling them both about a few DVDs I had watched recently. The common theme was that they were movies with a child (or children) as the protagonist(s) without actually being made with children in mind as viewers.

You can probably think of many, many movies and books where this pattern is followed - it is actually a very common device. After all, there is a strong autobiographical aspect to literature (and therefore to the films made from books) and childhood is such a vivid experience to draw on for all kinds of reasons. But I thought that over the next couple of days I'd look at some I have watched recently.

Such movies (and books) interest me because I think there is often a marked difference in the way a movie is made depending on its audience. I don't simply mean that there is less violence or sexual scenes or swearing or whatever - I more mean that there seems to be a difference in the approach. Sometimes this is because there is perhaps a greater allowance for ambiguity in a work intended for adults, but often it is simply a question of what is considered believable or realistic.

Recently I watched two DVDs with a very similar theme. They both are both adaptations of novels, set in the past and dealing with a boy who does not fully comprehend the level of danger and threat to another boy with whom he forms a bond. In both stories, the fates of the boys become intertwined with shocking results. In both books, the world of adults is seen as full of duplicity and violence.

My wife had read Niccolo Ammaniti's novel I'm Not Scared and bought me the DVD of Gabriele Salvatores' movie for Christmas. I had not read the story and had not noticed the movie at all for some reason. It was great to watch something where I had no prior expectations. I can't recommend the novel (though my wife does) but I can certainly recommend the movie.

It is set in the late seventies in the heel of Italy during that crazy time in Italian history when there seemed to be a kidnapping every five minutes. It is beautifully shot and acted and quite apart from the riveting plot, it just seems very honest and true about childhood itself. It seems to grow naturally from the experience of being a child - from that world of game-playing and secrets.


I should say straight away that I have not read John Boyne's bestselling novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I have only dipped into it. My son read it for school and so I bought the DVD of Mark Herman's movie for him. But as truthful as I'm Not Scared seemed to me, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas seemed unbelievable on so many levels.

My son said straight away that it seemed implausible that an eight year-old (with a high-ranking military father) would not know who Hitler was. At eight? In fact I think I'm right in saying he is nine in the book. Would any nine year-old in Germany not know who Hitler was? Would he really not know whether he was a Jew or not? The ignorance of the boy in I'm Not Scared seems believable and true, whereas the ignorance in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas seems only to be there to facilitate the 'twist' at the end.

I have many problems with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and I'm far from being the only one. But apart from issues with the plot, the way the movie was directed was so oddly flat.

Childhood is evoked brilliantly in I'm Not Scared, with wonderful shots of running through wheat fields and cycling down dusty tracks. The camera is right among the children and - for me certainly - it felt like an impossible memory (given that I am sure that I did not grow up in the south of Italy). But I did grow up in those mobile phone-free days when a bicycle was the only thing you needed for a great adventure.

I'm making I'm Not Scared sound nostalgic, but it certainly isn't. It is also sharp and dark. It just feels real. The children seemed like I was at that age - and like children I know now. Friendship is often the concern of children's books, but this story picked up on the fact that children often form little groups and gangs without necessarily liking each other at all. Circumstances bring them together - geography, school, parental friendships or whatever and they form loose, wary, often edgy groupings that get more edgy as the children concerned get older.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and I'm Not Scared are both about the loss of innocence, but strangely, given that it is intended for children, the loss of innocence in the former is connected with the boy's mother, not the boy himself. She comes to understand exactly what kind of man her husband is. But the boy remains innocent of the true nature of the camp and is in no position to learn from the experience.

And even the 'innocence' that is lost seems open to question here. Could you really live next door to an extermination camp and be oblivious?

Turkish tales

I received this in the post from Bloomsbury. It is the Turkish edition of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror published by Tudem. It is particularly exciting to have a Turkish edition, because one of the stories - Jinn - is set in south-east Turkey.

Setting is a big part of a story for me. In short stories it is often the thing that sparks the idea. Sometimes I simply want to set a story in a certain location and it is that decision that gets the whole thing started.

I travelled in Turkey many years ago, flying to Istanbul, getting a ferry along the Black Sea coast to Trabzon (the seat of the Byzantine Empire of Trebizond), and then down through the country to Erzerum, Van and then to Dogubeyazit, Diyarbakir and Urfa. To be honest, any one of those places would (and possibly will) make a vivid setting for a story, but it was a little village near the Syrian border that came to mind when I was writing this book.

Urfa, held by Muslims to be the birthplace of Abraham, is where the story Jinn begins and has a scene at the sacred carp pools with a cat is snatching roosting swallows - a scene that was simply drawn from life.

We did not witness a violent death when we went to see the ancient village of Harran with its beehive-shaped houses, but we did encounter some very aggressive children.

One girl in particular took great exception to the fact that we had no sweets to give her (tourists had made sweet-toothed beggars of the village kids) and threw stones as we walked away. That incredible place and those fierce children stuck in my mind and eventually became the basis for Jinn.

More Dutch tales.

Further to yesterday's post, Bloomsbury got in touch yesterday to say that Pimento, my Dutch publisher, wants to take Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. Which is great.

I have also been asked to talk at the Bloomsbury sales conference next week. I get ten minutes or so to sell myself and my books to the sales people. It's very nice to be asked, if a little daunting.

I will probably still put a word in for the Tales of Terror books, because they are still very much out there. Tunnel's Mouth is out in paperback in October and all three are going to be repackaged at some point (more about that nearer the time).

But of course, this year's book is The Dead of Winter, which is coming out in October (twinned with the Tunnel's Mouth paperback). It will be good to get back to that book, having been caught in between promoting Tunnel's Mouth and writing next years book.

Top hats and tales

Sarah Odedina from Bloomsbury emailed this to me. It is the Dutch bind-up of the first two Tales of Terror books. I'm not sure whether that makes it more, or less, likely they are taking the third, but it looks good doesn't it? I love the look of that word verschrikkelijke by the way.

I met up with Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart in Cambridge today. They were in town for an event at Heffer's, organised by Kate Johnson. I caught up with them before they were booked to go on and then joined my wife and son for something to eat before heading down Trinity Street to the bookshop.

We ended up walking behind some King's College School boys - from the choir I think. In top hats and gowns. Cambridge is a bit like that. I am constantly aware of another world going on that I am removed from - the world of the public schools and the University. I constantly toy with the idea of setting something in Cambridge that will deal with this idea of a secret world running parallel to the mundane one the rest of us inhabit. But whether small boys in top hats will feature, I couldn't really say.

Paul and Chris were on good form. I envy them the mutual support of a double act. It works well and they obviously feel very relaxed. Chris draws and Paul reads the odd extract and waits patiently while Chris completes another interruption. They play off one another like a couple of old jazz musicians.

It was well-attended, like all Heffer's events, and we left them signing books for a very long queue of of their fans. Chris and Paul are two of my favourite people and I wish them well with their new book, Wyrmeweald, which is out soon.

As for me, Philippa, my agent, has just confirmed an offer from Bloomsbury for my new book proposal. The provisional title is Mister Creecher, and I will tell you more about it over the next few months as I write it. For now I will simply say that it is strongly related to my recent blog fixation with Frankenstein. . .

Is he man or monster?

When I was a teenager I drew all the time. I tended to respond to anything I saw or read by doing a drawing or two. These were often no more than doodles. I remember doing something a little more finished for Frankenstein though - it was an ink drawing with a colour wash over it and it was heavily influenced by that Signet Classics cover.

The creature was in silhouette against a night sky with a full moon behind. I don't have access to that drawing now - it is in one of many folios that remain in storage - but interestingly, I revisited the image when I came to do roughs for the cover of Redwulf's Curse - the third of the Tom Marlowe mysteries. My original idea was to have the mysterious guardian of the barrow standing alone in the marshes. I was persuaded that this was too stark at the time - but I still prefer it to the one I eventually did.

By the time the cover reached the finished version it had gone through so many tweaks that it had lost the quality it had at the beginning. A lot of the book plays on the fear of desolate places and the image had lost sense of that somehow. The book was eventually repackaged with a completely different cover anyway.

This is the drawing of the creature that graced the frontispiece of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. It shows the moment where Victor looks at his work and recoils in horror. Note the skeleton under the creatures legs. And the lack of stitches.

The great American illustrator Lynd Ward decided to show the scene where Victor wakes to find the creature looking down at him through the bed curtains. His illustrations were published a few years after the James Whale movie, but as you can see, his is a very different creature from Karloff's, again with no signs of having been cobbled together from spare parts.



Bernie Wrightson used a very similar image in this more recent illustration for the novel. Wrightson's creature is even more muscular than Lynd Ward's and not surprisingly comics had been quick to see the potential of Frankenstein.


Stan Lee's The Incredible Hulk is a clever cross between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein, but the latter probably had the bigger influence - not only in its fear of science but also in the way Jack Kirby was clearly influenced by the movie representation of Frankenstein when he came to draw Bruce Banner's alter ego.


In the early 1970s - when I was discovering Frankenstein as both movie and novel, Marvel even used Mary Shelley's story as the basis for a series of comics with the creature as the main character - Monster of Frankenstein (later Frankenstein's Monster).

When I was on the Foundation year at art college, in 1976/7, we had to submit a proposal for a graphics project and mine was to do a graphic novel treatment of Frankenstein. I was told - quite rightly - that it was too big a job for the time allowed. It was more of a 2nd Year project. And by the time the 2nd Year came round, I had other things on my mind.

A big part of my desire to do that project was the urge to tell the story exactly as Mary Shelley had written it. Now - thirty-odd years later - I'm not sure that I have the same need to be true to Mary in that way.

I tell my own stories now and though my fascination with Frankenstein has never dimmed - and the idea of of doing a graphic novel of the book still appeals, I find I want to respond to the book in a more oblique and personal way.