The mask

The Mask was the original title for Through Dead Eyes, and for good reason - the whole story hinges on an antique mask that Alex buys when walking round Amsterdam with Angelien.

The mask I had in mind was a wooden Japanese noh theatre mask.  Hanna's father was a Dutch merchant with trading links to Japan and brings it back with him.  Through Alex, it returns to the house he lived in with his daughter - the house that is now the hotel in which Alex is staying with his father.  It is via the mask that Alex makes contact with Hanna - and she with him.

Whether the mask was cursed before Hanna wore it, I will let you decide when you read it.

Publication day

Through Dead Eyes is now published by Bloomsbury.  I have had copies of the book for a while now and I have already moved on in my mind, editing the next book and writing the one after that.  But publication day is still very exciting.  Any writer who doesn't find it exciting is possibly in the wrong business.

So what is Through Dead Eyes about?  I have already said a little about how and why I came to write it, but I have said very little about the plot.

The story concerns a teenage boy - Alex - who visits Amsterdam with his father.  His father is a writer and in the city hoping to get his history of Amsterdam during the Second World War made into a documentary series.  But we quickly learn that there are complications.

Alex's parents have separated and Alex has not adapted well.  He has had some trouble at school and he and his father are doing their best to avoid talking about it.  Added to which his father's editor in Amsterdam - Saskia - is an old girlfriend from his university days.  Saskia's daughter, Angelien is roped into being Alex's guide whilst Saskia and Alex's father talk business.

Angelien is older than Alex, intelligent and attractive.  They become closer as they start to investigate the mystery behind a strange Japanese mask Alex feels compelled to buy at an antiques market, and Alex starts to fall for her - despite the attentions of her aggressive boyfriend.

The mask has something to do with Alex's sense that he is not alone in his hotel room.  When he puts it on he sees the world as it was in the seventeenth century.  More than that, he sees the world through the eyes of the girl who used to wear it - a girl called Hanna.

And it is a very dark world indeed. . .

Good news, and bad...

Yesterday I was very pleased to learn that Mister Creecher had been shortlisted for the UKLA Book Award.  I know I say this every time, but there are so many books out there, so many really strong writers, that it is a real honour to be singled out in this way.  A big thank you to all those involved in choosing it.

I was still glowing from this news when I heard, today, that once again I have failed to make it from longlist to shortlist for the Carnegie Medal.  I am hugely disappointed, of course - but I don't intend to stop writing any time soon, so I just have to hope my time is yet to come.  This was the third time one of my books had reached the longlist, and that in itself is very gratifying.  Good luck to those who have made it onto the shortlist.

World book day

I did a World Book Day event yesterday, at the Cambridge International School just down the road from me.  If you are reading this outside of the UK and Ireland you will be confused.  We decided against having World Book Day on April 23 when everyone else celebrates it, despite it being a UNESCO idea.  I'm not really sure we have much of a claim to calling it World Book Day, but it is such a good cause that no one ever seems to complain.  It does miss the point of the whole world joining in, though.  The reasons seem to revolve around the idea that schools may be closed because of the shifting nature of the Easter school holidays and the fact that it is St George's Day.

I'm not sure why St George's Day is incompatible with World Book Day and April 23 is also cited as the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, which seems to make the day more suitable, not less.

Anyway, my World Book Day event was fun.  I arrived to watch teachers in costume recommend books to their students, who were also in costume - and that is rare in a secondary school.  We had some readings and even a little acting, and then I had eight minutes or so to sum up my career, explain the plot of my latest book, do a reading and take questions from the audience.  It was all a bit of a blur and then I was back in the car and back home.

Through dead eyes

A package of advance copies of Through Dead Eyes arrived in the post the other day ahead of the publication day on March 14.  I thought I'd tell you a little more about why I wrote it.

The first and most obvious thing about the book is that it is the first book I have done for Bloomsbury that has a contemporary setting.  Why?

Well, much as I love writing books that have a period setting - and I have no intention of stopping doing that - I know that for some young people (possibly many young people) the period setting is a turn off.  A Victorian setting requires a certain language level to make it believable, it requires descriptions of things that no longer exist and of which the reader may have no prior knowledge.  It is inevitably 'old-fashioned' - it has to be.  For some children, that is enough to put them off.

I am not saying that I am chasing readers.  That way madness lies.  many young people will never read a horror book, whatever the setting.  But it is also interesting for me, as a writer, to see if I can create the same atmosphere without recourse to a period setting.

As with so many of my books and stories, Through Dead Eyes was sparked by my response to things created by other people - things that affected me deeply and stayed with me.

When I was at school we had an English text book called Voices - a very eclectic mix of drawings and photographs, poetry and prose.  I have a memory - although I do not have the book to prove it - that in one of the Voices editions there was a detail from Bruegel's Children's Games which focused in on the strange mask in the window at the top left of the picture.  I found - still find - that image disturbing, every time I revisit that painting.

I also have a very strong memory of watching the BBC adaptation of Schalken the Painter from the late 1970s.  The whole thing seemed to exist in deep shadow and carried with it the strange otherworldly atmosphere of so many interiors and portraits of the Dutch Golden Age.

Then there is movie Don't Look Now of course.  The canals of Amsterdam are blacker than the canals of Venice on a dull day.  Although the layout of the town is not so maze-like as Venice, Amsterdam is still a perfect location for a ghost story, full of atmosphere and history.  There is a little homage to Don't Look Now in the book, for those who know the movie.

So I knew I wanted to set it in Amsterdam and I knew I wanted it to have a link to the seventeenth century - the Dutch Golden Age - and those black-clad merchants who stare out from the paintings in the Rijksmuseum.

But I also knew that I wanted to deal with a boy's awkward attempts at relating to the opposite sex.  I wanted everything to be in a state of flux - I wanted him to have no solid ground at all.  This is common in psychological chillers for adults, but I wanted to try and put some of that emotional confusion into a book for teenagers.

Copying

I was drawing in a café in Manchester, when I was a student there, many years ago.  A girl of about eight or nine wandered up and looked at what I was doing.  She looked at my hand drawing and she looked at the people I was drawing at the other side of the small basement cafe.

'Can't you draw without copying?' she asked.

That has stayed with me ever since.  For her - like most children - drawing was all about sitting and retreating into a private world - of trying to make your imagination come alive through drawing.  My own son would spend hours at a similar age, drawing complex battle scenes or fiendishly complicated plans of imaginary houses.  Very little thought was given to how well rendered these things were.  They were simply ways of recording the thoughts in his head.  They were functional.

Of course, I didn't see objective drawing as 'copying', even though - in a way - it is.  The subject matter is given to you.  It's one of the things that appeals to me about it - the freedom from invention.  Freed from the pressure to invent, I can just relax and enjoy the accidental arrangements that occur in real life - the way one object partially conceals another, the way hair falls, or clothing creases.

I used to carry my sketchbook everywhere, sketching friends, the corners of rooms - whatever was in front of me at the time.  Over time, as my illustration career and painterly pretentions kicked in, I decided that sketching was all a bit blasé.  I became more and more dissatisfied with the drawings I did and more and more sceptical of the reasons for doing them at all.  Real artists didn't sit about sketching, for goodness sake!

Looking through some sketchbooks from college, I was struck most of all by how thankful I was to have done them and to have these reminders of those I loved and of the places we lived and worked.  But I was conscious too that I had lost some of the confidence I showed in those drawings.  It had been replaced with a doubt - a doubt I think I persuaded myself was the authentic sign of a true artist.

When I write, I am interested in what makes the character I am writing about specifically that character and not another.  I am very, very concerned about setting - about the particularities of the locations that I choose.  I will often set a story in a very specific location.  Even when I have not named it, I still usually know in my head where it is.

When I write, I invent the plot but use actual locations, historical detail and observations of the world around me to make that invention real for the reader.  I think I need to do something similar when I paint and illustrate.

And I think I need to get back to the joy of drawing for pleasure.

The turn of the screw

I went to see the The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida the other day.  As I mentioned a long time ago, we are trying to get a play based on one of my books - Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth - off the ground, and so it was a research trip as much as anything.

It was fascinating to see.  There is a trend at the moment for this kind of effects-based theatre, full of appearances and disappearances, sound effects and thrills.  This was the first I had seen and by all accounts it is not as strong as The Woman in Black production, for instance.

I know the story reasonably well - and was encouraged to revisit it on the way home on my Kindle.  I know it best through Jack Clayton's 1960s movie The Innocents, which improves, in my opinion, on the book.  Film allowed for a much more naturalistic performance from the young actors and also allowed them to be genuinely young.  Miles is ten in the story, but was much older here, with a man's voice.  It was understandable, given how much of the story they have to carry, but it did detract.  It was harder to imagine Miles as the beautiful innocent, corrupted by Quint.

The effects were good, in the main.  But it did inevitably become all about the effects, with people craning their necks to see where the next appearance was coming from.  The set revolves so much in the second act that it is in effect a roundabout.

It was also a strange atmosphere.  A little like a pantomime for grown-ups, with people coming for a good time.  And The Turn of the Screw is quite a serious plot to house that kind of fun.  As Gemma Jones as the housekeeper described Quint's depravity, the man next to me chuckled loudly - and he wasn't alone.  The script seemed to have become a connecting device to prepare us for the next jolt.  I don't really know what to make of it, except that it simply did not carry the psychological threat and menace that the story should have.  There was no ratcheting up of tension as there should have been.

Interestingly, it was pointed out to me that although The Turn of the Screw begins with the story being told to house guests and then read to them from a manuscript of the tale told by the governess, we never return to that wraparound story.

This is quite odd.  The man who tells the story was clearly in love with the governess at the centre of the story and when he meets her she is a governess at another house and apparently completely normal. We don't hear what the storyteller thinks of her after he reads the manuscript, nor do we hear what the guests think of it.