Marianne Dreams, Catriona Screams

What stories scared you to death when you were a kid? Or even as an adult. Did you learn anything about storytelling from that?

It’s Eric’s day, but he was too chicken to write about this. Juuuuuust  kidding. I’ve got a guest  tomorrow (Edith Maxwell / Maddie Day – it’s going to be a great post) but I’ve also got a book coming out next week and this topic is perfect for it and for me. Hm, the two things might not be unrelated.

Links and details here

In The Dead Room, newly widowed Lindsay Hale (née Lord) comes home to the house where she grew up and where her brother still lives, and gets lost all over again in what the cover-copy writer called “the thickening mist at the end of memory lane”. Isn’t that great?

The Lord family home is a bungalow inside the gates of a scrapyard – Lord’s Will Provide! – where Lindsay and John spent a childhood making pirate ships out of garden sheds and time machines out of dentists’ chairs. Until John grew up and turned to his own secret places where Lindsay wasn’t part of the plan.

People often ask if I am my protagonists, if my heroines are me. Here’s a bit of proof that I’m not. John’s den, for him and his big boy friends, is a place he calls “The Barrens”, a name Lindsay doesn’t understand. Lord’s Yard is anything but barren! It’s stuffed to the gunwhales.

As John knows though (me too and Angela on Monday as well), “The Barrens” is a reference to a notorious spot in Stephen King’s fictional Maine town of Derry, where kids hang out who shouldn’t, where things happen that definitely shouldn’t. Lindsay has never read about it.

But I bet a lot of us have. Because so many of us read Stephen King at what someone recently – who was that? – called “exactly the right age. Which is ‘far too young’.” I was one of them. Danny Glick at the upstairs window? Yeek. And Neil and I still share a look if poor old Rachel, who’s nearly twenty, attempts a jump and muffs it.

On my laptop where she believes she belongs

But that was enjoyable terror. After Pet Sematary and Salem’s Lot, I went straight to The Stand, The Shining and the rest. I read the end of Dumas Key, all alone in my isolated Scottish farmhouse, during a powercut, by the light of a guttering candle. It was only when I closed the book, looked around and thought about going upstairs to bed, with the shadows leaping at me, that I reconsidered my choices. If memory serves, I phoned my mum.

But long before that there was a book that served me true terror, no enjoyment involved. It’s a kids’ book called Marianne Dreams, and searching for the jacket on Wikipedia yesterday gave me the absolute willies all over again.

Why? Marianne is a wee girl who’s ill in bed, amusing herself by drawing sketches of houses and people and trees and dogs, all the usual things. The trouble comes when she falls asleep, which is when the sketches – sprung to life – are waiting for her. She can walk in and out of the jagged, pencil doorways and talk to the stick-figure strangers. When she wakes up and scores through her drawings, all that happens in the next dream is that the people are stuck in the house, trapped behind those scored lines and screaming for help.

That book scared me for years. In fact, decades later, in that same farmhouse on a Scottish hillside but thankfully not alone this time, I saw a trailer for the film they made out of it and had a full-on panic attack.

Why? Well, I managed to go to sleep every night between the ages of five and fifteen only because I believed, tried to believe, worked at believing, that all scary things were imaginary and couldn’t do any real harm. Marianne Dreams, joining nightmares and waking reality with those thick, deep, pencil lines, threatened to destroy a very precarious, although functional, system.

And did I learn anything about storytelling? Oh, you know, this and that. Nothing that helps with Dandy Gilver or Lexy Campbell. But the standalones? Where all those women face down demons and triumph in the end? Or at least gain peace, purpose and found-family? What are they but me insisting that the scary things are imaginary – after all I imagine them – and so they’re powerless. I’m in charge now. I love watching all these women find their way through the Barrens and out the other side, before I send them off into their futures.

I hope anyone who goes back to the scrapyard to vanquish demons when The Dead Room comes out next Friday enjoys this latest journey too.

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