*** Competition: WIN a pile of books from HarperCollins

I feel like I should be christening March 2012 as HarperCollins month as they have so many great titles being released, every one of them a potential contender for my book of the year. Thanks to their almost overwhelming generosity I have a copy of each of their big titles that are coming out this month to give away, and you could be the lucky winner of a copy of each of the following:


Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda
Department 19: The Rising by Will Hill
Freax and Rejex by Robin Jarvis
The 13th Horseman by Barry Hutchison
 

To enter all you need to do is answer the simple question below and add your details to the form. The first name drawn at random after the closing date will win all four books. Deadline for entries is 8pm GMT Monday 19th March. This competition is open to UK residents only.

Contest open to UK residents only.
Neither the author or I will not be held responsible for items lost in the mail.
I hold the right to end a contest before its original deadline without any prior notice.
I hold the right to disqualify any entry as I see fit.
I will contact winning entrants for their postal address following the close of the competition. Winners have 48 hours to reply. Failure to do so in this time will result in another winner being randomly selected.

*** Interview with Robin Jarvis (author of Dancing Jax)

Yesterday I posted my review of Dancing Jax, the new novel from the brilliant Robin Jarvis. I have been a fan of his work ever since I read his Wyrd Museum trilogy, and I loved Dancing Jax, and so I was really chuffed when Sam at Harper Collins asked if I would be interested in hosting a Q&A with him.

How would you describe your book Dancing Jax to potential readers?

Not for the faint hearted. If you don't like scary books, this isn't for you. If you’re brave enough though, it’s about an old children’s book, which was written by one of the most evil men ever to have lived and what it does to you.

What was the original inspiration for Dancing Jax?

Believe it or not (and even I’m still sceptical even though it happened to me) I dreamt the very last scene in every detail. It’s the only time that's ever happened but it gave me everything I needed, the title of the book, the characters and their names and other key "ingredients". I had to jump of bed and write it all down straight away - I got 2 and a half pages of synopsis out of it. It freaked me out a bit.

This is obviously the first book in a series. Do you know how many books there will be in the series and have you planned them out already?

Yes, there will be 3 in total, I've almost finished the 2nd one and I know what'll happen in the last.

I think the Ismus is one of your creepiest characters to date. Did you have fun creating him and is he based on anyone you know?

Again I can't really claim any credit for him. He was there in the dream, fully formed - and fully dressed! I just filled in a bit of shading.

I loved the passage in Dancing Jax where the Ismus justifies his actions to Martn Baxter. Did you intend for there to be an element of social comment in the story when you started writing it?

Oh absolutely, and I agree with the Ismus in that the modern world is ripe and ready for the power of Dancing Jax. It wouldn't have been anywhere near as effective if it had been distributed back in 1936 as Austerly Fellows originally intended.

Your Wyrd Museum trilogy and Dancing Jax contain elements of British folklore. How do you go about carrying out the research for your work? Are you a ‘collector’ of folk tales?

Its an area that's always fascinated me and when I was young I received big encyclopaedias on the subject every Christmas. For some reason though our folklore is seen as uncool and something to be sneered and giggled at so people look to other countries for theirs instead. I've never understood that.

Having read a number of your books I would guess that you are a fan of horror and fantasy. What are your favourite books and/or authors from these genres?

I'm never really sure what the term "horror" means. It’s different for everyone, isn't it? Some "horror" writers can't wait to get to the blood and guts, which just puts me right off because I don't think its particularly interesting or original. I'm a lover of good, inventive storytelling that keeps you on the edge of your seat and if the writer can make an impossible thing plausible then that’s the best hook for me there is. M. R. James did that all the time.

Which books/authors did you read as a child/teenager? How do you think they compare with the children’s/YA books available today?

Alan Garner, Lucy Boston, Tolkien, Susan Cooper to name a few. I don't actually read much YA fiction today, because I don't want to be influenced either way by what other people are doing. From what I've absorbed osmotically though I'd say the older books had an innocence to them that just doesn't exist any more, which is very sad.

What scares you?

Many of my books deal with loss of personal identity and a lack of control. That frightens me. Dancing Jax is all about that.

Your books are very dark. Have you ever come up with something so wild that you scared yourself?

Haha - I never think of my books as being dark, but people tell me they are so I guess they must be. I just try to put my characters into frightening situations, if that's dark then okay. I think of them as scary thrillers though.

When I'm writing the frightening scenes I'm right there with the characters and have to make myself scared by whatever it is they're going through in order to write them. It’s the same with the sad parts - I'm always making myself cry.

Some people think that horror writers must be a little weird to come up with their stories. Would you agree with them?

There’s that "horror" label again, I wouldn't really class myself as a writer of "horror", but then some readers might, I suppose. As for "weird"... yes okay I am a bit. I write at night till about 5am so that’s not really normal I guess - whatever "normal" is.

If you were to have a dinner party and you were able to invite any three people alive or from the past, who would those three people be and why?

Ooh, tough question. Umm... I'd have loved to have met the young Elizabeth I, she was an absolute genius, then Victoria Wood because no one has made me laugh as consistently as she has over the years and Al Bowlly to give us a song after the dessert because he had such a mournful, haunting voice.

I am not the only one who feels that Deathscent was brilliant. Are we ever likely to see a continuation of the Intrigues of the Reflected Realms?

Oh thank you for that! I loved the world of Deathscent and had the second book all worked out and ready to write but circumstances in the real world got in the way and it never happened, unfortunately. I still intend to write it one day though. It begins in the uplifted French court of Catherine de' Medici where a council of learned scholars from across Europe have gathered to debate various matters concerning life and theology of the floating islands but most especially what to do about the increasing shortage of black ichor for the mechanicals. Adam o' the Cogs and the Tizzy are there, accompanying Dr Dee and Lantern. Also present is the Spanish Ambassador, on a nefarious intrigue of his own, and a mechanical the like of which no one has ever seen before.

I know Dancing Jax has only just been published, but is there anything you can tell us about the second book in the series?

Sure! It begins a few months after Dancing Jax has been published and the whole of the UK is in its power. Well, not quite, there are still a tiny few over whom the words of Austerly Fellows have no power. This is the story of what happens to those aberrant children.

Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you would like to say to readers of The Book Zone?

First of all, thank you for asking such good questions! Secondly, I hope everyone enjoys reading Dancing Jax. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it and I hope that comes through. I suppose I should end with "Blessed be", but that might be too creepy...

~~~

Huge thanks to Robin Jarvis for taking the time to answer my questions. If you are a big fan of the author then I imagine that like me you will be keeping your fingers firmly crossed in the hope that the sequel to Deathscent will one day see the light of day. In the meantime though, get out and read Dancing Jax - it is released today and in my opinion it is his best book so far (although I should remind you that I have not read any of his Deptford stories - see my review of Dancing Jax for my reasons).

Review: Dancing Jax by Robin Jarvis

At the end of a track, on the outskirts of an ordinary coastal town, lies a dilapidated house. Once, a group of amateur ghost hunters spent the night there. Two of them don’t like to speak about the experience. The third can’t speak about it. He went into the basement, you see, and afterwards he screamed so hard and so long he tore his vocal cords.

Now, a group of teenagers have decided to hang out in the old haunted house. Dismissing the fears of the others, their leader Jezza goes down into the basement… and comes back up with a children’s book, full of strange and colourful tales of a playing-card world, a fairytale world, full of Jacks, Queens and Kings, unicorns and wolves.

But the book is no fairytale. Written by Austerly Fellows, a mysterious turn-of-the-century occultist, it just might be the gateway to something terrifying…and awfully final. As the children and teenagers of the town are swept up by its terrible power, swept into its seductive world, something has begun that could usher in hell on earth. Soon, the only people standing in its way are a young boy with a sci-fi obsession, and his dad – an unassuming maths teacher called Martin…

If Stephen King were to write a book for young adults then I would imagine it would be something very much like Dancing Jax. Although in an interview that Robin Jarvis has done for The Book Zone (coming tomorrow) he suggests that he doesn't see himself as a horror author, this book is as chilling as anything the great King has published. Reading it certainly made me feel the same as I did when I first read 'Salem's Lot, which was very nervous indeed. I don't scare easily these days, and I totally love horror films, but both of these stories had me feeling on edge pretty much from the first chapter.

I have now been sitting staring at my screen for an hour trying to come up with words that describe this book. The blurb at the top of this post says a lot about the plot, and I feel that saying much more could not so much create spoilers, but in some way diminish reading enjoyment anyway. I think this is because the plot seems unique to me; I certainly don't think that I have come across anything similar in YA literature before. The beginning of the story suggests a fairly standard horror story of ghostly/demonic possession, but Robin Jarvis very quickly dispels any thoughts that his story will be as straightforward as this. And I'm still struggling to work out the best way to describe it. To call it a horror story would, I feel, do it an injustice as it is so much more than that. Similarly, to call it fantasy does not feel right. It is a brilliant hybrid of all the best elements of horror, fantasy, fairy tales, folk lore and even social commentary, and somehow Robin Jarvis has blended all of these ingredients as if he were a master chef cooking a perfect five course meal for a panel of the world's most hard-to-please food critics.

The story revolves around a book, the (almost) titular Dancing Jacks; a book created by a truly evil man - the supposedly long missing and presumed dead Austerly Fellows. This book has the power to 'convert' anybody who reads it into a devotee of the Ismus, but not in the brainwashed cult way that we see occasionally in the media today. These converts start to believe in another world, where the Ismus is lord and master, and each new follower has a specific role to play, based upon a deck of playing cards. Therefore, we have the likes of the Jack of Diamonds, the Jill of Clubs, the Queen of Spades as main characters in this fantasy world, and the lower numbers become serfs with menial tasks. And they genuinely all believe that this world exists, thanks to the malevolent magic that permeates from the book, corrupting all who read or hear its story.

I think the element I found most disturbing is that the first people who are targeted by the Ismus are the children of the secondary school on the fringes of Felixstowe. Like a clever drug dealer, the Ismus gets the book into the hands of a few and this very quickly snowballs, with 'addict' after 'addict' falling under the spell of the evil book. And before too long, so are the adults. Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive as I spend a big part of my life encouraging young people to read, and yet in Dancing Jax it is this very activity that becomes their downfall. How disturbing is that? And possibly slightly unnerving is the fact that Robin Jarvis's Dancing Jax is almost as addictive as its fictional namesake - I just did not want to stop reading it and found myself reading well into the night, and then rushing home very tired from work the next day to get it finished off.

Going back to my earlier assertion that this work is similar to that of Stephen King, I think I feel this way because of the way in which Robin Jarvis builds his story. Like King, he focuses on the minutiae of the day-to-day lives of the people of this part of Felixstowe: their hopes and fears, the way they interact with each other on a daily basis, the way they deal with tragedy. In doing so we 'meet' a huge array of characters and therefore we really do not know who is going to be the hero of the story who will eventually thwart the plans of the villain. Just as I thought it would be one particular character the plot would twist, they would fall foul of the Book's magic and become another one of the ever growing legion of Ismus devotees. This also means that just as you get attached to and start rooting for a character your hopes are violently dashed and your character allegiance has to shift. I remember thinking exactly the same thoughts as I read 'Salem's Lot, as first one member of the town became a vampire, and then another, and another, although because of the way that book opens we always know that Ben Mears is likely to be a survivor.

As I was reading Dancing Jax I couldn't help but feel that at times Robin Jarvis was commenting on how our society has degraded over the last few decades. These thoughts were confirmed by one of my favourite passages in the book, which comes towards the end as the Ismus arrogantly justifies the magic of the book and his actions by preaching:

"There are no children in this world any more. You dress and treat them as mini-adults. You let little girls play with dolls that look like Berlin prostitutes. The morality and hypocrisy I used to find so stomach-churning no longer exists. You foist on to your young people role models whose brains are never as active as their underwear, and whose talents and achievements extend only as far as the bedroom door and the ability to blurt every detail of what happens behind it. You give your precious offspring access to a lightning-fast network of corruption and danger. You immerse them in computer games far more violent than the most savage and dirty war, and target prepubescents with inappropriate music and imagery - giving them a vocabulary that would have revolted sailors back in my day. There are not stigmas, no taboos, no boundaries, no respect and certainly no innocence left. To be pregnant at thirteen is no longer an everlasting shame, merely a career choice." 

Perhaps the Ismus is correct, and Dancing Jacks is the only solution to today's social problems? Scary thought.

Confession time: I have never read any of Robin Jarvis's Deptford books. I know I may be missing out on something fantastic (in fact friends have told me that I definitely am), but as I have stated on here before, anthropomorphic animal characters do absolutely nothing for me. I am therefore unable to compare his latest offering, Dancing Jax, with any of the books in that series, although I have a feeling that this book may be more in keeping with the chilling themes he explored in the fantabulous Wyrd Museum trilogy, and the almost as brilliant Deathscent. It is certainly not a book for younger readers, who may be put off by its 535 pages anyway, but I know many teen boys and girls who will totally love Dancing Jax. One word of warning though - I hadn't realised that this is the first book in a series (more to be revealed in the interview with Robin Jarvis), and as such I was expecting it to come to a natural conclusion. I couldn't have been more wrong - cliffhangers don't get much bigger than the one at the end of Dancing Jax.

Dancing Jax is officially released in the UK tomorrow, and my interview with Robin Jarvis will go live to coincide with this. My thanks go to the generous people at Harper Collins, who not only sent me an early proof of the book, but also a signed finished copy with it's stunning book cover design.

Review: Tales From The Wyrd Museum Trilogy by Robin Jarvis

The Woven Path: In a grimy alley in the East End of London stands the Wyrd Museum, cared for by the stranger Webster sisters -- and scene of even stranger events. Wandering through the museum, Neil Chapman, son of the new caretaker, discovers it is a sinister place crammed with secrets both dark and deadly. Forced to journey back to the past, he finds himself pitted against an ancient and terrifying evil, something which is growing stronger as it feeds on the destruction around it. Dare to enter the chilling and fantastical world of the Wyrd Museum in this first book of a compelling trilogy.

The Raven's Knot: Brought out of the past, elfin-like Edie Dorkins must now help the Websters to protect their age-old secret. For outside the museum's enchanted walls, a nightmarish army is gathering in the mystical town of Glastonbury, bent on destroying the sisters and their ancient power once and for all...

The Fatal Strand: Something has come to disturb the slumbering shadows and watchful walls of the forbidding museum and Miss Ursula Webster prepares to fight to the death with the strange new threat. Neil Chapman, caught in the unforgiving Web of Fate, is drawn into the battle, but is there really anyway he can stop the tide of time and Doom? 

______________________________ 

Robin Jarvis is best known for his Deptford Mice books but personally I feel that the Wyrd Museum Trilogy is by far his best work to date. To be perfectly honest, his other books have never really appealed to me that much - I'm just not a huge fan of stories that feature talking animals as the main characters. If you have read any of these other books by Mr Jarvis and feel the same as I do then don't let that put you off reading this trilogy...... they couldn't be more different. These are fantasy books that have been written to scare the pants off you!

The first book in the trilogy, The Woven Path, sets the scene perfectly. The premise is not a new one - boy and his younger brother move into a strange and exciting place (in this case a very unusual museum) as their single-parent father has a new job there. However, the story soon takes a very different direction from normal, with Neil, the main character, making a scary journey back in time to WWII London during the Blitz; a journey involving a toy possessed by the spirit of a dead airman and a battle against a fearsome ancient demon.

Whilst The Woven Path is pretty creepy, the second book in the series, The Raven's Knot, takes this to a new level. It takes quite a lot in a book to scare me, but this one left me feeling very uneasy throughout and has some genuinely terrifying scenes, featuring the spine-chilling crow dolls and the menacing Valkyrie. For me this is the best book of the trilogy - it develops the characters further, and we also begin to find out what part the Wyrd Museum and its strange owners, the Webster sisters, have to play in protecting the world from a demonic end. It also leaves us with a nail-biting cliffhanger, and I challenge you to not reach straight for the third book to find out what happens next!

The final book in the trilogy is a great end to the series, with yet another horrifying villain called Jack 'Tick-Tock' Timms. In this book we get even further character development, including the chilling descent into complete insanity of one of the Webster sisters. On top of all of this, Neil and his friends have to try to prevent the end of the world despite even the museum itself seeming to turn against them.

The pace of the narrative in all three books is excellent, and you really will not want to put them down. Neil, our hero, is very realistic, and his dialogue, actions and emotions throughout the stories are all very believable. There are also many elements of Norse mythology 'woven' throughout the story which may encourage readers to carry out further investigation into the ancient tales which these books use as a foundation. 

Just one final warning...... if you are easily scared then it is probably best not to read these books just before you go to sleep; elements of books 2 and 3 in the trilogy especially have a habit of creeping into your dreams and turning them into nightmares.  

Chuffed to bits!

I am really chuffed that Jon Mayhew, author of the forthcoming Mortlock, has taken the time to add a comment to my review of I Spy. Jon's first book is due to be published by Bloomsbury on 5th April 2010 according to Amazon (just in time for my birthday) and judging by the artwork for the cover and the synopsis I have already put it on the list of books to buy for the school library next year.

I love this cover, and I have already registered my vote and left a comment at the brilliant Mr Ripleys Enchanted Books blog. I wrote:

"Mortlock definitely wins it for me. Firstly, the colour - not enough green is used to give a feeling of horror on book covers thse days - but look at some of the genuinely scary film posters from the last few decades - Alien! The Fog! Rosemary's Baby! All green! And then there's those terrifying bird images. They immediately brought to mind the genuinely creepy book The Raven's Knot by Robin Jarvis! I think the whole concept of being chased by a giant, flesh-eating bird is pretty damn scary and the image on this cover portrays that feeling perfectly."

And having just made a quick visit to one of Jon's blogs I have now seen the brilliantly creepy promotional video for Mortlock which has made me want to get my hands on this book even more. Roll on April!