Review: Buried Thunder by Tim Bowler

When Maya strays into the forest, she walks straight into a nightmare.

It’s not just the horrific discovery she makes among the trees, it’s what’s waiting for her at home. Something too terrifying to believe in. She’s not even sure she believes it herself.

Perhaps she’s going mad—only imagining the sounds in the night and the feeling of being stalked. Maybe she didn’t see anything in the forest after all?

And there’s another question: what was she doing there in the first place . . . alone . . . at dusk? All she knows is that the eyes of a fox drew her there.

They will do so again.

Love horror? Getting a bit fed up with vampires, werewolves, zombies and the blood and gore their stories often contain? Well 2011 could be the year for you then, as there are a number of more traditional haunted house, ghost and psychological horror stories on the horizon. I have already featured Cliff McNish telling us about his forthcoming title The Hunting Ground, and I have just finished reading an early proof of a totally spinechilling book called Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough. But the first chiller I read this year, which is also the first of these to be released, was Buried Thunder by the brilliant Tim Bowler, officially published by OUP on today.

Tim Bowler is a name that should be up there with the likes of Darren Shan, William Hussey and Charlie Higson, but for some unknown reason he has yet to make the leap to stella stardom that these other horror authors have made. Maybe it is because his books are so different from these, very much relying on the psychological aspects of the horror story; the kind of stuff that made Stephen King such a successful author. I think many young people today have a view that horror equals blood and guts, or one of those aforementioned classic monster types, and therefore view books like Buried Thunder as thrillers instead. However, many of the more popular adult horror authors such as King and James Herbert have built their careers on just this kind of writing. Like these authors, instead of gore Tim Bowler fills his stories with atmosphere, and in doing so creates a feeling of creeping dread within the reader from the very first page, a dread that lasts well beyond the end of the story.

However you label Buried Thunder, be it horror or psychological thriller, it is still pretty damn unsettling. It tells the story of Maya, a fourteen year old girl who has just moved to the countryside with her parents and brother, as they start their new life running a small hotel. Tim Bowler doesn't waste any time introducing characters or back story, instead on the very first page he has Maya stumbling across several bodies in the local woods, bodies that there are no sign of later when the police begin their search of the area. Even worse, one of the investigating police constables is the spitting image of one of these bodies. 

Immediately our minds and filled with questions: Is Maya going mad? Has she had some kind of premonition? These questions and more play on the mind all the way through the book, and just as it seems an answer is looming and the evil machinations of a particular character revealed, Tim Bowler adds a deft twist to the plot and someone/something else comes under suspicion. And what's more - not all of these questions are answered come the end of the story and the author leaves the reader to come to their own conclusions regarding the meaning behind some of the more supernatural elements of the story. I know some readers will not like this but I thought it was inspired - it left me thinking about the book for some time after. Add to this mix a handful of rather strange and sinister characters, animal mutilations, and scratching noises at Maya's bedroom door during the night and you can't help but fear that the ending may not be a good one for Maya or her family. And as with some of Tim Bowler's previous books there are strong mystical elements to this story which keep the reader hooked from the very offset, desperate to discover just what the hell is going on.

As I was reading this book I couldn't help but think about some of the classic serials that the BBC used to show in their 4-6pm slots back in the 1970s and 1980s, some of which were adaptations of books. I'm thinking serials such as The Owl Service, Moondial, Children of the Stones, and many others that I enjoyed at the time but for the life of me cannot remember the titles of now. Buried Thunder is very similar in nature to these old school stories, some of which were very scary at the time, although not having watched children's TV for some time I have no idea if dramas like this are made these days.

I have not read many of Tim Bowler's books but Buried Thunder has certainly made me want to hunt more of these out. If you want more information about his work then why not do as I did and pop over to his website at http://www.timbowler.co.uk where, with a little hunting, you will also be able to find a short video clip of Tim reading an extract from Buried Thunder. My thanks go to Michelle Harrison at OUP for sending me a copy of this book.

*** 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.