Turning the World Upside Down

February 14, 2020February 14, 2020Leave a comment

On Valentine’s Day, I’ve treated myself by spending a little time and showing some love for my unpublished children’s book, Isabella Mawtle’s Immortal Vanishing Cream. This excerpt is from the chapter where Pip and Molly Mawtle, trapped in their Great-aunt Isabella’s bewitched house, tumble through a revolving floor, and find their world turned upside down in every conceivable way.

I hope you don’t mind me sharing…

“As the Cursery Rhyme whirled about her ears, Molly’s end of the see-saw soared too high. Molly see-ed up and Pip saw-ed down, and the floor revolved until it stood on end – and then tipped completely over. Their world turned upside-down and Pip and Molly were sent somersaulting into the darkness as, high above them, a fading violin voice whirled…

‘I’ve looked inside your hearts
To see the whats you whish to do!
You’ve dreamed all night, now hold on tight,
We’ll make them all come true…’

Faster they fell, the air rushing cold over their cuckoo-cropped scalps. Down and…

n…

faster…

fasterfasterfaster…

until, at last, a blood-red floor rushed up to meet them. They gritted their teeth. They clenched their fists. Remembering suddenly the wish they had made never to grow old, they thought for the first time of just what that wish might really mean, what double meanings it might hold, and how careful you should be when you whisper the words of your wishes in a witch’s house. And for the first time in their young lives they felt a vague sense that life might not last for ever. They held their breaths and waited a witch’s tick for the coming true of that careless wish: for the thud of young bone on stone, the thump of young skull on floorboards, the thwack, the crack…

…the squish!

Pip and Molly hit the floor without thud, thump or thwack. They landed not on hard as rock, but on soft as jelly; not egg on concrete, but rubber ball on space hopper.

They felt themselves sink gently into the softest, the bounciest, the most trampolinest of floors…

‘Balloons!’ Molly cried.

‘Balloons!’ laughed Pip.

And they remembered how in the back of a black carriage an age or so ago they had wished for a house with floors of balloons and ceilings of feathers, so that they might bounce up into the air and then fly back down again.

The first of these they did now, for what goes down must come up. With a squeal, the floor of balloons sank beneath their weight, and then sprang up and launched them into the air. They trampolined towards where they had fallen from, as if the cogs of the morning had been put into reverse. And as they flew back up through the darkness, Pip and Molly peered up towards where they knew a wooden floor to be – a floor that was now a ceiling, and a ceiling, since they were falling upwards, that was also now a floor! Never had their world felt more turned upon its head.

They had wished for balloons and they had got balloons. Now they wished even harder for feathers. And the darkness above sang out to them in a choir of honey-toned hoots. It sounded like an orchestra of bassoons blowing one huge ‘HOOT!’ above them, around them, inside them. They vibrated like reeds in the two ‘Os’ of that hoot, as if they had been sucked into the wind-pipes of a church organ. And as they flew towards the floor that was now a ceiling, the ceiling that was now a floor, they waited for the sharp rap of wood. Instead, they felt the soft wrap of feathers. They flew up into down – beautiful, feathery down – which caught them as softly as a woollen mitten catching two dandelion seeds.

For a moment, Pip and Molly were suspended there, side by side, sensing in the darkness the soft outlines of giant feathers. In silence, they hung there, happy to be neither falling nor rising, glad just to be still there and still.”

A Shadow-Raven

February 17, 2018Leave a comment

This week’s excerpt is short and anything but sweet…

“Isabella had squashed and squeezed Pip’s shadow into a feathery shape. She was reaching up now to place it in a brass bird-cage that swung from the ceiling. As she did so, she whined and whinnied the most whicked of Cursery Rhymes:

And now I have your shadow, Pip,
I shall do many wrongs to you.
I’ll cage it, like a raven,
And I’ll teach it to sing songs to you!

I’ll hold your shadow in my hands,
All feathered, fresh and fine.
And keep it like a pet, because,
Without it… you are MINE!”

tumblr_o39du1pgzz1rp1q8wo1_500h Excerpt from Isabella Mawtle’s Immortal Vanishing Cream,
Copyright © Jason Hook 2018

An Invitation From A Witch

February 12, 2018Leave a comment

003135 We all love to receive letters. But there are certain letters that should be left on the doormat where they land. Once touched, there is no untouching them. Once opened, there is no closing them. And once read, there is no turning back. A birthday invitation from a witch is one such letter. You may recognise it in time. The envelope will be pristine white, but the card inside will be yellowed and crumpled, as if it has been sent many times before.

If it contains a gift, beware.

If it contains the following address, be afraid…

Miss Isabella Belladonna Mawtle
THE MILL-ON-THE-MOLD
Ferryman’s Lane
ALLCROSS

And if it contains this rhyme, then we are already too late…

‘My dearest [please insert name here], my very special friend,
Please find enclosed the birthday past and present that I send.
Another year has gone (but you’ve so many more to spare!),
And so, I send a gift to show you just how much I care.
I offer you the chance to come and share my happy home,
To stay with me eternally, to make my life your own.
To come along where you belong, to share with me your dream,
And take your parts in making my Immortal Vanishing Cream.

I simply won’t allow you to refuse this generous gift,
To have you in my home will give my heart and face a lift.
My hopes are high, but stocks are low, there’s little on the shelf,
I need your help to make it, as it just won’t make itself.
Do bring someone to help you, one is never quite enough,
I seem to need at least the two, these days, to make the stuff.
We’ll work together, tooth and nail, we’ll make up such a team,
And take your parts in making my Immortal Vanishing Cream.

(If contents break in transit, please return them to the cellar.)

Ever umbilical cordially yours…

ISABELLA’

Excerpt from ‘Isabella Mawtle’s Immortal Vanishing Cream’,
Copyright © Jason Hook, 2018

The Gossip’s Reward

February 3, 2018February 13, 2018Leave a comment

You should be careful who you gossip about. Gossip about a witch, and she will know. Not only that, she will send you something in return. And if she’s a witch who wishes (as most witches do) for eternal youth, then that something might just be the signs of old age she wishes someone else to wear on her behalf.

That’s the essence of this second Cursery Rhyme from my unpublished children’s story Isabella Mawtle’s Immortal Vanishing Cream. It tells you quite a lot about Isabella, and why you should keep your gossip to yourself, or at least away from the ears of a witch…

‘I’m a 329-year-old whitch!
Not a ‘witch’ but a ‘whhhitch’,
Say it right, if you please.
I’m a whitch, which is why
I don’t witter or warble,
I whhhisper, I whhhheedle,
I whimper and wheeze.
When I spell out my spells,
I spell them out crisp,
I speak them in lines
With a whitchety lisp,
And all those old gossips
Who talk of my shame,
Why, I make them grow old
When they whisper my name.
When they tittle and tattle
And laugh at my tears,
I stamp them with warts
And I brand them with years.
Even now, my old eye-bags
Have packed up their lies
And have gone off to live
On the old miller’s eyes,
Where they puff up like
Pastries and slowly turn sour,
And hang from his face like
Two sackfuls of flour.
And there, my old crow’s-feet
Have found a new life:
See them perched on the face
Of the fat butcher’s wife,
Where they flap at her pig’s-feet
And fly to her moans,
As they peck at the neck
Roll of fat on her bones.
(There is always a debt
To repay on our loans!)
A shade on her chops!
An ache in her joints!
Three fingers point back from
The finger that points!’

The Great Golden Pleasury Of Cursery Rhymes

January 27, 2018February 13, 2018Leave a comment

I am about to embark upon the ticklish process of taking the newest incarnation of my children’s novel, Isabella Mawtle’s Immortal Vanishing Cream, and throwing it upon the mercy of potential agents. I thought, at the same time, I might set free to the wider world a few of the spells or ‘Cursery Rhymes’ that the central character scatters throughout the book. Please take care of them.

This is where the witch, Isabella Mawtle, first shows her spell book to her niece and nephew, Pip and Molly, and explains something of its powers:

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“When I was small, I was left on my own,
So, I played with this book like a dog with a bone.
I’d no toys and no friends, and no father or mother,
So read it alone, and from cover to cover,
And took from this book all my happiest times:
From The Great Golden Pleasury of Cursery Rhymes!

It taught me to write, and it taught me to talk.
I had learnt it by heart by the time I could walk.
So, beware of its words, and take care of them well,
For I learned how to speak when I learned how to spell.
And I shook from this book all my happiest times:
From The Great Golden Pleasury of Cursery Rhymes!

It holds verses of curses, and chapters of charms,
With indexes of hexes and hoodoos and harms,
There are tables of fables, and rituals and runes,
Filled with abras, cadabras and hocus-poked tunes,
It’s the sorcery source of my happiest times:
From The Great Golden Pleasury of Cursery Rhymes!

It’s a book that can look to the sound of your voice,
It will write you a juju or jinx of your choice,
All its pages will turn to a birthday girl’s sigh,
To her verse, or her curse, or her sweet lullyby!
And she’ll write in this book of her happiest times:
From The Great Golden Pleasury of Cursery Rhymes!”

War and Peace: A Fairy Tale

January 25, 2016January 26, 20162 Comments

tolstoy fables I was struck, last night, by the way in which the BBC’s magnificent production of War and Peace drifted in Episode 4 into what felt suddenly like a fairy tale. The previous week, Natasha Rostova had gone like Cinderella to the ball and fallen in love with her Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (resplendent in tight-fitting uniform and gold braid, in contrast to the tragic observer Pierre Bezukhov whose outfits always appear two sizes too big) in a suitably enchanted dance sequence.

Now, Andrei seeks the permission of his increasingly eccentric father, Prince Nikolai, to propose marriage to the Cinderella-like Natasha (who possesses the secret of happiness) and rescue her family from impending poverty. If that doesn’t all sound like the stuff of fairy tale, lo and behold, old Nikolai agrees to the match only on condition that the prince is banished from the kingdom for a year to test his love. A year and a day might have underlined the point, but the step into Faerie Land conjured thoughts of Celtic mortals lured away by the little people for a year and a day, and of Sir Gawain’s anxious year spent awaiting the avowed return blow after his beheading of the Green Knight.

All filmed against the fairy tale backdrops of Latvia and Lithuania, there is a distinct change in atmosphere at this point. Natasha is whisked away on a sled to the countryside where she seems bewitched by folk music into dancing a dance she doesn’t know. Returning to Moscow, she is seduced at the opera by the deliciously evil Helene Kuragina and her incestuous and lupine brother Anatole. Her happiness vanishes and she seems possessed by the predatory and already married rake, her childlike nature disappearing as if with a curse as she is pursued through a wardrobe of coats.

Perhaps reducing a vast novel to a television series inevitably involves a simplification toward types and motifs, and it is no less affecting for that, but Tolstoy was himself no stranger to folklore. He wrote stories for peasant children to study at the schools he founded on his estate, which can be found in Fables and Fairy Tales, and he made it clear the value he placed on such tales:

‘The artist of the future will understand that to compose a fairy tale; a little song which will touch; a lullaby or a riddle which will entertain; a jest which will amuse or draw a sketch such as will delight dozens of generations or millions of children and adults, is incomparably more important and more fruitful than to compose a novel, or a symphony, or paint a picture of the kind which diverts some members of the wealthy classes for a short time and is then for ever forgotten. The region of this art of the simplest feelings accessible to all is enormous, and it is as yet almost untouched.”

—Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (1897)

Jason Hook Books

Writing, commissioning and creating illustrated books

Category: Novels