“I promised to send you a monster,” says Phil, “and I keep my promises. Here is Auntie Bacterial! Minging!”

We can only agree.

“Also” (Phil continues) “here is a link to the children’s section of my website. You may enjoy it. It shows off my softer, caring, gentle side.”

For more of Phil’s work check his previous guest posts to TBM here and here.

Guest Blogger Laura here, bringing you another snippet of Monsterliciousness!

My partner in crime Christian recently found this poetry book from his childhood:

Apparently it used to completely horrify him. Quite right too! Honestly, it’s scaring me a little even now.

This is down to terrifically terrifying writing from poets such as Ted Hughes, Roger McGough, Ogden Nash and J.R.R. Tolkein. Coupled with equally odd and utterly disturbing imagery from Charles Fuge. . . just like this:

This..

And this guy..

  ..who reminds me of this guy:

Apart from thinking how much this would have fascinated me and scared the living daylights out of me as a kid, it also makes me a little sad.

Sad because I once had my own childhood monster book which freaked me out and i’d LOVE to discover it now. But I presume it was given away without my knowledge. I remember so vividly picking it out from the mobile, fold-away, shiny silver bookcases in my primary school assembly hall, when the book fair came to visit. It was a collection of short monster stories (that’s short stories about monsters, not stories about short monsters!). They were all fantastic but the one that scared me the most, above all others, was about a seaweed-covered monster who lived under an up-turned boat on a pebble strewn beach.

Does anyone else remember this book?

What books from your childhood used to really scare you?

Have you recently found a book from your past that brought back strange memories?

Do you have a book at home now which totally creeps you out?

Sleep tight

____

Monstrosities

Charles Fuge

9780099673309

(1989)

For those of you who like monsters, movies and comics (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) this is the stuff for you! You may recall my rather swift last post which mentioned my mental busyness on ‘super fun top secret project’ ???? No? Fair enough. Well the time has come to reveeeaall my secret!

Tadaaaaa…

Monsters from the Morgue is a 70′s zombie comic which can be found (and read) while sneaking around Joe’s Desk. Who is Joe I hear you ask? Joe is a young boy making his own horror movie with his friends, all of which are characters in the upcoming movie SUPER 8 by J. J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg. Go have a snoop around his stuff! 

There you will find lots of clues as to what the film is about. You can even play an old-fashioned arcade game! I think  you’ll love it.

You can go to my blog for more info on what I actually did

Catch you later!

When I was nine my mother had to be called into school. I was telling the
other children ghost stories in the playground, and parents were
complaining!

Fascinated by ghosts from a young age, I particularly loved ‘true’ stories.
I read book after book about ghostly encounters and legends. The idea
gripped me and I desperately wanted to see a ghost.

As I have aged, I’ve become less absorbed by the macabre.  Although party to
things I can’t rationally explain I’m not sure I’ve seen a ghost, and no
longer want to.

I think with age, our concerns focus more on real monsters: those who hide
behind human faces. Captivation with mythical monsters seems to me a luxury
of the innocent and secure.  Those who have nothing else to be frightened of
can enjoy the thrill of fear without experiencing real terror (which to me
is that moment when you realise your child has wandered from your side).

Mythical monsters seem an extension of those adult fears; looming terror of
injury or loss come to life.  Yet I’m a believer in racial memory (for
example how strange is it that dragon-type creatures appear in totally
different cultural mythologies?). I’m practical, but there are things I
can’t explain and there’s a magic in monsters that can’t be taken away.

The ghosts that haunt Cassie in my book are not traditional phantoms, but
the ghosts of buried personalities; yet she still has to exorcise them.
I think a blend of nightmare, fantasy and realism form the basis of the very
best ghost stories – the hidden room in Glamis where the Earl plays cards
with the devil, the ghosts that walk the Tower of London, or those of my old
college (you do not want to cross Corpus Christi old court on a misty
night).

I guess I’m still telling ghost stories, but I hope I don’t get so many
complaints nowadays.
Bryony’s book ANGEL’S FURY is published by Egmont

I know! I know! I said i’d post up about the book i’m illustrating, packed with ghosties, mummy’s, vamps, moving statues, gambling zombies, pond creatures, and such things as the unmentionables which dwell beneath manhole covers… but oh no, I have not done so (yet).

This is becaaauuuse… I have been crazy busy on ‘super fun top secret project’, which unfortunately I have a very small amount of time to do, and is actually what I should be doing RIGHT THIS MINUTE!! AHHH! So this is just a quick one about the amazing book I got today…

THE ARRIVAL by SHAUN TAN

Arrival is a beautiful BEAST of a book, with lots of weird and wonderful creatures to feast your monster-lovin’ eyes on! Very interested to ‘read’ it as it’s a silent book like mine and Ben’s!

Will post back when i’ve finished ‘super fun top secret project’ and get time to read it!

In the meantime, see this page of Tan’s website for a little bit about the storyline, lots and lots of amazing pictures from the book, and a nice lengthy comment on the book by the author.

On an unrelated note, it’s my Birthday tomorrow! Hurrah!

That is all.
Goodbye all

P.S  Hopefully be able to reveal what ‘super fun top secret project’ actually is, one day.

As a special additional date to his hugely successful blog tour, Vampirates author, Justin Somper, has battled his way deep into the caves to share his thoughts on bad guys with us.  Immortal War is the fang-tastic finale to the Vampirates series so, if you haven’t already, sink your teeth into a copy today!

—

Firstly thanks to the Trapped by Monsters crew for inviting me to write a guest blog and making TBM the “bonus extra date” on my blog tour for VAMPIRATES: IMMORTAL WAR. I’ve written a fair few blogs over the past couple of weeks but before I rest my (two) typing fingers (to clarify, I have a full set, I just don’t use them for typing), there’s one subject I’m itching to talk about… villains.

As I take stock of the sequence as a whole, I realise that one of the things I’ve liked best about working on this sequence is my cast of villains. They’re just so much fun to spend time with – far more so, dare I say it, than the “good guys”.

I guess my first uber-villain was Sidorio, the Vampirate who staged a rebellion in DEMONS OF THE OCEAN because he chose to take as much blood as he wanted, whenever he wanted. It’s not an unreasonable demand from a vampire’s perspective but it’s enough to see him expelled from the Nocturne – the ship of benign Vampirates who take blood from donors at the weekly Feast Night.

I never set out for Sidorio to be one of the sequence’s leads but he’s just been voted Number 1 in a blog list of favourite VAMPIRATES characters (for the full skinny, go to http://empire-of-books.blogspot.com/). Sid’s really gone from strength to strength from one book to the next. In TIDE OF TERROR, he gets his own fledgling crew. On the whole, this doesn’t go too well as he’s none too blessed with leadership skills. But he does make a very significant sire when he brings Jez Stukeley back from the dead and makes him his second-in-command.

I didn’t intend for Stukeley to be a main character either (see a pattern, here?). In fact, I only brought him into the story in T-O-T to swiftly kill him off and demonstrate that I could deliver plenty of jeopardy! But Stukeley has lasted the distance of the sequence and he’s possibly my favourite character of all. He’s less of an obvious villain than Sidorio and I like the way he is often torn between his past life and pirate comrades and the new realm he is now part of. For me, this is best encapsulated in the third book, BLOOD CAPTAIN, when he returns to Ma Kettle’s Tavern – but as a Vampirate, rather than a pirate – and all hell breaks loose. In fact, this is one of my favourite scenes in the sequence as a whole.

BLOOD CAPTAIN also introduced another villain – Johnny Desperado, the cowboy Vampirate. Johnny had a bad rap with readers initially, probably because he sets himself up as a rival to Lorcan Furey for Grace Tempest’s affections. I’ve liked Johnny from the beginning but I think he’s another character who has developed through the books. I think what helps mark him out is that whilst he is a very real villain, he can still be a great mate to Stukeley and have genuine feelings for Grace. That’s the thing I’ve learned about villains – they don’t have to be villainous in every last thing they do. You can actually point up their nastiness by focusing also on their acts of kindness. Of course, it can also throw both reader and writer off the scent. In IMMORTAL WAR, Johnny surprised me by how nasty he can be. It seems even an author can be fooled by a character’s charm!

One of the most talked about villains in VAMPIRATES is Lady Lola Lockwood, who enters the sequence in BLACK HEART. What I like most about Lola is that she’s terribly polite and sophisticated in certain ways but utterly vicious and bloodthirsty at the same time. She thinks it’s uncouth to drink blood direct from a victim’s flesh – she’d far rather have the blood drained into wine bottles for drinking later at her leisure. She has shocking double standards. There’s a fun bit in IMMORTAL WAR where her blood cellars have been vandalised and she cannot conceive of the brutality of people who would do such a thing!

Lola does plenty of extraordinarily vicious things in the three VAMPIRATES books she features in and is responsible for a couple of the most memorable kills. I think she injected the sequence with a fresh energy and possibly a new, darker tone. I learned that you can ramp up the horror if you balance it with laughs and I think it’s fair to say that Lola and Sidorio’s scenes together – particularly when they are courting – are some of the funniest I’ve written.

Not all of my favourite villains make it to the last pages of IMMORTAL WAR and it’s fair to say they were amongst the hardest characters for me to say goodbye to. As for the others, although the book says “THE END”, in my mind they will be busily getting on with their twisted plans long after the book is closed.

As for me, it’s time to get busy on writing something new. And it’s time, I’m sure, to get better acquainted with some new villains!

Thanks again for the opportunity to guest post on the brilliant Trapped by Monsters and for being the last port of call on my blog tour. If you’d like to chat further, do swing by www.vampirates.co.uk where I regularly talk to readers.

We’ve also started hearing some groaning and whimpering from another part of the cave, which sounds suspiciously like Jamie. He may well be trapped in here with us somewhere. While I go investigate, check out his second guest post below…

Jamie Rix Guest Post #2

What is it with monsters? You pay them a civil visit in November, contribute a beautifully hand-crafted roll of wallpaper to line the walls of their cave and instead of gratitude they hold you against your will and threaten to bite off your head and stuff your stumpy neck full of maggots if you try to escape. It’s taken me this long to find a sharp-enough rock and a big-enough slab of slate to write something down. So here goes:

HELP!!!!!

Actually what do I care if the monster eats me? I’ve just started writing a book about monsters so the experience might be inspirational.

It’s always better if you’ve actually lived through something you’re writing about. Like the joke in the Revenge Files of Alistair Fury when Alistair wrecks his sister’s much-longed-for date with a jug of milk. Not a lot of people know that the dousing really happened.

Mea Culpa

I was thirteen, my sister was sixteen and going on a date with her boyfriend, Steve (Boyfriend Number: 6,723). She had been completely foul and repulsive all day (as big sisters are when they are trying to make their fly-away hair sit flat on their heads and choose the perfect dress out of the millions in their wardrobe). She had shouted in my face several times and threatened to crush my fingers under the heel of her cowboy boots if I did not stop pushing stink bombs under her door. In those days, it didn’t take much to get me riled.

At 7.30 the doorbell rang. Trailing clouds of perfume, my sister ran down the stairs shouting to anyone who was listening that she’d be back later and nobody should wait up. If I had my way, she wouldn’t be going in the first place… As her fingers twisted the door latch, I burst out of the downstairs loo and dumped two pints of full-fat milk over her head. Her precious hair collapsed into a soggy mop, her little black dress was stained white and, bursting into tears, she ran upstairs, slammed her bedroom door and promised never to come out so long as I was still living in the house. Result!

Anyway, my point is that when Alistair Fury did that to his sister, a couple of critics said it wasn’t believable because it would never happen…. What do critics know? I bet if I told them I was holed up in a cave with a monster breathing witchetty gas and bad eggs down my neck they wouldn’t believe that either.

By the way, The Incredible Luck of Alfie Pluck didn’t win the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, so it’s just as well the monster is holding me prisoner, because if I’d been out there I might have had to pay the judges a visit in the middle of the night…with a jug of milk!

PS: You can believe this or not – I don’t care… Steve the Thick was still standing in the porch waiting for the door to be opened when the milkman arrived at six o’clock the following morning.

But this is not your average big, hairy, claws, jaws, stomp stomp, yum yum, bones for my bread etc etc. Oh no, it’s far greater than that.

A MONSTER CALLS by (pretty darn good author) Patrick Ness is the book of which I speak, and this is what it entails:

An ancient but innocent yew tree by day, a groaning, creaking, tree beast with compost breath by night, by 12:07am to be exact. One night, Conor awakes from one nightmare to find himself in the middle of another! The graveyard tree he knows so well is bellowing at him from his moonlit garden!

“You look like a tree,” Conor said.
The monster squeezed Conor until he cried out.
I do not often come walking, boy, the monster said, only for matters of life and death. I expect to be listened to.

To find out just what this matter of life and death is however, I suggest you have a read for yourself. It’s a brilliant story, with one of the most original monster characters i’ve ever known, aided perfectly by amazing illustrations by Jim Kay.

What a treat! You can read the first chapter online HERE I hope you all enjoy it!

Just like A Monster Calls, the story behind the story is a fascinating but sad one. The story started with Siobhan Dowd. ‘She had the characters, a detailed premise, and a beginning. What she didn’t have, unfortunately, was time.’ After she passed away, Patrick Ness had the challenging and honourable task of completing her book.

And i’m very glad he did.

I’ll be back soon with news and illustrations of my own book, written by Ben Read and featuring lots and lots of.. yes.. you guessed it.. MONSTERS! And beasties and vampires and pond creatures and ghosties and ghoulies and zombies and nasty edwardian fairy ladies!
Have a good day!

“It’s a break away from my usual daft artwork to give space to recent events,” Phil says. For more of his work, check his website.

“…p.s. Monster coming soon.”