A Sprinkle of Sorcery

"Magic, in some ways, can be the creepiest form of scariness, particularly in children’s literature. The opening chapter of A Sprinkle of Sorcery is one of the best. It’s got this real feeling of a fairy tale twist where you’ve got the witch and the lord whose advances she rejects. When they take out her eye she replaces it with a stone, and when her voice is taken she speaks through a crow. It’s got this marvellous macabre richness to it. And what Michelle Harrison does really well is make you look at the everyday items and feel deeply, deeply spooked out by them. I can’t look at Russian dolls now, without thinking that they’ve been used to make someone invisible – is there someone behind me…? Yes, you know you shouldn’t want to be there. But then you sort of think about how lovely it would be to be in the Widdershins’ pub surrounded by the clanging prison bells. She pulls off a fantastic trick of making it very scary and yet also making you want to go into that world and see Granny Widdershins puffing a pipe and that sort of thing. I think if you ever need to make something a bit scary just bring in a fog and immediately it’s terrifying, as soon as you can’t see something. A bit like in Dracula , which you think is scary for the first half and then the second half becomes even more terrifying, because you don’t know where Dracula is but you know he’s somewhere. I think the best of scary books is often rooted in human evil and the more supernatural fantastical elements are grown out of that base of human evil. When Charlie is taken, that’s a terrifying moment. You think it’s scary when a six year old is taken away by wardens, but then another level is added: they’re impersonating wardens in order to kidnap her. Any book which manages to give you both the shock and thrills of the jumpscares in the fog and then marry that with humans at their worst, it’s just a delicious combination."