Jack Meggitt-Phillips's Reading List

"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."

"I have always been deeply suspicious of my own bottom so for me this this was a very scary book. The general setup is that there’s a twelve year old boy named Zack whose bottom rebels against him. His bottom is part of a worldwide federation, a rebellion of bottoms which are fed up of doing the dirty work and want to replace themselves with the faces. I think it’s quite scary because even though it sounds like the most stupid and preposterous setup for a book, it’s actually really well written and – apologies for the number of times I’m going to say the word ‘bottom’ – you see Zack detached from his bottom and it’s again the human evil stuff. Andy Griffiths characterises the bottoms and you can fully understand their struggle. I remember reading it and I was quite scared about the great ‘bumcano’, a bum volcano, and I thought it was a great and startlingly original evil plan. Broadly speaking, it’s a comedy but with the plot of an action adventure, and like all good action adventure stories there are thrills and scary bits where you might have to put the book in the fridge for a little while and then before you return to it you have to explain to your mother why there’s a bottom book in the fridge. It’s like a very well written family film with scary moments but a good gag count as well. Yes, you probably do. The clue is in the title and on the first page it says ‘unfortunately the scratch and sniff edition of this is not available.’ But as I said, it’s a really well written book because you’ve got these two sides and you can sympathise with the bottom."

"It’s my Christmas tradition. My job is to peel the chestnuts, and I normally listen to an audiobook while I’m peeling. With A Christmas Carol , the more I revisit it, the more I realise how scary it actually is, if you read it for the first time, or read it like you pretend you don’t know anything about the story. You’ve got a door knocker coming to life. You’ve got the ghost of Jacob Marley with his chains. That’s very scary stuff. And especially the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, when you’ve got the grave robbers. It shows you what will happen if you don’t care about others, it shows the journey of Ebenezer’s understanding of where his life has led him. At its heart, it’s a ghost story. Because it’s got Christmas in the title, people think it’s a lovely, wholesome story about a man changing his ways, which it is, but really it’s got all the ghost elements that you could want. Exactly. I’m sure all of us, if we had a ghost of Christmas, past, present or future visiting us and we were shown the impact we’ve had on people it would shake all of our bones to their core. Or maybe I’m just suspicious that I’ve been secretly leading an evil life. Absolutely, I stole it basically. I think what A Christmas Carol does particularly well is how you see a character change over the course of the book. But it’s not a dull read because you’ve got the scares and the ghosts. In my case it’s a ravenous carnivorous beast in the attic, and it’s the human connection which helps defeat evil in the story. Ebenezer Scrooge is saved from a very miserable afterlife, and a very miserable rest of his life, by finally embracing his family, being nice to his his co-workers, and sending something special for Tiny Tim. In the same way my Ebenezer would have lived probably another five or six hundred years of selfishness if he hadn’t been very reluctantly forced to bring this rude prankster into his life. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. Exactly. When I started writing about her I didn’t like her at all. I was thinking she’s so horrible that maybe I should just feed her to The Beast. At the start it was basically a book about three villains, because The Beast is just irredeemably bad. Ebenezer thinks it’s fine to feed children to The Beast, and Bethany has spent most of her time being a prankster and a bully. I found it quite fun trying to see why they were the way they were and whether that made them redeemable. Fortunately it did, otherwise it would be a depressing book. Ebenezer has lived five hundred years and he’s done absolutely nothing with it. At the end of the book, he’s just got a normal human lifespan left but in an hour of his new life he’ll be doing more good than in the five hundred years he’s just been living for exotic teas and fabulous varieties of waistcoat. Hopefully it’s got some sort of lesson, amongst the jumps and scares."