I'm afraid that today was another forgetting-it-was-Monday day! It's the May Day Bank Holiday, meaning I'm off work so naturally, I've been spending the entire day thinking it was Sunday. So I've had to quickly put together my notes for this blog, which is all about the Mentor Character in a middle grade novel. But first... What is the Mentor Character? This character's primary job is to teach and guide the protagonist until the time comes when they can stand on their own two feet. This could involve teaching them magical abilities, or lending a listening ear when it's needed. It could be a family member, or a friend of the family's, or a guide to another land... The possibilities are endless (just be aware of stranger danger!) Do all Middle Grade Books Need a Mentor Character? No, not at all. But, if you have a bunch of kids running around on adventures, the authorities are going to start asking questions sooner or later. A mentor offers the opportunity...
When I was little, we had a few scary books in the house, but none were scarier than Spine Tinglers and In A Dark, Dark Room. These absolutely terrified me, with their creepy rhymes and frankly disturbing illustrations. To be fair Spine Tinglers even included a warning that it might upset some children – and I was that child. As a result, the books were put away in an old wooden chest, which Holly had painted. It didn’t work. My fear transmuted to the chest itself and, since it was kept in my room for some time, that was very far from ideal! In fact, fear of the chest lasted far longer than fear of the books themselves. Now, we keep the spare bedding in it. Not very threatening – but very full!
As I approached secondary school age, my fear of the macabre in fiction began to slowly subside. I loved my children’s version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde; I wrote a story about a “Warné” – a hideous werewolfesque beast which went around terrorising people; when I was fourteen I took a young adult version of Dracula out the library and then immediately went on to the original. From there, I moved on to the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. All my writing went dark: I remember writing a story about skulls on a table, and I started a series of poems about supernatural creatures and beliefs. I wrote what I thought was a fabulous poem about Whitby and, in 2009, I was the runner-up in a competition run by English Heritage for stories inspired by Whitby Abbey. The competition was judged by G. P. Taylor and knowing he had enjoyed my story was an incredible thought. Of course, the story itself was a Gothic-style ghosty tale.
Then, I left ghosts and horror behind. I returned to high fantasy, and then made a niche for myself in Young Adult magical realism. I did write The Backwater, which was a ghosty story, but I wouldn’t say it was Gothic. My interest in the macabre continued through my love of graveyards, and my dissertations were on Halloween and tombstone iconography. I remember discussing this with a former lecturer, who commented that it was “suitably Gothic for me”.
The Devil’s Servant was a return to the Gothic Horror genre for me. I had been studying Keats’ life and works for the Keats-Shelley Essay Writing Competition and had found myself slipping down a Romantics rabbit hole which Virginia has explored in far greater detail. Then, I saw a callout from Quill and Crow for Gothic Horror short stories about madness, and I wrote one about someone who was obsessed with the Romantics. The story was picked up by Quill and Crow and was first published in their anthology, Ravens and Roses.
Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of The Devil’s Servant (for me, at any rate!) is that I tied it into other stories I’ve written about Broughley Abbey. The town of Broughley, with its castle and abbey, is one I made up myself and have developed so much that there are at least fifty different stories which could be set there. In The Devil’s Servant, the castle isn’t mentioned (it fell into ruin in the 16th century) and the abbey is now a stately home, based on Newstead Abbey, which I visited in 2015. Having a place which I can use and reuse has been a godsend for me as a writer and, I believe, has helped to world-build across the different genres I’ve written. Broughley is on the edge of the Lincolnshire Fens, which is a place which always caught my imagination when we used to travel through on the way to Suffolk to visit Lydia.
The next thing which followed with The Devil’s Servant was that I knew I wanted an unreliable narrator, and I had a great time creating that. Because, in true Gothic fashion, this is the story of an older man who’s looking back on one of the seminal – and most disturbing – moments of his life. Characters followed: the mysterious and potentially dangerous O'Connell, the utterly mad and broken Henry Giles, all juxtaposed against the educated and practical Reuben Fancroft. But then… is he as educated and practical as he puts across? I wanted the reader to be able to decide for themselves.
[You can read Judith's earlier January Gothic Horror blog post here]
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