The Haunting of Cassie Palmer and The Monster Garden

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Vintage 80s downbeat horror from Vivien Alcock

In this episode we discussed The Haunting of Cassie Palmer and The Monster Garden by Vivien Alcock.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is [e-mail]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com.

Transcript

Adam Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror. I’m your co-host Adam Whybray, with me is Ren Wednesday and today we’re talking about two books by Vivien Alcock, The Haunting of Cassie Palmer and Monster Garden. Enjoy!

Ren Hello, hello Adam!

Adam Hello, hello Ren.

Ren Hi! We’re back, and we have some books to talk about today — which are The Haunting of Cassie Palmer and The Monster Garden by Vivian Alcock which were your choice, so how did you find out about them? Did you read them when you were a kid?

Adam I knew you're gonna ask me that! The answer’s no, I didn't read them as a kid. They were bought for me for Christmas, from our previous guest of the podcast Ali Kay.

Ren Ahhh.

Adam Who I think did read them, or at least one of them as a kid and came across them in Oxfam books, I believe, and thought that they seemed like my kind of thing and suitable for the podcast. And I don't know about your copies, but mine have a very 90s kind of cover design aesthetic.

Ren Yes, I was going to say. The covers feel very familiar to me. The ones I have have these very desaturated illustrations which I can just imagine sort of being laminated and being a bit yellowed and kind of sitting in those spinning book displays in the library when I was a kid.

Adam Oh, yeah, absolutely, that’s a beautiful description. The Haunting of Cassie Palmer has some kind of super imposition, of Cassie and possibly of the ghost and possibly of her mother, I’m not sure.

Ren Yeah, yeah, this is the 1983 edition and it has a smiling white girl wearing a pinafore dress and socks and sandals and a brown hat. And there's this superimposed image of, well, I assume it's meant to be the ghost, but it doesn't look much like the description of the ghost that's in the book. And I'm pretty sure it has a mulett.

Adam It looks like she’s being haunted by the drummer of a hair metal band.

Ren Pretty much! And he looks a bit suspicious or challenging.

Adam Yeah, he has this kind of wry expression. Like, ‘eh, you think you’re all that Cassie Palmer!’

Ren So the covers are not great.

Adam Oh come on, the Monster garden cover is great!

Ren Okay, so the Monster Garden cover is similarly washed out but has a sort of head and shoulders portrait of a pretty white girl wearing a turtleneck in in a frame of twigs and coming in from one side is this blue hand with bulbous fingers holding a feather in its palm.

Adam Yeah, it’s beautiful!

Ren I was staring at it for ages trying to work out why there was a feather in his palm and then on re-reading I did figure out why but it was not immediately obvious.

Adam It’s very odd, because it looks like a very posed portrait.

Ren Yeah, it looks like a school portrait or something.

Adam Yeah, so this kind of blue gelatinous hand looks really odd.

Ren But yeah, I think probably these covers wouldn't have necessarily caught my eye as a child, as something I wanted to read.

But Vivien Alcock was an English children’s book author, and she was very prolific in the 80s and 90s and published more than 20 novels during that time.

And of the two we’re going to talk about today, they’re both very short, neither of them more than 150 pages, and The Haunting of Cassie Palmer was published in 1980, which was her first children’s book, and The Monster Garden was from 1988.

So I think it makes sense to start with The Haunting of Cassie Palmer. Which is about 13 year old Cassandra (Cassie) Palmer, who is the seventh child of a seventh child, and has consequently been told all her life by her mother that she will be a great medium one day. Her mother is a medium herself, and supports her three children still at home by doing seances. However, at the beginning of the book, Cassie’s mother’s usual Friday night seance goes awry, when a sceptic in attendance reveals the tricks and props that she’s been using, that she claims supplement her gift, when it’s having a dry spell.

This leads to a crisis of confidence for her children, who start doubting what they’ve been told their whole life, and Cassie is quite relieved because she starts to feel like she might be freed from her seventh child destiny. But her brother dares her to summon up a spirit to prove that it’s nonsense, and so they go to the cemetery, to a hidden part over a wall, that they called their ‘garden of death’. Which is incidentally the title of my favourite painting, the Garden of Death by Hugo Simberg.

In this cemetery they all have their favourite gravestones, and Tom’s is one he calls ‘The Black Beast’, which it describes: ‘His headstone was black with age, speckled and pocked with grey, and one corner angling up sharply like a crooked shoulder. It said simply: ‘Deverill. 1720-1762’.

That night in the cemetery, Cassie loses her brother and sister, but decides to go ahead with the plan anyway to prove her point. She garbles some words, then a voice from the Deverill grave says: ‘What do you want?’. And the description says: ‘She saw it was a man, dressed in a black coat or cloak, so similarly flecked and speckled with grey that it might have grown from the same stone… his face was thin, the eyes hidden by the shadow of his hat, the pale skin, drained of all colour by the moon, much pocked and pitted and scarred so that the smooth plump lips showed up in strange contrast, glistening like grey satin’.

Which was a contender for Texture of the Week, I like how his cloak is flecked and speckled with grey like the tombstone.

Adam I think one of the reasons they suspect that he's a bad egg is the lack of much of an inscription on the gravestone. Speculating that if you haven't got a you know, dearly beloved or remains forever in our hearts, then you've probably done something terrible.

Ren Yeah, so he sort of pops up and offers to teach Cassie witchcraft, and she’s is scared and runs away, until eventually she finds her siblings again, who it turns out had run away because they saw police. Her brother is convinced that she just saw a homeless man in the graveyard and got spooked. So a few days pass and nothing has happened but the kids get back from school to find out that their mum has put their house up for sale, because she can’t practice seances in their town any more. When they protest their mother starts to shout about the expense of raising them all, and to distract her they tell her that Cassie saw a departed spirit.

Their mother is sceptical, claiming that even with years of experience materialisations are extremely rare, so doesn’t quite believe it. But Cassie’s preoccupied with thoughts of having to move house, and then on the way back from school, Deverill reappears. They talk a bit, and Deverill says he would like to meet Cassie’s mother, and then starts to explain how to make a wax effigy of a person?

Adam Just casually drops it in there!

Ren He does! He’s quite keen on trying to teach Cassie witchcraft, which she’s not having any of. Cassie argues with him about whether or not he is Deverill, and he proves it by waving his hands about in front of a cat’s face, who doesn’t attack him, and he claims that only creatures with souls and minds can see him.

Adam But to be honest this sounds like stepson George's cat Yoshi. Who, to be fair, Yoshi was bought for George as a comfort animal, and as such she’s pretty placid. Placid to the point that you might assume that she’s dead. She’s not! But she’s profoundly hard of hearing so she won’t respond to calling her, but George will really lug over her, and he really coohcie-coos over her, he’s a bit obsessed with her and think she's the cutest cat ever, and is often inspired by YouTube memes so he gets her to be Keyboard Cat and so on.

But I’ve been teaching George, doing some of the home teaching during lockdown. And today when I was doing his maths work, I said something about ‘flumping down’ and he said, ‘Oh Yoshi flumps!’ and then just went on his hands and knees and toppled over to the side as though dead. Anyway, my point is that I’m not entirely convinced that Deverill’s technique of proving he’s not a ghost is completely foolproof.

Ren Yeah, I agree, it’s not the most rigorous scientific method.

Adam But it works for Cassie. Cassie’s like, well, that proves it then.

Ren Yes, so, Deverill wants to meet Cassie’s mother. And Cassie’s mother is intrigued, but decides that she must be rational, and decides that Deverill must just be a creepy man hanging around and accompanies Cassie to and from school for a week to protect her from men lingering around. Deverill doesn’t appear and eventually her mother relents, but tells Cassie to invite Deverill to tea if she sees him again. So she does, the following Monday, and he proclaims himself her friend. To her concern, I think it’s fair to say.

Mrs Palmer is won over by Cassie’s insistence that Deverill is a spirit, and looks forward to the fame and success that could come her way by seeing a real departed spirit. When Deverill appears, however, she is alarmed by his appearance — asking him to take off his hat when he’s not wearing one, and cries out ‘where are his feet?’. Which I quite enjoyed. His feet are right there, but something about him as made her think he has no feet. She tells him that her daughter can’t help him, and he’ll need to find someone more qualified, and he sweeps away in a gust of wind. She decides to write to the Psychic society, to get someone to come and deal with him.

Deverill keeps appearing to Cassie on her way home from school, and tells her that time moves differently for him, so there’s no time where he’s not with her. He tells her that when he was in his grave he had bad dreams, and he doesn’t want to go back.

He asks her how he can serve her, and she tells him about the house that she wishes the family could move to, with a river running at the bottom of the garden. And when the family go into the countryside and see someone that Tom may be apprenticing with, they find a house for sale, just as Cassie described it to Deverill. But it’s too expensive, and when Cassie sees Deverill again she complains: ‘what’s the good of a house we can’t afford?’.

He says that he used to live in this town, and that he left a box of gold and jewels under a floorboard in his old house. He shows her the house, and explains that a deaf old lady lives there now, and he’s sure she could just open through the back door and creep up to the attic. Which Cassie is pretty unsure about —

Adam Yeah, she’s basically like ‘you’re trying to trick me into doing evil!’ because as you said, Deverill’s been trying to turn her on to doing witchcraft and such.

Ren Yes. She does sneak into the house, and imagines kicking the old lady down the stairs and running away with the treasure, and then realises that that’s not something she’s going to do, and feels justified in reporting Deverill to the Psychic Society.

So she confesses her near-crime to her mother, and when Deverill appears to her again she tells him that she will betray him. On the night of the visit from the Psychic society, Cassie gets a vision of the visitor in a car accident, and runs out of the house to try and stop it and warn him, but in her frenzy it’s her who runs out into the road and makes his car swerve. The man from the Psychic Society is not badly hurt, but is taken to hospital and Cassie and Deverill confront each other. Neither knows what their purpose is, but they realise it must be something between the two of them. Cassie tells Deverill that she wants him to go back to the grave, and he says she can’t ask that of him.

Cassie runs to the graveyard, intent on driving a stake through Deverill’s heart. She calls to the other spirits to rise up, but no-one comes. He tells her to destroy her then, if she’s going to, and she realises that she needs to do the opposite — she calls to him to help her, and she sees an image of him as a little boy, surrounded by hostile murderous adults being called a devil and a witch’s son — she calls to him and makes a gap in the circle. He escapes, and is set free.

When Cassie is recovering, her mother tries to break the news gently to her that her gift has come on too sudden and strong, and she won’t be a medium as an adult after all. Cassie finally tells her that she never wanted to be one. Cassie and Mary go to the old woman’s house and ask to look for Deverill’s treasure. They find it, and split it with the old woman, without murdering anyone.

Adam Hooray!

Ren The last paragraph reads:

In the old cemetery, the headstones lean sleepily, the grass grows long and wears feathery plumes nodding in the sun, and there are only wild flowers: dandelion, and ragged robin and the white trumpets of convolvulus. Except in front of one grave, where someone has planted forget-me-not. This headstone is black with age, speckled and pocked with grey, with one corner angling up sharply like a crooked shoulder. It says simply: Deverill. 1720-1762. And underneath, carved unevenly but with love, the letters: R.I.P.’

And that’s The Haunting of Cassie Palmer! What did you make of it?

Adam It was more low key than I was anticipating. Because I think it starts with a terrific set-up, it really brings you inside Cassie’s world, and that of her mother Mrs Palmer, the semi-fraudulent medium. And the stakes feel pretty high. It’s clear that they’re not very well-to-do and a bit hard up, and Cassies’ mum gets revealed as a fraud, or at least a partial fraud early on. And this is clearly a kind of big humaliation to her, she’s quite a proud woman, this falls hard on her kids. So there’s an element of domestic drama which really draws you in, and then there’s this creepy undercurrent of Cassie being the seventh child of a seventh child. And that she possibly, you know, hears the voices of spirits, or is affected quite deeply when the seances occur. And I really love the scene when they go to the graveyard and Deverill is summoned.

I think where it falls down a bit for me is in the middle section. There's so much mystery around what Deverill’s doing that he ends up seeming as if he's just dilly-dallying about. He’s quite a creepy presence, but he kind of becomes banal quite quickly. And Cassie, is just like, oh, I don’t know what to do with him.

Ren She’s just like, ‘Oh there he is again’.

Adam Yeah, and there’s this odd standoff between them where they’re affecting boredom with each other like ‘Oh hey ghost’, ‘Oh hey human’. So I do feel like that section then drags, which is a shame. And what strikes me as interesting is the way that The Monster Garden then repeats some of the structure of Cassie Palmer but more successfully.

Because both these books are about a protagonist who is aligned in some way, maybe awkwardly or with some of the peril involved involved with a misunderstood alien or outsider figurer. But the tension doesn't really let up in The Monster Garden. The stakes remain high. And I think I think it's a stronger work. I do feel that Alcock’s writing shines through, though, and there are some great descriptive passages.

Ren Yeah. I think I pretty much agree with everything you said. The Haunting of Cassie Palmer is very downbeat, to the point that it does drag a bit in the middle. And you feel like, there could be more done with that setup. But it does have some great writing.

Adam What did you think of the relationship between Cassie and her siblings? And also her mom.

Ren Um, it was interesting. It was vividly written, I think you definitely get a strong sense of the mum as a kind of character who’s struggling really. And she's quite harried and takes it out on her kids sometimes. But also believes in what she's doing and is trying to make the best of things.

Adam Yeah, like that ambivalence. It’s not as simple as she's a fraud, or she's a real medium. And I think that's more accurate. I definitely think there are some very cynical mediums who just use cold reading and are just there to exploit grieving people. But I don't think that's necessarily the whole story. You know, I think there are more people perhaps, who maybe tap into aspects of intuition, or are very attentive listeners. Or maybe they are tapping into something. I think it's probably much more of a spectrum, and a spectrum of belief when it comes to whether mediums actually believe in what they're doing, you know, I think it tends to be a lot more complicated than either side presents. And I like that very much. I thought the portray of Mrs Palmer was convincing.

Ren It’s an interesting nuance. You know, she believes in her own gift and she believes in what she's doing. But also she has to make money. And kind of partly reluctantly, and partly enjoying her sneakiness shows off the little tricks that she has to make things a bit more exciting.

Adam Yes, because she’s partly a romantic figure and partly a hard-nosed pragmatist. And similarly, I like that the relationship between Cassie and her mum is quite fractious, and the same with the siblings. Sometimes it feels like Cassie’s older brother and sister are very much on her side, and other times they're quite antagonistic. I thought it captured the sibling relationship quite well.

Ren I think I missed having a close relationship that’s not a contested relationship in this book. Like in The Monster Garden, Frankie has her best friend and has this straightforward, fun, good relationship. And I sort of wanted Cassie to have something like that.

Adam Yeah, there’s quite a sad passage where she kind of reflects that Deverill’s her only friend. And she says, ‘You know, obviously, most people think he's creepy. And he's this pretty shabby looking old ghost, but I don’t have anyone else’.

Ren Yeah, it's quite a lonely book.

Adam It is, I agree with that. And the title is The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, and it is Cassie Palmer’s story, ultimately. And she is quite alone. You know, even when Deverill is brought in to meet the family members they don't know how to respond to him.

Whereas with The Monster Garden, I guess we're going to get into that now, with Frankie’s outsider figure she lets more people know about the situation a lot earlier, and it becomes much more of a collective project.

Ren So the protagonist of this book is Frances Stein, known as Frankie, because rather on-the-nose main character names are something that these two books have in common. She introduces her family by saying: ‘My father is a high-up scientist and a low-down male chauvinist pig.’ - which is a strong opener! She’s a girl in a family of her dad and brothers, and her father works at a laboratory that people at school say is a ‘monster factory’ that does bizarre experiments on animals.

The instigating event is that Frankie’s brother David has stolen a test tube of something or other from their father’s lab, and Frankie says that she’ll tell him, if David doesn’t give her a bit of the substance. Reluctantly, he does, and she pricks her finger and squeezes a bit of blood onto a saucer, tips the jelly onto a saucer on the window sill and then goes to see My Fair Lady and forgets all about her monster.

Frankie’s a different kind of character from Cassie. She’s a much more carefree soul. There’s a thunderstorm during the night, and Frankie sees a bolt of lightening jump towards her open window. The next morning, her goo has grown, and developed two red eyes and a short, fat tentacle. Frankie gives it another drop of her blood before realising what Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors doesn’t which is quote ‘that it was perhaps not advisable to bring up a monster on my own blood. After all, I had only a limited supply. I didn’t want it to develop a taste for it.’

Adam I really love how plainspoken she is as a narrator.

Ren Yeah, a sensible choice there! Frankie casually asks her brother how much his has grown, and he assumes she’s just being silly.

The next day her monster is ‘the size and shape of a small cushion’ and Frankie is fully alarmed, and even more so when she wakes up to find it sitting on her pillow looking at her.

It says: ’The monster sat on my pillow and stared at me with its red eyes.. It had a domed head but no hair, no nose, no ears. It had two eyes and a thin slit of a mouth, as if someone had drawn a line in soft clay with a knife; a thick body, short stumpy arms and legs. But no hands or feet. Its grey flesh had a greenish tinge. It looked absurdly like a very large jelly-baby’.

Adam See, I thought that might be your texture of the week.

Ren Yeah, I think the monster is my texture of the week in general.

Adam Shall we go into Texture of the Week?

Ren Sure.

Ren and Adam (Banging and shaking noises) Texture of the week!

Ren Do you want to go first?

Adam Sure. My Texture of the Week is when Cassie Palmer’s family finally meet Deverill. So.

‘Cassie also looked at him, trying to see him through her mother’s eyes. In the bright light from the newly washed shade, he looked shabby. There was no other word for it. The rough material of his cloak was not greasy, it was dull. It absorbed the light with no answering sheen, but he felt that if you shook it out the air would be filled with dust. His boots were stained with a whitish mould, as if they've been too long in water and never properly dried. His hair was lank and without luster. His face, well, his face was ghastly enough, she is not surprised Mary had screamed. Bright light did not suit him. He had a greyish pallor, the marred complexion pitted with shadows as if the flesh itself were half-eroded. If he were not a departed spirit, he was certainly well on the way. He is sick, she thought, perhaps dying. But thin as he was, surely too solid for a spirit. I love this description. It's almost architectural, like the crumbling face of a building.

Ren Yeah, it's good. It definitely brings back to life the time that I got a pair of shoes very damp and then left them in a plastic bag for a week, and they got very mouldy and I had to throw them away.

Adam 28 years old!

Ren But yes. Regardless of my inability to look after my own possessions, it’s a good description.

Adam Yeah, I like that it doesn’t get too wispy and etheral. I like ghosts when they have a solid presence to them. That’s why I like the ghosts in M.R. James stories. They tend to have a bit more flesh and blood about them.

Ren Yeah, it’s definitely very evocative of having been in the ground.

All right, so I have one from The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, which is just when Cassie accuses Deverill of wanting her soul, and he says ‘I don't want your soul. Such a little one, what would I do with it? It’d be lost in my pockets.’

Adam You like the idea of a pocket full of souls.

Ren I do! And digging through your pocket trying to find the right soul. You can generally assume that everyone of the descriptions of the monster later known as Monnie are my Textures of the Week, because they are delightful. But I also quite enjoyed Frankie saying of her brother that ‘You could grow cress on the back of his neck’. Which is quite evocatively disgusting.

But yes, the jelly baby monster is a good one.

Adam And is named Monnie.

Ren Yes. Not quite yet, but that is it’s name. So Frankie yells at it to go away, but softens when it starts to act like a strange baby, twisting its mouth around and making its legs longer and shorter.

Frankie doesn’t trust her brother with knowing about the monster, so she tells him the sample was dead. She wants to talk to someone but all her friends are ‘lively, light-hearted chatterboxes’, so she decides on a girl she doesn’t know very well, but who seems serious, and has a brother who’s good at languages.

So this is Julia and John, and they come round and are terrified and disgusted by Monnie, who Frankie has come feel fiercely protective of. Eventually they calm down, and watch as the monster tries to grow its own hands to mimic theirs, but ends up with ‘hundreds of thin silvery threads… fringing each hand til they looked like a sea anemone’.

Under pressure from Julia and John, Frankie says that she’ll tell her oldest brother about it when he comes to visit in 8 days, and keep Monnie hidden until then. As Monnie’s growing so quickly, they decide that they’ll need to keep it out of the house, and a rabbit hutch at the bottom of the garden might work. Frankie talks to the gardener, Alf about making a hutch, and Julia earns a place in Frankie’s bad books by calling him ‘half-witted’. Frankie tells Alf that she wants a secret rabbit, in this not particularly convincing cover story. And she also learns that Monnie eats through its leg, by putting its foot in the saucer.

Frankie tells her Dad and brother that her friends are going to come over and practice their stomp-esque percussion, to get them to leave for the day.

Adam Which I guess was all the rage in schools in the lte ‘80s.

Ren I imagine so. It was bin lids all the way. She gives in and tells her best friend Hazel about Monnie, and when he’s made the hutch, she also shows Alf. At this point poor Monnie’s in a bit of a state though:

‘Monnie had changed. The jelly-like substance that had given it the semi-transparent look had worn off in patches, or perhaps been absorbed into its body. This gave it an odd mottled appearance, like a peeling wall. On either side of its head, where ears should have been, it had grown a vertical fringe of delicate tendrils, like thin green ribbons, covering small slits that opened and shut continually. Its feet were large and floppy and toeless. It had only ten fingers now, but they were all on its right hand. Its crimson eyes were bright’.

I love Monnie!

Adam I knew you’d love Monnie when I was reading it!

Ren I’ll protect Monnie with my life. They put Monnie in the hutch and it stands up against the wire netting, like, quote ‘a prisoner of war on the telly’. When Frankie goes to give it its dinner, she has to hold its hand through the netting, and sing it a lullaby, until it eventually goes to sleep. (Ren makes snuffling noises of aww).

I guess a note on Monnie’s pronouns? They usually call Monnie it, although sometimes people say ‘she’. Which I find interesting, because normally people default to masculine with animals or objects or whatever.

Adam That’s a good point.

Ren Frankie decides to keep a record of Monnie’s changes. After its moulting, its skin looks healthy again and it can now make a whistling noise. The next morning, Frankie goes to feed Monnie and finds it out of its cage, and lying at the bottom of the pond. She thinks its dead but it’s just playing about, and Julia suggests that it’s amphibious.

Adam I like how it’s just like ‘tricked ya! thought I was dead!’.

Ren Monnie starts giving little gifts to the group, like a ‘bird’s feather or dandelion or a bright brown pebble’, but never to Julia. And this is where the feather on the front cover comes from, it’s not immediately obvious.

Adam It’s pretty cute, it makes me think of a hymn we had to sing around the harvest festival in primary. Called ‘I will give to you’, or ‘I will bring to you’.

‘The best things I can bring to you, I will give to you’, and then it’s all a bunch of random stuff that a kid might have in their pocket. Like: ‘a bit of gum, some broken twigs, a conker too, some sparkly bits’. Which is all well and good, but I think they’re meant to be an offering to God? For an omniponent being who’s used to animal and human sacrifice, I’m not really sure if an old…

Ren Chewit.

Adam Quaver. Or a bit of Sticklebrick, is really going to cut the mustard. But anyway, the gifts that Monnie finds are quite nice.

Ren One of my life ambitions is to make friends with a magpie, who could bring me little gifts.

Adam Oh, that’s your plan!

Ren Well, I’m not fussy, any corvid would do. I just want to be best pals with a corvid.

Adam As long as they can bring you gifts! I see your get-rich-quick scheme!

Ren Yeah.

Adam Robin Hood of the animal world!

Ren I’m just thinking a bottle top, it doesn’t have to be a diamond ring. Although it could be!

So, Frankie finds out that her oldest brother isn’t coming back when he said he would, and starts to panic. Monnie is still growing rapidly, and keeps trying to escape the chicken hutch. When David comes round to the garden unexpectedly, Frankie rushes out into the street with Monnie wrapped in a towel, causing some alarm and confusion. John leads her to his dad’s building yard, where Monnie rolls happily in some orange sand, but then it all goes wrong again because Julia, it turns out, has told Frankie’s father everything. Frankie sneaks herself and Monnie onto a truck heading to a place where she knows there’s a creek where Monnie could perhaps be happy.

So they get to this field and Monnie is having a whale of a time paddling in the stream and rolling around in the grass, but then Monnie falls asleep under a tree and Frankie starts climbing it, and while she’s occupied a group of boys come along and start throwing stones at Monnie, who runs away. She gets a small boy to tell her which direction Monnie went, and climbs through brambles and into the creek to find it, but she can’t.

Adam Can I just say, the small boy was very cute indeed. He was very much like: (tiny squeaky voice) ‘I’ll help you! Let me go on the adventure with you!’ and Frankie’s like ‘No time for you, small child!’

Ren Pretty much. You do have a soft spot for small squeaky voiced children.

Adam It’s like the other month, this little 2-3 year old boy, I was walking down the street with Antonia and he came up to me and said: (squeaky voice) ‘Hello mister! Do you like my new shoes?’ It was very cute.

Ren Did you like the new shoes?

Adam They were very nice shoes.

Ren When I was working at the charity shop we had a miniature drum kit for a while, because it was the best because kids would come in and play this miniature drum kit and look really pleased with themselves. Anyway.

Frankie trips and falls, and loses consciousness, and when she wakes up again there’s a trail of leaves and pebbles that she realises are Monnie’s way of saying goodbye, and it’s swam away into the creek.

Adam It’s all quite impressionistic, my impression was that she’d fallen into the creek and Monnie had rescued her.

Ren Ahh, okay. That might be it.

Adam I might be wrong, but that’s what I thought.

Ren That makes sense. But it’s not super clear, because it’s Frankie’s perspective and she’s fading in and out a bit at this point.

Adam Yes, it’s all quite woozy.

Ren When Frankie’s recovering, it turns out that the sample didn’t actually come from her father’s lab, but a different scientist, and that her father was only working on plants all along, and is quite taken aback when he realises that his daughter thinks that he’s making terrible monsters in his laboratory.

At the end, Frankie sees Monnie one last time, ‘A gleaming figure came out of the sea a few yards away. It stood up to its full height, towering above me, and stretched its glittering, metallic arms towards the sky. A ribbed fin, yellow as a cockatoo’s crest, grew over its domed head and down between its massive shoulders. Green tendrils fluttered like seaweed from its silvery-wet cheeks’.

Which is amazing!

Adam It’s gorgeous!

Ren And nonbinary goals, I think. And that’s the end! And as you mentioned, I did enjoy this book a fair bit more than the first one.

Adam I think tonally it’s a lot more spirited. It’s got more of an adventure to it, while Cassie Palmer is a more depressing book.

Ren Yeah, The Monster Garden is more of a romp.

Adam And also Monnie is really cute. It manages to balance being a bit squicky and gross, and also being really endearingly written.

Ren Totally, you can’t help but love Monnie, they way it plays about and experiments with its body and trying to find the right number of fingers.

Adam Yeah, in terms of comparisons to other books. They’re both about a child protagonist having some kind of hidden, or secret, friendship I suppose. And it’s interesting, because in The Haunting of Cassie Palmer there is an undercurrent of stranger danger. It’s explicitly talked about, like maybe Deverill is someone who kidnaps little girls, or maybe Deverill’s a murderer, and the characters joke about it. So it is very much there, whereas with The Monster Garden, I guess because Monnie is an alien creature, the source of peril becomes much more shadowy. It’s kind of scientific institutional lack of empathy for others, or something. Do you get what I mean?

Ren Yeah.

Adam Because Frankie’s obviously very scared of Monnie being taken away, but she’s also worried about being persued or punished by this shadowy scientific establishment that is bound up with her dad in her imagination.

Ren It’s a very vague shadowy threat. It’s the way a child might understand something, something that you’ve heard is sinister but you don’t really have any idea what’s going on, and you don’t really know what’s possible. As far as she knows, they could be making hybrid monsters in a lab. They could be doing anything up there.

Adam And her fear of her father and what her father does ends up being transferred onto this other scientist at the end of the book.

Ren Yes, it turns out that her father is just working on plants but the threat still remains in the form of this other scientist.

Adam I guess both books are much more about the experience of these young girls, and their relationships to family. I didn’t think it was a book with some kind of message or thesis. I think I would have got the impression that this was a very specifically anti-genetic modification, or anti-messing around with nature kind of book. But it doesn’t really feel like that. I think because Monnie’s been created through this process, but struck by lighting like Frankenstein’s creature. But I found it interesting that it flirts with some kind of tension between the scientific world and the more nurturing and natural world, but it’s never really developed. It’s not like Animals of Farthing Wood or Princess Mononoke, where the natural world is the thing to be protected and valorised.

Ren I think maybe Vivien Alcock was quite careful to not come down very heavily on one side or the other.

Adam It’s kind of the same thing with ghosts and mediums in The Haunting of Cassie Palmer. It’s not a super rationalist sceptic book, but it also doesn’t come across as someone who’s a die-hard believe in ghosts and the afterlife.

Do you think… I was going to say do you think kids today would like this, but I imagine any kids listening would be quite insulted as everyone is different. But what kind of kids do you think would enjoy listening to this? Because you said that when you were young you probably wouldn’t have picked them up.

Ren Yeah. I mean, I think if I’d have got past the old-fashioned covers I think I might have enjoyed them as a kid. Particularly The Monster Garden. Because I definitely enjoyed books with a creepy atmosphere. I think probably who they remind me most of is Anne Fine, I don’t know if you read Anne Fine books?

Adam Yeah, of course. I think I had to read Flour Babies in primary school. And one we might do on the podcast at some point in the future is The Tulip Touch, which really got under my skin as a kid.

Ren Yes, I’m surprised we haven’t done that one actually, because it’s genuinely quite scary.

Adam Maybe one to do soon!

Ren I don’t think there’s anything necessarily about them that couldn’t appeal to kids now. I don’t think they’re so dated that they’re irrelevant.

Adam It’s not like this is The Water Babies!

Ren It’s still about kids having slightly fraught family relationships and secrets, and tension between having a secret and what you tell your family, and the idea of a kid versus the establishment, which are pretty enduring themes.

Adam I mean, more towards the domestic end of children’s horror. There’s some similarities to the themes you get in Jacqueline Wilson books, that aren’t horror. There’s quite a lot of drama-ry stuff in both books.

Ren I don’t know, I’m not sure if they’re not exciting enough?

Adam I do wonder, I tried reading The Monster Garden to George and he wasn’t having any of it. But I think he really likes a lot of jokes, and hijinks, and there weren’t enough hijinks early enough. He really likes the Knights and Bikes books? They’re pretty great, they have a video game as well. They’re really fun kids books about these two girls on their bikes exploring this island, possibly off the coast of Cornwall. But a lot of stuff happens, and there’s a lot of jokes, it’s quite noisy and busy, whereas these are quite quiet books.

Ren Yes, these are quite quiet, and they’re not very wacky or high-energy. I can see how that’s a bit of a tough sell.

Adam But for any listeners who like more sedate, creepy but low-energy reads, I would reccommend them. Especially The Monster Garden.

Ren Yeah, especially The Monster Garden. Right, shall we wrap up then?

So, you can tweet us at @stillscaredpod, or email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail to com. Update on the last episode, I’m now checking the email again! Thank you to people who have emailed us!

Adam What, multiple emails?? What?? And they were nice emails, not like ‘Ren, get rid of that Adam guy’.

Ren They weren’t. And if you want you can review us on itunes or Apple Podcasts or whatever, but mostly thank you for listening!

Adam Thanks everyone, and… I have to do a sign-off, don’t I? Okay creepy spooky kids, I hope you learn to eat through your legs like Monnie does.

Ren See you next time, spooky kids! Bye!

Adam Bye!