Author Jon Mayhew captivated year 8 today, with a lecture of fear and tension in creative writing.
...It was an ordinary day for year 8, stumbling haphazard, Fridaywise into school.
With thoughts on the weekend, they had forgotten that today was the day...
The difference between a good book and a boring book is simple. A good book is a page turner and today's author, Jon Mayhew focuses on building tension into his novels for children, which centre on the destruction of the world and the power of good, evil and the supernatural...
The workshop enabled girls to listen to the devices used by the author and practice their own skills...
We look forward to the impact of the workshop on their impending gothic horror tales in the forthcoming Mount School Anthology.
Guardian Books Sunday 11 April 2010
Mortlock by Jon Mayhew
Told at a breakneck pace, this horror story will appeal to young readers of 10 and over, says Geraldine Brennan...
An astonishing number of British folk songs ponder on death and decay. First-time author Jon Mayhew, who is also a folk musician, knows a lot of them and starts most chapters of his ghoul-laden mystery adventure story with a traditional verse that tells of coffins, gallows, clay-cold lips, white bones or worms that crawl in and out.
The novel itself is well laden with all these but, while many ingredients of classic horror stories are present, this is also an original tale of two brave children who take on the forces of evil while they piece together their extraordinary history.
Mayhew has woven a rich tapestry depicting a series of convincing worlds, from the Victorian vaudeville circuit with its bearded ladies, tumblers and dancers, to a house of horrors in the Essex marshes, a circus where something is very wrong in the big top and the teeming, smelly, noisy streets of London before horseless carriages. It will appeal to a wide range of readers aged 10 and above and not only those who enjoy a gore-fest.
Three explorers called Mortlock, Chrimes and Corvis travel to the Abyssinian jungle in 1820 to find the amaranth flower, the first bloom to grow in the Garden of Eden and the key to eternal life. Terrified by the living dead who guard the precious plant, they vow to leave it in place. More than three decades later, in London, where Chrimes is drawing crowds as a magician called the Great Cardamom, it becomes clear that one of the three made the vow with fingers crossed.
Cardamom/Chrimes and his young niece, Josie, whom he has trained to perform a knife-throwing act as Artemis the Huntress, are besieged by three ominous "aunts" who are really ghuls (demons who feast on the newly dead) in the form of giant crows and who are seeking the amaranth for their master, Corvis. When Cardamom dies, a kind set-builder called Gimlet delivers Josie to her long-lost brother, Alfie, who has been brought up by Mr Wiggins, a Seven Dials undertaker, and has an uncanny gift with corpses. The children flee the aunts and their army of winged spies, only to find themselves in Corvis's lair. Meanwhile, where is Mortlock?
The tale has a breathtaking pace, so encounters with the many colourful minor characters are short enough to leave us wanting more of Corvis's rebellious servant, Chrimes's lugubrious housekeeper and Jacob Carr the trusty Thames boatman. The frequent changes of location and nail-biting escape sequences soften the edges of the truly horrific scenes, such as the demon-aunts' daily death-feasts and the ghastly secret of Lorenzo's circus. Death is delivered frequently and without sentiment, but there is room for mourning.
Alfie and Josie evade their captors so often and so imaginatively that they should have top billing as escapologists, with the readers cheering them all the way. While there seems to be no scope for a sequel, these are characters we hope to meet again.
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