Gothic Roots by Danny Weston

It never fails to make me smile.  

'Why?’ ask the concerned parents, ‘do our children have such dark imaginations? What attracts them to such sinister fiction? Is it healthy to be so preoccupied?’ 

 
My retort is invariably the same. I invite the parent to think about the first stories they ever gave to their children, long before they were able to read for themselves; the ones they read to them at bedtime. Little Red Riding Hood: Hansel and Gretel: Snow White. A dark twist of the gothic lies at the heart of all these stories – they are tales of murder and cannibalism and savagery and yet we deem them perfectly suitable for the youngest audiences. The dark seeds are planted early. 

As the children grow older, able to read for themselves, they’ll invariably fall for the stories of Roald Dahl, in which a succession of luckless youngsters are gleefully put through the mill by a series of evil adversaries. Dahl knew better than most authors, the attraction that the grotesque has for young readers. Little wonder that years after his death, his books still figure prominently in the charts.   

By the time the kids are into their teens and start to really look at the world in which they live, they see darkness all around them; in the daily news reports on television and social media, in the actions of corrupt governments that only ever put their own interests first. Here’s a generation of readers that aren’t old enough to vote but who are gleefully invited to massacre hundreds of strangers on their PlayStations and Xboxes whenever they’re in the mood for it.  

 
Little wonder that dark dystopias like The Hunger Games have become the order of the day. Little wonder that cheery escapist fiction is struggling to keep young readers hooked. 

When I came to write Danny Weston’s first novel, The Piper, I was looking to recapture some of the atmosphere that appealed to me as a teenage reader – the unsettling ghost stories of M.R. James, the cold brilliant satires of Saki (H.H. Munro) and the nightmarish qualities found in the writing of the legendary Ray Bradbury. I wanted to write scenes that would make the hairs on the back of a reader’s neck stand to attention… Danny, I decided, would only ever write about unsettling things. He would only ever see the glass half empty. Danny clearly was not going to be invited to many parties. 

Winning the Scottish Children’s Book Award for teen readers felt, somehow, like a vindication. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who liked my fiction dark. A lot of readers clearly agreed with me. 

And you know what? It’s all perfectly healthy for one very important reason. In fiction, we are able to ensure that after a long struggle, the powers of good will eventually triumph over the forces of evil – the sun will rise, vanquishing the darkness – the towers of the wicked will crumble and fall - our young protagonists will survive and will be immeasurably enriched by what they have experienced. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that real life is rarely like that. On a daily basis, massive companies that defraud millions of people walk away without a stain on their character. Corrupt politicians stab each other in the back before being voted into power. People that cheat, lie, steal, murder, all seem to get away with it.

It’s only in fiction that we can make them pay for their transgressions. And it seems to me, that is the most powerful and compelling reason for me to continue in the same vein.

 

 

About Danny Weston:

Danny Weston is the pen-name for Philip Caveney, author of the international bestselling Sebastian Darke series.  Philip has written two YA novels under the pen-name Danny Weston: The Piper, set during the Second World War and following the story of Peter and his younger sister Daisy and the unearthly music the pair hear...  Danny's second novel is the darkly comedic, Mr Sparks.  Based in Llandudno during the Great War, there is much suspicion in the town.  Danny has a third book due out 1st September, The Haunting of Jessop Rise. 

2016 has been a great year for Danny!  He won the Scottish Children's Book Prize with The Piper and has embarked on a terrific and terrifying tour of schools, talking about his latest book Mr Sparks.  Danny (or Philip) is also a highly experienced tutor in creative writing.  He has been writer in residence with the University of Central Lancashire, Worcester University and Lancaster University.  Philip is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.

Engaging with On and Offline Reading Communities by Alexia Casale

The landscape of YA publishing is ever-changing – and changing so rapidly it’s hard even for those who live and breath it to keep up. But that’s one of the things that make it so exciting. Our community and world isn’t a fixed, static thing but constantly being created and recreated so there’s always space for new people and new ideas. It’s like the ideal high school, where everyone is welcome and the weirder you are the more you’ll fit in. The best metaphor must be the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – only with half the teapots full of prosecco.

One of the reasons it moves so quickly is social media. The UKYA and UKMG world comes together for events – launches, festival, author events, UKYAX – but usually it’s only a small part of the community apart from two key dates: YALC and YA Shot. In between, our community lives online: we dip in and out of hashtags, Twitter conversations, scheduled chats and on-line events like the #YAtakeover, touching base with each other often multiple times a day. Twitter is very much the UKYA/UKMG office ‘water cooler’: it hosts a lot of what happens in our community, providing continuity to relationships between opportunities to meet in person.

Before becoming an author, I was really worried about Twitter. I thought it was a space where strangers told each other random, meaningless facts about the minutiae of their lives then never spoke again. The online book world isn’t at all like that. Many of my author friends are people I first met on Twitter. I still remember going to Edinburgh Book Festival when The Bone Dragon was only just out and lovely Cat Clarke coming up to hug me and launching back into a conversation we’d been having a few days earlier on Twitter. For the first time, I felt like I was at a party where I knew people and had something to say.

Twitter has continued to be crucial to my feeling of belonging, to my personal and professional relationships, and to my happiness. It’s amazing to have a space filled with wonderful book-loving, liberal-minded people to retreat to when the world is awful.

Twitter is also a great equaliser for the publishing industry and I love that. It’s much easier to join a conversation online – and often surprising people will respond if you’re legitimately joining in rather than trying to force an opportunity to make a person engage with you. Twitter means that everyone’s invited to the party and no one has to stand in the corner alone if they don’t want to. This replicates itself, though to a lesser degree, at events. Yes, authors are onstage and then behind signing tables, but the closeness of the online community breaks down some of the formality and barriers that would otherwise exist. It’s why the atmosphere at events like YALC and YA Shot is so friendly – so happy. It helps us create an ‘all of us’ feeling about UKYA/UKMG spaces so that authors and readers and publishing people know they can mix freely and talk to anyone they want to.

The fact that the UKYA/UKMG world is so bound up with the Twittersphere means that rich but free opportunities are available to publicise events and to reach out to all sorts of people to say ‘you are welcome, everyone is welcome’. This makes a huge impact in YA Shot’s ability to put its ethos of inclusivity and generosity into practice. An obvious way is the YA Shot Blog/Vlog Tour, which involves most of our authors and around 60 bloggers and vloggers each year. But there’s also our Internship Programme, which I am incredibly proud of. Although we do reach out specifically to local universities, particularly Brunel, social media means that we can get the word out quickly and easily to a far wider range of people. Yes, only those on social media, but let’s face it… most young people who want to work in the UKYA/UKMG fields are on there – or should be! – as it’s such a huge part of the job and the world of publishing nowadays.

YA Shot is an organisation built on transparency and equality above all else: we explain what we’re doing whenever anyone asks and we say why. Social media makes that not only possible but an on-going conversation, as it should be. Above all, it helps us reach out as widely as possible so everyone knows they’re welcome. It’s why our Internship Programme is full of diversity. We don’t select authors or interns based on personal characteristics: instead, we make sure we throw our net so wide that we can choose the best people each year and find that translates (as it should) to a diverse pool of authors and interns, bloggers and visitors. If the playing field is level, then there will be equality and, quite naturally, there will be diversity. Social media and the online world helps us turn that ethos into reality.

A related way that social media shapes the UKYA/UKMG world is that it gives people who want to listen to different voices the opportunity to do so. Yes, some people misuse the opportunity. And, yes, some lack nuance and/or the ability to articulate their perspective. And, yes, it isn’t always fair who gets the most ‘air time’. But everyone can speak and that’s a start.

So come and say hi! Join us on the #YAShot and #YAShot2016 hashtags. Join us at YA Shot itself! Let us know if you want to steward in exchange for a ticket! From August 1st, join us for over 60 stops on our Blog and Vlog Tour! We’ll see you at YALC too… and of course on #UKYAchat and #YATakeover, always with a cup of tea… though a teapot of prosecco may well be the way forwards now our Mad Hatter Tea-Party metaphor has put the idea in our heads.

About Alexia:

A British-American citizen of Italian heritage, Alexia is an author (The Bone Dragon and The House of Windows), editor and writing consultant. She also teaches English Literature and Writing. She is the visionary behind #YAShot and she will be taking part in the "Growing up and Moving out" author panel alongside Keris Stainton for the #YAtakeover on the 21st August.

Find out more information about #YAshot

Follow Alexia on Twitter (@AlexiaCasale)

Buy House of Windows on Foyles and Waterstones.