Breakfast At Libraries

Robin Jarvis writes fantasy and horror for children and teenagers, and The Power of Dark (out on 2 June) is his latest novel. Although I was aware of Robin Jarvis's books, I'm just old enough to have missed out on them as a child, as I was 13 or 14 when his first novel was published, and by that point I was mostly reading books aimed at adults. This is a shame as, judging from The Power of Dark, I would have liked Jarvis's books a lot when I was reading from the 9 - 12 or teen shelves in the library.

Tiffany Murray's Sugar Hall begins with the recently widowed Lilia Sugar and her two children, Saskia and Dieter, moving from their London flat, a post-war new build, to the ancient country mansion Dieter has inherited from his father's estranged family. The house is in poor repair and German-born Lilia feels horribly unequipped to play lady of the manor, while Dieter and Saskia, Londoners are heart, are lonely and out of place. But is that the only reason they feel so uncomfortable at Sugar Hall? And why is Dieter the only surviving heir?

Sugar Hall is a ghost story that edges from shiver-inducing eeriness into out-and-out horror at times; the ghost in question becomes an increasingly powerful, vengeful force. However, there are other, less literal 'ghosts' in this book. Lilia is haunted by memories of her past in 1930s Germany and the family she left behind, and her daughter Saskia, born when Lilia was a teenage refugee, is a constant reminder of the Nazi stormtroopers' brutalities.

This book is certainly strong on atmosphere, and the period details throughout are perfectly chosen and described, but it's also strong on character. A vivid cast of supporting players lend the story multiple points of view, in addition to those of the Sugar family themselves. Some (such as neighbour Juniper) more sympathetic than others (the local vicar) but all feel three-dimensional and believable. Moreover, Sugar Hall as a house is almost a character in its own right. Built on the proceeds of unimaginable cruelty in the days of the slavery, it's an oppressive and claustrophobic presence throughout the novel, ghosts or no ghosts.

More of a slow build than a rollercoaster ride, this is a genuinely creepy yet sensitively written book. What it doesn't really do is answer every question it raises, so if you're the sort of person who likes every loose end to be neatly tied up and every mystery to be fully explained, you might find the last chapter or two unsatisfactory, but I enjoyed Sugar Hall a great deal and found it to be a fascinating and surprisingly thought-provoking ghost story.

My Friend Dahmer is a graphic novel, or perhaps more of a graphic memoir, written and drawn by a high school classmate of the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. It outlines the brief period during the 1970s during which Derf Backderf and his friends Mike, Neil and Kent formed a friendship of sorts with Dahmer - albeit one founded almost entirely on their amusement at, and fascination with, his odd behaviour.

If you were imagining this might be a dark, gothic affair full of sinister drawings, you couldn't be more wrong. Backderf's excellent monochrome artwork is actually more akin to that which you'd see in a well-produced children's comic or a broadsheet cartoon strip. This contributes to the complete lack of sensationalism or prurience in Backderf's account of the teenage Dahmer, whom he presents not as a terrifying villain-in-training but as exactly what he was at the time: a lonely, awkward teenager who got his classmates' attention by spontaneously mimicking the speech and movements of someone with cerebral palsy, and feigning seizures for comic effect. That's not to say that the artwork isn't ever chilling - the wordless opening frames showing Dahmer as a child as he walks along a lonely woodland road by himself and discovers a dead cat are tense and ominous - but this is certainly no horror comic.

This is much as a book about the 1970s, about school and about being a teenager in smalltown America as it is about Jeffrey Dahmer. As Backderf freely admits, while he and his friends admitted Dahmer into their circle - referring to themselves at one time as the 'Dahmer Fan Club' in appreciation of his strange behaviour - none of them could truly be said to have really liked him or formed a great depth of feeling towards him. He entertains them, providing them with material for endless pranks (like the time they endeavoured to place him one or another into every school yearbook picture, whether he was a member of the group or not, or spent hours watching him perform his 'spaz'* act to the baffled discomfiture of store owners and shoppers at the local mall) but do they actually like him? Not much, it appears - they didn't invite to him to many, if any, social events outside school, and only afterwards does it occur to Backderf how acutely lonely Dahmer must have been, as his parents raged at one another in their isolated forest house. Once they leave high school, they have no further contact with him at all - in fact, Derf met with his friends a few years later and someone mentioned Dahmer's name, Derf joked, quite genuinely, that he was 'probably a serial killer'. Many of us, particularly boys, will know the feeling of having a 'friend' that you're not really sure you even like that much, but who you allow to be part of your circle purely because they somehow make you feel that you're no longer the weirdo - as Derf says, Dahmer was almost 'a bizarro school mascot'.

There are, of course, many shocking things about Jeffrey Dahmer's story, even when you end the narrative, as Backderf more or less does, when Dahmer is still in his late teens, but while this book does touch on some incidents that Backderf knew nothing about at the time of their acquaintance, it wisely focuses on the things that Backderf personally observed which are, in themselves, startling. Dahmer, for instance, developed a serious drink problem as a teenager that was clearly apparent to his classmates - he was very obviously drunk and reeking of alcohol at school on a daily basis - yet his teachers fail to notice. There is also an incident where, while on a school trip to Washington DC, managed to secure for himself and his friends, with a single call from a phone box, a private guided tour of the office of the then Vice-President, Walter Mondale, who greeted the boys personally.

How did Dahmer, a lonely, bullied misfit for much of his childhood who was so uncomfortable at his high school prom that he literally ran away from his date and spent the evening at McDonald's, manage to affect a manner sufficiently confident and charming to pull this off? It was, Backderf says, 'an incredible talent for BS' - was it this talent that later enabled him to dupe men and boys he had just met on the street into going back to his house to pose for nude photos, where he would then drug, molest and kill them? Or, still in his late teens, to make two police officers believe that the reeking bin-bags in the boot of his car, containing rotten human body parts, were simply rubbish that he'd forgotten to put out for collection while his parents were away and that he was taking to the local tip - in the early hours of the morning?

I can't think of another book quite like this one, and I would recommend it if you like the graphic novel format but have zero interest in superheroes, sci-fi or fantasy. Despite its focus on a boy who was soon to become a cannibalistic, necrophiliac serial killer, it has an oddly strong sense of nostalgia about it, and the questions Backderf asks himself as he relates his experiences of Dahmer are thoughtful and relevant.


*Backderf's word, not mine - Backderf does point out in the book that he and his friends are now deeply ashamed of the entertainment they got from mimicking disabled people, and remember that these were teenage boys in the 1970s, when attitudes were very different.)

The Emperor's Babe is a novel written in blank verse, set in Roman London. The narrator is a Zuleika, a girl born to Sudanese immigrant parents who, aged 11, is quite literally sold by her father to a wealthy man who wants her for his bride. Skip forward a few years and Zuleika is pampered materially but emotionally neglected, bored and unfulfilled - until she catches the eye of the Roman Emperor, Septimius Severus,

By far the most notable thing about The Emperor's Babe is its language, which is a strange mix of modern slang, street-talk and Latin phrases that combine into a sort of patois. It's sometimes effective, but just as often grating; it all just feels very overdone and occasionally patronising. Similarly, genuinely atmospheric evocations of life in Roman Britain - which are fascinating, vivid and a great reminder that London was just as multicultural a city circa 200AD as it is now -  are peppered with deliberate anachronisms. I assume are intended to make us feel closer to Zuleika and her world and identify more directly with them, but I found the somewhat laboured humour in references to Armani tunics and the EC4 postcode very quickly wore thin.

This is a shame, because some of the story really is beautifully written, and amid the brashness of Zuleika's narration, there are several moments that are touching, heartbreaking or arresting in one way or another. Zuleika's deliberately offhand references to the horrors of her wedding night - she is married, remember, at the age of 11, to an obese, middle-aged man - are painful in their deliberate casualness, and there is a viscerally shocking scene when she experiences a moment of catharsis while watching the grotesque cruelties of the amphitheatre.

While Bernadine Evaristo has done an innovative and interesting thing with this book - and I am sure many people would love it; there is much to admire in it - this one's just not for me, I'm afraid.

I'm not sure why I've never read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall before, as I've read most of the Brontë sisters' other novels and despite being by Anne, the least famous sister, this one must almost certainly have been on my degree syllabus many years ago. Anyway, a recent BBC documentary on the Brontës reminded me that I hadn't, so I picked up a copy. It seems ridiculous to 'review' a classic Victorian novel, but I try to cover all the fiction I read on this blog, so these are my thoughts on it.

First of all, it's surprisingly gripping. Like many 19th century novels, it is more verbose than most contemporary fiction, but I found I 'got into it' after a chapter or two and soon found that I honestly couldn't put it down. It begins with the arrival of a young widow, Helen Graham, at an isolated and only partially habitable mansion, Wildfell Hall, along with her little boy. The tenants of a local gentleman, Mr Lawrence, Helen and her son are soon introduced to the small, somewhat insular local community, where we see them through the eyes of our narrator, middle-class farmer Gilbert Markham. But rumours soon start to spread. Why is Helen so defensive when questioned about her son? Why is she so fond of solitude? Is she really a widow? And could there be anything in the observation that Helen's son bears at least a superficial resemblance to her landlord?

What then unfolds is a remarkably dark tale of alcoholism, infidelity, abuse and a marriage so toxic it still has the power to shock, even 150 years later - perhaps because, despite shifts in values and the rights of women since the book was written, the behaviour of the characters is all so recognisable. The portrait of Helen's marriage is utterly believable and not at all far from the experience of many women today - divorce might be easier for British women in the 21st century, and certainly less of a disgrace, but aside from that, Helen's situation has numerous contemporary parallels.

This is not one of those books when the wronged heroine is a faultless angel; Helen at the start of her story is in fact both naive and stubborn. However, she is pleasingly resilient and self-sufficient, and unwilling to suffer fools gladly. Neither is Gilbert particularly heroic - he begins the book as a somewhat immature, impulsive young man, but develops with considerable decency and resourcefulness as the story progresses. There are strong feminist undertones to the novel, which are, given the subject matter, very pertinent to Helen's situation.

I wasn't immensely keen on the end of the book - the plot, for Helen and Gilbert, is resolved in much the way that I had hoped, but there is one major story element that seems to fizzle out somewhat in a way that's simply too convenient and I might have liked this to be a little more dramatic. But then, I suppose, the book would have become a gothic melodrama, and despite what people might think of the Brontës, that is not what their books are.