Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Spitball Gutsnuggle Willy Slimebag

In this episode we discussed Angela and Diabola, by Lynne Reid Banks with illustrations by Klaas Verplancke.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Credits:
Skjor1 - Traditional Church Organ Music [Florence - Italy] 02
InspectorJ - Dramatic Organ, A.wav
kyles - loop smooth muffled rushing air tone skyline traffic distant wind trees forest.flac

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re talking about Angela and Diabola by Lynne Reid Banks. Enjoy!

Ren Hello Adam!

Adam Hello Ren, how are you faring?

Ren I’m, uhh, sleepy.

Adam You’re quite a constitutionally sleepy kind of person, aren’t you?

Ren I am. I have been referred to as a dormouse before.

Adam Is that the dormouse from Alice in Wonderland?

Ren It is, yes. Just asleep in a teapot, that’s me. If you ever want to imagine me, listeners, just imagine a dormouse sleepily napping in a teapot. And what about you, Adam? What character from Alice in Wonderland would you say you most resemble?

Adam Probably the white rabbit, but hopefully just hustling and bustling trying to get lesson plans done, rather than the scissor-wielding white rabbit in Jan Svankmejer’s animated version, who cuts off heads with scissors.

Ren I don’t associate cutting off heads with scissors with you. I’ve know you a while.

Adam Thank you. I mean, I associate that character with my friend Peter, because when I showed him that film in sixth form he did run after me with scissors, pretending to be the white rabbit.

And we’re talking about a book with similarly diabolical behaviour!

Ren Yes, this is Angela and Diabola, which is the pronunciation that I’m going with, because that’s how I read it, by Lynne Reid Banks from 1997. Lynne Reid Banks’ most famous children’s books were the Indian in the Cupboard series that got adapted into a film that I never saw but I did see the trailer often because it was on one of my most-watched VHS tapes, as a kid.

Adam I liked the Indian in the Cupboard. I always wanted to refer to it as ‘The Indian in my Cupboard’ when I referred to it this week, but that’s like Polly in my Pocket, but that’s not right either. There’s definitely some toy that’s like, in my pocket, or not just my pocket — a pocket.

Ren Um. I don’t know, maybe it will come back to us throughout this episode.

Adam (singing like an advert jingle) Indian in the cupboard, cute as can be! Don’t you want to come play with me!

There’s definitely about three different things from the ‘90s that are merging together in my head. And I want to make clear to anyone who doesn’t know the Indian in the Cupboard series, it’s like a little model of a stereotypical Indian from Cowboys and Indians, a little plastic figure that comes to life. Rather than just like, an actual full-bodied human who has been locked in a kids' cupboard, which would be a very dark premise for a kid’s book. But this is a fun cupboard, and as far as I can remember the toy quite enjoys being locked in the cupboard. I think. Maybe? I can’t remember very much about it, to be honest.

Ren All I know is that it’s a magical cupboard that brings toys to life.

Adam Also she wrote I, Houdini which is one that my sister liked when she was young, which is a crafty animal book. Possibly a hamster, who’s able to escape from things like Houdini.

Ren That does sound vaguely familiar now that you mention it. But yeah, I had no idea that she wrote Indian in the Cupboard because this was the book of hers that I read, several times, it was one of my repeat reads. It came out in 1997, when I was about nine or ten, so I was pretty much exactly the right age.

Adam Do you remember where you came across it, was it bought for you?

Ren No idea, no. I don’t have any memories of acquiring it, it was just one of the books that I had that I enjoyed but also found unsettling.

Adam I was going to ask if you found it scary, when you were a kid.

Ren I mean yeah, I think I found it funny but also it definitely had an edge of disturbing content to it, which it has on a re-read too!

Adam Yeah, before we started recording I said I thought it was like The League of Gentlemen for kids. In that it’s on that knife edge between being comedy that sometimes tips into horror, and it has these broad, slightly grotesque characters. And it has a mean streak to it that sometimes pulls you up short with something that’s quite cruel, I guess.

Ren My copy has a quote on the back that says: “A worthy successor to Roald Dahl”.

Adam Yes, I can see that.

Ren It’s an interesting book — it’s an interesting combination of these quite broad characters and dark comedy, and then theology as well.

The basic plot is that a young couple have twins, unexpectedly - the first twin is a beautiful, placid, gurgling baby who delights everyone who sees her, and the second is a screaming terror who gives the delivery nurse a bite on the thumb so severe she nearly bleeds to death.

They call them Jill and Jane, in the hope that they can instil ordinariness into them, but when it comes to their christening — I think it’s worth reading the christening aloud from wherever you see fit in the chapter.

Adam Okay, I’ll start with the christening of Jill, or at least that’s what the mother wants to call Jill.

(Church organ music)

"I name this child—“ he began. Then he looked down, and saw the baby’s face for the first time. Its heavenly blue eyes were looking straight into his.

He gasped. For some moments there was complete silence.

Then the vicar did a thing he’d never done before. He clasped the baby to his heart and began to cry.
"Angela!” he sobbed.
“No! Jill!” cried both the parents. But it was too late. He had named the baby Angela, which of course means “Angel” in Latin, which all vicars are supposed to speak fluently. Most of them don’t but this one did. When the hubbub had died down, and the two godparents had managed to pry Jill-now-Angela out of the vicar’s arms, it was Jane’s turn.

Reluctantly, Mr Cuthbertson-Jones turned to the other godmother, who stamped her cigarette out on the flagstones, coughed wetly, wiped the palms of her hands down the sides of her dirty old skirt and grabbed Jane, who was securely swaddled in a shawl so she couldn’t use her nails.

The tramp-lady didn’t bother looking at her godchild. She just thrust the bundle straight into the arms of the vicar and took another cigarette from behind her ear. The godfather meanwhile was furtively swigging from his bottle from behind the nearest pillar.

The vicar looked like a person who has just opened the most wonderful present of his life, and before even getting used to that, is given another.
"And what name is to be given to THIS divine and wondrous creature?” he asked, with a smile of radiant happiness on his face.
“Jemima or somefin’,” said the godmother.
Poor Mr and Mrs Cutherbertson-Jones were getting quite unnerved.
"JANE! JANE!” they shouted, so that everyone in the church jumped.

The vicar held the baby as before, looked up to heaven with a seraphic smile, and began: “I name this baby—“
And then he looked down into a pair of glistening little green eyes.

(increasingly discordant church organ music)

This good and kindly man had never been able to believe that anyone could be really bad, let alone a tiny newborn baby. But now he saw for the very first time that he had been wrong.

The shock was so awful that he dropped the baby straight into the font, which was an old-fashioned, deep one.

She made a terrific splash, and disappeared under the water. Before anyone could move, she popped straight up again like a cork, and let out a shriek of outrage so loud that everyone around the font fell back, holding their ears.

At the end of this piercing shriek she had to take in a breath. In the silence while she did this, a single word like a cry of anguish, pierced the church from end to end.

_“Diabola!” _

The vicar, unfortunately, was also fluent in Greek. Diabola means “evil one” in Greek. Coming from this good man, who had never sworn in his life, this terrible cry amounted to the worst word he had ever said.

But with it, he had named the baby."

Ren Thank you, Adam! The context for that is that Mr Cutherbertson-Jones had had to pay some people under a bridge to be Jane-now-Diabola’s godparents, because no-one would take up the task.

So despite very much wanting to call their children Jill and Jane, now have to accept that the vicar knows best, and they are called Angela and Diabola.

We get some details of Diabola’s general activities: spitting, punching, throttling that cat, throwing the dead cat at her father, trying to cut off her sister’s fingers with nail scissors - just normal things.

Adam Yes, it quickly becomes: “We need to talk about Diabola.” And there’s even less subtlety than there was in We Need to talk about Kevin that she is pure evil. There’s no doubt about it, she is a little creature of pure malice and spite.

Ren As they’re babies and then toddlers the the parents start keeping the girls separate so that Mr Cuthbertson-Jones can deal with Diabola and Mrs C-J can look after Angela. But this plan falls apart when they realise that Angela actually loves her sister, and wants to spend time with her, despite everything.

So they go shopping with both the twins, with Diabola trussed up in a scarf, and they’re kind of lulled into a false sense of security because she’s surprisingly quiet being next to Angela, but they end up leaving her alone for a moment at which point she disentangles herself from the scarf and starts flinging projectiles of frozen fish and chicken at everyone nearby, which ends with the police being called and Mrs Cutherbertson-Jones being jailed for a month.

So in this period they farm Angela out to the neighbours and Mr C-J is left alone with Diabola, and has invented techniques for subduing her including lassoing her and putting her in the ‘big cage’. Which is: ‘Like a tall playpen, only it was a cage with a barred lid, made of a strong light-weight metal of the sort they make space rockets out of.”

And at this point he’s become convinced that Diabola is a punishment specifically to him for some unspecified misdeeds so he ends up calling the vicar in desperation to see if they can exorcise Diabola. Which she finds very amusing.

The vicar’s a recurring character in this book. He becomes drawn into the theological conundrum of these twins, and the fact that one of them is pure evil and one is pure good.

The parents learn some techniques for managing Diabola. They they realise that the twins need each other in some way, and that Angela can have a mollifying effect on her sister, and the other thing that helps is that Diabola discovers drawing. So when the twins start school, and the parents are absolutely convinced she will be expelled on the first day, instead we get another eccentric background character of the headmistress, who finds Diabola’s drawing of someone being electrocuted in the electric chair quite avant-garde and expressive and hails her as a genius.

Adam I enjoyed this bit, actually. I'll just describe the drawing.

“The most horrendous picture lay before her. It showed a big wooden chair with a man in it. He had straps on his arms and legs. On his head he wore a sort of cap with string-like things coming out of it. The man’s face wore a very unhappy expression. Diabola was busy drawing in zigzag lines like lightning flashes coming out of him.
"Dybo!” Ms Applebough cried. “Whatever is that?”
Diabola ignored her. She put the finishing touches to the zigzags, and then took a plain pencil from her lap and wrote underneath the picture,
"Deth in ther Lekik Cher”.

Ren Yeah, but the headmistress Mrs Kirkbright is convinced that she comes from a very progressive home where she is exposed to all the horrors of the world to stimulate her art.

Adam Yes, like she’s grown up in Frank Zappa’s home in California in the ‘60s. Although I will note that Moon Unit Zappa and the rest of them have seemingly turned out to be very well-adjusted human beings — they haven’t turned out like Diabola.

Ren I was thinking about this book and I think that one of the reasons that I enjoyed it and wanted to read it was the fact that it has such a horrible little girl in it. I don’t think I would have been so interested in it if Angela had been a girl and Diabola a boy. If it had played into the sugar and spice and all things nice/ slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails binary. But instead we get a girl who’s slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails, which is kinda unusual!

Adam That’s true. It’s like a kind of twisted, ‘90s update of My Naughty Little Sister, if you ever read that as a kid. My X-tremely naughty little sister, spelt with an X.

Ren They’ve partitioned off half of a room now, into a cage, so that Angela and Diabola can share a room, but the cage is covered by a huge blackout curtain that can be lowered, because Diabola hates being ignored so in that way they can stop her having a tantrum, to a certain extent.

Adam I like how this book can justify and get the reader on-side with all of these horrendous childcare techniques that would have social services dashing round in an instant. But because Diabola is presented as wholly evil, you’re like: Yep, lock her in a cage that sounds good.

Ren Well there’s a bit right at the beginning when they’re babies and they’re trying to figure out how to feed Diabola without getting food all over everything, and it says:

"Before long they decided they had better feed Jane outdoors, to save cleaning up. But that didn’t work. The neighbours thought that they were killing her and called the RSPCC. When the RSPCC arrived, in the shape of a nice young woman, she took one look at Jane and decided cruelty to children might, in some cases, be justified.”

Adam (shocked laughter) That’s so wrong!

Actually, let’s do the Texture of the Week.

T-t-t-t-t-t Texture-Texture —

Adam and Ren Texture of the week! (clacking noises)

Adam Ooh, what’s that clackety thing you’ve got?

RenIt’s a long-arm stapler!

Adam Just the one arm?

Ren A long arm. One long arm. The long arm of the stapler.

What did you have in mind?

Adam Just the infant Diabola’s mouth, really. Like you can easily imagine a gummy baby’s mouth, but she’s described as having these fang-like teeth that bite and clamp onto things when she’s little.

Ren Oh you know what, Maki horrified me the other day by showing me the picture of a… what was it? A moray? No, a lamprey! Have you ever seen a lamprey’s mouth?

Adam I think I have seen photos of a lamprey’s mouth.

Ren That’s just what it made me think of.

Adam A horrible maw.

Ren A horrible maw, yeah. Mm.

Adam I rather liked the early stuff with her eating and feeding and generally being mucky. It made me think of Jan Svankmejer’s film Little Otik, which is his film about a tree baby, Otasinek, who ends up eating everything, including its parents. And Svankmejer uses some kind of — it’s probalby pork flesh, sadly, however much I like pigs I do enjoy Svankmejer’s films, but it has a horrible tongue and sharp gnashing teeth and gobbles everything up, and that was how I was imagining her as a baby.

How about you?

Ren I had their twinnish language.

Adam Oh cool, an auditory texture. That makes sense.

Ren Yeah, which they develop. For a while Diabola insists on only speaking in Twinnish to Angela who will then translate. Angela talks it too, but hers is a much nicer version, whereas Diabola’s is — well, we have some examples:

"Spitball gutsnuggle willy slimebag” is one. And “Chunk piddle ‘Jane’” is one, from the next chapter where her mother tries to start calling her Jane, again: “Chunk piddle ‘Jane’” I just really enjoyed.

Adam There aren’t lots of descriptive passages in the book, so I guess some of the texture does come through the dialogue and the images, rather than the language.

Ren And I think this book is helped by the illustrations, which are very good.

Adam Yes, they’re a bit Quentin Blake-like. By Klaas Verplancke.

Ren Oh yes, Klaas Verplacke. That’s the cover illustrations, and the inside ones too.

Adam Oddly, on the cover they look older than they ever get to in the book.

Ren Yeah, they do don’t they!

Adam They look taller. I think at the end of the book they’re nine or ten maybe, whereas on the cover they look more like twelve or thirteen.

Ren Things really start to go off the rails when Mr Cutherbertson-Jones finally snaps. He’s taking Diabola to school and she’s being awful as usual, but he loses her temper with her locks her in her cage, and when she complains that they always take Angela to school, he says: “Angela deserves to be taken to school and loved and looked after. If anything happened to Angela, we’d care.”

Adam Ohh :(

Ren Yeah. But then he’s overwhelmed with guilt and anguish and he leaves, just clears off. And soon after that the house falls down. Mrs Cutherbertson-Jones meets with the vicar and he theorises that the physics itself has been unbalanced by the phenomenon of the twins - and without the goodness of Mr Cutherbertson-Jones to balance out Diabola, the house could not withstand the pressure. It fell down!

Diabola is getting more supernatural by the day and less like a little girl.

Adam It’s getting more like The Omen or The Exorcist or something like that.

Ren Yes, she does a point and leaves a mark on her mother’s arm.

The family are moved into a flat at the top of a dingy towerblock. They put Diabola up on the roof in the rain while the Vicar helps get the flat habitable.

Adam It feels like they’ve been suddenly relocated into a Phillip Ridley book.

Ren It does, doesn’t it! They’re in Mercedes Ice, now. Very much so. But without any glittery fantastical —

Adam Without the mitigating whimsy.

Ren Without the mitigating glamour-whimsy, yeah. So it’s just this horrible damp flat. And Lynne Reid Banks has a kind of dig at the council.

Adam There is a bit of a dig at the council, local government, isn’t there?

Ren Not caring what happens to these people. But they manage to get it habitable with the vicar’s help, not before Diabola manages to knock herself out cold by jumping on the bed and hitting her head on the ceiling.

Adam There’s quite an upsetting image of her just as she makes impact, thwacking her head.

Ren Yeah! They’re still only six at this point but they’re becoming less and less like ordinary children. It’s accelerating and particularly Diabola is growing bigger and stronger — she’s always been bigger and stronger than her age, but it’s getting faster. When they go to sleep that night, Mrs Cutherbertson-Jones feels the whole block shiver, as if Diabola might pull the whole thing down.

Adam And Diabola seems to realise that her powers are growing stronger and takes to the roof to try them out on unsuspecting passers-by.
Ren I mean, before that there’s a slightly upsetting bit where is cooking breakfast with the flat door open, to let some light in, and two drunk intimidating men stumble in, trying to take her sausages and stuff.

And Diabola accidentally does a good thing and uses her powers on them and bores with her eyes into them so they feel as if they’ve been shot, and flee.

Adam Yeah, it is quite an upsetting sequence. There’s a real sense of threat, it’s like a little home invasion sequence basically. It’s quite underplayed, they don’t do anything apart from being intimidating and unpleasant, they’re stopped before they can do anything more, but it is quite disturbing.

Ren It was another bit that stuck in my head, that bit. Diabola realises she has these powers, and she wants to go to school because she wants to do more of her ‘orrible drawings, but where they’re staying now if far away from the school, so she goes and uses her new powers on someone to get him to give her money and gets in a taxi to school.

But in her drawing lesson that day she finally goes too far, even for the headmistress, by drawing the towerblock on fire with her mother and sister on the roof. I’m not quite sure why this is too much —

Adam Maybe it’s because she specifically draws her mother and sister on fire, whereas before it was more confined to the imagination: random person in the electric chair or whatever, but now it’s deliberately targeted it starts actually disturbing her.

Ren But Diabola manages to set the piece of paper on fire with her mind.

Adam Yeah, it goes into Stephen King Firestarter territory.

Ren I’ll just read the bit at the end of this chapter because it’s quite good: “Diabola watched the spreading flames for another few moments. Then, quite calmly, she gathered up her art materials and put them into her schoolbag. She glanced at the picture of the block of flats. It had a hole the size of her fist burnt into the middle of it. But the two little figures on the roof were still there.

With the real flames spreading and the smoke half-choking her, she quickly stuck her forefingers into the pots of red and orange paint — there was not time to use brushes. She finger-painted big, fat flames around the figures. She smeared the red and orange all over them until they disappeared.

Then she lifted the picture and threw it onto the blazing floor.

Real flames… paint flames…

You could no longer tell which was which.”

Adam Ah, she does have the spirit of an artist. I’m not saying I’m rooting for her, but there are times where you get where she’s coming from.

Ren Yeah, yeah. She just needs to have all the art materials she could possibly desire, and people to bring her food and keep her safe and warm and then she’ll be fine?

Adam Then she probably grows up to be the Chapman Brothers, pretty much. Who I will say, who’s art is not suitable for work, if you want to explore that reference. If you’re over eighteen, feel free, and some of it’s quite entertaining. But basically it’s the kind of art that she makes.

Ren I was wondering if there was a Francis Bacon reference as well, with the electric chair and the popes.

Adam Some of it does sound quite Francis Bacon, that’s true.

Ren But yeah, now she really knows the power she’s got and Angela meanwhile is like: we need to find Dad, we need to rebalance this situation.

Diabola’s on the roof, testing her powers, making cars swerve together and people keel over in the street - she realises the effect that Angela has on her, preventing her from being as bad as she wants. She feels Angela’s neutralising presence getting close.

Before Angela climbs to the roof, she asks her mother what her first name is. It’s Mwytho (muh-wy-thoh - possibly, that’s how an AI told me it’s pronounced, so sorry to any Welsh listeners.

Adam AI wouldn’t lie! It’s not able to!

Ren Yeah. Angela says “It means soft. You mustn’t be soft Mummy’. There’s a lot of stuff about names in this book and what names mean and the power of using a right name.

Up on the roof, Diabola shows Angela the people she’s stricken, and Angela makes them get up and dance. Diabola says next time! Diabola shouts, and when Angela turns to look back at the street, she feels a wave of badness at her back a moment before Diabola’s hands would have reached her to push her over. Instead, it’s Diabola who flips over the edge, Angela hanging on to her wrists.

Do you want to read that bit maybe, on page 208?

Adam

""Dybo!" she got out between her teeth. "Stop it! I can't hold you!"

Diabola didn’t answer. She was pressing the soles of her shoes against the wall, trying to climb up. Angela pulled, scraping her wrists more. Then her wrists came clear of the rough bricks. She was on her knees now, edging back, pulling, pulling Diabola up.

Diabola’s face came up slowly over the broken parapet.

Their eyes came level.

Angela saw Diabola’s face change.

She saw the terror in it disappear under something stronger.

Angela looked into her twin’s eyes. She couldn’t even see her fear now. All she could see was hate. All she could feel was Diabola’s wish to destroy her.

Angela used every bit of power she had. She wanted — at that moment, she truly wanted — only not to let Diabola go. The feeling of wanting that was so strong she forgot all pain, all fear. She forgot that Diabola had tried to kill her.

She held on. She pulled. But suddenly she felt that Diabola was not letting her pull her up. _Diabola was pulling back. _

In that second Angela knew the awful truth. Diabola was still trying to pull her over. Diabola wanted to destroy Angela more than she wanted to save herself.

Angela let go.

She didn’t decide to. It just happened. The sheer shock loosened her grip on Diabola’s wrists and they slipped through her hands.

For an instant, Diabola’s face hung there, her eyes wide with disbelief, staring into hers. Then she fell.

Down, down, down. Like the brick. Down to the pavement. Screaming all the way. And then -

Splat.”

Yeah! There aren’t many kids books that kill off a small child like that!

Ren Mmhmm!

Adam Listener — I was quite shocked!

Ren You didn’t think it would end that way?

Adam I didn’t think it would end that way, if I’m honest.

Ren So the last chapter’s called Balance, and when Angela wakes up she isn’t the same Angela she was before. Instead of two blue eyes she has one green eye, and the vicar says to Mwytho: “There is no such thing in the world as pure good or pure evil. For a little while, there was an exception. But it only proved the rule. Perhaps that’s why it was allowed to happen.”

Mr Cutherbertson-Jones returns and his name, as it turns out, is Currer: ‘Currer’: “It’s from the Latin for run but he never lived up to it again’. And Angela is renamed Jill.

And I’ll just read the last passage:

"And Jill? Well, she was now an ordinary normal little girl, with good and bad parts mixed up in her. Her parents adored her and on the whole she made them happy and proud.

But every now and then she would have flashes of bad temper and outbursts of bad behaviour. At at these times, she developed a squint.

Her blue eye would turn inwards and look at her green eye. The green eye would look back at her blue eye, and grow slitty and glittery. The two eyes would glare at each other across the top of her nose.

Usually the blue eye would get the better of the green eye.

But not always.

Just like the rest of us.”

So that is Angela and Diabola!

Adam It’s interesting to me that we spent a lot more time talking about Diabola than Angela, which is perhaps testament to the allure of evil, or something.

Ren Well, she is the star of the book, you know? Poor Angela, is not very interesting.

Adam I found it quite funny that their mother finds it worse when there’s a short-lived period where Diabola pretends to be good, and does an impression of Angela where she speaks in a cutie-pie voice, lisping. Which is apparently even more unendurable than her regular stuff.

Ren There’s also some amusing bits where the parents get tired of people fawning over Angela. They’re like: “She’s so beautiful and charming!” and the parents are like: “Yeah yeah, anyway.”

Adam But I can see why you liked it as a kid, it’s quite fascinating and it does feel faintly transgressive. It must have been quite exciting to read as a kid. Maybe that’s why it’s similar to Roald Dahl, this vague feeling that it’s a bit illicit on some level?

Ren I think so but… it’s kind of… Diabola does so many terrible things but she’s never cast out of the family environment, they just adapt to her until her dad runs away. It’s kind of comforting in a way.

Adam Oh, I see, so as a kid you can be like: ‘Even if I’m as bad as Diabola my parents can’t give up on me.”

Ren “They have to look after me." Yeah. Obviously not true, the Cuthbertson-Joneses are remarkably long-suffering. But I think it has this kind of ideal that the parents will always look after the child no matter what she inflicts on them.

Adam Yeah, that’s interesting, because it’s quite different to Roald Dahl, which as we discussed when we were talking about it a couple of months back there’s often just outright abandonment in Roald Dahl, or parents dying, but adults are quite remarkably unreliable in Roald Dahl books.

Ren Yeah, and I guess it’s interesting that this is the rare children’s book that for most of it at least, has two parents in a functioning relationship with each other. Because a lot of parents will have one parent having died or so on — I’m finding it hard to articulate what I mean but I guess it's stretching the parent-child relationship in a different way than is common in children’s books.

Adam We’ve definitely thoroughly spoilered this one, plot-wise, but really you know how the plot is going and it’s more just fun to read on a page-to-page level. There’s a lot of good jokes.

Ren Yeah, and just the enjoyment of seeing how the parents handle Diabola, the contraptions they rig up to keep her in check and so on.

Adam It was good, it was fun.

Ren That is an artefact from my childhood that I’m glad we got round to talking about.

Adam I’m glad I read it, it cheered me up, it was a fun read.

Ren And thanks to my local charity shop for having it on the bookshelf so I noticed it and remembered it, and was like: “Yeah, we should do that one!”

Adam Alright, do you want to run the credits?

Ren Sure. Our intro music is Maki Yamazaki, our outro is by Joe Kelly, our artwork is by Letty Wilson. You can leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever, we like seeing reviews, and if you follow us on Instagram at Stillscaredpodcast you get a bonus collage for each episode.

Adam Ooh, I’m excited to see the collage for this one!

Ren Yeah, yeah. I need to make a collage. Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam Oh well, I have a sign-off of sorts, which is follow us on Letterboxd, where I’ve started doing reviews of the films we’ve watched. That’s stillscared on Letterboxd.

Ren Oh yeah, it’s very good.

Adam Oh, and obviously don’t lock any small children in a cage, unless, I guess, they are the antichrist. But it’s very unlikely. Very unlikely.

Ren See you next time spooky kids!

Adam Bye!

Ren Bye!