One, a boy her own age named Harold, who is a bit surly but friendly enough. There she stumbles across two things of interest. It wore a black woollen hat on top of a garish ginger wig and had been dressed in charity-shop clothes – a tatty oversized jacket hung past its knees, underneath which were paint-splattered trousers.”Īs Malmouth isn’t exactly a happening place, Aveline eventually finds herself in the one shop in town she might enjoy: Lieberman’s Second-Hand Books. Its limbs were stiff because they’d been pulled from an old shop-dummy. “The figure’s head was made from a grubby white buoy, with eyes, nose and mouth scrawled on in blood-red paint. Local custom encourages residents to fashion eerily lifelike scarecrows which are displayed all over town. Lacking charm and warmth, however, isn’t quite enough for the residents of this seaside village. “The only living things to be seen were the rooks that sat hunched in the branches, hurling their angry curses across the empty countryside.”Ī cheery place, this Malmouth. Hickes has a gift for vivid description, as when detailing the drive between Bristol and Malmouth. The monsters were real.” – Phil HickesĪveline Jones has come to the English coast to stay with her Aunt Lilian in Malmouth, a tiny village in the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dartmoor or MR James’s Burnstow.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |