Stone Cold and Hydra

Explosive Denouement!

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Transcript: Hydra and Stone Cold

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. Today we’re talking about two books by Robert Swindells, Stone Cold and Hydra.

And just a warning, Stone Cold is on the grittier side. There’s a serial killer character and a bit more violent. Nothing too explicit, but it’s not as fun as some of our other topics. Hydra is pretty fun though, so you can skip to the end if you just want that one, at 52.00.

Ren: Good morning, Adam!

**Adam: ** Good morning, Ren and it is the morning!

Ren: It is the morning, for once, we are recording in the morning! Will this make a difference to our output? Let’s see. Today we’re going back to Robert Swindells, who we last talked about in 2019 —

Adam: Oh the years they go past! They go past!

**Ren: ** They do!

**Adam: ** I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.

**Ren: ** With an episode back then when we were young and dewy-eyed on Room 13 and Nightmare Stairs and we’re back for another double-header today with Hydra from 1991 and Stone Cold from 1993. Two quite different examples of children’s horror: Robert Swindells is a land of contrast. Shall we start with front covers?

**Adam: ** Oh yes, that’s a great call because they have a few. Let’s start with Stone Cold. My cover looks like it’s been taken from a computer screen at the back of a CSI episode. It’s just a silhouette, is yours a gauzy silhouette, with light coming in? A sinister, a possibly sinister shadow!

**Ren: ** No, I’ll explain what mine is because it’s quite striking.

So it’s an illustration by Peter Menim, we have two blond-haired young people sleeping on a city street in sleeping bags in the foreground, one turned towards the reader and the other turned away, and then looming above them is a man’s disembodied face, with a really quite strange expression - he’s slightly cross-eyed, and he’s flaring his nostrils and baring his teeth —

Adam Now you’ve said flaring his nostrils, I’m just imagining Rimmer from Red Dwarf —

Ren Yeah, yeah, the impression is a bit Rimmer, but also ‘predatory’, but also a bit puzzled.

Adam Puzzled??

Ren It’s strange. I might make it the cover image for the episode so people can see it.

**Adam: ** Yeah, it’s quite hard to imagine. I think I’ve seen this one before. When you say disembodied, it’s not like a head on a stick, is it floating in the sky?

**Ren: ** It’s floating above the ground in the street, it’s filling the whole alleyway.

**Adam: ** Oh my gosh, well that is scary. The sub-heading on my cover says: ‘Fear stalks the streets’, and it does seem like your cover captures that.

**Ren: ** Yeah, it doesn’t need to say that on mine, you can see. It also has a gold embossed Carnegie medal on the cover.

**Adam: ** Ooh. This one just says in a small font ‘Winner of the Carnegie medal’ which isn’t as good.

Ren: I was quite pleased with this cover, I think it’s a vintage early 90s one. My Hydra is a re-release that’s very ‘the year 2000’, I think.

Adam Oh, how so?

Ren Well, it’s this blurry horseshoe crab Xenemorph image. It’s the fonts, I think that’s really making it.

**Adam: ** I think I’ve got the same one. There’s been quite a lot of covers for Hydra, some of the translated ones actually have a rather better Hydra. Not that it’s called a hydra, there’s no mention of a hydra in the book at all, I don’t think. And when we do see the creature, it’s not really how I’d imagine a hydra, let’s be honest.

Ren: It only has one head, for one thing.

Adam: Yeah, surely the whole point of the hydra, right! Is that it has multiple heads! So why on earth Swindells called this Hydra, I don’t know.

**Ren: ** One other mention, this made me laugh on the back where it has the blurbs, one of the blurbs for Hydra is ‘explosive denouement’.

**Adam: ** I’m sure lots of kids are going to see that at the back, and go ‘Ooh, yes’.

**Ren: ** ‘Ooh, an explosive denouement you say’.

**Adam: ** Also not quite the Carneige medal winner — runner-up for the Sheffield children’s book award’.

**Ren: ** Well, you’ve got to start somewhere. I think we start with Stone Cold and then we can have a bit of a lighter ending with Hydra.

**Adam: ** Yeah, so Hydra is the earlier book but maybe he was warming up to the horrors of Stone Cold. But looking at the ‘also available’, he had done - was it Room 13 we did, and Nightmare Stairs —

**Ren: ** Yep.

**Adam: ** So they’re early ones and they are very much little Hammer Horror stories for children. He’d also done Jacqueline Hyde — which is obviously a reworking of Dr Jekell and Mr Hyde.

**Ren: ** gasp Is that what the tv series was based on?

**Adam: ** Well, I think it must be, right?*

Ren Oh my goodness, yes.

Adam I don’t know if that’s a future one to do, that TV series, because the Jacqueline Hyde costume was quite something.

Ren It was quite something. This is a real deep cut, children’s TV series.

Adam It’s a proper deep cut.

Ren British children's TV from the ‘90s.

Adam She was really hulking, wasn’t she?

Ren: She was, she was quite like the Honey Monster.

**Adam: ** Yeah, well, the Honey Monster was developed by the Jim Henson creature workshop, I’ve got this amazing book and the Honey Monster is in it.

Ren: Woah.

Adam Who knew?! But I suspect the company who made Jacqueline Hyde costume didn’t have that kind of money. But anyway, Swindells would then go on to do both Stone Cold and Brother in the Land. And I say that Stone Cold is harrowing, I kind of didn't want to make you read Brother in the Land because it might be too much!

**Ren: ** Maybe it will have it's own episode at some point.

**Adam: ** Yeah, we could do an episode on two nuclear wasteland stories —

**Ren: ** Wahey!

**Adam: ** For the kids.

Stone Cold as you say is a pretty grim read, I can’t remember if it was one I read in school, I think it might have been, it had won the Carniege. Do you remember what year it won the Carniege?

Ren ’94, or ’93.

Adam Yeah, I think I might have done it either at the end of primary or the beginning of secondary school, it might have been a Year 7 book. It had a real impact on me, I found it really gripping and I remember really liking it but I found it really disturbing. I honestly think it properly shaped me, I do think my tendency to chat to a lot of homeless folks might come from having read this book.

It definitely made me think about the experience of homelessness and particularly what it would be like to be young and homeless in a way that I hadn’t before, which stayed with me. Obviously I like trash, I don’t think that all children’s horror needs to be edifying or shaping kids into thoughtful socialists of the future, but I do think it’s pretty worthy in the best possible sense.

**Ren: ** You can tell from the GoodReads reviews that it is still taught in schools, there’s lots of kids griping about their English teachers

**Adam: ** Aw, I’m glad to see that kids are using Goodreads at least, get them off Tiktok and onto Goodreads!

**Ren: ** But you can see why it would be a good one to get kids to read to think about homelessness.

I was coming to this for the first time, reading it for the podcast. I feel like it was in the school library but I never picked it up.

**Adam: ** You are 2 1/2 years younger than me, so I think by the time you got to it in the school library it was probably quite dog-eared. The copy had probably fallen apart.

**Ren: ** I remember seeing Stone Cold or Brother in the Land looking very dog-eared and early 90s in the school library rotary stand and thinking ‘nah, I don’t fancy it.’

**Adam: ** You were like, instead there’s this new shiny Artemis Fowl, or something.

Ren: Well, there were all the Paul Jennings ones.

**Adam: ** Ooh, of course! With their exciting double-covers. I can see how that would have got you.

Ren: Possibly venturing into a new horror genre for us, political horror, social horror —

Adam: social-realist horror, kitchen sink horror.

**Ren: ** Because before you even get to the overt horror of the serial killer — there is a serial killer in this book — there is the horror of Thatcherism, basically. Which isn’t mentioned by name, but is otherwise quite explicitly set-up.

Our protagonist is 16 year-old Link, that’s his nickname, from Bradford, and the catalyst for his homelessness is his abusive stepfather, but the reasons why his situation becomes so bad are this spiralling combination of: lack of apprenticeships/job opportunities for young people, predatory private landlords, and the cruelty and indifference of what’s meant to be the social security system, and the messages of right-wing media, all of that. It’s quite explicitly shown to cause Link to end up sleeping rough in London.

So we’ve got this dual structure for the book, it’s very short, only 132 pages, but we have alternating chapters between ‘Link’, and our antagonist ‘Shelter’, who is an ex-Army drill sergeant, who has been discharged on ‘medical grounds’, which we quickly pick up from his narrative is code for ‘ being a dangerous sadist’.

**Adam: ** Yeah.

**Ren: ** And he’s keeping a log called Daily Routine Orders, that are numbered and are his plans to murder homeless children.

**Adam: ** And we know he’s evil from the font. Link has a nice humane serif font with curls so we know he’s nice, whereas Shelter has a sans-serif font that is really regimented and orderly, like ‘look at this inhumane robot monster!’. So I could tell just from the font choice!

**Ren: ** There you go.

**Adam: ** It’s quite useful having the two different fonts so you don’t get them mixed up.

**Ren: ** He’s got this very creepy voice that he writes in —

**Adam: ** Yeah, it’s hard to place, it’s quite insinuating.

**Ren: ** It’s probably worth reading a bit of it:

"Daily Routine Orders 2 I’m getting used to my name. Breaking it in like a pair of new boots. Good morning, Shelter, I say to the bathroom mirror. Smiling. Good morning, Shelter. You’re a handsome devil but you’re idle, lad. You need a shave. I’ve been writing it, too, on the backs of old envelopes. Shelter. Shelter. Shelter. It’s starting to look like an authentic signature already. I realize of course that all this has precious little to do with recruiting, and perhaps you think I’m stalling. Putting it off.

Not so. I’m merely indulging myself. After all there’s plenty of time. The street people aren’t going to go away, and anticipation is the best part of a treat, as my old grannie never used to say. So it’s a case of wait for it, you ’orrible little man.”

**Adam: ** There’s this weird faux-friendliness to it, and this barely-contained rage. It’s good at building this horrid sense of complicity, like he’s talking to you.I think it’s really effective, actually. It’s quite cinematic, this cross-cutting between these two narratives, good for creating dramatic irony and suspense.

Obviously we care about Link and want him to be okay, and we know from Shelter’s account that he’s spotted Link and Link is one of his new targets, and he’s stalking him. And so we’re cutting to Link doing things and going about his day, and back to Shelter talking about Link. And obviously from his perspective Link is just this victim or this target, whereas we know Link as a human being. I think it’s really effective, actually, it makes the dehumanisation hit harder. It’s a really clever device and much more effective than if it was just narrated from one of those two perspectives.

Ren: So Shelter’s plan is to act the part of the non-threatening do-gooder, dress in cords and sweaters, adopt a cat, and offer street kids a bed to sleep on at his place, then kill them and stash their bodies in the ventilated space underneath the floorboards.

There’s some interesting stuff about how Shelter presents himself, the specific person he’s going from. I’ve written homosexual (unthreatening), not to jump too far ahead but when Link eventually ends up in Shelter’s flat he says that this is the kind of man that his Auntie would describe as “a Mary-Ellen’ which is not a mainstream piece of slang as far as I can find. But I think it means fussy, tidy — I think homosexual (unthreatening) is it, and there is insinuation of the other kind of homosexual.

**Adam: ** I was also reading it as how the right-wing imagines an ineffectual left-wing tweedy academic, like how so many people found it so easy to be contemptuous of Corby ‘Oh, he’s probably got an allotment!’

Ren: Yeah, that did also occur to me, the Corbyn comparison.

Adam: This idea of a soft liberal do-gooder. It’s interesting having this character adopt this persona, because it’s a figure he would be quite contemptuous of, but he’s having to adopt it to fulfil his really predatory desires.

**Ren: ** But he also has his own prissiness —

Adam That’s true.

Ren He doesn’t swear, one of his repeated phrases is ‘by golly I will’, which is really sinister and there’s that touch of this murderer who is squeamish about swearing.

**Adam: ** It’s a bit like Annie Wilkes in Misery.

**Ren: ** Ah, I don’t know it.

**Adam: ** Part of what’s disturbing about her character is that she’s willing to commit extreme violence and be homicidal but at the same time she doesn’t like swearing and uses a lot of this Ned Flanders-style euphemisms.

**Ren: ** Link is a sympathetic character, crucially he doesn’t drink or take drugs, which I think is Swindells keeping it simple in a book aimed at teenagers, people are more likely to blame addicts for their situation.

**Adam: ** I guess this must have come out around a similar time — was it Melvin Burgess who did Junk?

**Ren: ** I learned so much from that book.

**Adam: ** I’m trying to think what year - that’s ’96. That’s set in Bristol, with two homeless squatters, teenagers, who become heroin addicts. That’s more complex in terms of character identification. Both characters are sympathetic, but to memory, the male character starts becoming abusive himself — he’s had an abusive father and he hates himself as he recognises that he’s becoming like his father as he descends into the heroin addiction.

**Ren: ** I think it’s Gemma who’s the lead in Junk, I remember her being very sympathetic.

**Adam: ** Gemma really anchors it. They would be interesting comparison pieces, it’s been a little bit too long since I read it to remember clearly enough, but they would be interesting books to pair together.

Ren: It is sort of mentioned in the text, Link meets another teenager called Ginger who teaches him how to live on the street, and Ginger writes a sign for them to hold that says ‘Homeless, non-alcoholic’ and says they won’t give you money if they think you’re alcoholic. So addiction isn’t completely ignored, but Link is quite straightforwardly sympathetic, there isn’t anything to complicate that.

**Adam: ** I think that’s true. I guess it might end up being overly complex, obviously one of the complicated things about someone being alcoholic on the streets is that if you go cold turkey you go into alcohol withdrawal which is really risky, even compared to withdrawing from heroin. If you go completely cold turkey and you’re a heavy drinker, you could die. I’ve seen the argument where if you give money to a homeless person for them to buy alcohol you could be endangering their life, but you could also be endangering their life not giving them money for alcohol, to be honest!

I could see why he does it, because it’s so often what people use to not engage with people who are homeless, or give money or talk to them, like oh well they’re addicts. And let’s be honest, a lot of addicts, it does tend to go hand in hand with trauma.

Ren Oh yeah, absolutely.

Adam It would make sense if you’ve been abused or otherwise exploited or mistreated, why you might turn to substances.

Ren: As well as the trauma of being on the streets —

Adam And being cold!

Ren And we can talk about that a bit in the book, because as research Swindells went out to sleep rough in Central London and more importantly talked to homeless people. So do you want to read the bit about where he’s talking about sleeping on the cold pavement?

Adam: “If you think sleeping rough’s just a matter of finding a dry spot where the fuzz won’t move you on and getting your head down, you’re wrong. Not your fault of course – if you’ve never tried it you’ve no way of knowing what it’s like, so what I thought I’d do was sort of talk you through a typical night. That night in the Vaudeville alcove won’t do, because there were two of us and it’s worse if you’re by yourself.

So you pick your spot. Wherever it is (unless you’re in a squat or a derelict house or something) it’s going to have a floor of stone, tile, concrete or brick. In other words it’s going to be hard and cold. It might be a bit cramped too – shop doorways often are. And remember, if it’s winter you’re going to be half frozen before you even start. Anyway you’ve got your place, and if you’re lucky enough to have a sleeping bag you unroll it and get in.

Settled for the night? Well maybe, maybe not. Remember my first night? The Scouser? Course you do. He kicked me out of my bedroom and pinched my watch. Well, that sort of thing can happen any night, and there are worse things. You could be peed on by a drunk or a dog. Happens all the time – one man’s bedroom is another man’s lavatory. You might be spotted by a gang of lager louts on the lookout for someone to maim. That happens all the time too, and if they get carried away you can end up dead. There are the guys who like young boys, who think because you’re a dosser you’ll do anything for dosh, and there’s the psycho who’ll knife you for your pack.

So, you lie listening. You bet you do. Footsteps. Voices. Breathing, even. Doesn’t help you sleep. Then there’s your bruises. What bruises? Try lying on a stone floor for half an hour. Just half an hour. You can choose any position you fancy, and you can change position as often as you like. You won’t find it comfy, I can tell you. You won’t sleep unless you’re dead drunk or zonked on downers. And if you are, and do, you’re going to wake up with bruises on hips, shoulders, elbows, ankles and knees – especially if you’re a bit thin from not eating properly. And if you do that six hours a night for six nights you’ll feel like you fell out of a train. Try sleeping on concrete then.

And don’t forget the cold. If you’ve ever tried dropping off to sleep with cold feet, even in bed, you’ll know it’s impossible. You’ve got to warm up those feet, or lie awake. And in January, in a doorway, in wet trainers, it can be quite a struggle. And if you manage it, chances are you’ll need to get up for a pee, and then it starts all over again.

And those are only some of the hassles. I haven’t mentioned stomach cramps from hunger, headaches from the flu, toothache, fleas and lice. I haven’t talked about homesickness, depression or despair. I haven’t gone into how it feels to want a girlfriend when your circumstances make it virtually impossible for you to get one – how it feels to know you’re a social outcast in fact, a non-person to whom every ordinary everyday activity is closed.”

**Ren: ** Thank you, Adam

**Adam: ** I think it also captures how much of a dramatic monologue a lot of Link’s chapters are. I don’t know if this was ever adapted for stage but you can imagine it as two competing monologues on a stage.

**Ren: ** Yeah, definitely. I feel like you can tell in that extract that Robert Swindells did go and try and sleep on some pavement, obviously going to try out being homeless is not —

**Adam: ** Yeah, it’s going to be very partial.

**Ren: ** But for writing, quite useful. And as well as all those troubles, Link is having to content with Shelter, whose political project is to lure vulnerable homeless kids to his home, murder them and stash them under the floorboards as his army, where he ends up calling ‘The Camden Horizontals’ which is particularly nasty. He’s cutting their hair post-mortem and dressing them up in surplus army gear.

As you said, Shelter briefly encounters Link and Ginger early on when they ask him for money and then laugh at him, so he calls them ‘Laughing boy one and two’ and sets his sights on them’. Shelter tricks him into following him home, telling him that Link is hurt and in Shelter’s house, and when he gets there Shelter kills him.

Link is obviously upset that Ginger’s disappeared and doesn’t know what’s happened to him, but then he meets a girl in a cafe, a fellow ‘dosser’ as he calls them, called Gail, and Link is besotted enough that he doesn’t key into the clues that there’s something a bit off about her.

They start putting pieces together about Shelter, there’s a few missing homeless kids now, and someone’s seen one of them with a man in his 40s, so they’re starting to put it together. They go to the police, who go to Shelter’s door and he does his do-gooder, big softie act and totally fool them.

**Adam: ** There’s a parent looking around, a dad looking for his daughter who we know that Shelter’s killed, so that’s pretty bleak.

**Ren: ** Yeah, and that’s another moment of contrast as we’ve had Shelter’s dehumanising narrative about this girl and then we have the father looking for his beloved daughter, so that really hits home

Link ends up hanging out around Shelter’s flat, and decides that he’s got it wrong and that Shelter’s harmless, but Shelter invites him in and Link sees his watch on the side cabinet that was stolen by the Scouser the first night he was in London, and then the Scouser was killed by Shelter. Shelter drops the act and it’s quite horrible.

"The strength of the insane. I’d come across that phrase, and now I found out what it meant. I’m not a small guy and he was a lot older but I couldn’t break free. I bucked and writhed and lashed out with my feet, but he’d wrapped his arms round me and his grip was like bands of steel. My feet left the floor and he carried me across the room like he’d carried the cat, except he didn’t croon or nuzzle, and when we reached the hole in the floor he threw me down and fell on me like a wrestler. I was pinned, lying on my stomach with my head overhanging the hole. A draught rose from the hole, carrying a cloying, sweetish smell. After a few seconds my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I saw them.

There were seven, laid out in a row like sardines. He’d done something to their heads – they were all like his – you couldn’t tell if they were girls or boys – but I recognized Ginger by his clothes. His face was – well, I wouldn’t have known him from that. I gagged, twisting my head to one side. ‘Let me up!’ I screamed. ‘I’m gonna puke.’”

Ren: Yeah. Hah. Um… He's saved by Gale coming in, but she's followed by a camera crew. And it turns out that her name's actual Louise and she's a journalist who's been researching homelessness for the last few months before stumbling into the story of a serial killer murdering homeless youths and now it';s her scoop. So, we sort of end on this kind of… Link feeling deeply betrayed and… Yeah, it's a really bleak ending.Adam: It's also really interesting… as is it a mea culpa for Swindells? It's interesting. I don't know if Swindells has a discomfit with his own role as a writer and the fact that he's gone out and talked to or befriended homeless people (as Dawn did) so he can write his book. Or whether he's kind of trying to differentiate himself from a more cynical opportunistic journalistic practice, while as a fiction writer he's doing something different to what someone working for a newspaper would be probably writing. I did find that quite interesting. I don't know if it is a completely unexpected ending because we get some indications that something is up with Gail. She keeps supposedly phoning her “sister” and it is mentioned enough times that we know that it can't be – that she's doing something… talking to someone.I don't know if the betrayal is the betrayal is partly a class betrayal. So, her boyfriend is really obviously written as comfortably upper-middle class.Ren: Link's really upset and he's like, “Gosh, she saved your life/ C'mon”. He doesn't understand; and Gail tells Link her story that she had an abusive step-father as well… so, them being in the same situation.Adam: It's a really interesting ending. Shall I just read the end of it?Ren: Yeah please.Adam: 'Gail' is revealed as actually Louise and gives him some money. And she is a human being and is not some cynical jerk. She clearly does care about what she's doing and has come to care for Link. So, she gives him this wad of bank notes and says she's really sorry. Link says:“Oh, I know. I ought to have chucked the money in her face. A telly hero would have, but then a telly hero doesn’t have to live on the street. Anyway, that’s the sort of happy ending it was. Yeah, but like – justice was done, right? Was it, though? Shelter (that’s what he called himself – they found a sort of log book) – Shelter gets life, which means he gets a roof, a bed and three square meals a day. I don’t.What I hope is this. I hope when Louise and Gavin do their story it’ll have some truth in it and that a lot of people will read it. People can only start to make things better if they know what’s going on. There has to be an end to this some day. I just hope it happens while I’m still around.In the meantime, though, I’m not sure what I’ll do. I can’t stay round Camden, that’s for sure. Too many ghosts. I’d be forever seeing Gail across the street, or Ginger. I might try the Embankment or Covent Garden. There’re a lot like me round Covent Garden. Or of course I could leave London altogether.It’s a free country, right?”

Adam: That final line seems like a final jab at Thatcher.

Ren: Absolutely. The character of Link is someone who has been shut out of every opportunity. Or, if there might… you can imagine someone saying “There must be some kind of charity that can help him”. If there is… nobody's told him. As far as he knows there is no-one to help him and nowhere to turn.

Adam: I respect Swindells for not just giving it a really cosy ending. And actually similar in some ways to Brother in the Land. Brother in the Land, looking this up… it's actually quite an early one, from 1984. So, he had already done more grounded horror – or, like, the horror comes from things that are not too fantastical. I guess you could say he operates in two modes of horror: More fun, escapist horror, and then more gritty horror. Stone Cold is not fun. Did you enjoy it — maybe not enjoy, but did you appreciate it?

Ren: Yeah, I appreciated it. It's snappy and compelling and does its job.

Adam: Yeah it does what it sets out to do. And it's short, which is always an advantage as a teacher.

Ren: Would you set this for Year 7s or 8s?

Adam: Yeah I would… there's not much for language analysis, but in terms of structure, and actually talking about structure is something that kids find very hard to do, actually. And where some kids fall down at GCSEs is that they’ve got good at the language analysis but they don’t think about structure and form at all. So actually it could be useful in that regard. And it’s a good little length.

The last two years I’ve been reading my way through Middlemarch —

Ren Oh have you! I’ve also been reading Middlemarch!

Adam It’s so well-written, right! George Elliot is so obviously a genius, and yet it’s so slow. I simultaneously feel — it’s clearly incredible, like every sentence you’re like “Oh George Elliot, you’re much smarter than me!” but also like “How have you taken village gossip and made it into a novel, and it’s this long! How!”

**Ren: ** I’ve been reading it since January and I think I’m about 60% through.

**Adam: ** Do you know what I mean, it’s kind of a weird thing to read because on one level it’s obviously incredible, it’s quite staggeringly good, it kind of makes Dickens seem a bit juvenile by comparison. Like, okay, these are real human beings, this is amazing character writing. But you’ve got to get into a different head space, or a different time space, I think.

Ren: You’re going to sit down for several hours to read this, and by the time you’ve done maybe people may have had some conversations, about who’s leaving who money in a will, or local politics, or maybe Dorothea will have had some feelings.

**Adam: ** It’s kind of like a soap, but a soap with some very low quiet drama, and written in the most sophisticated way possible.

Ren: Yeah, yeah.

Adam: But I mention Middlemarch, because amusingly, Michael Gove said that it should be on the syllabus and taught to kids, back when he was education minister.

**Ren: ** Jesus Christ

**Adam: ** I was just trying to imaginine teaching Middlemarch to a bunch of 14 year-olds or 16 year-olds, it’s not going to happen!

**Ren: ** As I’ve been reading it I’ve been thinking I’d struggle to have read this at degree level just because of the length and the denseness, you know.

**Adam: ** I think you’ve got to challenge kids, I like the idea of meeting kids where they’re at, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be some level of challenge in the reading. But you’ve got to be realistic, not Middlemarch!

I did read a lot of Hydra with my year 7s last year because we finished what we were doing, basically. We got through a whole scheme of work and there was still four weeks left at the end of the term, so I asked the head of department what we should do now, and he said, “Just chose one of the books we have a whole load of copies of that you want”. So I made my own little scheme of work based around Hydra.

Generally speaking, I’d say that the kids were pretty receptive to it. What they didn’t like, interestingly, was the romance element. And as much as this is an alien thriller, it is also something of a romance, surprisingly. Quite considerably, more than you would expect. You’ve got these characters of Ben and Midge, they are friends and they’re only kids. I can’t remember how old they are, 12?

**Ren: ** They’re talking about going to secondary school next year, so maybe 11?

**Adam: ** I think this is set somehwere with a middle school, maybe.

**Ren: ** Ah right, yeah.

**Adam: ** Anyway, they’re not that old. I've mentioned this before, but one of the fascinating things I’ve found — and it was probably always the case but it’s got more pronounced. But some of the 11 year olds will make the most awful innuendo and laugh at the mere suggestion of words they’ve heard of TikTok. I’m sure some of them have been exposed to more than that online, but some of them haven’t. But there’s a fair amount of inappropriately sexualised banter that you have to reign in and do safeguarding reports about. And yet at the same time, as soon as there is any romantic, emotional intimacy, either on screen or on the page, they freak out. Like, as soon as there was hand-holding in this book, my word! “We can’t be doing this!! this is innapropriate! Waurghh!” What on earth?? It’s so strange!

**Ren: ** Wow, that’s… huh… okay.

**Adam: ** It’s very odd. It’s very mild romance but too rich for the blood of the 11 year-olds I was teaching. Unexpectedly that caused a bit of an issue, much to my bemusement.

Ren: Bizarre, okay.

**Adam: ** We talked about Stone Cold as having a dual narrative, this is incredibly structually ambitious! Like, it jumps between a lot of characters.

Ren: It does, doesn’t it? And the first character perspective is the aliens!

Adam: It’s not first person but the narrative voice is very closely linked, I think there’s a technical term for it, like an over-the-shoulder shot.

**Ren: ** Close third, I think it’s called.

**Adam: ** Okay, close third. But as you say it starts kind of with the perspective of the alien, which is cool.

**Ren: ** Do we want to read that, maybe?

**Adam: ** Yeah.

“One.

It was sick and hungry and a long, long way from home. It had little brain but it sensed that the tank was a hostile environment and it cruised around the wall, revolving slowly about its axis, bumping the frost-rimed metal till it found the door. As the floater’s soft bulk bumped against it, the door moved.

The floater felt the motion and bumped again. Minute ice-flakes, dislodged from the hinges, drifted down, melting in the first waft of warm air as the door swung outward.

The temperature inside the tank rose a half-degree. The floaters, half-poisoned by the chemical cocktail mist on which they fed, didn’t notice. As the creature entered the airlock, the woman jabbed the CLOSE button and the door swung slowly, clunking into its housing. Smiling behind her face-mask, she opened the outer door and stood aside.

The floater moved out into the barn. Eyeless, it felt the faint pull of starlight and followed, passing through the great open doorway and drifting away in the dark”

**Ren: ** Yeaaah!

**Adam: ** And that’s a whole chapter! So one thing I like about this book, this is a longer book than Stone Cold, and yet the chapters are very short. It feels quite cinematic, we jump between these different scenes and perspectives. I think it’s a flawed book but that’s one thing I really like about it, it does keep what is actually a fairly slow story quite dynamic. And if we couldn’t picture the floater we have nice little drawings at the start of each chapter.

**Ren: ** So this is my favourite thing about the book is the illustrations by Mark Robertson, above each chapter heading of these aliens that are initially described as floaters. They start off jellyfish-like and over the first 30-something chapters they are still these jellyfish but are slowly shedding their tentacles, which is really neat. And between chapters 31-36 it transforms into it’s adult form. So my texture —

**Adam: ** Oh, okay, yep. So I was going to sing — I don’t know if this is a bit gauche — (mispronounced)

Ren Gauche?

Adam (In an aristocratic accent) A bit gauche! But do you know the song Homeless from Paul Simon’s Graceland album?

**Ren: ** Not to memory, no.

Adam Because it came into my head and you can kind of go: (to the tune of Homeless by Paul Simon) ‘Texture, texture, texture of the week’ But I’m guessing you don’t know the backing vocals?

Ren I don’t, it’s been quite some time since I’ve listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland.

Adam Well, when I go ‘texture’, you do a quieter ‘texture’ right afterwards, like a call and response thing: Texture

Ren (quieter) Texture

Adam Yeah, like that but right after it. Texture.

Ren Texture.

Adam Texture of the week. Yeah, nice! So what’s your texture of the week?

Ren So my Texture of the Week is chapter 34 in its entirety.

Adam Oh yeah, that’s probably mine too -- yeah, it’s the same, it’s obviously the best texture. I was like: “Can I do a whole chapter for a texture?” but you have too. Do you want to read it?

Ren

“It was night when the real change came. The terrestrials slept. There was no witness.

During the course of the evening the largest floater had risen till it hung just beneath the domed roof of the tank. Spikes like a crown of thorns circled its mantle. It had ceased to rotate. Instead, it began a sort of bobbing motion: ascending a little, sinking back, ascending again, like a boat on an oily swell. As it did so, a shallow depression appeared at the centre of its mantle. Gradually this deepened, so that the creature appeared to be falling into itself. As the hollow deepened, a bump appeared on the floater’s underside, growing as the depression on top became more pronounced. As the process continued, the spiked rim of the floater’s mantle was drawn in towards the centre and the creature’s diameter slowly shrank as it poured its substance into the bump which hung from its underside, elongating like a great glob of wax falling in slow motion from a melting candle. For a while, the creature resembled a monstrous, floating flower, its ring of spiky petals closing. But as the process of change became complete, an observer would have realised that the flower’s head had become a great mouth ringed with spiky teeth: that the floater, by turning itself inside out, had become another creature.”

Adam Urgh, gross!!

Ren Brilliant!

Adam “As it poured its substance into the bump which hung from its underside, elongating like a great glob of wax” That’s horrid.

Ren It really is. It’s an ambitious book, isn’t it?

Adam Yeah, for a book that’s mostly a lark, it’s not a book of great thematic depth compared to Stone Cold, it is really ambitious.

Ren It also does kill a dog.

Adam It does! I do wish that the creature had killed a few more — maybe it’s a bit bloodthirsty, but it builds up so much to this transformation, it’s like “Oh my god, it’s on now, it’s ready for a killing spree! It’s going to take over the world!” But it doesn’t get very far. Obviously the martians in War of the Worlds get a bit further, but like the martians they’re not very adapted, they didn’t think it through. They can’t cope with the climate conditions, so once they’re outside of their chamber —

Ren They dissolve.

Adam They dissolve.

Ren I was half expecting them to get into the library.

Adam That would have been fun!

Ren Because Ben’s mum works at the library and it keeps being mentioned.

Adam And as ever with the parents in children’s horror, they doubt the kids! That would have shown them what-for!

Ren And we do get a full-page illustration of the monster.

Adam Yes, we do. And I’ll tell you what the kids enjoyed. Well, this is interesting to be fair — the copies of this book dated from the ‘90s from when it came out, so they’ve probably been left in a cupboard for the best part of a decade if not more, and I was quite excited about getting to the full-page illustration. And this creature, it’s not really a hydra, it’s like a horrid newt with wings, I guess.

Ren Big teeth.

Adam The maw is quite bestial, it's like a dog crossed with an eel.

Ren It’s quite dribbly.

Adam Quite dribbly in the way a dog might be, but it’s also got these moray eel-type fangs. It’s got all this spit coming down from its fangs. It’s got horned wings with spikes coming out of them, and then there’s a kind of dorsal fin coming out of the side, would you say it’s a fin?

Ren Yeah…

Adam Well, whatever it is, that’s certainly not what —

Ren Oh. Oh okay.

Adam That’s certainly not what many young people thought it was, and they had extended this extrusion, obscenely, on many, many copies of the book. With anatomy of various shapes and sizes.

So this was to their great delight and amusement — however shocked and horrified they were by hand-holding — they were not shocked and horrified by this, quite the opposite. Kids who had copies with the graffiti were very keen to share them around and show everyone. But what really amused me, and I pointed this out to them, is that this was their parents’ generation. And a lot of kids at my school, went to literally the same school as their parents — these could have been drawn by your literal parents! Go home to your dads tonight, ask them if they remember studying Hydra in school, because if so. So I did find that quite funny — an educational bridge connecting parent and child —

Ren The generations. And that’s what we call the teacher’s insight.

Adam So that was a noisy lesson. It is a really good creature, I just wish it had been allowed to do a bit more. But I did like the fact that the drawing at the end just shows it melted, It’s just a puddle with eyes and teeth.

RenIt’s good.

Adam It’s surprisingly soppy this book, between Ben and Midge, the two child investigators, and there’s this recurring motif of Midge’s ‘Mona Lisa smile’ that Ben keeps fixating on. So it ends with Ben looking at her and seeing “That smile, that Mona Lisa smile”. And then we get the jawbone of the creature underneath it! I don’t need that association, I’m assuming that Midge’s Mona Lisa smile doesn’t look like that!

Ren “… as she unhinges her jaw…”

Adam Yeah. The villains are quite sinster, as well.

Ren We do have another adult who is quite willing to kill children, in this book.

Adam Yes, that’s true. She’s pretty nasty. What’s her name, Wanda Free. Which is a pun of sorts?

Ren Yeah, I was wondering if we were going to find out that was a pseudonym because she was on the run from having done NASA crimes, but apparently that was her name, I don’t know.

Adam Very odd. She’s a maniacal scientist type who becomes increasingly obsessed with fame and fortune to a degree, but she also becomes obsessed with letting the aliens out into the world and being able to say, “I did that! I let the alien plague upon humanity! Haha!” I think, basically.

Ren That does seem to be her deal.

Adam And she’s teamed up with a very cynical, greasy journalist type. He’s rich, he owned a newspaper. Exley. He’s the kind of character that Eric Idle would play in a children’s horror film, like in the Casper movie, the Eric Idle character in that. A completely spineless, money-craving — not necessarily actively evil but with no moral backbone whatsoever.

Ren Any other stray Hydra observations?

Adam There’s a bit, didn’t you mention this, there theres’s a food choice —

Ren — Yeah, I feel like tahini gets unfairly maligned in this book, because Exley and Wanda Free move up onto this farm and to make the point that they’re different from the locals, it says that they read the Daily Telegraph and they cook with tahini, which I found an odd combination of cultural stereotypes.

Adam I don’t know, I come from the countryside, you’re a Londoner, you and your London tahini, coming down here with your tahini!

Ren I feel like it would more be like reading The Guardian and tahini, I don’t know what I stereotypically associate with the Telegraph, what do they eat, Union Jacks.

Adam Bourbon biscuits with Union Jacks emblazoned on them.

Ren Yeah, exactly.

Adam The worst thing to eat.

Ren That’s good, end on a lighter note after the gritty realism of Stone Cold.

Adam We might always come back to Swindells because he was pretty prolific and generally worked within a broad children’s horror vein.

Ren And we were saying before we started recording that if we were a YouTube podcast, our clickbait-y image would be ‘Stone Cold - the book that stopped Adam being a Thatcherite’, with open-mouthed expressions. ‘If it weren’t for this book Adam would be a Thatcherite’

Adam Yeah, that’s how you get them. But as ever, as Thatcher was laissez-faire about economics, so we are laissez-faire about growing our listenership, assuming that the invisible hand of the market will do it for us. So review our podcast, thanks.

Ren Apparently some people have, but I can’t see them —

Adam What do you mean?? You heard on the grapevine? Rumour has it!

Ren It’s on Spotify, but it says "You have to listen to the podcast to review it”, simply making it is not enough.

Adam We’re locked out of our own podcast.

Ren It has about a four star average, which seems fair.

Adam Yeah, I’ll take it. We’re good but we’re not that good.

Ren A bit rough around the edges. So, do we have any remaining avenues of self-promotion? Yes, we’re still on Instagram, I do collages.

**Adam: ** You do collages! Are you going to combine both these books into one very strange collage?

Ren Yes, I am.

Adam Great.

Ren Also you can email us at Still Scared Podcast at gmail.com. We don’t check the emails very often, but when we do it’s nice to have an email from a listener rather than a spambot.

Adam Spambots listen to our podcast too

Ren Do you have a sign off for us Adam?

Adam Read Middlemarch but don’t eat borboun biscuits, spooky kids.

Ren Yeah! See you next time spooky kids! Bye!

Adam Bye!

**Adam: ** * Turns out, what we were both thinking of here was the CBBC series ‘Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde’, which ran between 1995 and 1998 and which was not based on the Robert Swindells novel. There is also a 2005 horror-comedy film called ‘Jacqueline Hyde’, but that doesn’t seem to be based on the Swindells novel either, as that book is apparently a fable illustrating the dangers of glue-sniffing.