Toady Review
There's a great review of the new Humdrumming edition of Toady in the latest issue (#346) of Starburst Magazine. The review, by Stuart Weightman, gives the book 5/5, and says:
"Like the missing link between Stephen King's It and a post-watershed Grange Hill, Morris's reprinted debut novel is a blood-flecked snowstorm that will wrap itself around the reader and carry them into a winter of terrifying discontent. Reprinted 17 years after its original and successful release, the title character and his three friends, Richard, Robin and Nigel are the teenagers that everybody knew (or perhaps were!) at school. The physically flawed and 'geeky' outsiders whose demeanours and interests - in this case their self-formed 'Horror Club' - earn them the vicious scorn of their peers, in particular, the brutal Rusty. One night the four hold a seance in a rotting, abandoned house and something is unleashed into their frostbitten seaside community that has the ability to enter nightmares, stalk its prey in various forms and slice its human victims to pieces.
It is the fleshing out of both the younger characters with their growing pains and horrified awe, and the adults in the teens' lives that really make this a page-turner as well as Morris's obvious gifts for bewitching sensory prose, and dripping particularly chilling frights before the wide eyes of our characters. Some might see one too many similarities between this and King's epic, but for the most part Morris creates his own absorbing world; a close-knit urban snowglobe with arcane magic in the wind and festering evil beneath the ice.
Read it in the summer to cool you down like literary ice cream or during the winter months to listen to the chilly howling wind outside as you read by bedside light, but just read it."
The reference to Stephen King's It is interesting, because I began Toady in 1986, the year It was published, and can vividly remember - having already plotted my book out and launched into it - reading It and feeling utterly dismayed that Stephen King, the most popular horror writer in the world, had written a book which contained the same core idea as mine - a group of kids in a small town menaced by a seemingly all-powerful, shape-shifting entity. I'm pretty sure that for a short while I toyed with the idea of abandoning Toady and writing something completely different, but I think in the end I decided that while my core idea was similar to King's the specifics of the two books were far enough apart for it not to really matter. And so I persevered - and am now bloody glad I did.
As a coda to that story, I ought to point out that when Toady was finally published in 1989, I fully expected everyone to compare it to It - and nobody did! I think the Starburst review, twenty years down the line, is the first time it's ever happened.
Life, eh? Funny old business.
"Like the missing link between Stephen King's It and a post-watershed Grange Hill, Morris's reprinted debut novel is a blood-flecked snowstorm that will wrap itself around the reader and carry them into a winter of terrifying discontent. Reprinted 17 years after its original and successful release, the title character and his three friends, Richard, Robin and Nigel are the teenagers that everybody knew (or perhaps were!) at school. The physically flawed and 'geeky' outsiders whose demeanours and interests - in this case their self-formed 'Horror Club' - earn them the vicious scorn of their peers, in particular, the brutal Rusty. One night the four hold a seance in a rotting, abandoned house and something is unleashed into their frostbitten seaside community that has the ability to enter nightmares, stalk its prey in various forms and slice its human victims to pieces.
It is the fleshing out of both the younger characters with their growing pains and horrified awe, and the adults in the teens' lives that really make this a page-turner as well as Morris's obvious gifts for bewitching sensory prose, and dripping particularly chilling frights before the wide eyes of our characters. Some might see one too many similarities between this and King's epic, but for the most part Morris creates his own absorbing world; a close-knit urban snowglobe with arcane magic in the wind and festering evil beneath the ice.
Read it in the summer to cool you down like literary ice cream or during the winter months to listen to the chilly howling wind outside as you read by bedside light, but just read it."
The reference to Stephen King's It is interesting, because I began Toady in 1986, the year It was published, and can vividly remember - having already plotted my book out and launched into it - reading It and feeling utterly dismayed that Stephen King, the most popular horror writer in the world, had written a book which contained the same core idea as mine - a group of kids in a small town menaced by a seemingly all-powerful, shape-shifting entity. I'm pretty sure that for a short while I toyed with the idea of abandoning Toady and writing something completely different, but I think in the end I decided that while my core idea was similar to King's the specifics of the two books were far enough apart for it not to really matter. And so I persevered - and am now bloody glad I did.
As a coda to that story, I ought to point out that when Toady was finally published in 1989, I fully expected everyone to compare it to It - and nobody did! I think the Starburst review, twenty years down the line, is the first time it's ever happened.
Life, eh? Funny old business.