Alan Garner / the valley of the dread

From an interview in the Times online:

"I've always been attracted to trying to find an explanation of the sense of the religious," Garner says. "I take it straight from the Latin root, religio: a fear or sense of awe. What is due - to a place, or a concept or god. That is religio. And from a very early age I became aware that wherever I looked or read, there seemed to be no group in the world that didn't express this in some form. I didn't go along with the notion, simply, there is a God - but there's something. There's a line in Horace: 'I don't know what god there is in him, but there is a god'."


...


That night, away from the valley, Garner and I sit by the fire as the day dies. The images of the novel, and of the extraordinary, disturbing place to which Garner took me, dance in the flames. "If I could see any purpose in life as to why I should go on existing - and I see this in everyone when they are working, when they are selfless in their selfishness - it is that they are trying to bring about the future. We all have different ways of doing it. We all have our tessera; like a mosaic. Some of us are lucky to have two. And perhaps we make a picture."

Subject: New House and Surroundings

The Mad Dogs

The Rooks II

The Ghost Werewolf

The Burnt Down Forest

The Howl

The Shape

The Clinging Rhododdendron Bush

The TV Room

The Strange Happenings Investigation Group

Between the ages of 8 and 12, my sister and I were members of a secret ghost-hunting society. The society was kept religiously secret from our parents and any children other than our next door neighbours, who were in on it too. We fearlessly investigated anything spooky within a 200 metre radius of our houses.

As there was never anything particularly spooky within a 200 metre radius of our houses, (just the woods, railway heath and semi-detached homes of a commuter town outside London), we had to conjure spookiness up from nothing, from the mundane world around us; and this created the eerie feeling that there were magical, invisible forces at play, dancing just behind the visible world, contradicting its boredom and normality.

Increasingly, we wove taller and taller tales, and we wrote them down and filed them away in secret. They formed a body of evidence that desperately strange things were afoot, and that we were fated to be at the very epicentre of them. Only we could read the signs, and the signs showed that our little town was an enchanted and savage place, no different from the Manchester of Elidor or the Buckinghamshire of the Dark is Rising, both of which we had read, but as coded messages, rather than works of fiction. Sort of like Buffy if every character was Willow, and with Arthurian legends rather than vampires.

In a spring clean last week I rediscovered some of our files, and I laughed til i could hardly breathe. We hadn't realised what comedians we were.