Out of Salem

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

A Zombie and a Werewolf walk into a High School

In this episode we discussed Out of Salem by Hal Schrieve, whose website you can find here.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is [e-mail]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com.

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 Out of Salem by Hal Schrieve. Enjoy!

Ren Good afternoon, Adam!

Adam Good afternoon Ren!

Ren Hello hello, welcome back to the podcast where I’m not going to introduce it by talking about how long it’s been — it’s fine!

Adam Time doesn’t exist anymore anyway, so we can’t be held accountable.

Ren What is a month? Yep. But we’re here now and we are talking about a recent novel called Out of Salem which is a Young Adult queer horror novel written by Hal Schrieve, and published in 2019. Which I’m very excited about!

Adam Yeah, get ready for a lot of wholesome content, because it’s a very good-natured book.

Ren You think?

Adam Oh God disagreement already!

Ren I mean — okay, we’ll get into it!

And this episode will have full spoilers, but it’s more relevant this time because it’s recent and does have plot-twists that you might wish to experience for yourself. So if you’re interested I do suggest you read it first, and when you have this episode will be here.

Adam Snazzy!

Ren And we should maybe also just stick a few content warnings at the top of the episode, because this novel is… not exactly darker than other things we’ve covered, because Robin Jarvis is right there… but more rooted in real-life trauma than most things we cover.

Adam Mm, it has allegorical elements but it’s always very clear what’s being… allegoricalised.

Ren So there will be references to family death, bullying, homophobia, threatening bigotry and police violence, I guess are some of the main ones.

So I found this novel because last summer I was ransacking the young adult horror category of my library app — and read a few books that I thought were very good, including Wilder Girls by Rory Powers which might be the topic of a future episode — but I think Out of Salem was my favourite. And it was definitely the queerest, so.

And in terms of what we’ve talked about on the podcast so far, this reminds me the most of Witch Week, the Diana Wynne-Jones novel we read a while back.

Adam There were bits that felt a bit John Whyndham-y to me.

Ren Yeah, I can see that.

Adam Definitely this theme of children or young people up against adult institutions and the adult world —

Ren That’s the main theme of our podcast!

Adam It really is. It’s also, I want to call it a mini-epic? Which is something you get in Wyndham. You don’t necessarily travel across a great expanse and while you’re reading it it might feel quite static, but at the end you feel like you’ve gone on quite a journey. Does that make sense?

Ren Yes, yes. The reason I was thinking of Witch Week was the atmosphere of it. They share this kind of downbeat, chilly kind of atmosphere, and the sense that they’re set in a world that’s gone wrong somewhere — in Witch Week they’re burning witches at the stake, in Out of Salem they’re sending zombies to the Incineration Station. A world that’s like ours but something’s gone strange. *

Adam Yeah, that’s interesting because Schrieve’s authorial voice feels very inclusive and nurturing or encouraging to me. I might be wrong, but to me it feels like someone writing a book for their younger self, thinking ‘this is a book I wish had existed.’

Even though it is bleak, until the last quarter maybe I was reluctant to call it a horror, if I’m honest. There’s a lot of danger and peril for the characters and it is an upsetting read, but I felt that Schrieve wants the reader to have a pretty nice time.

Because for instance, ostensibly The Water Babies should be a nicer, easier read but it’s written by someone who clearly, I don’t know —

Ren Hates you.

Adam Hates children and hates you. But I felt this was quite a good-natured book, I thought.

Ren I mean, I can see what you mean but I thought that while it obviously is a found queer family narrative I found it less on the cosy end of that genre. I thought it was quite unsentimental about the characters, they’re not particularly nice to each other all the time —

Adam Oh God, maybe it’s just because I’ve read so much Megg and Mogg during lockdown. And if you’re under 18 listening to this, you probably shouldn’t read Megg and Mogg, if I’m honest. But I guess you might anyway. But in Megg and Mogg the characters are so vile to each other, and I did read that everyday — Simon Hanselmann’s workrate is ridiculous so he managed to do it every day for the last half a year or something, so that might have somehow messed up my ideas about how characters should treat each other.*

‘Oh the characters haven’t left each other for dead in a dumpster, they’re really nice!’

Ren So on a spectrum from Steven Universe to Megg and Mogg this is somewhere in the middle.

Adam Okay, that’s fair. That’s maybe what gave me a slightly 90s feel to me, the way the characters talk to each other. Some of it bought to mind House of Stairs, for instance and these characters where some of them are kind of sympathetic but they don’t always say or do nice things.

Ren To clarify, this is set in the 90s. I didn’t realise this until halfway through the book on the first read, it’s not thrown in your face. It’s not going full… what’s that show that’s set in the 80s? Stranger Things.

Adam I think it is written to a modern teen audience, it’s not written for millennials to read and be nostalgic about.

Ren But yeah, it’s set in the 90s, and the characters are secretly monsters in a small town that hates them.

Okay, so I think this book has a really great opening line, I’ve been doing quite a lot of creative writing recently and I just want to give props to this line : ‘The morning of the funeral, Z’s uncle Hugh made eight pots of bitter coffee’.

Like, yeah, that’s great! one sentence and we have an intriguing event, we’ve got two characters with names and the phrase ‘eight pots of bitter coffee’ sounds great, suggests atmosphere. Great work! *

Adam And it’s faintly Southern Gothic as well, like it wouldn’t be out of place in Faulkner or something.

Ren So we have this funeral. There’s been an accident and Z our main character is still here, but the rest of their family have died and Uncle Hugh is their only relative. And on the second page we see the results of a quiz that Z has taken from a website called ‘transexual.org’, classifying their gender identity as ‘androgyne’. So although other characters call them ‘Susan’ and ‘she’, they are really ‘Z’ and ‘they’ and the narrative calls them that.

Adam I found it interesting, and maybe a little jarring that ‘transsexual’ is the term that’s used in the book, which obviously isn’t the term that’s usually used now, although maybe it’s coming back a bit.

Ren Yeah, it’s getting a revival among some people but is not generally considered the term. But it was in the 90s, it was pretty common, there was a 90s radical trans organisation called Transsexual Menace who were about and did things like protested at the funeral of Brandon Teena who was a trans man who was murdered. It’s period accurate. I definitely saw some GoodReads reviewers objecting to it, but trans terminology changes every five minutes so you can’t really expect a book set 30 years ago to have terms that everyone agrees with now.

Adam I was worried that there would be too much infodumping in the book and there definitely isn’t. I think it’s partly because on the back the review from Cat Fitzpatrick says ‘Shrieve’s book’s much more than just a good Young Adult read, it’s also in the best possible sense an educational experience.’

Ren Huh!

Adam And when I read that I thought, is this going to be edutainment-y in a way, and it doesn’t read like that. It might be an emotional education, possibly, or a young reader might find things that resonate with them or terms that help them make sense of stuff, but it’s not overtly educational.

Ren No, not at all. I think it errs on the leaving things a mystery side of the exposition curve. So you get just this little printout that Z’s got from the internet, and they talk to people throughout the book a bit about their gender, but it’s not like ‘sit down kids, we’re learning here’.

Adam Yeah, it feels perfectly integrated and Z’s gender is a facet of their character along with lots of other facets. The characterisation was probably my favourite thing about the book. I did find the characters believable, and I felt like I grew to understand them more over the course of the book and Young Adult fiction doesn’t always achieve that.

Ren With also a fair bit of plot as well.

Adam Yeah, at the start I thought the pacing… there were parts that felt fast and then much slower but by about 1/4 of the way in I thought it really found its groove.

Ren So although Z is still here, they are not alive. And the way we find out about it is in this incredible scene in the church, that really made me like… literally gasp when I first read it. It’s amazing. So Hugh makes Z go to church, and as the service goes on, their eye starts itching — and I’ll just read an extract:

‘their right eye suddenly really hurt. They reached up to touch the contact lens and pull it out, but they couldn’t find where the lens ended and their eye began. They began poking at their eye, aware that several people were still staring… They poked their finger into their eye. The contact lens would not move. Z scraped at their eyeball with two fingers instead, hoping to gain purchase on the small rubbery lens. Suddenly, Z’s right eyeball came out into their hand. They stared down with their left eye — it took a moment to figure out what it was. There was some gooey blood on their palm.’

This novel goes pretty hard on the body horror, which I’m into!

Adam I thought it was fun! Peter said that happened to his gran. I don’t think it was at church, she was on the phone and pressing on her eye and popped it out.

Ren What?!

Adam And apparently she could still see with it out of its socket, so the description in the book of Z still being able to see with the eyeball out is accurate, so that’s good to know as well. Another educational aspect!

Ren So I’m like, ‘This was shocking!’ and Adam’s like, ‘Yep, sounds like an everyday event to me’.

Cool. Well. I don’t know if Peter’s gran was a zombie, but Z is a zombie.

Adam Ooh, as I am, technically!

Ren I’m sorry??

Adam Yes, revelation listeners! Your co-host Adam is a zombie. As you know, I was born three months premature and was very delicate and in an incubator and such, and my heart stopped and my breathing stopped for I think over three minutes. Which I think means technically I medically died. Don’t quote me on that, but I remember my mum saying something of the sort. So zombies walk among you.

Ren Well, congratulations.

Adam Yeah, thanks. Just living my life, being a zombie.

Ren When Z’s uncle sees that they’ve popped their eye out of their socket he gets very angry and starts shaking them for causing a scene and an elderly lesbian woman called Mrs Dunnigan steps in to be Z’s caretaker instead. I really liked Z’s relationship with Mrs Dunnigan, I found it quite poignant.

Adam Yeah, Mrs Dunnigan’s great, which helps. But yes, I like that it’s simultaneously quite nurturing and unsentimental.

Ren Yes, Mrs Dunnigan’s quite elderly, she’s running a bookshop, she’s not in the best health and she tries to look after Z but her flat’s a mess and they end up eating pickles and toast for dinner. At one point she says: “We both have to work hard to stay alive, don’t we?”, which I really liked and felt like one of the themes of the book. For lots of reasons the characters have to work quite hard to stay alive, whether it’s because of disability or old age, or because of other people’s cruelty.

Adam She reminds me, Mrs Dunnigan, of some of the more experienced older activists in Extinction Rebellion that I’ve met. Like the ones that were hippies back in the ‘60s and have been at it for years and years and years.

Ren She reminds me a bit of my 90 something friend Francesca who’s a Quaker, and whenever I talk to her starts conversations like ‘So Ren, what do you think the meaning of life is?’, and I love her.

Adam One of the members of the Unitarian congregation, Beryl, who’s also in her ‘90s and always says that her long life is due to her drinking Guinness.

Ren This is a hard-core old people appreciation podcast, particularly queer ones.

Adam And Z makes a friend as well.

Ren Yes, Z makes a friend as well, eventually, Aysel. They’re quite suspicious of each other at first but they come to be friends. And Aysel comes to be the other main character, and is an unregistered werewolf. In her storyline we see her meeting the first other werewolves that she’s ever met, who are a couple of older teenagers called Chad and Elaine who are both runaways living nomadically to avoid detection and electric shock therapy. And Elaine explains to Aysel and the readers what the general situation is like for young werewolves:

‘For most of us it’s like, a little hospital, a touch of juvie, and then more hospital til your brain turns black and your magic curls up inside your muscles and dies. I ran away before I was old enough to get shocked more than twice a year, and even then my magic got pretty messed up. I still have like magic arthritis and a bunch of pain problems’.

So is this is generally how we find out about the world of the story, is just these little snippets of things that people say. It’s really interesting, the bits we get! Like from the school lessons we learn that Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway were werewolves —

Adam I liked that.

Ren We learn that there were werewolf riots in the 1920s, and then a generation of radical werewolves in the 1960s that the government put down. On the zombie front there’s another school lesson saying:

‘In 1891, three hundred warlocks of Irish and Chinese descent employed by Northern Pacific who had assisted in the construction of the railroad through Stampede Pass went on strike after their wages were withheld. Their numbers were not significant enough to prevent the use of the railroad, so they raised a group of forty dead former citizens who were buried in the cemeteries of Portland and Clackamas’.

That’s just great.

Adam I like the precision of it and how everyday it is as well, it makes it very convincing.

Ren Yeah, it’s great world-building. Later in the story there’s anti-monster reactionary protests in the town and we learn that in New York werewolves have to observe a curfew on nights adjacent to the full moon, and have to lock themselves inside during it.

And from Mrs Dunnigan we learn a little about the history beyond the United States. She was in Ireland and it describes how in becoming a republic they distanced themselves from the British hostility to magic and accepted people like shapeshifters and selkies.

Adam That was a really nice touch. I mentioned to Antonia that it’s really nice to see selkies in an American Young Adult novel.

Ren Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that!

Adam I thought it showed even just a gesture of interest to outside of America’s borders, and I thought that was cool.

Ren I think I won’t recount the whole plot? Because I’m trying to do a thing where I don’t spend half the episode reading out a plot summary.

Adam I think your plot summaries are very good!

Ren Okay, I do have notes but I worry I’m boring people going ‘this happened, then this happened’. But I think there is quite a lot to talk about thematically and we can describe bits of the plot as we go.

I love the Wolf Guts zine.

Adam Yeah, that was really great! That was a really convincing 90s zine.

Ren Later in the book Aysel meets up with Elaine and visits the house that Elaine and the other mostly werewolf teens are squatting, and they’re making a zine that includes things like:

‘Where to get health care, legally or illegally, which doctors to see if you feel like you want to try experimental drugs, how to avoid cops, where to go during moons, that kind of thing’. And articles like, “Punk rock and lyncathropy’, ‘How I survived prison’, ‘the real history of werewolves’.

I want to read this zine!

Adam Yeah, that would be a great tie-in promotion!

Ren I did actually look and see if anyone had made this.

Adam Maybe you’re the person! If you’re listening to this Hal Schrieve, and thank you if you are, I can’t think of a better person. *

Ren It made me very happy.

I guess we can talk a bit about the queerness of it, because it is obviously quite a big thing about the book that there is a wide range of queer and trans characters in this novel. We have Z, who is genderqueer/androgyne, Aysel and Mrs Dunnigan are lesbians, Chad and Elaine are a trans man and trans woman.

And you know, we were both teenagers in the early-mid 2000s and I haven’t got used to this level of representation!

Adam Yeah, that’s really true. I like the fact that it feels really integrated, and they felt like queer 14 year-olds. Almost what’s worth talking about is the fact that it’s just done in a really nice, straightforward and I think quite nurturing way.

Maybe because it’s written by a queer author, it’s clearly not committee written and hasn’t been written to be like, ‘hey, how do we expand our demographic to meet the queer market?’ which is when I think stuff does feel forced or just insincere.

Ren It does feel just like, yeah, these are good characters, people are queer, people are trans. But then I have to stop and be like, ‘wait a moment!’.

Like, I am non-binary, hello, I am coming out in episode 38, but I’m not actually sure if that has come up on the podcast before. But having a genderqueer character who uses they/them pronouns is just cool!

Adam Yeah, representation matters.

Ren And I think Hal Schrieve does a really great job.

Adam Like… it’s interesting. I don’t know how I’m going to express this, okay. The writing style is pretty straight-forward, I would say. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad, sometime it’s very effective. I probably like slightly more fruity writing, I do like some purple prose if I’m honest so sometimes it was a little bit straight-forward and plain in its style for my tastes.

But at the same time one of the dangers of queer culture online and I guess the mass popularity of things like RuPaul’s Drag Race is perhaps the over-aestheticisation (of queerness). And obviously aesthetics are super important, I’m not saying they don’t matter but they’re one thing amongst many and I think sometimes hyper-focus on aesthetics can obscure other things.

I guess what I’m saying is that I like that these characters aren’t necessarily super cool. They’re not always managing to be fabulous and living their best lives. It’s not like some wildly aspirational read.

Ren And neither is it like total queer trauma, where they’re all having a horrible time specifically because they’re queer.

Adam Yeah, it doesn’t do either of these things.

Ren And it also threads the needle quite well between the fact that they are monsters… you know how it’s quite easy to use being monsters as an allegory for being queer, and in this book they are monsters AND queer, and we get some interesting interactions of those two things, right.

Adam That was my fear when I started reading, that it would be heavy-handed and you’d have this allegory that might be quite obvious and done before. But it doesn’t quite work in an allegorical way, to the novel’s credit. It’s obviously drawing these parallels, but as you say they are queer and monsters.

Ren Yeah, this was maybe the only example I found of how the magic of the world intersects with being trans specifically which was a throwaway comment by Elaine talking about well-off trans women who were getting potion treatments and magical alterations. And I was like, ooh, I want to know more — how does being trans work in this world?

Adam The world-building tends to be glimpsed in references and gestures that are made, and hints in lines of dialogue rather than being explicitly descriptive.

Ren Which I think is admirably restrained really, because you could really go off on a whole thing about trans magical etc.

Adam It’s definitely a book that invites fan-fiction. Like, if this book becomes really popular I can imagine a lot of fan-fic being written out of this.

Ren Shall we texture it?

Adam Oof, yeah, go on then. I’ve got something to slosh around, which is good because of the selkies in this book.

(sloshing, gargling noises) Texture of the week!

Ren I was sloshing a bottle of ink.

Adam Nice, I had some days-old water.

Ren Do you want to go first?

Adam Sure, I have quite a simple but effective one, which is the cobwebby texture when Z experiences the invisibility spell. Because I thought, I’ve encountered a lot of invisibility spells in fantasy books and films etc., but I’ve never to my memory heard it described in terms of what it would feel like as a physical sensation, and I really liked the idea of it feeling like a cobweb draped around one like a cobweb armour. I found that evocative and that worked for me in terms of thinking how it might feel to have this invisibility magic working on you.

How about you?

Ren Well, I need to explain a bit of plot to talk about my one, it’s one of the main bits of plot really which is that Z is bought back from the dead because their mother put a spell on them, but the spell wasn’t particularly well done and Z’s body is degrading and without renewing it Z would eventually just crumble to bits.

So one of the main plot threads is Z trying to find a spell that could prolong their life in this environment where any information about necromancy and even the condition of being a zombie is highly forbidden. So as you mentioned, with help from their teacher Mr Weber they sneak into the library to try and steal the books on necromancy.

But they find that the books have already gone, and Mr Weber ends up getting arrested but Tommy who is a character that we haven’t talked about, who’s the third main kid character who is another kid at school who’s bullied for being weird and effeminate, and it turns out that he stole the books, and he gives one to Z so they can make the spell to renew the spell that’s keeping them alive.

Okay! So they do it and there’s a potion, and the potion is my texture:

‘The potion on their tongue was sweet and bitter at once. There was something happening in their mouth. It started with a buzzing that filled the spaces between their teeth like mechanical bees, and a drumming sound in their chest. Then it spread. Their forehead ached with novel temperatures, icy and then hot. Their veins seared. Z suddenly felt their hands against the dirt of the ground; they had fallen over. It seemed like there was water seeping into them, like their flesh had become a sponge.’

Spongy flesh! There’s quite a lot of good Z textures, but that’s one of the less ‘orrible ones. Before they take the potion we get these vivid descriptions throughout the book of Z coughing up black sludge from somewhere deep in their lungs, or getting dark spots of blood forming under their skin and stumbling because they can’t feel their feet. I felt like there’s effective and unsettling description of Z’s degrading.

Adam Feels like being in your thirties, eh?

Ren Ehh!

Adam I really like how those descriptions are almost always from Z’s point of view, so the body horror is coming from Z. Because one of the risks of body horror is that it others the character and makes them grotesque and alien, and I think this is the issue with David Cronenberg’s work is that on some level it feels like it’s embracing radical otherness and is excited by body horror, but on the other hand it feels like it has this weird conservative bent to it and whether he’s progressive or conservative is hard to tell.

But what I liked here is that it’s not about other characters looking at Z and describing their body, it’s very much about how Z is experiencing this. And I thought that was really effective and a classy way of doing body horror.

Ren Yeah, that’s a really good point! I hadn’t considered that but it’s true. We do occasionally get characters reacting in shock to Z’s appearance but it doesn’t linger over what they see that they think is horrifying about Z. It’s that Z sees them do a double take.

Adam I think that’s really good, I actually think that’s quite innovative. I think Schrieve’s found a way there to do body horror in a way that doesn’t feel ableist or regressive which I actually think is quite a notable thing.

Ren Hmm, yeah! That is the tension with body horror, right? Like, I enjoy it but it can get gross. There’s things that I’ve felt that have crossed that line. I’m thinking about Attack on Titan.

Adam Oh yeah, my students talk about it but I’ve never actually watched it.

Ren So there’s these titans which are this big monster people, and after a while I felt like the way they were depicting these monstrous bodies and the way they looked and moved just felt like it was shading into ableism really. Like, ‘they move in this atypical way, isn’t that horrifying’/

Adam It’s definitely something that I’ve seen in anime and manga sometimes. I’m a big Junji Ito fan, but I think there are Junji Ito comics that if you read them with a critical eye it becomes like, hmm that is ableism.

I guess it depends on how much you abstract it from everyday reality. But this is one of the issues with horror, is that if you’re writing about what we’re scared of, reactionary politics and positions are often coming out of fear and ignorance. So that’s a tricky thing, and especially if you’re then going to make the thing aesthetic and then be revelling in it.

If you think right back to Tod Browning’s Freaks, I’ve seen people arguing both sides — that the performers are treated with dignity and they’re clearly not the real freaks of the title and it’s the able-bodied characters who are behaving in far more vile ways. And yet at the same time, clearly if you look at the cinematography there are shots in that film in which the performers are lit and shot in such a way to look grotesque and scary. Same thing with American Horror Story: Freak Show. So yeah. Bit of a digression, sorry!

Ren It’s fine, I enjoyed it. Yeah, there’s also some interesting stuff with Z and Aysel and how they come to be very close but they have this suspicious relationship to each other at first, because they’re just thrown together by Mr Weber.

And they’re both convinced that the other has no idea what they’re going through, which is somewhat true, right — because Aysel has known that she’s considered a monster for her whole life, and is also further othered by being fat, and being Turkish in a very white small town. But she does have a loving mother who is protecting her, whereas Z is now both newly monstrous and alone in the world apart from Mrs Dunnigan.

I think it’s done quite well, the tensions between their experiences and how they navigate that, and they get upset and frustrated with each other for not understanding each others’ position but they also end up forming quite a deep solidarity.

Adam Yeah, I like that it shows that mutual solidarity is possible but it’s not easy.

Ren Do we want to talk about the end of the novel? The last act of the book?

Adam To a degree, I mean you’ve mentioned that Aysel falls in with these two homeless werewolves and they’re part of this loose anarchist commune, I suppose, making these zines, most of whom are werewolves with some hangers-on.

And running through the book is this fear of bigotry that some of the townspeople have against werewolves and this is escalating and being stoked by the media, and then there’s a police raid towards the end of the book and I suppose that’s what sets in motion the events of the book’s last act.

Ren So… someone was bitten by a werewolf earlier in the book and the werewolf was shot?

Adam Yes, and then someone’s killed and werewolves are accused.

Ren Right, yes, and then the police raid this werewolf squat. And it’s intense!

Adam It is, it’s an upsetting scene.

Ren The police are armed, and Z is outside smoking and manages to escape and Elaine and Aysel just manage to get away together but the next day they find out on the news that three people were shot dead, including Chad who Elaine was travelling with and the rest of them were arrested.

At this point Z had been getting closer with Tommy and he turns up and tells Z, Aysel and Elaine his secret, which he’s a shapeshifter, and had been getting experimental treatment from Archie Pagan, who was the therapist that was killed earlier in the book. That was how he’d stolen the books from the library, by shapeshifting into animals.

Adam Like in Animorphs!

Ren Yeah, like in Animorphs! But he reveals that it was him who killed Archie Pagan, after shapeshifting into a massive lion, and then he panicked and buried the body in the woods, and werewolves were accused. But he also reveals that there was a hidden back room in Archie Pagan’s office, where his treatment happened and where Archie kept his files on werewolves, and that he didn’t think the cops had found it yet. So they decide to break in.

They find the hidden room, which is wrecked and blood-splattered, and they nearly get caught by a receptionist who calls the police, but get out after Aysel destroys this shock-chair and sets the building on fire. They get away, but Aysel sees on the news that they didn’t manage to fully destroy the evidence and now the police have a lead.

Ooh yeah, what we haven’t mentioned when we talked about selkies is that Mrs Dunnigan turns out to be a selkie. She’s been involved in this anti-werewolf plotline because her bookstore had a display on werewolf rights and had a speaker saying, ‘Oh maybe we should treat werewolves alrihgt’ and so she’s been targeted and her store had its windows smashed in. So these people are after here, and she gets mailed a crate that turns out to be her seal skin.

So, if you’re not familiar with the selkie myth. I’m quite familiar with it, I have a book called The People of the Sea which is all selkie stories. It’s a Scottish and Irish myth about women who are seals who come out of the sea and leave their seal skin, but if their skin is returned to them they have to go back to the water. So as soon as she gets her skin she’s compelled to go back.

So Mrs Dunnigan leaves really abruptly and Z’s alone, and there’s quite a nice little passage about that which is Z thinking: ‘By now, the water would have come up and closed over her head, by now she would be far out in the deep salty clean sea. Z prayed there were no oil slicks near the coast. Z thought of the miles of water, so cold, and dark, and the sky above the sea gray, and shivered’.

So Z’s in Mrs Dunnigan’s flat alone and tries to go back there after the werewolf raid but the police are outside. So the only thing they can think to do is to go and see Mr Webber. He ushers Z, Elaine and Tommy in, but tells them that it might be worse for them to come to him, because since he was arrested at the library he’s been under surveillance.

He says he’ll put a cloaking spell on them and drive them to the train station to get a night train to California. The only other option is to undo the spell that’s been holding Z’s body together, which will let off enough energy to transport everyone magically away.

But Mr Weber’s car starts to break down, and a police offer comes by to see what’s going on, not suspecting them, but there’s this monitoring orb that’s going around and patrolling the street where Mr Weber lives and their cover story gets exposed — Mr Weber is about to get arrested but makes a portal and disappears. But just before he goes he undoes the spell on Z.

And something happens! Can you explain, Adam?

Adam Police cars on fire?

Ren Yep. Tommy’s shapeshifting back and forth —

Adam A rip in the space-time continuum?

Ren Yeah, there’s just a huge amount of energy —

Adam Chaos!

Ren Chaos! Shapeshifting, stars, galaxies, magic, the universe! And when it all settles again they’re still there but there’s no-one else there. They’re in a wood, the city’s disappeared and they start to walk towards the ocean.

Adam Yeah, it ends on this slightly melancholy note. Hard to now if it’s leaving itself open for a sequel or not.

Ren They walk, the four of them, in this odd new environment.

Adam Maybe they’ve got transported to a better world, a softer world.

Ren I’ll just read a bit. It says: They picked their way down the last rocky incline and landed on the hard brown wet beach. The water crashed onto the shore, dredging up brown and green seaweed and leaving, on its retreat, open pores in the earth through which clams squirted. Aysel stood out and looked at it. It had been years since she had been to the sea. Z turned to her. The first light of morning illuminated their face. “I think today is going to be better than yesterday,” they said.

And that’s the end! And I think that’s the end of my notes as well.

Adam And possibly the end of the episode.

Ren And maybe even the end of the episode! Unless you have any further thoughts?

Adam Well, I guess just with the unsurprising revelation that Joss Whedon was just horrible and harrassing and bullying on the set of Buffy, this could be a replacement to Buffy, I think. A Netflix version of this with many series could be it.

Ren With that and obviously the nonsense of J.K. Rowling we need our own queer fantasy.

Adam As I said I wasn’t sure at first but I really did warm to it a lot, it’s a very nifty book.

Ren Yeah, I think it’s great and I feel like if I read it again I’m going to find more interesting bits and tidbits and maybe I’ll even write my own fanfiction at some point.

You can find us on twitter at @stillscaredpod, or potentially even email us at [e-mail], although I admit I haven’t checked it for a while. I really am sorry if you’ve emailed us. You can rate and review us on Apple Podcasts if you like, but no pressure.

Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam Oh gosh, well, I just wanted to say that we’re not Boomers, we’re Millennials. Just because a couple of my students… I’ve had an ‘Ok Boomer’ or two. I made an Animorphs reference, okay!

Ren Yes, we’re firmly millennials.

Adam We have too many neuroses to be boomers!

Ren I want a sign-off Adam!

Adam Monster, monster!

Ren Monster, monster, see you later spooky kids. Bye!

Adam Bye!

• Not to suggest that our world hasn’t gone wrong somewhere!!
• Just to be totally clear, Adam’s talking about Megg, Mogg & Owl by Simon Hanselmann and not the 70s children’s books Meg and Mog by Helen Nicoll and Jan Pieńkowski, in which no-one’s left for dead in a dumpster.
• This bit of nerdery is inspired by my having just finished Tim Clare’s 100 Day Writing Challenge from his podcast Death of 1000 Cuts at the time of recording. I recommend it!
• Adam is too kind.