Fully Automated Luxury Mushroom Communism

In this episode we talked about Revenge of the Toffe Monster and Killer Mushrooms Ate My Gran, by Susan Gates.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Adam Welcome to Still Scared, Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Adam Whybray, my co-host is Ren Wednesday, and today we’re talking about two books by Susan Gates: Revenge of the Toffee Monster and Killer Mushrooms Ate my Gran. Enjoy!

Ren Good evening, hello! Hi Adam.

Adam Hi!

Ren And hello Willow, our returning guest, who was last on quite a while ago to talk about The Box of Delights, and is now back to dredge up another artefact of our shared childhoods, which are a couple of books by the English author Susan Gates who’s another one of those incredibly prolific children’s book authors, written over a hundred books —

Adam Really?! These must be early in her career, because my copy of toffee monster only mentions Sea Hags, Suckers and Cobra Sharks, so I thought this must have been a bit of a flash-in-the-pan author, but no —

Ren No — this is just her early work! So we’re talking about only two of these hundred books: Revenge of the Toffee Monster from 1999, and Killer Mushrooms Ate my Gran, from 2000.

Willow I feel like they're classics of children libraries in primary schools. I distinctly remember their covers on shelves.

Ren Oh yeah?

Willow And I remember being intrigued by the textures, in fact.

Ren Yes, well they were published just at the right time for someone born in, say, 1991 to have read as a kid. And you did, Willow, you definitely had Revenge of the Toffee Monster.

Willow I did! I think I was a bit displeased when I first bought it to find that the gorgeous colour picture on the front was not replicated within and it was in fact only words, that I had to read, using my brain. It tricked me! But I do remember reading it nonetheless.

Ren Yes, and I also picked it off your shelf and read it and had this memory of just textures and an unsettling atmosphere, so I thought it would be a good candidate for the podcast.

Willow Absolutely. And in contrast you were a most prolific reader, so keeping you away from my books would have been tricky.

Adam It says in the little autobiographical section that Susan Gates was a prolific reader, and she read every Science Fiction novel in Cleethorpes public library, and also had a craze for detective stories. Which makes sense, I do think these have a hardboiled edge to them, they are interesting stylistically.

She was born in Grimsby, and they do have a bit of the feel of Grimsby about them, but they also have almost a parody of that American detective story style. Not on the plotting, just how it’s written somehow.

Ren I mean, it’s very liberal on the similes, is mostly what I noticed about the writing.

Willow There’s so many, I was thinking I could use these older than the ones I do teach about similes and metaphor.

Ren I don’t know if you did this, Willow, but I asked you if you would write down what you remembered about this book before re-reading.

Willow I did! So, what I remembered about The Revenge of the Toffee Monster, is that someone breaks into a toffee factory and finds a toffee monster. I might have been using context clues for that first part. I believed that the monster was once a human, and suffered some kind of grave injustice, or accident, that led to their toffification.

So there were elements of correctness in there, but also parts I misremembered. I thought it emerged and maybe absorbed people, a bit like the blob. Maybe, I wasn’t sure. And I remember finding the character sympathetic, but I wasn’t sure if it was sympathetic on the cover and more frightening in the book? I thought there might be some tension there between the front cover and how I experienced it as a character. So those are my recollections.

Ren Cool! That’s more than I was expecting because all I remembered was a toffee texture and a disconsolate atmosphere.

Willow But Ren, you read a lot more books than I did, you see. This was a much smaller percentage of your total.

Adam That’s true, although I think that speaks to how Ren’s memory works as well, that it’s textural.

Willow That’s true, while I remember the character beats. I think it was the cover that drew me to this book, when I was young.

Ren Oh yeah, we should probably describe the covers.

Adam The covers are really warty!

Ren They are really warty, both of them.

Willow By Tony Blundell, in both cases.

Ren Yeah, Revenge of the Toffee Monster has a very warty toffee monster, with a grin? A grimace?

Adam Oh, definitely a grimace. It looks pained to me!

Ren And the title is also written in a blobby toffee font.

Adam It’s a bit like a movie poster.

Willow Yeah, a schlocky movie poster. There’s a difference in the way the words and the monster are printed, so they’re shiny, they’ve got a clever publishing trick on them.

Ren Yep, they’ve got a bit of the old laminate. And then Killer Mushrooms Ate My Gran has again some very warty mushrooms, red and —

Adam — brain mushrooms.

Willow Very severe looking.

Adam Inquisitorial.

Ren Surrounding the gran, who is wearing a cycling helmet and gear.

Willow And the mushrooms are laminate but the gran is not, this time. Also, just as a flight of fancy I tried to write down what I remembered of Killer Mushrooms Ate my Gran, never having read it before. Just to see if it was more or less accurate than what I remembered of the one I had read.

Ren Okay….

Willow So I guessed that there might be a child who lives with their gran, who hates mushrooms and never eats them, in fact they throw them down into a basement after pretending to eat them each night, and then I thought they might hear noises from the basement, and see strange orange glowing eyes at the windows, and then they venture down, and scare off the mushrooms, but the gran is not so lucky. They eat her, but then they hunger for more, perhaps they control her like a pod person, and use her to lure others down to the basement. And then the child has to build a ragtag bag of misfits from school to destroy the mushrooms, and it validates their dislike of mushrooms.

Ren That’s really not bad at all, you clearly have a strong grasp of children’s horror tropes under your belt. I’m impressed. I like how surreal you’re making this podcast, already. Good addition.

So, Revenge of the Toffee Monster.

Lenny is bored during the summer holidays, all his friends are away, he’s riding around on his bike and he finds a sign to a ‘Toffee museum’. He investigates, but finds it dusty and dreary, and is a little disturbed by the image of a Victorian child with a mournful expression on an old toffee tin. He’s about to leave, when he smells the sweet, buttery smell of toffee, and follows it into an industrial kitchen where a woman is throwing toffee by hand in these great looping strands.

Lenny is transfixed by this display, but the toffee throwing woman, revealed to be Miss Butterworth, is initially very hostile to him. She says that little boys used to love Butterworth’s toffee, but now they only sell it to the old folk’s home and soon they’ll be out of business entirely. Lenny tries to explain modern sweets to her, using the example of the Sparkle Bar in his pocket, which is a candy that fizzes blue foam and turns your teeth blue. And also has a theme song, I don’t know if anyone wants to try and sing the theme song on page 25.

Willow Sure, yeah, can I get some backing music? I’ll give it a go.

Adam (groans, gets up) Okay, if you start drumming Ren, I’ll be back in a sec.

I'm too old for this!

(Ren starts drumming)

Willow Wowww. Cosmic kids eat sparkle bars. Woww. Sparkle bars are ace. They wow the world, the universe! They wow aliens in space!

(Adam strums guitar)

Ren Thank you Willow!

Willow You’re welcome, it was a bit more like a spoken word poem.

Ren No, that was great. I really enjoyed that.

Willow Do we want to talk about Lenny in the beginning first?

Ren Yeah, feel free if you have things you want to say about Lenny.

Willow I thought Lenny was an interesting choice of character, and quite cool, that the character in this story is from a poor household, his family can’t afford to go on holidays, and he’s bored in this industrial area.

I thought that’s not — it’s not a bunch of posh kids in the countryside s