The Feathered Man blog tour

I am delighted to welcome Jeremy de Quidt to Bookster Reviews for the blog tour of his new novel The Feathered Man. He has written a brilliant post about Halloween when he was a child - enjoy!

(Sorry about the terrible photo alignment - I'm terrible at computer stuff!)

Halloween wasn't made anything of in my house when I was a child. The shops might have had toffee apples in, and I can remember them alright, but as for Halloween itself at home - it just was another day. People didn't dress up and go from door to door then, not like now. I’m glad they do, now. I like that. We always make a pumpkin lantern and leave it on the wall outside. I like the sound of the gate going and hearing the muffled conversations. I like turning out the light and slowly opening the door to see who’s there. A couple of years ago I whipped it open as fast as I could and growled at the ghosts and ghouls on the step - it wasn't quite what they’d been expecting and the shrieks and screams that went up could have woken the dead - which is, after all, what Halloween is really all about - waking and remembering the dead. I knew that much even when I was growing up as a child in a house where Halloween was just another day. But you see for me it wasn't the day that was the problem, it was the night. As the afternoon drew in and darkness began to fall, I started to wonder what really did happen when all the lights were out and the clock struck midnight on Halloween. I began to wonder with growing disquiet what the graveyard at the church - the one that I walked past everyday on the way home from school- was really like in the darkness; all those crooked headstones and the green coloured chips of glass that were strewn over the white marbled graves, the bunches of withered flowers in the little vases. And suddenly the dark wasn't a place I wanted to be in - even a trip with rubbish to the metal dustbin down the path by the back door was done as quickly as I could do it - down the steps, take the lid off, bang it back on and get back in and shut the door - keep all that darkness out. But as the evening wore on there at the end of it, like some grim, awful train approaching, would be bed time and the house would be clicking and cold and quiet, and whatever was outside, all that remembering of the dead, would come knocking on my bedroom door. One year in the weeks before Halloween, Mr Jones died. He was the old man who’d lived in the house next door. I remember the absolute terror of lying in bed that Halloween night and thinking that Mr Jones was going to come tapping on my window, dressed in his old brown jacket and grey trousers, a bunch of withered flowers in one hand, and broken chips of coloured green grave glass in the other. That night lasted for ever. I remember it now.

I even looked on the frost covered path the next day as I went to school to see if there were any pieces of green grave glass dropped there.

I still wonder to this day what on earth I’d have done, if there had been.

Wow, fantastic (and creepy!) post Jeremy, thank you for that!

The Feathered Man was published by David Ficking Books on the 1st of November, and is now availible in all good bookshops, as well as Amazon and The Book Depository.