Jennifer Killick on Dread Wood

"I genuinely believe that if I was in one of these horror-story situations, I would still be joking and laughing. As much as some things can be quite harrowing and upsetting, I need to be able to laugh through it.”

For her seventh children’s book Dread Wood, due to be published by Farshore in March, Jennifer Killick returned to the comedy/horror mash-up style of writing that propelled her previous novel, Crater Lake, to success.

If it’s not exciting, cut it out! If, when I’m going over my work, there is a chapter where nothing happens, I have to re-do it. I want to write for all children, not children who are necessarily readers. I need to keep them engaged

The story is about a group of Year 7s who have been given a Saturday detention so must return to their former country mansion of a school for a Back on Track session. Obviously Angelo, Gus, Hallie and Naira think this is the worst thing that has ever happened in their lives, but things take a downward turn when some of the school pigs disappear, as does their teacher, Mr Canton. The youngsters realise that there is something mysterious and frightening under the ground—and that might just be coming for them next. They have no phones and there are no adults they can ask for help, apart from a husband-and-wife team of caretakers called the Latchitts, who turn out to be the kind of people no one should turn to in a situation like this.

The children don’t really know each other but it’s not a coincidence that they are all there at the same time, says Killick, who wrote the first draft of Dread Wood in only three weeks. They have been given these detentions for a reason: they have all, separately, been mean to a girl called Colette, who (spoiler alert) is the granddaughter of the Latchitts. And the Latchitts are in fact the Lacheys, former scientists who have gone rogue and have created creatures from whom the four protagonists must now escape. They do eventually figure out a way of getting away from the gruesome Latchitts, but not until a number of nail-biting escapes take place, including a pivotal scene in the middle of Dread Wood.

Killick was inspired by a number of things, including a game her son plays which involves pretending the floor is lava, and the film “Tremors”, specifically a scene in which a man up a telephone pole has died because he hasn’t dared come down to the ground. She was also influenced by Taylor Swift’s song “Betty”, which has the line “One of the worst things I did was what I did with you” and inspired the Colette storyline. “Most of us have done or said things that have upset people, and were much crueller that we intended them to be,” says Killick. “I think it’s important to acknowledge that we all do that but it doesn’t need to be irreparable. It can be turned around… [The book] is about making mistakes and not letting those things define you.”

Farshore is promoting Dread Wood as being similar to R L Stine’s Goosebumps series, which Killick says is a great honour, but her stories are funnier and she is totally tuned in to the way kids banter. “I’ve always been more comfortable hanging out with the kids than the adults,” she says. “If I’m at a party there will be a room of kids and I will be with the kids. I seem to connect with children and I enjoy their company.”

She has five children and step-children and says if you ever listen to children in the playground or playing on an Xbox it’s “jokes, jokes, jokes” all the time. Gus, for example, is based on a friend of her son’s who is always trying to distract or entertain by being funny and she loved the idea of including a character where you never know what they are going to come out with.

Ultimately, of course, the book is also about friendship: the friendship that the four main protagonists forge in the face of adversity, as well as (spoiler alert, again) the hand of friendship they extend to Collette in the final chapter of the book. “Most of my books have themes of friendship, because it’s something I’ve always struggled with,” says the author, who was the “weird, geeky, shy” girl at school. “I’ve never felt I fitted in anywhere, so I think a lot about what it means to be a good friend.”

Breaking through

Killick previously published her books with Firefly Press, an independent publisher in Wales which released her first scary title, Crater Lake. That text “unlocked the next author level” because it was chosen as a BookTrust Bookbuzz title and is popular in schools as a Year 6 class read. The follow-up, Crater Lake Evolution, was part of a Waterstones Piccadilly window display, which was an “amazing” experience, says the author.

Her knack for combining humour and comedy also attracted the attention of Sarah Levison and Lindsey Heaven at Farshore, who approached Killick’s agent, Kirsty McLachlan at Morgan Green Creatives, to ask what Killick was working on. “I had happened to pitch a ‘Breakfast Club’/‘Tremors’ idea to my agent literally two weeks earlier, so she asked me to write a short paragraph,” says Killick. “Farshore offered me a deal the next week. It boosted my confidence so much, having someone who believes you will write something good on the basis of a few sentences.”

Farshore offered a two-book deal and the second story is already in the bag. It involves an app-based game called Flinch that gives children points every time they scare each other. But who is controlling the game, and what chaos do they want to cause? That is something that the heroes of book one (plus Colette, who is now part of the gang) must try and discover. And yes, the creepy Latchitts will be back and more of their backstory will be revealed.

Something Killick excels at is driving the plot forward, a skill she honed at writer development agency Golden Egg Academy. “If it’s not exciting, cut it out! If, when I’m going over my work, there is a chapter where nothing happens, I have to re-do it. I want to write for all children, not children who are necessarily readers. I need to keep them engaged.

“I just want kids to read [the novel] and for it to make them feel more confident and hopeful and happy, and less lonely, and all of those things books have given me through my life. When you are growing up and you are shy, books fill the gap if you feel like you don’t fit in or have friends. Books got me through and I want other children to have that, too.”