Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Wolves In The Walls

James Machin · 08 Jun 2006, 11:44 · from 2006-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jfmachin at hotmail.com (James Machin)
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 11:44:39 +0000
Subject: (urth) Wolves In The Walls
Message-ID: <BAY101-F165E2FD3E4F3E6EC7CB374C38B0 at phx.gbl>

I've been aware of this new(ish) Neil Gaiman children's book for a little 
while, but just looked it up on Amazon:

"Truth be told, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's picture book The Wolves in the 
Walls is terrifying. Sure, the story is fairytale-like and presented in a 
jaunty, casually nonsensical way, but it is absolutely the stuff of 
nightmares. Lucy hears wolves hustling, bustling, crinkling and crackling in 
the walls of the old house where her family lives, but no one believes her. 
Her mother says it's mice, her brother says bats, and her father says what 
everyone seems to say: "If the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over." 
Lucy remains convinced, as is her beloved pig-puppet, and her worst fears 
are confirmed when the wolves actually do come out of the walls."

I don't have the book to hand, but I distinctly remember reference made in 
BotNS to rumours of wolves (white, I think) haunting the wall spaces of the 
Citadel. I'd be interested to see if Gaiman acknowledges this debt to his 
erstwhile collaborator in the story itself.



An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net