Pages: 194
‘An Animated Horror Novel-Noir Double Bill’
The setting: a fairy-tale village of Volkaland, long ago, in times of yore. Professor Hans Gast – brought there by the mysterious Cornelius – is given the key to the Castle of Desires, a place with all a man could wish for: wealth, leisure, servants, lovers; knowledge, power, even the very stars …
The setting is a valley in California, 1937. For ten-year-old Jemima – brought up in the cartoon studio of Pineville – life is as quirky and idyllic as a girl could hope for: surrounded by a wealthy ‘family’ of animators, artists, musicians, and even film stars …
That is until a hired extra, Maximilian Richter, arrives at Pineville – only to stir up a storm of fears, desires, vice and violence …
excerpt ~
The Pineville Studio was Jemima’s destiny, taken inside its wealth-washed walls. And yet she had been born into an era of poverty and Prohibition, just before a time of civil unrest, and Dust Bowl Depression, of bootleggers, rum-runners, tommy-gunning gangsters. But as the years of the 1930s ticked away, there were New Deals and new investment in the United States. Businesses were growing again, and the cinema business had been especially resilient to the Depression. The Hollywood studios, those Dream Factories, had proved to be Dream Fortresses, their fortunes largely immune to the misfortunes of the rest of the world.
Jemima had also just been born before the very first Jazz-singing all-talking motion picture. Yet through some vocal defect, she grew up to never ever speak a word. A mute silent-era child she remained. Jemima soon learned to give a little whistle, or to trill like a songbird, a fairy-tale nightingale. She used a pencil and paper pad too, to write her own captions as if she were a silent movie actress ‘talking’ in speech cards; but more often she filled the pad with scribbles and pictures, drawn-thoughts and doodle-moods.
Jemima’s youthful life thus far had featured a whole montage of locations: visits to a sunny beach on the panoramic Pacific coast; a park with carousel, museum, and zoo; car rides, bike rides into the city, the local cinema, stores or markets … The constant backdrop to her life, though, was Pineville: Artie’s village, standing almost island-like outside the city in its own idyllic valley.
about the author ~
Neale Osborne was born in 1970, in Birmingham, England.
His debut novel ‘Lydia’s Tin Lid Drum’ was published by Oxford Children’s Books, in Autumn 2009.
A freelance artist since 1992, Neale’s illustrations and caricatures have appeared in a variety of publications and places, including The Times, the BBC Proms, The Gramophone and Mojo magazines.
