Bloodtide was the project I began after Junk had won the Carnegie Medal. I learned a few lessons from that time. One was, that there was a real shortage of exciting, difficult, dangerous books for young people - the sort of thing your parents wouldn't care to recommend to you. There's a market for this sort of thing in music, computer games, film and so on, but books tend to be a bit goody-goody. I hope Bloodtide will fill that gap. I wanted it to shock, stir you up, lift you up and bring you down.
Click here to buy Bloodtide from Amazon

…and I was running across bent over double to the remains of a low stone wall, going so fast I was toppling forward. I was dead already, there was nothing to lose. I flung myself face down in the dirt. I retched again, pure bile. Shit! The fear's supposed to stop once you get going. I pulled my face out of the mess and looked back. Regin was out of sight already - hidden safe away.

I felt so betrayed. Everyone had led me to this. That's why I couldn't say no, that's why I couldn't run away. It wasn't me doing this - it was them. My father, my stepfather, my friends, Regin, my own mother. They were sending me to die and I was going along with it. Coward! I said to myself - coward! I did what they said because I lacked the courage to do anything else.

I got up and started to crawl along, keeping down under the cover of the wall. At the end of the wall I was sick again. I looked at it hanging out of my mouth in strands and I thought - I'm still here, and I didn't mean I was still alive. I meant, I was still myself. Dead or alive, this was my fate. The time and place and manner of my death - these things are fixed. All I have of my own is how I face it. And this is how - on my hands and knees with green vomit hanging out of my mouth, scared shitless.

"Today is a good day to die," I whispered to myself. I was almost tempted to walk the rest of the way just for the style of it. But you got to try. That's right, isn't it? You got to try. Stupid! Even then I was hoping to survive.

Bizzare! - Reviews in for Nicholas Dane continue to bounce between the sublime and the ridiculous. So far, no one can agree on anything. For Nick Tucker in the Independant, this is a "fine novel" and "Melvin Burgess is the ideal author ot recount these travails." According to Sally Morris in the Daily Mail, the second half of the book is "a brave exploration of how the brutalisation of children reverberates long after it has passed," while to Patrick Ness in the Guardian, "The sexual abuse story fades baddly into the background and when it does re-appear, it feels like a failure of nerve from one of the nerviest wirters around." At the same time, over in Love Reading, his boss on The Guardian, Julia Eccleshare, says the story is handled "with great sensitivity and engrossing narrative drive."

Peter Hollingdale in Books for Keeps says that "the book's well documented and appauling subject matter deserves something better," and suggests that the "timely subject matter does not excuse the poor and overall erratic quality of the writing," while Christine Baker, editorial Director of Gallimard Jeunesse, the much respected French publishing house, speaks of "the humanity that shines through the whole book. ... It's obviously a powerful read, but it is also well-judged and with a huge heart."

What to make of that lot?

Junk won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's fiction award in 1997. There were howls of protest from the right wing press - mainly the Daily Mail and a handful of local papers. It was on radio and TV, there were articles and cartoons and much breast beating about the loss of innocence in young people today and where on earth is children's fiction going. But there was also a great deal of positive reaction. Today, Junk is still widely read, and the approach it takes in being open, honest and upfront about drugs and drug culture is seen as being enpowering thing, encouraging people to think for themselves, rather than encouraging them to take drugs, as its critics still sometimes try to make out.

It has always been my most popular book.

REVIEWS

The Book Memoirs.