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Darkness in literature: Chris Beckett's Dark Eden

In a hostile world, an isolated family struggles with blinding night

It's not just dark on Eden. It's "dark dark", sometimes "dark dark dark". Night is permanent on this hostile, beautiful planet, where the only light comes from the flora and fauna. One small valley contains the only human inhabitants, the 500-odd incestuous descendants of two astronauts, abandoned there 163 years previously.

I recently chose Chris Beckett's Dark Eden as my science-fiction book of the year, but it's probably also one of my books of the year, at least if you judge by the number of people I've forced it on. I just love it, so I'm delighted that Sarah Crown chose "darkness" as her theme this Christmas, as it means I can go on about it a little more.

With elements of Riddley Walker, Dark Eden is narrated in the strange lingo that has developed among the "family" which now inhabits Eden, the sometimes stunted, deformed family trying to survive until Earth sends help.

A Landing Veekle, "one of those sky-boats with lights on them … brought Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions down to Eden from the starship Defiant", runs their mythology. Tommy and Angela stayed in Eden and made four daughters and one son. Harry "slipped" with his sisters, and now there are many. They recite their history every AnyVirsry, but it's starting to mutate. "Jesus was the leader of the Juice," they say, and he was "spike[d] up to burn" by Hitler. Anyway, the young ones – some batfaced, some clawfooted, thanks to inbreeding – are starting to forget it all. They don't believe it matters any more. "You should say years … you should say 15 years, not 20 wombtimes. You know what Oldest say: The world doesn't come from a woman's belly."

And the food in their valley, hunted and stripped of its shining alien vegetation for more than a hundred years, is starting to run out. When murder comes to Eden for the first time, one young man, John Redlantern, decides to set out across Snowy Dark to find out if there is anything else out there.

The image of his little crew, babies and all, walking out into the pitch, primeval Dark of this planet with only a few lights between them has stayed with me ever since I read Dark Eden in January. It's freezing. They don't know what's on the other side. Terrifying beasts are hunting in the black. "This was where he'd led us," says John's cousin Gerry. "The rest of us bunched up in a circle, in a place so dark that it was the same as being completely blind, waiting for that leopard to strike and kill again. It was dark dark dark. But out in that darkness that made us blind, near near, with nothing between us and it, was an animal that wasn't blind at all, and could run silently over the surface of the snow."

It's not that Beckett describes the darkness at length, in great swooping passages of beautiful prose; he doesn't. His story is all told in the first person, narrated by different characters in their addictively odd vernacular. But that makes it all the more evocative, I think, and I'm shivering just writing about it. Thank goodness, then, that Beckett has just signed a deal to write a sequel, Gela's Ring, out in 2014. It's a long time to wait, but this is a world I'm desperate to return to.

Science fictionFictionAlison Flood
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The Dragon Lords, world's first 'cloud-sourced' novel, prepares to land

Silvia Hartmann's latest work was written on an open Google Drive document, with 13,000 collaborators offering critiques and even providing a title

2012 has been the year in which the digital book has taken readers by the throat. You might think it's a shame that it was EL James who achieved this, but – deal with it, friends – the e-book has come of age. Big Time. Putting Fifty Shades into perspective, we must acknowledge that the arena of new fiction is passing, and has passed, into cyberspace.

More seriously, as this blog has often noticed, the 21st century, with all its life-changing technology, has ushered in a new age of reading and writing. Across the planet, on screens, laptops and mobile phones, more people than ever before are receiving the written word in any number of new formats, and transmitting it too in tweets, texts and emails.

What's more, this process shows no sign of slowing down, and there may even be a quasi-literary dividend (see below). When cultural historians eventually come to describe the first decade of this century, they will be hard put to resist phrases like "paradigm shift", or "literary upheaval".

No question: these momentous years have seen a transformation in the world of books and letters unequalled since the days of Gutenberg.

The latest example of innovation arrives in the form of a "cloud-sourced novel", which will be released on Wednesday 19 December by fantasy fiction author Silvia Hartmann. The Dragon Lords is, according to its publicity, "the world's first novel to be written totally in the cloud". So let me take you to a brave new world of fiction-writing, undreamed of in most current literary communities.

The book is the outcome of the so-called "Naked Writer Project", for which Hartmann wrote a fantasy novel online, watched by a global audience of thousands.

It worked like this. Hartmann's daily 90-minute composition sessions were overseen by hundreds of followers, who could put forward their ideas and influence the plot. Comments were added to the manuscript in real time, with Hartmann responding to them.

Participants from the UK, US, Brazil, Malaysia, Russia, Australia and New Zealand took part in the project. Their input ranged from critiquing plotlines to actually naming the book. That bit of the process is probably a gimmick. At the end of the day, it's still Hartmann's novel. Indeed, one suspects that the "cloud-sourcing" element is really a new kind of global publicity under another name. I'm not sure that a serious writer, committed to self-expression, would want anything to do with this kind of collaboration. But I digress.

Dragon Lords was completed between September and November, 2012, which is quick work, but not unseemly. Many famous novels have been written as fast as that. Faulkner famously wrote As I Lay Dying in just over a month. Georges Simenon routinely used to write a police "procedural" in a week.

However, the making of Dragon Lords is unlike almost any previous English-language novel. More than thirteen thousand people are said to have "interacted" with the title. This is a step-change. (Many books would be grateful to have 1300 readers, let alone 13,000.)

What's more, in this new world of creativity, all of them were hosted on Google Docs, a word processing tool that promotes and celebrates this kind of collaboration. No surprise, then, that Google is now actively puffing Dragon Lords, mostly as a new-book phenomenon. Everyone involved is being rather coy about its actual literary merit. And indeed, Alison Flood was not convinced by the work in progress. In truth, Dragon Lords is more significant as a technological, rather than a creative, feat.

I'm aware that, for most writers this kind of cloud-sourced creativity will sound like the realisation of a literary nightmare. Still, I'd argue that it deserves to be noticed. Never mind the quality (which will not be revealed until 19th December), feel the global reach. This is the new world of reading we can now experience, a world in which, somewhere on the planet, an English language fantasy can reach a new audience, who may also have the appetite to respond.

Today, fiction and poetry are being taken into new, stratospheric dimensions. Who knows what the final outcome will be ? Ten years ago, many people sneered (they still do) at graphic novels as "comic books." Now two graphic books have been shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Prize. In fiction, it was always true that "anything goes".

Accordingly, I'd suggest that it's possibly a mistake to dismiss "cloud sourced" fiction like Dragon Lords out of hand, tempting though that might be. Who know? In years to come, there'll be crowd sourced novels competing for Costa or Booker. Stranger things have happened. All it would take is a new, young writer, at home with a mass audience, and confident of his readership. Dickens, anyone ?

FantasyFictionCrowdsourcingGoogleRobert McCrum
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Darkness in literature: Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly

Philip K Dick explores the psychological horrors lurking in the shadows of sunny 70s California in his cult classic, A Scanner Darkly

Philip K Dick's partially autobiographical chronicle of 70s hippie drug culture takes place under the eternal sunshine of southern California. Even the book's nighttime is saturated with the electric glare of strip mall lighting and the glow of the television screen. And in a society that never switches off the lights, the dark has become internal. A Scanner Darkly is about a descent into the deep fears of our 24-hour consumer society: the twilight of intellectual and emotional collapse. The darkness of insanity.

Dick dissects modern insanity through the cypher of Bob Arctor. Arctor is a man on the fringes of society. A man who realises one day that he hates his suburban existence, and so trades it in for a life among the hippie drop-outs, drug addicts and street people of Orange County, California. But Arctor is also Agent Fred, an undercover narcotics officer whose identity is hidden even from his police handlers by a "scramble suit" that makes him appear as an unmemorable blur. When an administrative error results in Agent Fred being assigned to monitor Bob Arctor, Arctor/Fred has the strange experience of monitoring his own activities through the holographic scanning equipment that gives the novel its title.

A Scanner Darkly is late-phase Dick. It stems from the period following his revelatory religious experiences in 1974. The cult science fiction author spent the last decade of his life trying to understand a series of visions he experienced under the effects of sodium pentothal after a dental operation, a struggle charted in his biblical Exegesis and in the novels Radio Free Albemuth, Valis and The Divine Invasion. It's this phase of Dick's life that, more than any other, cemented his reputation as a modern-day mystic. But in Dick's own reflections on those years, it's clear he experienced a protracted mental breakdown or a series of psychological disorders brought on by drug abuse. The value of his later writing is not as mystical insight, but a social document concerning an all-too-common modern affliction.

Bob Arctor's life is really Dick's life over a two-year period, from 1970-72, after his fourth wife Nancy left him. It was a restless life, sliding through relationships and jobs, and from city to city. Finding himself alone again, Dick filled his four-bedroom house with drifters and fell fully into drug addiction. A Scanner Darkly was born from this period and is a fascinating portrait of 70s Californian counter-culture.

Arctor falls further than his creator. His dual life as an investigator and addict in thrall to the mysterious narcotic Substance D, lead him to a crisis. He ends up a low-functioning schizophrenic, embroiled in a plot to infiltrate the manufacturing cycle of Substance D. The darkness here is not in the high-concept sci fi or conspiracy theories that permeate much of Dick's fiction, but in the credible depiction of a life collapsing under the weight of a mental breakdown. Arctor slowly loses family and friends, work and livelihood. He falls between the cracks of society and becomes one of the broken, exploited and weak at the bottom of the heap.

The theme of darkness runs through literature as a metaphor for our fears. As a society, we are so scared of insanity that we construct all kinds of guises to hide it from view: the lunatic, the criminal, the addict. And with these illusions in place we pretend lunacy, crime and addiction aren't right there waiting for us should misfortune find us. A Scanner Darkly is about the fragility of our lives and the obscure horror of insanity. In his later work, Dick explores what lies behind our fear of madness, and perhaps it's there that his work becomes true art. But in A Scanner Darkly he drives us down into our deepest fears and leaves us there, in the darkness.

Philip K DickHorrorFictionDamien Walter
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Poem of the week: An Arab Love-Song by Francis Thompson

This intense and erotic lyric by a Victorian Englishman, set in an Arabia of the mind, may not be 'authentic' but its power is stunning

This week's poem is "An Arab Love-Song", by Francis Thompson (1859-1907), author of the great Christian ode, "The Hound of Heaven" and not to be confused with the Scottish poet James Thomson (1834-82), who wrote "The City of Dreadful Night". Both men were utterly original, extremists in their work and in their sometimes wretched lives. But James was the true poète maudit, the "laureate of pessimism", as he was nicknamed, who could raise squalor to the level of the visionary. Francis, despite his own dreadful nights of homelessness and addiction, was blessed by a strong religious faith, and by the friendship and support of the Meynells. Thanks largely to their interventions, he kicked his opium habit for extensive periods, made his mark as an essayist, and published three collections of verse before a final descent into dereliction. This little erotic lyric is an oddity in his work, and yet it seems to possess, in miniature, the rhythmic drive and flexibility which make "The Hound Of Heaven" memorable on its more ambitious scale.

While living rough in London, Thompson found occasional refuge with a kindly woman who worked as a prostitute. But the inspiration of "An Arab Love-Song" is thought to be a later acquaintance, a young short story writer named Katie King. Her mother disapproved of Thompson's courtship, and warned him off in a hurtful letter. "Thy tribe's black tents" is eloquent code for what he felt about the King family.

Borrowing the mask of another culture, perhaps pretending to be a translation, the poem might, with some justification, be labelled pastiche. What Thompson knew first-hand about Arabic poetry is unclear. His English filters are plain to see. There's a Biblical tone, particularly audible in the third stanza. Coleridge's poetry, we know, had touched his imagination, and it seems very likely that he had fallen under the spell of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Of course, it's not impossible that Thompson had heard real Arabic love songs. He roamed the streets of England's capital city for three years, and must have met and talked with many passing strangers at the all-night coffee stalls he haunted – "those little centres of distressed humanity waiting for the dawn".

More likely, though, Thompson's song belongs to an Arabia of his imagination. Its very informality underlines that impression (Arabic poetry was traditionally highly formalised). With its episodic and asymmetrical stanzas, the verses have a strange and no doubt deliberate nomadic quality.

It opens with three sets of irregular couplets. A certain whimsicality is more than offset by that striking image of the clouds as "hunchèd camels". The expected adjective is "humped" but "hunched" both suggests the characteristic shape, and, in a stroke of realism, shows us animals huddled together on the sand, at rest, because it's night. Then, picking up the "moon" rhyme for the first line, and plainly echoing Fitzgerald, Thompson expands into a longer-lined, highly emotive tercet. The declaration of love leads to a thought that, for a Victorian poet, must remain un-sayable (even for a Victorian poet in Orientalist guise) but the erotic intensity is thoroughly insinuated: "And night will catch her breath up, and be dumb."

The voice of the dramatic lyric, as a genre, does not need to be authentic to the poet; though it has to be, or appear, emotionally authentic. Thompson's title demands we conjure up a speaker – or singer – from a different culture. The genuineness or otherwise of the original impulse can be judged only by criteria belonging to the poet's own language – the rhythmic energy, the linguistic inventiveness. Thompson's poem is endowed with both.

The last, seven-line, verse is structurally the boldest, closer to prose than poetry, with rhymes (mother/ brother/brother/mother) that seem casual, almost accidental, subdued to the rhetoric of invocation. Their sound is suitably breathy, almost gasping. The thought is bold, too, when the speaker claims, God-like, to be his beloved's father, brother and mother. Finally, Thompson leaves us with another vivid picture, earthbound this time, as if to balance the earlier imagery of the night sky. The contrast of the "black tents" and the "red pavilion" (recalling the exclamation, "blood of my heart") is almost simplistic, almost crude – yet it's a striking evocation of the polarity of death and life, resistance and invitation.

Thompson's quirky technique never detracts from the fluidity and inevitability of the utterance. Though it might seem one of the by-products of Victorian poetry, this poem actually expresses an essential quality of the age, its power of synthesis. An Arab love song sung by an Englishman, tenuously linked, if at all, to the real grandeur of Arabic literary tradition, the poem is a cunning disguise. It allows Thompson an intensity unlike anything we find in his other secular poems. If the right hand doesn't always know what the left is doing, this is a left-handed poem. I wish he'd written more.

An Arab Love-Song

The hunchèd camels of the night
Trouble the bright
And silver waters of the moon.
The Maiden of the Morn will soon
Through Heaven stray and sing,
Star gathering.

Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,
Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!
And night will catch her breath up, and be dumb.

Leave thy father, leave thy mother
And thy brother;
Leave the black tents of thy tribe apart!
Am I not thy father and thy brother,
And thy mother?
And thou – what needest with thy tribe's black tents
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Crime stalks the Shetland Islands, while questions of identity are examined through a very different lens in this week's roundup of reader reviews

"When precocious teenager Catherine Ross is found murdered, the prime suspect is ..." well, stpauli, who's turned to crime this week with a review of Ann Cleeves' Raven Black. We're off to the borders of the North Sea, a setting which stpauli says is "brought convincingly to life without sentimentality or lazy assumptions".

While the finger of blame is first pointed at Magnus Tait, a loner who has always been blamed for the death of another girl many years ago, it soon becomes clear that "in the small, tight-knit community of Shetland there are plenty of others who might have had a motive for killing Catherine". Cleeves tells the story not only through the eyes of her detective, Jimmy Perez, but also from the perspective of characters "including Magnus Tait himself, schoolgirl Sally Henry and incomer Fran Hunter".

"Each character is well-rounded and credible, and each lends something different to the narrative. However, Perez himself is an engaging lead, trying to make decisions about his own future and his relationship with Shetland and Fair Isle as he attempts to unravel not only the mystery of Catherine Ross's murder but also the 'cold case' of Catriona Bruce, who, like Catherine, disappeared shortly after a visit to Magnus Tait's croft."

Perez is "the very opposite of the traditionally rational, driven, detached detective", stpauli continues, who feels "almost overwhelming pity for Magnus Tait, whether he was a murderer or not", strives to protect the ex-wife of a former friend, 'even though she could reasonably be a suspect too', and buys his house "on a romantic whim". A conclusion that is "at once startling and yet simultaneously completely believable" leaves stpauli already planning her next trip – Jimmy Perez returns for his next Shetland outing in White Nights.

ROYMARSHALL has been suffering from double vision, saluting Maria Taylor's ability to inhabit and interrogate her Cypriot ancestry in her collection of poems, Melanchrini. The "filmic" opening poem puts us in rural Cyprus, where the day begins with "strong coffee" and a sense that the young child who waits with the sun before rising may not truly belong.

"This sense of duality is mirrored in images and within whole poems where ethereal, dreamlike or hallucinatory qualities come up against the concrete-hard descriptions of daily life, where the rural meets the urban, where below the surface of the everyday there are other lives, other stories, some lost in the passage of time."

A couple of lines from 'Par Avion' could almost serve as the poet's credo, continues ROY:

"Memory lapses into dream and dreams
are forgotten. The only reality is ink."

Other highlights include a scene in a betting shop and an evocation of the "the horror of teaching poetry to schoolchildren", 'Larkin', which "ends with a suitably Larkinesque twist". This is a first collection which "in its assurance, maturity, coherence and bravery ... feels a long way from being a debut", adds ROYMARSHALL, and I'm inclined to agree, if only to keep ROY from any more shouting.

Thanks for all your reviews – as always, give me a shout over at richard.lea@guardian.co.uk if I've mentioned one of your reviews, and I'll dig out something from the cupboards.

Crime fictionPoetryRichard Lea
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A festival of comics and graphic books inspires new artists and writers in Newcastle

John Hill celebrates the Canny Comic Convention in the home of the graphic book reading circle, Readers of the Lost Art

Our story begins with a young lad called Josh.

Josh happened upon the first Canny Comic Con in Newcastle last year. He took part in a workshop on how to put together comics. He went away inspired.

And then, most importantly, he kept going.

When the second event rolled around last weekend, he returned with sketches to show everyone.

"It's pretty much exactly what you'd hope for when you're putting together an event", says co-organiser Stacey Whittle.

The Canny Comic Con is a free event nestled in Newcastle City Library. It brings together all sorts of creators, from emerging local talent to professionals such as 2000AD's Al Ewing and Alice in Sunderland creator Bryan Talbot.

Josh's story is an example of why events such as this are important, and why it's sad that some people still sneer at comics. Maybe it's a rite of passage for all mediums. After all, some 18th Century critics fretted that novels would corrupt "the young, the ignorant and the idle", distract from useful work, and encourage people to read by candlelight and risk setting their houses on fire.

"It's such a shame that Britain still has – to a degree – a lack of comfort in the medium", says Dr Mel Gibson, a senior lecturer at Northumbria University. She believes many are still hamstrung by the definition of the comic book as "for children and funny".

More challenging work written for adults is always going to be seen as more difficult if you've developed a culture which sees anything but a comic for children as a problem, not as a wonderful kind of material to work with.

Dr Mel gave a talk at Canny Comic Con about comics for girls through the decades, how they changed and what they said to a generation.

It only takes seeing comics from the era that you're passionate about to remind you of who you were then, and how those texts shaped how you thought about reading.

As a child, Daniel Clifford fell in love with reading thanks to comic books. He went on to create comic books such as Sugar Glider, a Newcastle-based superhero tale he developed with artist Gary Bainbridge. Daniel's also teamed up with Hexham artist Lee Robinson to set up Art Heroes, which delivers creative comics workshops for young people.

Comics helped me develop reading skills and other skills. If it wasn't for comics, I would never have a degree. I wanted to be able to go out and do the same for other young people.

The Canny Comic Con offered an opportunity to meet fellow creators and existing fans in the North East, and maybe inspire a few new ones.

You meet families and older people, people who might not have seen a comic before, or might not have wanted to see a comic before", he said. "You start to engage with those people, and it's interesting to see the expressions on people's faces as they look through.

The Canny Comic Con sprang from the Paper Jam Comics Collective, a group for aspiring creators that's been running in Newcastle since 2007. It found a willing host in Newcastle City Library, which has a long-running graphic novel reading group called Readers of the Lost Art.

Organiser Alexi Conman says:

Canny Comic Con relied an awful lot on goodwill - but the fact that both events have worked so well says everything about comics and the people who make them.

Sunderland-based writer and artist Bryan Talbot was at the event. Dotter of Her Father's Eyes - a graphic memoir he illustrated from his wife Mary's script - was recently shortlisted for a Costa Book Award.

"It's all about meeting people", Bryan says. "Sometimes it's seeing people you don't see very often, but also meeting the readers of your books who can give you feedback."

Bryan started out as part of the underground comics scene, and has created works such as The Tale of One Bad Rat and the ongoing Grandville series. He gave a detailed presentation at the event on how he makes his comics, including the creative flourishes he puts into his work. For example, Metronome is designed in 4/4 time, with sets of four panels used to mimic a beat.

"Comics are just a medium, like prose, novels, opera or theatre", he says."You can communicate sometimes quite complex ideas very simply and directly using a mixture of words and pictures, so you can tackle any sort of story."

So how do you become a comic creator? Apparently, it's a question of not expecting to make money, and taking joy from what you're making.

Al Ewing got a sample script published a decade ago in enduring British comic 2000AD. He's since established himself as a respected comic writer and novelist, and has written several stories for 2000AD's iconic character Judge Dredd. He advises:

That's the wonderful thing about comics. You don't need equipment or materials and you don't even need a lot of time. You can get something together. If you've got an idea just make it, put it out there, send it around.

So long as you keep doing it you can't go far wrong, because eventually someone's going to notice.

You can hear John talking to Daniel Clifford here:

And to Dr Mel Gibson here:

And to Bryan Talbot here:

And here are John's details:

John Hill is a freelance writer and journalist based in Newcastle.

He blogs on http://www.betarocket.co.uk/ and you can get in touch with him on Twitter @John_PJ_Hill

ArtComics and graphic novelsNewcastleNorthumbria UniversityYoung people
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Darkness in literature: Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes

Bradbury illuminates the night in this darkness-obsessed 1962 novel about a sinister carnival that pulls into a small US town

Let's get something out of the way. Yes, I know that Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is essentially a Halloween book. But now that the season of the witch has been subsumed into a spendstravaganza of candy-floss ghosts and supermarket zombie masks, we must strip back this 50-year-old novel into its essential components: deep darkness, approaching night, and the fear of the unknown.

Bradbury's story tells of an October night when a sinister travelling carnival pulls into a midwestern town, and the lives of two young boys, on a fire-breathing dragon of a train. Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, crisscrossing the land, holds up a distorting sideshow mirror to the hopes and fears of small-town America.

The novel is drenched in darkness, every character a slice of night. Even the boys' names reflect it: adventurous, reckless Jim Nightshade – a night-blooming flower, for sure – and bookish Will Halloway, almost Halloween in name. Then there's Mr Dark, a moustache-twirling villain dressed in black, straight from the inky, monochrome illustrations of melodramas.

Most of the book is set in the dead hours of night, as Jim and Will investigate the arrival of the mysterious carnival and the effect it has on the townsfolk, lured by its bright lights but quickly drawn into shadows: the teacher who grows young again, the boy aged beyond all sense, the man who becomes his dwarfish reflection in the hall of mirrors. Even in daytime, the threat of darkness is present; the book opens with the itinerant lightning-rod seller Tom Fury blowing into town just ahead of "a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth".

Bradbury described the night like no one else. "Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt." "Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in high attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics and stirring up dreams about clocks in all the beds where children slept." "The night was sweet with the dust of autumn leaves that smelled as if the fine sands of ancient Egypt were drifting to dunes beyond the town."

As poetic as Bradbury's descriptions of the literal darkness are, it's the unspoken yet irrepressibly approaching night that is at the core of the book. Will and Jim are only half of the story; the characters I focused on in my first reading of the book when I was their age. Upon rereading recently, after Bradbury's death at the age of 91 in June, it was Will's father, Charles Halloway, whom I paid attention to.

Charles is 10 years older than his wife, and feels too old to be a proper father to Will: "Hell, I was 40 years old when he was born!" Halloway says to his wife, in bed, while Will listens through the wall. "And you. Who's your daughter? people say."

Something Wicked This Way Comes is about the approaching night of Jim and Will's adulthood: hotheaded Jim rushing headlong into it, Will more wary as the long summers of their youth give way to something unknown.

But more heartbreakingly, it's about the darkness that Charles Halloway can't see a path through, the final darkness of creaking bones and forgetfulness, and ultimately death. Older than his wife, impossibly older than his son, he hides in the dark shadows of the library, watching life speed up like the whirring calliope tunes of the sinister carnival.

And it is the night people who come with the sideshows, stripping away artifice and heightening desire, who force the boys and the older Halloway to confront their fears; to face up to the darkness and, in the case of Will's father, to gaze into the black abyss of old age and realise that, although nothing will stop the night approaching, he does not have to go gentle into it.

Ray BradburyScience fictionFantasyClassicsFictionDavid Barnett
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Books found in strange places: share your stories

This morning, a stranger on a train left a book - and I think it was meant for me. Has anything similar happened to you?

An unusual thing happened to me this morning: a complete stranger gave me a book. At least, I think she did.

I was on the way to work, and the gentleman sitting beside me had stood up to leave, when the lady opposite very deliberately placed a copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie on the empty seat. She then read the paper and got off at the next station, leaving the book behind. Mine is one of the last stops and this morning I was the only one in my carriage. The book was still there, so I picked it up. I'm just not sure if it was really meant for me.

Having been a London commuter for several years now, I can say that random acts of kindness aren't all that frequent. But the occasional times they happen bring such joy. Just last night a very drunk fellow, still wearing a bright red paper hat, got on my train and promptly fell asleep as soon as he sat down. Concerned that he'd miss his stop, those closest to him woke him up and kept talking to him to ensure he wouldn't nod off again. They nicked his hat in the process but at least they gave him a fighting chance of making it home. And last week, on the bus, a conversation spontaneously started between strangers, one of whom was reading an Alice Munro book. The second passenger, who was clearly a big Munro fan, took the opportunity to talk about her work to a fellow enthusiast. The exchange made me smile and feel a little more generous towards my fellow travellers.

Perhaps the lady this morning understood that leaving a book on a London train for someone to find inspires a sharing spirit that is passed between passenger all the day long. Finding a book can make your day, as projects like bookcrossing.com know. It can, of course, be difficult to know if it has been purposefully left for another to read and pass on, or if it has just been forgotten. I once found a copy of Roddy Doyle's The Van tucked between two rocks on a beach. It was well above the tide line, so it's possible that it had been placed there, rather than forgotten. I'm slightly ashamed to say I didn't play the game properly, though; instead of passing it on, I still have it on my shelf. This time, though, I'll make sure I pass Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress on.

Tell me: have you ever found or left a book in a strange place? And on the off-chance that I've got the whole episode wrong and the book wasn't left intentionally at all, if you were the lady on the 8:39 to St Pancras this morning: I have your book! Email me if you'd like it back.

Hannah Freeman
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Darkness in literature: Jill Tomlinson's The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark

Jill Tomlinson confronts the primal terror darkness inspires with wry humour and understated poetry in her classic, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark

Most children, at some point, are afraid of the dark. That deep, palm-prickling fear is an evolutionary leftover – a baby monkey straying alone by night is probably a baby monkey snapped up in a lunge and a squeal by a grateful nocturnal carnivore. In clean, cosy bedrooms, as in fire-lit caves, childhood's vivid, sometimes fevered imagination peoples the dark with monsters, all the worse for being shadowy. One little book, though, has done a great deal to help dispel the terrors of the nightly world since it was first published in 1968.

Jill Tomlinson's The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark is a tiny gem, full of the wry humour and understated, powerful poetry that seem to arise most naturally when an assured author writes for young children. The restraint dictated by new readers' scant vocabulary, and the power of its humorous but hypnotic repetition, impart an unusual, intensely memorable scope to a seven-chapter book about an insomniac owlet.

Plop is a Baby Barn Owl, "fat", "fluffy" and "quite perfect", with a "beautiful heart-shaped ruff" and "very knackety knees". He is not very good at flying yet, and doesn't like to sleep by day – in fact, he scandalises his parents by insisting that he wants to be a day bird. His appetite is insatiable, as is his curiosity ("What was that?" "Shrew." "I like shrew", "...vole", "...fish"), so he is quickly packed off by his mother to glean new opinions of the despised darkness in which his parents patiently acquire his enormous meals.

Under his tree, Plop encounters several wise heads who love the dark – a little boy, an old lady, a Boy Scout, a girl waiting for Christmas, a naturalist, an astronomer, and, most memorable of all, the elegant hunting cat Orion, a miniature urban Bagheera, who tells the little owl about the beauty of the night. Each has a tenebrous adjective to impart to Plop, who grows in confidence and wing-steadiness throughout the book until his landings cease to resemble catherine wheels and become noiseless, assured glides. "Dark is Exciting", says the small boy, waiting for fireworks. "Kind", says the old lady, looking back into an unlit world of memory. "Necessary," says the firm little girl – if you want to hang up a stocking for Santa, you must accept the darkness in which he comes to fill it. Swayed by his friends' unanimous enthusiasm, Plop, newly proud to be a night bird, declares that "Dark is Super".

Steer clear of the abridged picture-book version, stripped of the hints of gore ("shrew" and "vole" tactfully replaced with "dinner"), the humour of the exhausted, exasperated owl parents and the mysterious, poetic spaciousness of the original. Although Paul Howard's work is sumptuous and sweet, I'm also biased in favour of the older version's black-and-white illustrations – Howard's royal blue darkness and fiery-eyed, creamy-winged owls are gorgeous, but, to me, the original's sparse, humorous pen-and-ink allows the reader's imagination freer rein. Whether you hunt down a secondhand Young Puffin or plump for a spandy new Egmont re-issue, though, make sure the text is unabridged.

Twenty-five years after I first encountered Plop and his fears, I remain slightly afraid of the dark myself, especially in the freezing deep of winter. But I'll always be grateful to the fat little owl and the sleek black cat for revelling in the greys and blues, the summer scents and the ragged shadows to be found in the featureless, threatening darkness outside my bedroom window. Inviting frightened kids to marvel at the remote beauty of constellations, fireworks and silent hunts, this book will live on in its readers' memories for as long as children are afraid of the dark.

Children and teenagersImogen Russell Williams
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Rereading Stephen King week 13: The Gunslinger

The first book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series is strange, scary and utterly gripping – the perfect start to an unforgettable journey

Warning: spoiler alert

Hindsight is everything. I first picked up book one of the Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, when I was in the deepest throes of my teenage King addiction. I had read a lot of his books by this point (around 1995) and was ploughing through them. I came to The Eyes of the Dragon, a book that looked different from the others on the shelf, read it … and hated it. Hated it with every part of my horror-loving self. I knew what I wanted from Stephen King. I wanted the horror. I wanted the science fiction. I wanted the weird darkness in the hearts of normal people. The Gunslinger was, I knew, part of a longer-running story; it was also a fantasy novel, as The Eyes of the Dragon was. It was, I decided, after 20 pages of weird-speak and dusty places and a man called Roland, not for me. That's fine, I thought, not every book has to be for me. But I wasn't alone. It seemed they weren't King's most popular books. I moved on.

In 2003, I realised that I was an idiot. A friend, a huge King fan, noticed the gap in my collection. He told me I was insane. I hadn't read The Dark Tower? King's magnum opus? We were heading towards the end of the series, with Book V (Wolves of the Calla) about to be published, and I was behind. I was going on holiday for a week to sunnier climes, and decided to take the first four books with me.

Day one of the holiday, I put my back out. Seriously. I'm not an old man, just a criminally unfit one. I jumped into a freezing cold swimming pool and pulled a muscle – or rather, the muscle, the one that helps you, you know, move. I spent three days on a sofa, and began reading The Gunslinger on day one. I finished book four, Wizard and Glass, three days later. I was totally embroiled. It was like nothing I'd ever read. It was funny and dark and scary and nasty and really, really strange. Somewhere between high and (so-called) low art; literary metafiction meets SF/fantasy/western pulp. But most importantly, how had I lived without it? The first line – "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" – is so perfect. How had I not wanted to read the whole thing? What did the teenage me get so wrong?

Now I understand. The Gunslinger is a quiet, meditative novel; as inauspicious a way to start a sprawling epic fantasy series as I've ever encountered. In Roland Deschain, the titular Gunslinger, there's a superb, violent, powerful and thoughtful protagonist – Clint Eastwood's guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds