Blood Brother
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from the gift edition of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory illustrated by Quentin Blake and with design and typography by Peter Campbell. The successful collaboration between Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake has played an important part in the popularity of Dahl’s work over the last fifteen years. Blake’s unmistakable artwork truly complements Dahl’s writing. His economical, amiable, illustrative style balances out Dahl’s often expansive language. And the liveliness, humour and pathos of the drawings offer a softer side to Dahl’s sometimes gloriously grotesque, sometimes cruel descriptions of his characters.
Thanks to Penguin Children’s Books for their help in producing this July cover which commemorates the thirty years anniversary of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s first UK publication.
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Send to friendBlood Brother
One of the 'Dark Shadows' series, this is a novel which, in a currently popular mode, moves between real and supernatural worlds. The 'blood brother' relationship of Billy and Seb Sallis and its development following an accident in which Seb is severely paralysed provides an interesting, and at times an ingeniously used, starting point for Brennan's story. It has, undeniably, a number of dramatic and tension-packed moments, particularly those in which Seb's 'marvellous, modified Macintosh computer' would seem to be assuming a life and direction of its own. But the overall difficulty with the book is that it attempts to incorporate serious themes - bullying, alcoholism and wife-beating, for example - within a narrative format where their seriousness is diminished by being juxtaposed with a macabre dimension which becomes increasingly subtle. In good horror fiction the real horror resides in the reader's imaginings: here, we are told too much and left to imagine too little.
