I Wish I’d Written: Alex Falase-Koya

Alex Falase-Koya on the book that turned his liking for horror into love.

When it comes to most children’s fantasy novels, a core element of their appeal is creating a world that the reader wants to live in. The Spook’s Apprentice by Joseph Delaney goes in the opposite direction. It creates a world that I don’t want to inhabit and that’s one of the reasons I find it so cool and wish I’d written it myself.

The premise, at a high level, is about a boy being training to become a ‘Spook’, someone who takes on monsters, evil ghosts, witches and other things that go bump in the night.

The Spook’s Apprentice is a horror novel at its core, that’s part of the brilliance of it. It demonstrates one of the cool things about the horror genre, which is not just its darkness, but its vulnerability. Physically, everything feels dangerous. The main weapon, Thomas Ward, our protagonist, trains with is not a sword, but a chain, one he can throw around his enemies to bind them. Even that sets a tone. The creatures here are so scary, and powerful that sometimes just binding them is the best that can be done.

Mentally, the job of a Spook doesn’t carry much praise, Thomas spends a lot of the book scared and lonely. I really related to him.

I grew up liking horror, but I don’t think I ever really loved it until I read this book.

The Spook’s Apprentice by Joseph Delaney is published by Red Fox, ‎ 978-1782952459, £7.99 pbk.

Alex Falase-Koya has been writing since he was a teenager and was a winner of Spread the Word’s 2019 London’s Writers Awards for YA and Children’s. He is the author of the Marv series, illustrated by Paula Bowles, published by Oxford University Press. The fifth book in the series, Marv and the Killer Plants, will publish in July 2023.