You, Hero

There was a series of adventure game books I loved when I was young. They were presented and occasionally written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I arranged them neatly on a bookshelf, their regular green spines lined up in the correct order. My interest waned around number 35 and the series itself seems to have closed down around number 50. Still, fifty books is not a bad run.

In the books the reader directs the action, choosing where to go next out of a few options. As they say on the cover, “YOU become the hero.” The books were somewhere between a story and a game. You were supposed to use dice too but I think most readers bent the rules plenty. I know I did. Most of the adventures were set in a kind of Middle Earth type world called, if I remember correctly, Titan. Dragons, orcs, hobgoblins, that kind of thing. However science fiction stories were sometimes thrown in too.


It was the illustrations that I was interested in as much as anything. I loved this sea monster, drawn together from discarded bones. Look at the strange fish-with-arms beasts coming out of the shadows either side of it. Cool.

I think the best storyline was Slaves of the Abyss, that book would make a good movie. Some of the game books were themselves based on movies, not in their plots necessarily but in their atmospheres or general feel. Starship Traveller was like Star Trek and Freeway Fighter was like Mad Max. In retrospect I realise The Rings of Kether was based on Bladerunner and the work of Philip K. Dick. This story, number 15, was set in a seedy future, where technology has not saved the human race but rather given us even more ways to be bad.



In The Rings of Kether your mission is to crack an intergalactic drugs cartel. You travel around and sometimes go undercover. There were drug dens inhabited by genetically-adjusted slobs. There were weird mutants, one like a worm with a woman's face and a long tongue. And these books were supposed to be for kids! I recalled that some of the illustrations to The Rings of Kether scared me a bit. But it did not matter, I was hooked.

Reading and Workshop

Last night I put down the final word of book three. However it might change, as might many of the words that came before it. It is still untitled.


Downpatrick, getting attacked by a zombie worm, the real ones aren’t so big.

On 7 August I will be doing an author visit and workshop in Downpatrick. It will be part of their Imagine Festival. Come along if you can. It will be fun and a tiny bit educational. There will be some drawing, some writing and some monsters, many of them real sea creatures you may enjoy learning about. Fact is stranger than fiction, they say, and it’s true. Did you know that at the bottom of the sea there lives a creature called a Bone-Eating Zombie Snot-Worm? Imagine. Come along and I'll introduce you.

Please click here for the Down Arts Centre page.

Two Hells

Gustave Doré was born in 1832 and taught himself to draw as a child. He went on to become a famous illustrator. He had a particularly good eye for monsters.

Perhaps the most famous etchings he produced were illustrations for the Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. This long poem describes a tour of hell and was written late in the 13th century. People have continued to read Dante’s Inferno to this day, there are many modern translations to choose from. Far more people read the Inferno than the Paradiso, a tour of heaven that Dante also wrote. This is because badness is more interesting than goodness.


Gustave Doré’s Geryon, 1857.

In part 17 of Dante’s Inferno the visitors to hell meet a monster called Geryon. This creature is a symbol of lies and deceit. It has the face of an honest man but (beware!) the tail of a scorpion. However Geryon helps the visitors on their way, carrying them down to the next level of hell. It flies with them on its back, drops them off and quickly flaps away. A 1843 translation describes the scene like so:

Thus, grounding in the bottom of that pit,
To foot o’ the ragged cliff did Geryon bring
Our human freight, and, of his burden quit,
Sped off, like notch of arrow from the string.

A 2004 translation of Dante’s Inferno modernises it, setting the story in a collapsed and tortured American city. The same part of the story is told like so:

… Greyon finally set us down at the bottom of that rocky cliff. As soon as we climbed down from his back, he was off again like a bullet.

Very 21st century but perhaps not as rich. It is odd that the translator changed the name of the monster, Geryon to Greyon. Why do that? But I love Sandow Birk’s illustrations to this 2004 version. He has modernised Gustave Doré’s work, showing that not only words are open to translation. He has reset the illustrations in the dangerous city, where arrows have become bullets, and portrayed it as a sprawl of parking lots and fast-food joints. One of the most striking illustrations is his retelling of the monster of deceit. It has been transformed into a military helicopter.


The new flying montser.


The Minotaur: “Who when he saw us, as with cankerous rage. Inly consuming, his own flesh ‘gan tear.” John Dayman, 1843.


The Minotaur: “When he saw us, he freaked out by biting himself, growling at us and going psycho.” Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, 2004.

In other illustrations Birk has kept much of Doré’s original composition. Elements are arranged in the same way although with a twist or two. In part 12 the visitors meet the half-man-half-bull that is the Minotaur. It has been sent to the seventh circle of hell because of its violent life. Doré drew the Minotaur in a way befitting an artist embedded in the classical tradition. Birk lives in California and his Minotaur is a brash logo. It is spot lit and standing on top of a food stall next door to a petrol station. In the background skyscrapers loom where Doré had drawn mountains.

In all these pictures Sandow Birk captures what people mean by the term ‘urban hell'.