#WitchWeek2019: When shall we all meet again?

The end of another Witch Week. Villains step aside and make room for next year’s theme, announced over at Calmgrove’s blog.

Calmgrove

Well, the world has survived another Witch Week. Lizzie and Chris couldn’t have done it without the help of everyone who participated:

• Laurie of Relevant Obscurity, for her terrific post about that ice-hearted Narnian witch, Jadis, not to mention her perceptive contributions to our discussion of DWJ’s Cart & Cwidder
• Sari of The View from Sari’s World, whose survey of Shakespearean villains dripped with bloody images
• Jean of Jean Lee’s World, who introduced us to one of the scariest aunts in fantasy literature
• people, too numerous to mention, who added comments and questions; Tweeted/Facebooked links to our posts; and included pingbacks, links, and reviews on their own blogs
• our readers across the globe
• and, finally, a nod of appreciation to Lory of Emerald City Book Review, who 5 years ago started this annual celebration of Diana Wynne Jones and fantasy fiction, yet willingly relinquished the chains…

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#WitchWeek2019 Day 6: Cart and Cwidder

In today’s Witch Week post, 3 bloggers dive deep into DWJ’s Cart & Cwidder, where music and mayhem play hand-in-hand.

Calmgrove

Cart and Cwidder HarperCollins UK edition 2016

When their father, a travelling minstrel is killed, three children involved in rebellion and intrigues inherit a lute-like cwidder with more than musical powers.
— From the first edition of Cart and Cwidder, Macmillan 1975

You’ll by now be aware that Witch Week takes its title from a novel of the same name, ostensibly for children, by Diana Wynne Jones, who died in 2011. So it seemed apt to have as this year’s novel for discussion Cart & Cwidder, the first volume in a fantasy quartet set in a polity called Dalemark. In fact the very first Witch Week featured The Spellcoats, another Dalemark novel in which the principal villain is actually identified.

Three of us have had a detailed online chat about this — an edited version is offered below — but a number of you…

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#WitchWeek2019 Day 5: Sinister Relations

A dark story about a very bad relative — Jean Lee tells us what she thinks of Diana Wynne Jones’s Aunt Maria.

Calmgrove

Jean Lee is a blogger, author and massive fan of Diana Wynne Jones.

Jean was an obvious choice, therefore, for inviting to participate in this event as one of DWJ’s books was the principal inspiration for it, and we’re very grateful she responded so enthusiastically!

She has chosen to focus on one of Jones’ most sinister figures, Aunt Maria from Black Maria (1991), published as Aunt Maria in North America.

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Firstly, dear readers, I am honored to be here with you during this most magical Witch Week. Diana Wynne Jones is one of my absolute favorite writers for many reasons: her arduous childhood, her steel resolve, her motherly devotion, and her bottomless love for sharing the gift of storytelling with others. While others wrote what she called “Real Books,” books that described real-ish kids in real-ish situations going through all the real-ish problems that kids deal with in real…

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#WitchWeek2019 Day 4: Baked in a pie

Shakespeare’s mean girls for Witch Week

Calmgrove

Fig 1. Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, John Singer Sargent, 1889 (National Portrait Gallery)

Today’s Witch Week guest post is by Sari Nichols, who tweets as Armchair Scholar and blogs at The View from Sari’s World and at The Groundling’s Guide to Shakespeare. Her expertise suggested her as an ideal guide to Shakspearean villains.

As Kipling wrote, “The female of the species is deadlier than the male,” and that may well prove to be the case in the Bard’s work as Sari explores some especially wicked wives, dastardly daughters, and murderous mothers.

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My official introduction to Shakespeare happened during a high school English class reading. Our teacher must have been a frustrated actor because he didn’t just read the play, he entertained us students with a one-man production of Macbeth!

While I found his antics highly engaging, the play didn’t resonate with me; at 17 I…

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#WitchWeek2019 Day 3: Wolfish villains

Chris at Calmgrove guides us through Joan Aiken’s alternative history series for Witch Week. Can you hear the frightening howls?

Calmgrove

For many years now, as many of you know, I have on this blog been exploring one ofJoan Aiken‘s alternative worlds with its alternative history, set mainly in a paracosmic Britain of the 1830s and 1840s. This ‘Wolfish Villains’ post is a fairly rare overview, looking at a set of character types whose anticipated defeats provide the impetus for much of the action.

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Should young readers be presented with really hair-raising villains? I believe so. They love to be scared, and are more robust than adults…
—Joan Aiken: ‘The Way to Write for Children’ (1982)

This post for Witch Week examines some of the villains the late Joan Aiken created for the series beginning with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, a sequence which — thanks to Lizza Aiken — we now know as the Wolves Chronicles.

Almost every one of the novels that comprise this…

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#WitchWeek2019 Day 2: Graphic Villainy

Hooray for graphic novels — not just for kids anymore.

Calmgrove

Lizzie Ross, co-convener since 2018 and last year’s co-host for Witch Week, blogs about reading and writing atLizzieRossWriter.com. In this post she rightly draws attention to villains in graphic novels, the range of which may prove surprising to those not familiar with this genre.

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Yesterday, Laurie from Relevant Obscurity set the tone for Witch Week 2019 by providing us with a list of despicable qualities found in evil rulers. In this post I apply Laurie’s points to villains of all sorts in fantasy graphic novels. Some of these villains are leaders or want to be; others use/enslave/kill characters to gain power or wealth or longer life; still others just seem to get joy out of causing mayhem. But whatever their motivations, they’re all heinous enough to provide frissons of horror.

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