Frozen Charlotte

"But Miss, They Like Being Dead." In this episode we talked about Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell. Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com Credits: 'Fair Charlotte' as sung by Eugene Jemison for Folkways Record (1954) archived by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (2004) creepy music box.wav by Modification1089 Transcript Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books films and TV. Today we’re talking about Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell. Enjoy! Ren Hi Adaaam Adam Hello Ren! Ren Welcome to the podcast that everyone is calling SSTCH! Adam Is that your Claim of the Week? Nobody’s calling it that! Ren They might be! To themselves! How would we know? Adam Okay, if I hear people on the street making that noise I’ll assume it’s viral marketing for our podcast. Ren Sussstchhh. So we promised creepy dolls at the end of the last episode and we’re delivering on that promise with Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell, a Young Adult horror novel from 2015. Here are the creepy dolls! Adam That’s not that end of the episode! There ya go, promise fulfilled. Ren Yeah, yeah. It says: ‘warning, not for younger readers’ on the back, because it’s quite grisly. Adam It is! I’m quite tempted to donate this to my school library after we’ve done the episode because I like it well enough but I’m not going to re-read it, and I do think that some of the kids will really enjoy it. But at the same time… I don’t know, there are some quite violent bits in it. Ren It’s quite nasty! It was my pick, I hadn’t read it before but I had read the sequel, or the prequel, Charlotte Says because that came up in the Young Adult Horror section of my reading app, and I thought: ‘Oh, that’s actually quite scary, we should do it on the podcast'. But then I thought we should probably do the first one first, but the first one isn’t as scary as the prequel, so I’m a little bit disappointed. Adam What period is the prequel set in? Ren So the prequel’s set in the early twentieth century, like 1910, with the schoolgirls who have the creepy dolls. Adam On the Isle of Skye? Ren On the Isle of Skye, yes. Adam Because that’s where the first chapter of this book is set. Ren Yeah. It goes back and expands on the schoolgirls who originally had these Frozen Charlotte dolls. And I think it was scarier because — not to denigrate this book before we’ve even started talking about it — but I think it was scarier because there was more connection with the dolls, with the girls being the right age to play with the dolls and seeing firsthand the thrall that they are in to the dolls, whereas in this one it is at more of a remove. Adam That makes complete sense to me. So in the prequel the dolls are more integrated into the girls’ lives, whereas in Frozen Charlotte the dolls do seem quite alien. They have this presence in the house but a lot of them are sealed up in a glass cabinet, and bits of dolls worn as a necklace around one of the character’s necks, fused into the architecture of the house and into a burnt tree in the garden. So there are a lot