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BAD UNCLE MORTIMER is the second story in CHRISTMAS DINNER OF SOULS, told by the foul and explosive Retch Wallmanner. It’s is the story of an ancestor of his named Mortimer – a foolish, greedy young man who gambles away his money and makes a deal with the Devil one Christmas Eve. As you might expect, it all ends rather badly for him…

This was the first story I came up with for CHRISTMAS DINNER OF SOULS – when I look in my notes back in 2013, I can see that I scribbled the outline for a story called ‘UNCLE ________” about a man who makes a deal with the Devil, and each time the Devil comes back he’s grown scarier. In some ways, it resembles my favourite folk tale: the story of a fisherman who catches a magic fish that grants him a wish, and each time he comes back to demand more, the sea’s grown angrier and angrier. That image has always stayed with me – I even included it as a water-puppet play in PERIJEE & ME!

As for the story, the amazing thing about BAD UNCLE MORTIMER is that I can remember the exact inspiration for it. When I was ten years old, I was looking through my school library and found a book of Satanic folk tales. Quite what it was doing there, I’ll never know! I remember the stories so vividly: they were moral tales of people who confronted the Devil. Sometimes they were good or clever and succeeded in tricking him: but more often than not the stories were about bad, foolish and greedy people who made a deal with the Devil and were punished horribly for it. As for the title, I know EXACTLY that came from – I shamelessly stole it from the story UNCLE SILAS by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu! Remember, there’s no such thing as “stealing” if you’re a writer – it’s flattery…

I knew exactly that that was the kind of story I wanted, but with a few little original twists: I wanted to make to make it seem like the Devil had no interest in Mortimer’s soul, even if the reader suspects that the Devil is lying, and above all I wanted to make the Devil look different to how he’s normally shown in books and films. You can see him on the front cover: children always tell me he looks like Slenderman!! That wasn’t intentional – so much for my original idea…

I love telling children at the schools I visit that I first came up with the idea for one of my stories when I was ten years old – it just goes to show that the ideas they come up with at school can stay with them for years, and may one day be in books of their own!

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