Naben Ruthnum publishing first YA novel this fall, a coming-of-age story with a horror twist
CBC Books | Posted: May 16, 2023 1:24 PM | Last Updated: May 16, 2023
The Grimmer will be published on Sept. 26, 2023. Read an excerpt now
Naben Ruthnum is a Toronto-based author and screenwriter who has written everything from short fiction and crime fiction to thrillers, memoir and literary criticism.
He is the author of the memoir Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race and the novels Helpmeet and A Hero of Our Time. Under the pen name Nathan Ripley, he is the author of two thrillers, Find You In the Dark and Your Life is Mine.
This time, he's dabbling in YA horror with his latest novel The Grimmer. In it, high schooler Vish — who loves heavy metal and literature — is uncertain about his future. With his father fresh out of treatment for addiction, he can feel the eyes of the town focused on his family — one of few brown families there.
After Vish is attacked by a pale, decaying monster, he finds himself drawn into a world of witches, undead creatures and magic. With the help of an eccentric local bookstore owner and his teenage employee Gisela, Vish tries to stop an inter-dimensional threat that could destroy his whole town.
"I choose what to write as accidentally as I choose what to read. I hadn't planned to write a book for younger readers, but there was a time a couple years ago when I started to revisit the ghostly literature of my own youth," Ruthnum told CBC Books in an email.
"Books by John Bellairs, Phillipa Pearce, Robert Westall, Joan Aiken, either in the very same editions that I'd dug out of places like The Book Shop in Penticton and Ted's Paperbacks in Kelowna three decades ago, or ones that I'd ordered to replace lost copies."
He also says the novel is a love-letter to the books and local bookstores he loved as a kid.
"The supernatural incursions in those books and the kids and young adults who confront them collided with a convoluted joke about a psychiatrist's cat having psychically absorbent qualities that I made to my fiancée one night, and I found myself thinking about the bookshops where I'd found all these stories in the first place."
The Grimmer is will be available Sept. 26, 2023. You can read an excerpt below.
Vish hit the Power button on the remote and the room went dark. The dead springs in the couch creaked as he leaned forward. His eyes got used to the absence of light, and he moved closer to the sliding patio door that was next to the bay window. It was a glass door, with a simple lock that Vish thought he was checking, just to make sure it was in the right position. It was. But Vish found himself pushing it down, unlocking the door. He slid it open, just enough to fit through sideways.
There were crickets, and the sound of someone swimming in the Ackroyds' pool, six houses over. Just one person paddling around. Probably their son Mikey, who was back from college in Washington. Mikey, tall and pale with an Adam's apple that was truly as big as a crab apple. He'd stopped calling himself Mikey years ago, going for Mike instead, but when he was Mikey he was also the newspaper delivery boy who had taught Vish to ride his bike. They always waved at each other, but they hadn't talked for a few years.
He'd stopped calling himself Mikey years ago, going for Mike instead, but when he was Mikey he was also the newspaper delivery boy who had taught Vish to ride his bike.
Vish could hear each splash and stroke because the night was so quiet. He stepped out onto the cool, pale cement just outside the patio door, leaving it open, even though mosquitoes might make their way inside. He didn't know if it was bravery that was making him come out here, but he did know that he wouldn't be able to stand taking another step if that door was closed behind him. Mikey swam regular laps when he was home, and those made a very clear sound, nothing like what Vish had heard since he'd opened the door.
What he could hear was a gentle slurping, as though someone was trying to get out of the pool as slowly and quietly as possible.
Vish started walking toward the maple tree. He stared at the small, fat hump at its base that was new. Vish would have thought it was a little heap of earth if he hadn't seen it move when he was inside.
The crickets didn't go quiet all at once. And maybe Mike Ackroyd just got tired of swimming at around the same time as the bugs settled down. But by the time Vish stepped off the cement and his bare feet touched the springing green of the wet grass and the crisp yellow of one of the patches that the sprinklers never caught, there was no sound in the air except the air itself. Vish's breathing. And, quietly, from that hump by the roots of the tree, a sound somewhere between breathing and the puffing a kettle makes just before it whistles.
Vish's toenail touched a rock. He would have stubbed the toe badly if he'd been walking at his normal pace. He was barely five feet away from the patio, and it had been almost a full minute since he'd walked outside.
Vish knelt and picked up the rock. It was smooth and heavy. It fit his palm. On a beach, he would have tried to skip it across the water. It was dark grey or black in the moonlight, with little lines of mica that glistered when he moved his hand. Vish wasn't moving it on purpose: it was shaking. He looked again at the hump, and stopped his breathing to see if he could hear it.
But the thing had stopped breathing as well. It was moving. What seemed at first to be an arm unfolded from the cluster of dark. Except it kept folding out, getting longer, until Vish was sure it was a leg. But then it seemed even longer than that, and it began to rise into the air, until the end of it wrapped around one of the lowest branches of the tree.
The white face that Vish was sure he'd seen within the quivering black mound began to turn towards him. Vish knew that if it smiled at him he wouldn't be able to stop screaming.
Below the turning face, the figure was only one arm and one leg, with a darkness between the two. Farris's ghost limbs taking shape, stealing solidity from the trees around them, perhaps from Vish himself. If Farris stored people by making deals and eating them, perhaps he could nibble and bite on living folk who'd made no deal. Mosquitoes and blackflies did it, taking blood and skin that wasn't theirs: why not this man? Farris had burned Gisela's hand even though he knew she was protected; maybe he would try to go further with Vish.
The white face that Vish was sure he'd seen within the quivering black mound began to turn towards him. Vish knew that if it smiled at him he wouldn't be able to stop screaming.
Feeling a coldness at his back, Vish turned around. And there, he saw the other parts of the dark shadow that was under the tree. Half green-black and dripping the Ackroyd's poolwater on the light cement of his patio. The missing arm and leg, the ragged torso, all walking toward Vish, as the other half of the body approached from the tree.
Something else, forming above that scrappy torso, began to smile at Vish.
Vish wheeled around and threw the rock at the only thing he could see clearly in the darkness. He was bad at throwing balls in any sport, but apparently good at throwing rocks. The corner of the white face that was coming towards him was hit squarely, and the breathing hiss started again. The green blackness behind Vish rushed past to join the other half of its body, which was retreating back toward the maple.
The hissing stopped altogether as both long arms, lengthening into handless tentacles, tightened around the tree branch and pulled the mound of dark matter up into the air, swinging it over the fence into the next yard. Vish heard a lolloping thump and rise, the sound of a sticky limb gripping branches and eavestroughs and windowpanes in yards farther and farther away, until he could hear nothing at all. But while he listened to all of this, he watched something that was drifting like a leaf down from the upper reaches of the trees, where the creature's first swing had launched it.
The hissing stopped altogether as both long arms, lengthening into handless tentacles, tightened around the tree branch and pulled the mound of dark matter up into the air, swinging it over the fence into the next yard.
The whiteness fluttered into the grass just in front of him. It looked like a mask, but it wasn't made of rubber or latex. It was paper. Vish knew that if he touched it, it would be rich and thick, like the expensive stuff at the stationery store in the mall, but with even more texture. There was a hole where the mouth should be, a torn gap that went up at one end and down at the other. In profile, it could smile or frown when whatever was wearing it turned aside.
There were holes for the eyes as well, but they weren't holes, just now. As Vish moved back and around the mask, letting more moonlight hit it, he saw what was in the holes. In a way, it made perfect sense.
It was a pair of eyes. Real, pale blue eyes, without eyelids, staring up stupidly. Vish opened his mouth to scream, and as he did, the eyes vanished, either melting into the grass or evaporating into the air.
Before the mask blew away in a wind that hadn't been there a moment before, Vish saw that the mask also had eyebrows. Thin, black eyebrows. The thinnest eyebrows Vish had ever seen.
Excerpted in part from The Grimmer by Naben Ruthnum. Copyright © by Naben Ruthnum, 2023. Published by ECW Press Ltd.