Malamander (An Eerie-on-Sea Mystery)

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Your class will explore retrieval, inference and vocabulary based questions, and answer using their knowledge, understanding and comprehension skills. Boat Hook Man corners Herbie and Violet in the fish shed. They try to escape using a rope, by jumping from the window to a suspended fishing net. Herbie misses the first opportunity for release and is left “dangling, four stories up.” He thinks, “At this point, I can let go of the rope and probably break both my legs, or I can stay dangling where I am and be filleted like a small lemon-flavored herring in a Lost-and-Foundery’s cap.” The characters occasionally “swear” to show honesty. Jenny says Violet’s father “swore blind that he saw things” that were supposed to be only legend, not real. In this resource we have included a blank resource for your class to complete and a reference resource for the teacher. While eating at the diner, Herbie notes, “Outside, where the sea mist is gathering, someone screams.” Herbie and Violet see Boat Hook Man head for the beach, “his long, hooked spike dangling like a weapon.” However, they never find out where he was going, because instead they find Mrs. Fossil, a townsperson, “clutching one arm and sobbing with pain.” Her clothes are “torn to shreds” and “there are angry red marks on her skin.” She had been bit by something with what she calls “teeth like needles.” She passes out.

This book introduces a diverse new detective duo in Herbie and Violet, and is told with such neat storytelling and surprising phrases it would be a joy to read aloud Mrs. Fossil tells the children about the legend of the malamander. She says the creature lays an egg and then “devours it.” Since the egg has the power to grant wishes, she explains, many people have sought it. However, she tells them, “Every single one of them . . . gobbled up by the beastie!”

Mrs. Fossil, a beachcomber, thinks she has some “beach finds” which would “suit a young man looking for something for that special someone in his life.” She assumes Violet and Herbie are romantically involved.

Eels tries to get the egg from Violet. Eels “grabs the egg with one hand and punches Violet in the face with the other.” She falls into the cold water. Herbie dives in after her and wonders “for a moment if I’ve died without noticing” due to the “cold and dark.” When he finds her, “she gasps and coughs.” This creepy, quirky debut trilogy opener--think H.P. Lovecraft crossed with John Bellairs--is dank, misty fun. In Eels’ house, Herbie sees “an empty bottle of whiskey” on the floor near Violet. She insists she did not drink it and asks him, “Do you think I drink whiskey?” We’ve had the pleasure of working with Thomas in our short story “No Man’s Land’ and we are pleased to have created resources for his AMAZING book Malamander.Twelve-year-old Herbert Lemon lives and works in the Grand Nautilus Hotel in the strange and frequently foggy seaside town of Eerie-on-Sea. The hotel’s ‘lost and founder’, he’s tasked with cataloguing lost things and trying to find their owners. But his newest ‘lost’ item is rather different: an enigmatic girl called Violet Parma.

In Herbie’s lost and found system, if red lines are crossing out a name, that means “the owners were declared dead.” Violet’s parents’ entry is crossed out in red, and Herbie apologizes while giving Violet her parents’ lost belongings. The word malamander sounds very similar to salamander, which is derived from ancient Greece. Did the ancient Greek myths influence your writing at all? How did you decide on a name for the mysterious creature in the story? Taylor wonderfully builds the world of Eerie-on-Sea. From the very first chapter, it is clear Eerie-on-Sea is no ordinary island. It is home to ancient legends regarding the existence of sea monsters, which Herbie and Violet discover to be more fact than fiction. The legends– and the people who tell them– are enthralling, and each person is essential to the story being told. By the end of the novel, readers will feel as if they were on the island themselves.Many of the characters use names such as weasel, fool, stupid, and creep. For example, Herbie calls Mollusc a horrible, hideous man, though not to his face. Would you like to read the next book in the series when it comes out? What do you think it will be about? The Bad Beginning is the first of 13 volumes in the appropriately named collection, A Series of Unfortunate Events. Author Thomas Taylor talks to Ian Eagleton about his new book Malamander, Greek myths, mysteries and monsters, and his exciting plans for a sequel… You can find out more about Thomas Taylor and his work here! After art school, Thomas set out to illustrate books, then to write them himself. His first commission was the cover art for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. Following this, he pursued a career in picture books, mostly from France where he lived for many years.

Your KS2 class must rewrite the following paragraph, adding in all the correct punctuation. They will need to use capital letters, full stops, commas, inverted commas, apostrophes and question marks. I tend to overcomplicate my plots and then struggle with them, but I’m learning to concentrate on the essential points. I tend to plot about 50% of the book ahead of time, and then write my way through the rest by the seat of my pants! It’s a bit of a blur, there’s a long ‘Post-it Note phase’, and a lot of pacing around on the beach, fretting. But I don’t believe it would be possible to plan everything in advance, and I do believe it’s important to allow plenty of space for surprising things to happen. Somehow, at the end of all this, a book emerges. Young Herbert Lemon has an honest heart and that matters a lot in Thomas Taylor’s story of magic and mystery. Herbert lives in the Grand Nautilus Hotel in the seaside town of Eerie. The hotel is right on the sea front and the mist that rolls in could be hiding all sorts of things, even the scaly Malamander, subject of so many town legends. Helping his new friend Violet find clues to the whereabouts of her missing parents – Herbert is a lost and found expert – results in the two children coming closer to the Malamander than they could ever have expected. Eerie is a wonderfully edgy place, strange, gothic and inhabited by some singular people, and Herbert and Violet’s adventures are equally unique and totally enthralling.Remember, the children have the opportunity to use their imaginations and knowledge to make deductions, it might be useful to revisit this at the end of the story and see how close their deductions were. Captain K, also known as Boat Hook Man, wished to “live forever” and the egg granted that wish. The egg responds, “But if you lose [the egg], your wish shall become your curse.” Captain K’s “wounds closed up as soon as they opened, and his injuries healed.” Sebastian Eels plans to carry a weapon to confront the malamander. He claims it “will be for protection only, to scare it away if I’m seen.” While walking with Violet, Herbie mentally describes how “the snow is like a swarm of icy bees—stinging [their] eyes and trying to get up [their] noses.”