Afterwards they’ll take you to Seegol’s Diner, on the lonely pier, for the best fish-and-chips in Eerie-on-Sea. They’ll introduce you to Mrs Fossil - the town’s one-and-only professional beachcomber - in her fabulous ‘Flotsamporium’, and be your guide at the Eerie Book Dispensary, where you don’t choose your book, your book chooses you, with the help of the marvelous mechanical Mermonkey. If you haven’t visited Eerie-on-Sea before, I strongly suggest you find Herbert Lemon, lost-and-founder at the Grand Nautilus hotel, and his brilliant friend Violet Parma. Exploring these ideas in my imagination, it didn’t take long for the fictional town of Eerie-on-Sea to begin to grow, with its stately but tumbledown hotel, twisty streets of weird and wonderful shops, castle museum of curiosities, and sea-gnawed pier. At other times sea mist creeps into the streets, full of hidden things that seem to peer in at you through your windows as you stoke up the fire.

Only people with a good reason (or a very bad one) go down onto the beach then, while on windy days you can barely walk upright. When the ice cream kiosks are closed and the bucket-and-spade tourists are gone, darkness and the weather claim the town. When I first moved to the seaside, I quickly discovered that coastal towns like mine have a strange character of their own in the winter months.

Malamander book 5