Never the Bride (Brenda 1) [Paperback]

Never the Bride is the first in the Brenda and Effie series by Paul Magrs. The books are set in Gothic Whitby, the sea-side town with the rolling mists and tales of vampires.
Brenda runs a Bed and Breakfast whilst her best friend Effie lives just next door where she runs a cluttered junk shop. All sounds pretty normal doesn't it? Don't be fooled, Brenda is hiding a terrible past, she knows that she will soon have to explain the intricate scars covering her body and the fact that she doesn't appear to age.
Never the Bride introduces us to these two women's wonderful friendship. They are quite happy going for quiet walks and sharing fish and chip suppers so it comes as quite a surprise to them that the gateway to Hell is situated in Whitby and they are the chosen guardians.
I instantly fell in love with the characters of Brenda and Effie. These two ladies take everything in their stride, from murder to martians and vampires. Paul Magrs offers his readers such an original story set in the beautifully atmospheric Whitby with it's dark alleys and age-old myths.
Never the Bride is full of dark, witty humour and I found myself completely carried away with the story. It's so exciting to find a new series of books to read and I can't wait to start the next one.

Bride: "A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her" - Ambrose Bierce

Part of what marked Paul Magrs' "Doctor Who" books out from the tie-in herd is the plethora of ideas which seemed to pour out from his head onto the page, with one insanely wonderful concept following the next like a series of bright marbles thudding down a wooden staircase. Glass men and cardboard UNIT captains tumble after mutating gila monsters and time splicing pinking shears; manipulative power-mad poodles bound alongside fantastically-endowed Robins, the Queen of Spring and Tom Baker-shaped sex robots; and a TARDIS in the shape of a double decker bus putters down behind the lot of them, a gin-soaked old harpy at the wheel.

On the other hand, in the non-Who world Magrs started off writing 'traditional' magic realist novels. Interesting and imaginative ones, as well written as you would expect, but in certain ways deliberately limited by their chosen form. It was only in Who that he appeared to really let rip and in doing so created work which you really can't imagine anyone else doing.

With his previous novel, "To the Devil - a Diva" Magrs began to bring more of the style of his Who novels into his mainstream work, but it's only in "Never the Bride" that a wholly successful mix has been achieved.

There are obvious similarities between the two novels and in some ways "To the Devil" can be seen as a rehearsal for "Never the Bride" - specifically in that both novels use the tropes and trappings of horror movies to weave a truly fantastic tale set in contemporary England.

It's an interesting point, actually - for Magrs to write this kind of book, he needs something to play with, something to roll between his fingers, mutate and subvert. In these two novels, Magrs utilised the long history of respectively, the Hammer and Universal horror film collections and gently tweaked their tails while creating something altogether new from the base material.

There is still a leavening of the grittiness of his early novels, which is all to the good (the depiction of the submerged loneliness of the two leads is particularly well done), but "Never the Bride" isn't a 'literary' novel in the sense that, say, his earlier "Could it be Magic?" was. This is a piece of work informed by the visual not written media, where the creations of James Whale and Tod Browning, not Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, come flocking to Joss Whedon's Hellmouth - only to be confronted not by the petite Sarah Michelle Gellar, but by Elsa Lanchester as the 'monsterous' Bride of Frankenstein.

Or Brenda the B&B Lady as he's known to her friends in Whitby.

Which is the point at which "To the Devil" and "Never the Bride" deviate. "To the Devil" has been described, pretty unfairly, as a "Harry Potter parody for naughty big boys" - it's a lazy comparison, but it is fair to say that To the Devil could easily be made into a big-screen extravaganza in the Potter mould, filled with visual spectacle and colourful set-pieces. The characters remain true to their reassuringly recognisable roots - Karla is a Hammer queen in the mould of Ingrid Pitt, Lance is the archetypal soap star and so on - and the urban Manchester and flashback evacuee settings are ones which viewers might expect and which they are likely to be comfortable with, and the Wheatley-esque elements provide a cinema-friendly frisson of the occult.

"Never the Bride", on the other hand, could only be filmed if Tim Burton or David Lynch wanted to do it as a TV series. It's set in a small old-fashioned town, there's a plethora of monsters, the good guys and bad guys are not who you might initially expect and swap places now and again, the novel ends with a ton of loose ends and the story line is really a set of linked short stories rather than a linear threaded narrative. It's very clear that this is a deliberate ploy by the author - each chapter is a different self-contained episode with the entire novel as a season arc, as Brenda and Effie bustle about town investigating sinister goings-on and bitching about their neighbours, as though Mapp and Lucia had become friends and turned detective. Affectionate nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Most Haunted and Twin Peaks serve to cement the feeling of a TV series in prose.

It's beautifully paced and enormously well-written, with some absolute killer lines - and it's got more ideas in it than a dozen JK Rowling books.

Paul Magrs has created his own universe in which to play and, as readers, we can only be happy.

I've read` pretty much everything Paul Magrs has written and loved all of it but I am beginning to think that the Brenda and Effie series could end up being thebooks he is most fondly remembered for - though I hope to get to read much, much more of his work and am prepared to be proven wrong!

Magrs takes the seaside town of Whitby, installs Brenda the most mysterious landlady since Mrs Madrigal and sits back as we are taken on a Gothic romp via magic realism. It's a hoot! I sat and read the book in almost one sitting and then turned to the first page and read it, more slowly again. Each creepy character leaps out from the page and you are left wondering who Brenda is and of course wanting more.

More there is! Personally I'd buy books two and three now so you don't have to wait for the second one to arrive - you'll be kicking yourself if you don't.