Sponsored by
Chocolate... with a twist
JOANNE Harris has done more to eroticise chocolate than Cadbury's ever did – especially since their risqué Flake campaign was deemed, by killjoys, too sexy for our screens.
But as if to underline that women are from Venus, men from Mars, it's best selling author Joanne we have to thank for the guilty pleasure of Johnny Depp, dipped in chocolate, gift wrapped to thrill in the Oscar-nominated film Chocolat.
Of course, her book was better, but the film's pairing of Juliette Binoche and darkly delicious Depp melted our hearts.
You either get books or you don't. If you do, you can't live without them. It's like a life without music, mountains, seascapes, sunsets – and chocolate.
Joanne Harris appreciates books not just because she writes them but because she once struggled to read in her second language – English.
In a literary wasteland of victim genre fiction and so-called celebrities plying their ghastly memoirs here is a writer whose very name sells a book.
It's fitting, with Easter coming that Joanne is heading here, for an event, at County Hall, Preston, hosted by Kirkham's award winning independent bookshop, Silverdell.
Joanne's saddened to be missing out on the treat of all signing sessions at Silverdell: a personalised ice cream, themed by Elaine Silverwood, co-owner of Silverdell.
Would she have wanted chocolate to feature in the creation? "Absolutely not," says Joanne. "I play the favourite ice cream game all the time with my daughter. Mine is champagne sorbet with wild strawberries."
Right now, she's serving up a chilling treat for regular readers in her own write. This time, food (Chocolat, Five Quarters of the Orange) or drink (Blackberry Wine) doesn't feature, or even some picturesque, and picaresque, French location (Coastliners, French Market).
Instead she returns to a path gently trodden before, in the form of Gentlemen and Players, which introduced an extraordinarily civil serial killer, a sort of Talented Mr Ripley crossed with Flashman.
Her latest book Blueeyedboy delves even deeper into serial killing. Her villain blogs his deadly intent, and descent into all that's dark. In fairness, there's always something deliciously perverse about Joanne's work, but this is a full-on assault on the senses, rather than a hint or something sinister, or amiss.
"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death?" Joanne dips into ee cummings' poem Buffalo Bill for the title of her new book, Blueeyedboy, the promotional rounds of which bring her to our neck of the woods this month.
It is published by Doubleday, at 18.99, on Wednesday, and launched on Thursday at the Oxford Literary Festival.
Joanne admits she had to summon some inner demons to pen her portrayal of a socially networked serial killer for whom blog is god and tweet 'n' text take the place of Ripper-like warnings, in blood, from the grave.
She confesses, too, that it came from some dark nights for her own soul, when she found herself not so much writer-blocked as looking for diversions online, "searching out ever more ingenious ways of evading reality."
She acquired another readership, under a nom-de-plume, rather than the "fanfic" of her own established author website. She came to realise how others interacted online, in cyber communities, small cliques of gossips, exhibitionists, perverts, cyber bullies, the emotionally needy, all reliant upon one another, in different ways, yet with no way of knowing just how honest such communication can be.
"It's a great area to explore as a writer," she admits. The anti-hero of the psychological thriller, blueeyedboy himself, stems from a chance remark of a taxi driver in Italy.
"He told me how his mother dressed him, and his brothers, in different colours, the same colour each day, blue for one, black for another."
Her blueeyedboy nurses fantasies of murdering his mother, which he translates into fiction, and posts on a website called badguysrock, keeping in touch with other online fic-fans, including some known to him in real life. The lines between fiction and reality increasingly blur. And, as ever, there's a twist.
Joanne's working on a very different book, too, Runelight, a sequel to Runemarks, a children's fantasy novel published three years ago, and a huge hit with children, young adults, and quite a few of their parents.
By way of lighter relief, it features born-again Norse gods, Thor, Odin, Loki, amok in a puritanical world. In fact, Joanne wrote the first book when little older than her Rune readership, 19. It languished in a drawer until she read it to her daughter Anouchka – and the rest is history.
She lives with her husband and daughter in Yorkshire, just 15 miles away from where she was born, and is looking forward to seeing the Fylde again.
"I find Blackpool surreal and interesting. It featured in one of my first published stories, about a Grimsby fishmonger turned vampire who ends up in Blackpool, and finds out they're all vampires..."
* Joanne Harris, April 13, County Hall, Preston, 7pm, tickets 5, from Silverdell, 01772 683 444. Or email info@silverdellbooks.com
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Blackpool
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 1 C to 3 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 4 C to 7 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: West
