Half a Creature From the Sea: A Life in Stories

by David Almond

  “A powerful and highly imaginative graphic novel.” GUARDIAN

  “Stories on the page are so beautifully neat. All that lovely black print; those lovely straight lines and paragraphs and pages. But stories are living things, creatures that move and grow in the imaginations of writer and reader. They must be solid and touchable just like the land, and must have fluid half-known depths just like the sea. These stories take place in a real world – the streets in which I grew, the fields and beaches over which I walked. People I know appear in them. But in fiction, real worlds merge with dreamed worlds. Real people walk with ghosts and figments. Earthly truth goes hand-in-hand with watery lies.

  ALSO BY DAVID ALMOND

  The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon

  The Boy Who Swam with Piranhas

  Clay

  Counting Stars

  The Fire-Eaters

  Heaven Eyes

  Kit’s Wilderness

  Mouse Bird Snake Wolf

  My Dad’s a Birdman

  My Name Is Mina

  The Savage

  Secret Heart

  Skellig

  Slog’s Dad

  The Tightrope Walkers

  The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  First published 2014 by Walker Books Ltd

  87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ

  Introduction and story introductions © 2014 David Almond

  “Slog’s Dad” © 2006 David Almond (First published in So, What Kept You?)

  “May Malone” © 2008 David Almond (First published in The Children’s Hours)

  “When God Came to Cathleen’s Garden” © 2009, 2010 David Almond

  (First published in Sideshow: Ten Original Tales of Freaks, Illusionists and Other Matters Odd and Magical)

  “The Missing Link” © 2008, 2014 David Almond (First published in The Times)

  “Harry Miller’s Run” © 2008 David Almond (First published in conjunction with Great North Run Culture)

  “Half a Creature from the Sea” © 2007 David Almond (First published in Click)

  “Joe Quinn’s Poltergeist” © 2014 David Almond

  “Klaus Vogel and the Bad Lads” © 2009 David Almond (First published in Free? Stories Celebrating Human Rights)

  Illustrations © 2014 Eleanor Taylor

  The right of David Almond and Eleanor Taylor to be identified as author and illustrator respectively of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-4063-6114-8 (ePub)

  www.walker.co.uk