Bringing It Gloam: Jack Mackay on Winning The Week Junior Book Award

Something at the Door: Jack Mackay| Interview |

Jack Mackay puts a wishing claw at the heart of The Haunting of Old Splinter, then hands the legend to two brothers who only want their family to stop falling apart. It is his second novel for young readers, and it arrives in the wake of Gloam, the island gothic that has just taken both the Breakthrough and Audiobook prizes at The Week Junior Book Awards 2026.

That is a rare double for a debut, and a telling one: a book built to frighten children has been honoured for reaching them on the page and in the ear. Old Splinter takes W. W. Jacobs and his monkey’s paw, moves the curse to Barghest-on-the-Moor, and asks what a child’s kindest wish might cost a blended family already under strain. Mackay, who also co-founded York’s Griffonage Theatre, writes horror that respects its readers enough to scare them properly, and he has a showman’s sense of when to drop the lights. So we begin where his new book begins, with a boy telling us, before anything has happened, exactly who he blames.

Mackay refuses to treat young readers as fragile. His horror does not fling open the door on every ugly truth; it opens it a crack, hands children the tools to approach, and trusts them to decide how far to push. The fear is real, and so is the respect.

How Jack Mackay Reworked The Monkey’s Paw

Your opening chapter, “The Magician”, has Peter tell us straight away that it was all Uncle Lawrence’s fault, before he runs down the list of everyone else to blame and finally lands on himself. Jacobs builds his story on the reader not knowing. You tell us up front that something goes badly wrong. What does that confession give a young reader that suspense alone would not, and at what point in the drafting did it arrive?

First lines are funny. Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting something – anything – down on the page so you can get to the good stuff and come back to the start when you’re finished. I wrote extensive longhand notes for the book, but Peter’s musing about blame was the first thing I ever typed in the first draft. But unlike other first lines – Gloam’s, for instance, changed in the second or third draft – Old Splinter’s stuck.

I think I was attracted to the suspense, but also it felt important to immediately establish the centrality of blame and consequence to the story. From the very beginning, I knew the novel would be about the choices we make, the temptation to try to wriggle out of the consequences, or culpability for them, and the hubris inherent in that impulse. And it’s not just about the wishing claw, because that opening confession tees up the most important conversation in the book: between Peter and his stepdad George, where they talk about blame and whether it’s fair to punish yourself for wanting to do something good and making a terrible mistake along the way.

You named the town Barghest-on-the-Moor, after the spectral black dog of northern folklore whose appearance was said to foretell a death, and then painted its front doors in bright colours. Gloam drew on Holy Island and your grandparents’ house in the Midlands; Old Splinter moves you onto a Yorkshire moor. What did the North give this story that an island could not, and how much of the barghest’s old meaning did you want lurking under that cheerful paintwork?

I live in York and love it very much. It’s very proud of its ghosts, so much so that the horror and violence associated with Viking raids or someone like Dick Turpin has somehow become part and parcel of its historical quaintness, which is a contrast I find really appealing. But I also love it because it’s a little beacon of cosy urban life on the edge of a vast, untamed wilderness of the North York Moors. Being on the cusp of that environment and its picturesque desolation naturally conjures a lot of evocative ideas for a horror story.

It makes it feel very close to home. And as for the name “Barghest,” I’ll admit that I stole it from the name of a shop in the York Shambles. The town in the book was originally called “Otherdale”, which is a pretty dull, generic name. For Old Splinter, I wanted something more evocative, more laden with history, so “Barghest” felt right, especially given its association with the Moors, and of dark omens that follow you wherever you go…

Alfie lives in a purple clothes-donation bin behind the town hall, and the first thing he does is growl “Yummy!” through the slot to give the boys a fright. He is also the keeper of the legend of the claw: a man with no home holding the story of the grandest house in town. How did you approach writing an unhoused man for nine-year-olds so that he is neither an object of pity nor a punchline, and why did the story have to come from him?

I think the depiction of unhoused people in children’s fiction, or any fiction for that matter, can often tip into archetype, even if the author’s goal is to invoke sympathy. There will always be a bit of archetyping whenever you write in certain genres, because familiar tropes help establish a baseline that you can play with and subvert. This happens a lot in horror because, a lot of the time, you just want to hurry up and set the stage so you can get to the scary stuff.

But I do think the representational opportunities afforded to unhoused people in fiction are uniquely limited, and usually end up being unintentionally dehumanising. The person becomes a trope used for sympathy points, or as a stand-in for an exposure of societal dysfunction, and that trope is always attached to prejudicial baggage relating to the way people perceive unhoused people and presumptions about their choices and their nature.

In light of conversations I’ve had with local unhoused people in York, I knew I wanted to have a character who had that kind of background and lifestyle, who perhaps had experienced some really unfortunate twists of circumstance, but was still afforded his own agency and expressions of individuality. In a story about fate, that felt very important. Making him a sort of storyteller figure to the boys felt like a good way to do that. I wanted Alfie to be, at the basic level, a human being: integral to the plot, hopefully with a couple of surprises of his own, but also someone you could imagine meeting in real life and being friends with.

Brothers, Blended Families and Taxidermy at Home

Peter and Adrian refuse to let the “half” in half-brother mean anything, and their Bro Promise has no loopholes. Above them sit George and Uncle Lawrence, brothers of a different kind, whose friction spills down onto the boys. You have spoken elsewhere about wanting to show a stepfamily that is neither neglectful nor villainous. What were you reaching for by placing a second, older pair of brothers over Peter and Adrian, almost like a warning of what brothers can become?

There was definitely a sense of warning there. I do think that a natural part of growing up and developing your own agency involves scrutinising your parents or your family and learning your own private lessons from what you see. At the same time, Peter has a very specific familial circumstance – a stepfamily with added cross-cultural complexities, a birth father who’s still in the picture, and a chauvinistic shwashbuckler of a step-uncle – that makes him feel quite isolated.

Loneliness can make you turn inwards and can sometimes give you an inflated idea of the uniqueness of your situation. It felt like a very healing thing to be able to slowly reveal to Peter that actually he’s not alone, and he has much more in common with his stepdad than he thinks, and that there are ways we can communicate and look after each other if we give each other the chance.

Peter’s mum is a nurse who ethically taxidermies roadkill in her spare time, and you have admitted that your search history took a disturbing turn towards taxidermy while you were writing. It is a sly detail to put in a book about a preserved hand: one character keeps dead things with care and respect, while a magician’s relic keeps something far worse. Where did she come from, and what does her hobby let you say about the difference between honouring what is gone and refusing to let it go?

That’s a really astute read which I hadn’t considered before. This is a very boy-heavy book – it’s about brothers and fathers and uncles, and while I was planning I did become worried that Mum/Emma was fading into the background a bit. By giving her an unorthodox hobby, I gave myself an angle I could approach her from to get a better idea of her character, which happened to be someone who was very caring, very ethical and considered, who saw herself as a sort of shepherd in many ways, even for dead animals. Naturally it also establishes her as being unusually accepting of unorthodoxy, which meant that Adrian’s embrace of horror and gruesome things probably came from her.

But I really like the connection you make between holding onto things and letting them go, because that very much folds into the ideas of fate and consequence which the wishing claw naturally conjures. In that sense, I think Emma’s approach hinges on an acceptance of what has changed and making something new and beautiful out of that (even if her creations aren’t “beautiful” in the typical sense). She finds a kind of sanctity in that process.

On the other hand(!), the wishing claw provides the temptation of undoing all your worst mistakes, but in pursuing that, it’s very easy to change everything for the worse. Nothing is ever literally undoable. Consequence marches on without you. In that sense, maybe the wishing claw ironically represents a greater inertia than the taxidermizing of animals, which Emma perceives as a process of rebirth.

Adrian reads Ghastliest Tales, can quote “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Black Cat” from memory, and Peter’s opening roll call blames him for believing the story. You were reading a lot of Poe while the book took shape. The usual horror rule says the kid who knows the genre is the one who survives it. Why did you give the believing to the brother who has read all the warnings?

As an adult, I find the ability of kids to literally believe that the stories they love are real, even if their logical mind knows better, to not only be very sweet but also admirable. I think it speaks to a lack of self-consciousness, and a willingness to immerse oneself in a story and its ideas, which most adults fight tooth and nail to sever themselves from, to lock it away with all the other childish things.

Adrian is a believer because the power of those stories is so resonant with him; it’s become part of his core. It also means that he has a wisdom beyond his years when it comes to interacting with the supernatural events in the book. That makes him a great foil to Peter, whose scepticism as the older brother is tempered by his guilty desire to tamper with dark magic if it means changing his circumstances.

Gloam’s Double Win at The Week Junior Book Awards

Gloam has just been named The Week Junior’s Breakthrough book, more than a year after publication, by which time its successor was already on the shelves. A breakthrough implies a wall. Looking back from the far side of book two, what was the wall, and what, if anything, did you have to unlearn from Gloam’s reception to get Old Splinter written?

That’s an interesting question. I think the best thing that I learned from Gloam was that horror is really finding an audience with Middle Grade audiences at the moment. I had my own suspicions, having younger siblings who have recently become horror fans, but it was really encouraging to see them confirmed. If there was any wall at all, I think it was the well-meaning but restrictive impulse to self-censor when writing for young people.

We tend to imagine that kids are much frailer, less curious and less robustly desirous of serious, complex fiction than they are. Gloam’s breakthrough is a really humbling thing but also a very exciting thing, because it proved to me that I was on the right track when I made an effort to make it and Old Splinter genuinely very scary.

The panel that gave Gloam two prizes was not a horror jury. Joe Wicks, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Rhys Stephenson and Dr Emily MacDonagh sat alongside people from publishing, schools, libraries and literacy charities, and the Children’s Laureate, Patrice Lawrence, helped judge. What does it mean to you that a book this frightening won over readers who do not necessarily come to it as horror fans, and what do you think it was that reached them?

I’m beyond glad that Gloam resonated with an adult audience as well as a younger one. I loved reading books with my parents and grandparents as a kid, and I do worry that too many books nowadays, in trying to ignore the adults and write exclusively for children, end up removing the darkness and complexity that makes so many books exciting for young people.

At the same time, for all my bluster about wanting to be Properly Super Scary, I’m delighted that my stories are being embraced by people who are new to horror as well as seasoned horror fans. Horror gives us as readers a chance to access emotions and themes we might not find in other genres, which is why it can be so exciting to read. If Gloam can be a gateway for horror sceptics, then I must be doing something right.

The Week Junior is written for eight to 14-year-olds and reaches more than 100,000 of them every week, and its readers vote for two of the prizes themselves. Gloam’s wins came from the judges, but its real audience is exactly that readership. What have children told you about Gloam, at events or in letters, that no judge or reviewer ever could?

It’s always surreal and gratifying to be told that your story has connected with a reader, especially those readers for whom Gloam or Old Splinter might be their first stab at a horror story. The best feeling in the world is when a young person who perhaps doesn’t find reading that easy, or hasn’t found much joy in reading yet, develops a passion for your books.

It’s even better when that passion leads to any kind of creative expression. I get so excited (and a bit emotional) when kids show me pictures they’ve drawn, or tell me about the story they’re writing at home. It’s endlessly rewarding (and a huge responsibility!) to realise that you might have played even the smallest part in helping them get in touch with their own inspiration.

The Breakthrough award carries Ben Joel Price’s name alongside yours, and his chapter-head illustrations are part of how Gloam frightens. In children’s horror, the pictures have often done some of the damage. What was it like to see someone else draw your nightmares, and how, if at all, did his images change the way you saw Esme or the House?

Ben’s artwork is simply magical. We had a couple of sketches from other illustrators, and they were lovely, but ever so slightly on the younger side. I was very conscious that I wanted the book to look like something a thirteen or fourteen-year-old wouldn’t feel embarrassed to read on the bus. When Ben sent through what he’d drawn, which wasn’t just a cover but a full portfolio of monsters and wells and wasps in that glorious spiky, smoky style, I knew instantly that he was the guy.

We’ve since become friends and it’s been awesome to realise how similar our reference points and inspirations are – for example, we both love the Little Nightmares games, and I think the scale and grotesquery of those monsters and environments really come through in both the text and illustration of Gloam. It’s one thing to see your imagination illustrated on the page; it’s quite another to see them rendered in such a unique style, in images so vivacious and terrifying. In terms of atmosphere, weird beauty and fear factor, his renditions of Esme and the Stitchy Man completely surpassed whatever I had in my head. I’m very lucky to work with him.

Cariad Lloyd, one of this year’s judges, said the awards are there to help parents and carers guide their children towards what to read. You have long argued that children can handle more fear than adults give them credit for, and now an award will be the thing that reassures some of the very adults who might have hesitated. If you could say one thing to a parent choosing Gloam because it won, before they hand it to a ten-year-old, what would it be?

I’d say that, even though I’m a fierce advocate for horror stories, the best approach is to let them have at it at their own pace. Kids are smart and have strong impulses about what they like and don’t like, and nothing suffocates a spark like too much pressure one way or the other. You know your kids, so you probably have a good idea of what they’re into, which means you can trust them.

If the reader is new to horror, they might want to take breaks, or else wait until they’re a little older. Reading it with them could be a really rewarding way to experience a scary story in a safe environment. Otherwise, they can always close the book and come back to it a little later, once they’ve had time to process and warm up to it. As long as they have plenty of space if they need to talk with you about the dark and scary bits, you can’t go wrong.

The Gloam Audiobook, Indira Varma and the Door Left Ajar

Gloam’s second trophy is for its audiobook, and the ghost story is older than the printed page: tales told aloud, passed from mouth to ear. Old Splinter even builds that in, with the legend of the claw reaching the boys as a story Alfie tells rather than a book they find. For plenty of children, print is the barrier, whether through dyslexia, sight loss or never having been read to at home. How do you think about audio and other formats when it comes to who gets to be scared by your books, and has this award changed your picture of who your reader is?

Some might be sniffy about the written word versus other formats, but I have no such reservations. As you say, the oral tradition is the oldest form of storytelling, centuries before we ever started printing novels. Some of my favourite memories are of someone reading to me, and my siblings grew up listening to audiobooks every night. It’s a way of accessing stories without the barrier of print, but without losing the craft of the prose.

If the performer makes an effort to do some good voices (like Indira does with great results in her reading of Gloam) it can sometimes be even more powerful than reading individually. The most important thing is accessibility and inclusion. Do kids (and adults!) feel like they have the tools to immerse themselves in stories? That’s all that matters to me.

Indira Varma was your first choice to voice Gloam, and as an actor you know exactly what a good performer can do to a line. On the page, dread depends on the reader’s own pace: the pause before a page turn, the eye racing ahead to see if it is safe. In audio, the narrator owns the pause. How much do you hear a voice when you write a frightening sentence, and what did hearing Gwen’s nightmares performed teach you about your own prose?

As you alluded to in the previous question, there is no story we associate more strongly with the spoken word than the ghost story. I think that’s because horror stories conjure such powerful emotions, which means it can create a kind of social catharsis when you share them directly with other people. It’s a really strange and lovely human ritual. That does put you at the mercy of a narrator, but when they’re as skilled and vibrant a performer as Indira, you can be comfortable in surrendering yourself completely.

I often write in my own voice, so hearing that abstracted and filtered through Indira’s interpretation and inflection was a really surreal and thrilling experience. I kept forgetting that I’d written the words I was hearing. I listened to the whole audiobook while on the bus back and forth from Cambridge when I was writing Splinter, and I vividly remember getting full-body chills and recoiling into my seat whenever Esme said or did something truly villainous. That’s a testament more to Indira’s brilliant instincts as a voice performer than mine as a writer!

When Gloam came out you told Books for Keeps that Gwen’s monster, an embodiment of grief and of losing your childhood, was the one closest to you, because you had only just left education and could feel your own childhood slipping away. Two books and two trophies later, every year puts a little more distance between you and the thirteen-year-old who first read “The Monkey’s Paw” in an English lesson. What do you do to keep that boy within reach, and what happens to your writing if you lose him?

Perhaps I’m lucky, because I still have younger siblings, so I still have a captive young audience to write for. But as I mature, I’m realising that the fears I was expressing through Gwen’s monster have settled somewhat. They’re mellower now. I don’t think I’m trying to outrun my adulthood in the same way as one does when one graduates university. I think that comes with realising that the boy you were never really dies or goes away; he’s still here, somewhere in the jumble of my self, and if he’s still here then I can still talk to him, if I try hard enough and keep my ears and heart open.

Sometimes I indulge some childhood nostalgia and rewatch old Doctor Who episodes, or something like that. That’s the cheap way of getting in touch with a younger me. But the best, most lasting and productive way is to try and maintain that childlike enthusiasm for living.

I’m still learning and changing every day, so in that sense my “childhood” as an era of unrepressed curiosity hasn’t really ended at all. If I can, I’d like to keep evolving in my understanding of the world, in my empathy and in my work. I think the line between being a kid and being an adult is blurrier than we like to pretend. I still have a lot to learn, but I find that exciting rather than frightening.

When you wrote for our Childhood Fears series ahead of Gloam’s launch, you described the corridor in your grandparents’ house and the face peering round the doorframe, and you kept returning to one question: what’s behind the door? Jacobs, famously, never lets us see what is knocking. Old Splinter is a book in which something comes knocking. So let me hand your own question back to you: when you write for children, do you owe them what is behind the door, or is the kindest and most frightening thing you can do to leave it shut?

Nice use of the word “hand” there.

I wholeheartedly believe that our job as children’s authors is to help young readers explore for themselves the worlds we reflect in our fiction. If what’s behind the door is something terrifying, some monstrous taboo or ugly truth about the human experience, the best thing is not necessarily to throw open that door and wise up our readership via exposure, because that’s not always productive.

You risk triggering a retreat, and you never want to punish somebody for their curiosity. Maybe our job is to give young readers the tools they need to approach the door and open it on their own. And if the idea is to retain a sense of mystery, or of dread, then maybe the best thing is to open it just a crack, so that they can catch a glimpse of what might be lying behind it. How far they push it, and how far they venture into the strange and dangerous space beyond, is up to them. It’s entirely their choice. There’s great power in that, I think.

If something knocks at your door tonight, resist the urge to wish it away. As this Jack Mackay interview proves, every wish comes with small print, and nobody ever reads the small print.

About The Week Junior

The Week Junior is a multi award-winning weekly magazine for eight to 14-year-olds. Reaching over 100k children and their families every week, the magazine promotes reading for pleasure with regular book reviews and recommendations, interviews with authors and illustrators and year-round coverage of book Awards shortlistees and winners – in print, on their podcast and via their weekly newsletter for parents and guardians. Find out more about The Week Junior Book Awards 2026 here. 

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