The Haunting of Tyrese Walker

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The treatment of mental health and bottling up your feelings is perfect for a supernatural story, it’s a clever way to show that by sharing with those around you it can make you feel less isolated and help you move on with your life. The story also offers great family and friendship values and the horror keeps getting more and more intense. We even find some body horror moments that are also not always seen in a MG story. The Haunting of Tyrese Walker is a powerful and beautiful metaphor for grief and a fantastic read for horror/paranormal fans. Visiting relatives with his mum in Jamaica, after the tragic loss of his father, Tyrese finds it extremely difficult to overcome his negative thoughts and low mood, despite the constant delicious offerings from Grammy’s kitchen and the kind attention of his cousin, Marvin. What’s worse is his Grammy’s tiresome tales of ‘duppies’: spooky spectres that, for reasons that Tyrese refuses to believe, require the scattering of rice about the estate every night just to keep at bay.

Then Tyrese is warned he’s being hunted by the mysterious Shadow Man. Under threat, Tyrese and his friends set out on a terrifying journey across the island to try and uncover the Shadow Man’s sinister history. Who can Tyrese trust when his own mind is falling apart and there’s nowhere left to hide?The winners of the Diverse Book Awards 2023 have been announced, with one winner from each of the four categories announced: Picture book, Children... Tyrese Walker is grieving and he doesn't want to talk about it. His father died six months ago and nothing in Tyrese's life will ever be the same. He's given up his hobbies, he has grown distant from his mum and he has a bit of a temper developing. In an effort to help her son, his mum organises for them to go to Jamaica to visit his grandmother. However, things don't end up as they seem. After a weird experience on the mountain paths near his grandmother's house, Tyrese can't shake the feeling he's being followed by something not quite there. He wakes up to weird cuts on his fingers, his windows open, he sees weird old men and his grandmother begins to tell him tales of Duppies and Ghosts and the Shadow Man. Has Tyrese accidentally fallen into the Shadow Man's sights, or is his grief starting to overtake him? Tyrese, his cousin Marvin and their new American friend, Ellie, find themselves thrown into a world of darkness and mystery more terrifying than any of them could have imagined. The book was also filled with Jamaican culture and I loved to learn so many things about the culture and their beliefs. This moment of clarity was the beginning of a wonderful journey with Tyrese. I wanted to explore grief and mental health for all readers, but I especially wanted Tyrese to be a vehicle for boys to examine loss and processing pain, as well of course as create an atmospheric ghost story. As I began to listen to Tyrese’s voice and hear the story he wanted to tell, little did I know that it would become a transportive and cathartic experience from the emptiness of loss to the celebration and light of life and all that still lives in my heart. Where and when do you do your best writing? What do you do when you lose motivation with your writing?

The years then went by, and my adoptive mum passed away, and the world as I knew it and how it once looked, was no more. I found grief truly brutal. All my wonderful memories now felt painful, and what the ‘tomorrows’ held seemed now a bleak prospect. My heart was broken, and life didn’t quite make sense, or seem to fit anymore, but as I had always done in not only times of joy, but of times of difficulty, I found solace in writing. It was a place of safety, a place where I had some semblance of control. I started to write poetry which is where my writing grew from since I was a child, and then the question of, ‘what if’, started to form and grow in my head… What if there was a young teenage boy living through this sort of pain? And what if everything he ever had known and had taken for granted, and had loved, overnight was ripped away from him? What would the world look like to him? What would he look like to himself? And as these questions formed more and more, so did Tyrese Walker. It was important to me to be authentic, however, writing full Patwa for the Jamaican characters might exclude some readers as unless you know the dialect or can hear it in your head it can slow down the reading experience and I didn't want that as it was important that this book was for everyone. I still wanted readers to feel Jamaica and experience it so rather than make the characters speak full Patwa, I sprinkled it with Patwah, along with phrases and Jamaican sayings, which hopefully gives readers a real sense of authenticity. First of all, the book takes place in Jamaica and that's one of my fav things about it. I loved the setting and I loooooooved the folklore. He, Marvin and a new friend called Ellie, herself left to her own devices by a busy father find themselves running round the island, escaping unknown enemies and not-quite-real beings, and have no idea what's going on. Who is the Shadow Man who seems to be after Ty - and why?

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His mom decides that some time off would be really beneficial to him and would give him the chance to reconnect with his culture and his old self. So they take a flight to Jamaica where Tyrese will still struggle at the beginning to adapt.