Wicked Children

by Karen Maitland

Genres: Action & Adventure; Medieval

Synopsis

Step back in time with Karen Maitland, author of the much-loved Company of Liars, as she explores some true-crime cases of murderous children throughout history. In Wicked Children: Murderous Tales from History, the Dark Ages meets Stephen King's Carrie or We Need to Talk About Kevin.

'A brilliant writer, with a real sense of history' Susanna Gregory

'An adult who commits murder usually has some kind of motive we can understand, however twisted, but a child who kills often does it simply because they discover they can - and no one is stopping them.'

Karen Maitland, Queen of the Dark Ages, has created possibly some of the most wicked children in fiction. From Narigorm, the child rune reader with a penchant for death, from Company of Liars, to the scheming yet devastatingly beautiful Leonia in The Vanishing Witch, they revel in manipulating the world around them - and those foolish enough to cross them.

In Wicked Children: Murderous Tales from History, Karen Maitland explores some of the real-life cases of dangerous and powerful children which have inspired her own young - but deadly - characters.

What readers are saying about Wicked Children:

'A short and not all sweet story from the brilliant Karen Maitland. Just as good as all the other full-length novels'

'Excellent writing from Karen Maitland, as always'

Release date: August 25, 2016

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 64

Sample

‘There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead,

And when she was good she was very, very good and when she was bad she was horrid.’

Printed on a broadsheet sometime before 1870

History has proved that children are not always the sweet, innocent little creatures we like to believe they are. Many people remember from their own childhoods that children can be merciless bullies in the playground but, occasionally, the cold ruthlessness and brutality of some is so shocking that we can’t bring ourselves to believe that a child has deliberately set out to kill. An adult who commits murder usually has some kind of motive we can understand, however twisted, but a child who kills often does it simply because they discover they can – and no one is stopping them.

As young children we all go through a phase of imagining we have the power to make things happen by wishing it. If someone has an accident or falls ill after a small child has had dark thoughts about them, the child often feels guilty, believing they have caused it. But some children discover they really do have the power to control or harm adults and they revel in it.

If you were a strong-willed child-king in past centuries, the power you could wield over adults was almost limitless. My novel The Vanishing Witch is set in 1380/81 when King Richard II ruled England, then just thirteen years old. He’d come to the throne at the age of ten and he was an arrogant child, who forced adults to kneel to him if they happened to catch his eye. He ended the Peasants’ Revolt by leading the ringleaders and their followers into an ambush. Although he initially allowed all but the ringleaders to return peacefully to their homes, he had no intention of showing them any mercy.

The thirteen-year-old king had hundreds of men and boys hunted down and executed by the most brutal methods, including being torn apart by horses. He ordered the corpses to be quartered and nailed up on the doors of churches, houses and in the market places. It was a particularly hot summer and the stench of the putrefying remains was making everyone sick so the people, in desperation, pulled them down and b. . .