A & C Black , 1994

     "'So, who would like to play the genie?' asked Miss Cardigan, putting on her glasses and looking round the class..."

     A story about a not very confident boy whose life is taken over by his own double. Or a story about a boy undergoing a terrifying psychotic episode. You choose.
      Nice illustrations, even if I say so, myself. Well, some of them anyway. I still get pleasure from looking at that cover. Particularly the shirt and mug. Though it was doing close-up work like that which started giving me the migraines which forced me to give up illustration.
     Fiendishly complex illustrations they were, too, in this case. Not the drawing so much as the layout. The text and images weave around each other on every page. My editor sent me a set of layout sheets and a long, long toilet roll of proof text. I chopped this up, covered the pieces with spraymount and pasted them onto the layout sheets line by line, leaving space for the illustrations. As anyone who has illustrated a book like this knows, you finish the job after several weeks of mind-bendingly fiddly work and you're just sitting back with a mug of steaming tea and a fresh packet of Ginger Nuts when you see a vital paragraph from page 4 sticking to the leg of the table, covered in glue and carpet fluff and pencil shavings...