Inspiration comes from the strangest places. For best-selling author Paul Howard, his new children’s book draws on his love of cheese and his childhood nightmares. He talks to Carissa Casey about his first solo foray into writing for kids.

Paul Howard, the man behind the legendary Ross O’Carroll Kelly books, confesses he has always had a difficult relationship with cheese. “I can’t leave it alone. I love it. But it does have this effect on me when I sleep, I get nightmares. Mary, my wife, she loves cheese as well. We often find ourselves in the middle of the night, awake, comparing nightmare stories with each other.”

On one such night, the character of Aldrin Adams was conceived. Aldrin is a kid with the bizarre super power of being able to go in to other people’s nightmares and rescues them from whatever shape their fears and anxieties have taken. All he needs is a good helping of cheese and thankfully, his father is a cheesemonger.

Even aside from the cheese issue, more of which later, Howard has history with nightmares. “I probably had a lot more nightmares than the average kid when I was younger. I was a very anxious kid. I was a very stressed out kid. I had nightmares about absolutely everything. I was falling from trees, falling from cranes, cliffs, chased by dogs, chased by clowns, chased by tailor’s dummies, nightmares where I had no teeth in my mouth, there were just maggots where my teeth should be. Nightmares where I was in exams but hadn’t done any work, I didn’t have any of the answers.”

It meant that early in life he had to come to terms with the fact that nightmares “were just your brain’s way of processing your fears and your anxieties and your stresses. Then you wake up, and you realise that they can’t hurt you. That’s the positive message that comes from the book.”

But like every serious superhero, Aldrin needs a nemesis, a supervillain. Enter Habeas Grusselvart, a 500-year-old supernatural being who takes human form and spends his days dreaming up nightmares for kids and adults alike. His evil plan is to control the world through stress, fear and anxiety.  

“He has a big bank of screens in his office where he can watch all of these nightmares playing out every night,” explains Howard. “One day he has this sense of unease that something is happening. And he notices on one of his screens that there’s a little boy in one of the nightmares who shouldn’t be there…He realises that now he has an enemy, someone is coming for him.”

All of the nightmares in the book are based on ones that Howard experienced as a child. “I had to be careful when I was writing the book that I didn’t want the nightmares to be too frightening. You have to cognisant of the fact that you’re writing for a very young audience and I didn’t want it to be a horror book. So a lot of the nightmares are stress related, anxiety related nightmares, there’s nothing too scary in them. Most of them are just based around fear.”

The first one we encounter is a dream that Aldrin believe he has had. In it, his friend Frankie is stuck up a tree and is terrified that he is about to fall. Aldrin tells his friend not to be frightened and clambers up the tree to his side. Then he tells him to close his eyes and suddenly they’re in a hot air balloon and floating away to safety.

It’s only when Frankie tells him the next day about the exact same dream that Aldrin realises that he has the power to enter into people’s nightmares.

Howard first got the idea for the book several years ago. It wasn’t until the lockdown in March last year that he found the time to work on it. It was a difficult time for the writer and not just because of the stress and anxiety of the pandemic. 

“My brother died just before the lockdown. So I was going through a period of grief. It was difficult because as a family we couldn’t see each other. It’s really difficult to deal with those issues on Zoom calls. We’re a very tactile family anyway. It made those four months just really difficult for me. I wasn’t sleeping that well at night. I was very stressed and anxious. It was nice to be able to sit at my desk and disappear into this fantasy world, that deals with a lot of these issues.”

Despite the pain of that time, Howard is grateful that at least they had a proper funeral for his brother. “We could grieve together as a group and eulogise him in a church and bury him surrounded by people who loved him. I know lots of people weren’t that lucky. Mourners tuning in remotely. Tiny funerals with 20 or 25 people at them. It’s one thing we do well in this country. We know how to give people a good send off. It’s part of dealing with death, how we cope with death. But it suddenly changed. I probably watched four or five online funerals since the first lockdown. I could see how hard it was for people, how difficult it was to not have the full quota of loved ones and family there. We were fortunate in that we got that.”

Writing a children’s book is not something Howard ever planned, but now he’s smitten. He has already written three with rugby star Gordon D’Arcy about D’Arcy’s career. “While we were writing it, I started to buy a lot of children’s books. I love looking at children’s books now. The ideas, it’s such a vibrant area for creativity. I want to write more, I really do. It’s really excited me now.”

He’s planning to work this summer on a second book about Aldrin which will come out next year. In August, the next Ross O’Carroll Kelly book comes out. Called Normal Sheeple, it sees Ross get into GAA and generally make like Normal People’s heartthrob Connell. 

“I never get tired of Ross but it’s nice to be able to take a break. I’m fortunate in that I can do that. I write a column about him once a week. Each book would take up about four or five months of the year. So there’s seven months of the year, when I’m not working on him. And I’m working on another project.”

While the lockdown is starting to ease, a major problem has arisen in Howard’s life. He can’t eat cheese, which he describes as “just a living hell”. A few weeks ago, he was rushed to hospital with what turned out to be gallstones. He’s due to have his gall bladder removed in August and, in the meantime, must stick to a non-fat diet. So cheese is off the menu.

This should help his sleep patterns. Far from being an old wives’ tale, Howard explains that the link between eating cheese at night and having nightmares is actually science based. 

“Charles Dickens actually mentions it in A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge blames one of the apparitions he has at night on eating cheese too late in the evening.”

Heavy meals with a high fat content eaten late at night have been shown to cause disturbed sleep. “It’s actually disturbed sleep that’s most associated with nightmares, or at least memories of nightmares because you wake up more often at night and the chances of you remembering the dream are much higher.”

There’s also an amino acid in cheese that’s associated with the release of adrenaline which will also disturb sleep, he explains.

At least the cheese-related nightmares have done their job and given us a charming new superhero.

Aldrin Adams and the Cheese Nightmares is available for €10.99 at all good bookshops.