I read this in one sitting.
That doesn’t happen very often. I normally have enough distractions available to turn a 300-page book into a minor infrastructure project, but Come Up Screaming got opened and, several hours later, got finished.
Although I probably had an unfair advantage.
This is the story of Sebastian, a young American lad who finds himself transported from the United States to early-1980s Felixstowe.
My Felixstowe.
And I don’t mean a fictional seaside town that’s been given the name Felixstowe because the author once changed trains at Ipswich. This is properly Felixstowe. Streets, railway, seafront, Trimley, schools, weather, shops, houses and, rather more alarmingly, people.
Which made reading it a slightly surreal experience.
Sebastian arrives from America to live in Cornwall Road, thoroughly unimpressed with his new surroundings. It is raining sideways, his trainers are soaked and the house is described with all the architectural affection usually reserved for a condemned public toilet.
And I’m reading this thinking:
I know that house.
Not “I know the sort of house he means.” I know that actual house.
When I was growing up, I could see it from my nana’s window across the road. I have even been in it. With Steffan!
At that point reviewing the book objectively became pretty much impossible.
Hacks
Oh, Hacks.
The author makes it clear at the beginning that these are events from his childhood, with friends and events blended and compacted along the way. And I know some of them.
In the book we’re introduced to Hacks wandering around school with raffle tickets, flogging numbers for 25p with a bottle of Lambrusco allegedly nicked off the back of a lorry as the prize. Sebastian is warned that half of what Hacks is selling isn’t strictly a raffle.
Yep.
That’s Hacks.
Forty-odd years later, I’m still going to gigs with the real one.
I therefore can’t offer an entirely independent assessment of the characterisation, but I can confirm that encountering a teenage version of someone you still know in 2026 is bloody weird.
And then there’s McNalley…
I disliked the real McNalley.
Apparently Steffan Piper looked at this and thought, I can work with that.
Because I disliked fictional McNalley even more.
He has at least been rewarded for his efforts with an unexpected career promotion. The McNalley I remember was a games teacher. Somewhere on the journey from reality to literature he’s become a geography teacher.
Good for him.
I’m sure the additional qualifications were thoroughly deserved.
Where does the fiction stop?
That’s where Come Up Screaming became fascinating for me, because after a while I stopped trying to work out what was true.
There’s clearly fiction here. Characters have been altered, incidents reshaped and memories compressed. But then something completely real wanders onto the page.
A name. A road. A personality. A house.
And suddenly the fictional world collides with the Felixstowe I remember.
For another reader, Sebastian leaving town by train and passing through Trimley is simply atmospheric writing. For me, these are places I’ve known all my life. Piper even describes the Suffolk sky as being “the colour of an old tea towel”.
That’s annoyingly accurate.
Although I do object slightly to an American coming over here and pointing out that Suffolk is grey.
We know. We’ve been keeping quiet about it.
More than nostalgia
Beneath all that recognition, though, there’s a very good coming-of-age story.
Sebastian hasn’t chosen England. He’s been removed from somewhere he felt safe and deposited into a family situation where safety is in rather shorter supply. When he leaves America, he describes himself as feeling like a leftover part of somebody else’s story and adds one ominous word underneath: England.
The book is really about what happens after that.
School. Friendship. Bullying. Teachers. Family. Rebellion. First tastes of independence. Adults who help when perhaps they don’t even realise they’re helping. And that strange teenage process of discovering which bits of yourself are actually yours and which have been handed to you by other people.
And, obviously, the music
Lots and lots of music.
Which, unsurprisingly, worked for me.
The Jam, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears and the rest aren’t there simply to wave a large THIS IS THE 1980s placard at the reader. The music becomes part of Sebastian’s survival kit.
At one point he’s given Sound Affects by The Jam and hears That’s Entertainment. Suddenly he’s listening to somebody singing about streets that resemble the ones outside his own window.
His verdict: “Britain might be survivable after all.”
Paul Weller has been responsible for many things over the years, but making Felixstowe tolerable to an American teenager may be one of his greater achievements.
Come Up Screaming: The Playlist
There’s so much music threaded through the book that it seemed rude not to gather it together. So I did.
I’ve put together a Spotify playlist of the songs that accompany Sebastian through the story, from Depeche Mode and The Cure to The Jam, Joy Division, Duran Duran and plenty more.
And the musical thread pays off beautifully.
By the epilogue, Sebastian is working early mornings with flowers on Trimley Road. There’s strong tea. It’s drizzling. Radio Caroline is fading in and out through the weather.
And then there’s Myrtle.
Because apparently streets, houses, teachers and people I still go to gigs with weren’t enough. I had an Auntie Myrtle. Myrtle! Hardly the most common name even then. By this point the book really was taking the piss.
Then through the static comes Paul Weller.
English Rose.
That’s when you realise just how far Sebastian has travelled without necessarily travelling very far at all.
The Felixstowe that initially seemed wet, miserable and foreign has quietly become populated by friends, teachers, routines, music and memories.
In other words, it has become home.
My Felixstowe. His Felixstowe.
And that’s probably what I liked most about Come Up Screaming.
Because I was reading about someone discovering the town in which I was simultaneously growing up.
We were seeing some of the same streets. Apparently knowing some of the same people. Almost certainly complaining about the same weather.
And, decades later, I’m still knocking around with at least one of the characters.
The line between memoir and fiction consequently became increasingly useless to me. Sometimes I was reading Sebastian’s story. Sometimes Steffan’s. Occasionally I was wandering around my own memories.
And every so often I’d stop and think:
Hang on. I know him.
Or:
I’ve been there.
Or, most bizarrely:
I used to look at that house through my nana’s window.
So yes, Come Up Screaming gets a huge recommendation from me.
Whether somebody from Manchester, Melbourne or Milwaukee will get quite the same experience, I’ve absolutely no idea.
They probably won’t spend half the book trying to identify people. They definitely won’t be checking whether one of their old teachers has somehow acquired a fictional promotion. And there’s a reasonable chance they won’t finish it wanting to message Hacks.
But perhaps that’s exactly why this one got me.
For most people, Come Up Screaming will be a coming-of-age story set in 1980s Felixstowe.
For me, it was considerably more dangerous.
It was a novel set in my childhood, populated in places by people I knew, taking place on streets I remember.
No wonder I read the bloody thing in one sitting.