Be careful what you wish for

What would you do if you began feeling ill? If pieces of your short term memory seemed to be missing? If you started seeing things?

Hopefully you’d seek medical advice. Hopefully you’d confide in a friend. But what if you are nineteen and away from home at college? What if you are a sportsman who has always felt himself indestructible? What if you thought your peers would laugh and call you a wuss?

Meet Nick Blaketon, the less than heroic hero of the trilogy of supernatural thrillers that begins with Torc of Moonlight. At first he rationalises his symptoms, then he becomes distracted by Alice, a studious auburn-haired recluse seeking the shrine to a lost Celtic fertility goddess. He knows he saw her hair writhe around her head; she doesn’t believe in coincidences, or in Nicholas Blaketon. Only gradually do they start telling each other the truth, but by then…

The fact – yes, the fact – is that settings can come from anywhere. The settings for Torc of Moonlight came unadorned from reality quite by chance. I was walking round Hull’s university campus and from the plan realised that the accommodation blocks were named after Celtic settlements in the area. Inside they were warrens of beech-clad corridors. Outside ran a beech-lined road where squirrels played, at its top a miniature nature reserve with hedgehogs and field mice. The entire campus was, is, covered in shrubs, ivy climbing the walls of its original buildings. It is as if Nature is hiding in plain sight, gradually encroaching, gradually taking over. I simply added a purpose, and expanded its reach.

It was hardly stretching credulity. Yorkshire has more ancient springs named Lady Well than anywhere in England. The ‘lady’ in question has nothing to do with Christianity, and neither have the offerings found at some sites. And the moon? This year the New Moon will be on the 29th.

Be careful what you wish for when you laugh at Halloween.


Torc of Moonlight is available as an ebook and paperback
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Thirteen 4 & 5 star Reviews:
"..in starkly elegant prose, builds a powerful novel of possession and psychological breakdown.."
"..a skilled writer fully in control of her complex plot and ideas, and as dark secrets are revealed, this is a novel which satisfies on many levels.."