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Autumn


I’ve always loved autumn. When I was quite small I remember thinking these ‘Goldener Oktober’ wine adverts were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and spent ages trying to copy the lettering. (I wonder what the wine was like? My parents didn’t drink, so I probably didn’t even really know what wine was.) I never did get the lettering right, but autumn is still my favourite season.

Autumn sunlight is better than summer sunlight (more golden, less hot), leaves, ferns, and grasses start to turn more interesting colours after the drab greens of July and August, and the architecture of the trees starts to become visible again as their leaves are stripped away.  There are mists, mushrooms, blackberries (until Michaelmas when the Devil wees on them, the creature), and even in town there are sometimes great drifts of cornflake-crisp leaves to scuff through. If you’re lucky there is woodsmoke in the air, frost on the morning lawns, and a bracing chill when the sun goes down. If you’re not, there are storms and gales and wild howling winds, but that’s an excuse to snuggle indoors with the lights on and read. It’s a time for stories. It’s always been the time of year that best gets my imagination working. 

That’s why I called the archipelago where Utterly Dark is set The Autumn Isles: they have winter, spring, and summer there as well, but there’s always a hint of autumn in the air, which helped enormously in pinning down a slightly wistful, melancholy feeling I was trying to capture. It’s a book about the sea, but a lot of it is set on land, and that’s why I made sure Wildsea was equipped with plenty of woods and moors, because woods and moors are where autumn can be seen to best advantage. 

The story begins at midsummer, but really gets going as September turns into October and the dark hinge of the year approaches. It isn’t set at Hallowe’en, and I haven’t used any traditional Hallowe’en folklore (most of the folklore in Utterly Dark is invented) but I think it has a Hallowe’en feeling, because when you strip away all the trick-or-treating and the gruesome tat, Hallowe’en is about autumn, just as Christmas is about winter.

Happy Hallowe’en, and Happy Autumn!

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