Skip to main content

Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild


The second Utterly Dark book, Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild, is published in the UK today! Here’s the magnificent cover illustration by Paddy Donnelly.

As you can probably tell from Paddy’s artwork, this book isn’t concerned so much with the sea, which is what the first one was all about. This time, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, it is…  But on dry land, magical trouble is lurking. 

As usual I hadn’t planned on writing a series, and it was only when Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep was done and dusted that I started wondering if she could have more adventures. I wanted to know a bit more about Egg, so he gets more to do in this book, and there’s more of Will and Aish too. I grew very fond of all those characters while I was writing the first book, and I’d have been quite happy writing a sequel in which they just sat around and talked and went for walks on the beach, but I guess readers prefer it if something happens too, so I’ve thrown them into a new adventure featuring a bunch of new characters, and a whole new island. I felt this one leans into the humour more than the first, but a couple of people who have read it think it’s darker, so what do I know?

Utterly’s home on the island of Wildsea, where the first book took place, is very much inspired by Dartmoor and Cornwall, so to give this second story a different atmosphere I decided to move the action to a different island - Wildsea is part of a whole archipelago, the Autumn Isles, and Utterly and her uncle Will are visiting Summertide, which is much more like Sussex or Wiltshire. It’s inspired by the downs behind Brighton, where I grew up, by visits to Wiltshire (Wayland’s Smithy, Avebury, Silbury Hill). The paintings of the Wiltshire-based artist David Inshaw stuck in my mind - this one in particular, which I had a postcard of as a student, with the twilight moon hanging over the downland in the background and that white track leading up to it.  (I could only find this rather small and washed out image of it online - check out the link above for better pictures of other paintings.)
I’ve given the name Inshaw to the distant relative who has called Uncle Will in to advise him on a troublesome stone circle. The Inshaw estate is at a place called Barrowchurch, a downland valley which comes complete with all the ingredients for supernatural shenanigans, including an ancient burial mound, a chalk hill figure, and a sinister vicar. And needless to say there is also ancient magic, roused from its long slumber by the events of Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep, which is stirring and getting ready to make life difficult for locals and visitors alike…

Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild is published by David Fickling Books, and edited (like all my books these days) by Liz Cross. There’s also an audiobook, published by Bolinda and brilliantly read by Barnaby Edwards. If you’re in Devon, I’ll be talking about Utterly in this event organised by the Eastgate Bookshop in Totnes on Saturday 3rd September.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Excalibur at Forty

It's hard to believe forty years have passed since I watched Excalibur rise from the lake. It was Sunday, July 5th, 1981, around 2.45 in the afternoon, and I was in the ABC Cinema in Brighton. I remember it as if it were yesterday. In paintings and illustrations Excalibur often emerges from the lake at an angle. Sometimes it's in a scabbard and the Lady of the Lake grasps it by the middle; you can imagine her waggling it about to get Arthur's attention. But in Excalibur it rushes straight up, the misty water parting with a ripple around the eerily green-lit blade until at last the hilt breaks the surface, scattering slow-motion droplets like seed pearls.It's like watching the launch of an Apollo rocket. From the trees at the water's edge, mission controller Merlin looks on in awe. What he's probably wondering is, what happens next? Does he have a little boat moored among the roots to get him out to the middle of the mere where the sword is waiting for him? Or

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

One of the reasons the Arthurian Legends appeal so much to writers and film makers is that there is no single original version. If there ever was, it was a tale told by some Romano-British storyteller, sitting by a fire in a damp hall, perhaps expounding on the great deeds of a local ruler or late Roman general, and spicing up the action with some motifs borrowed from old Celtic myths. In the centuries that followed, the story grew, and changed. Lots of legends about other heroes got tacked on to it. French and German poets got hold of it and added Camelot, the Grail, and Courtly Love: Malory borrowed from them all in his Morte D’Arthur . Later, everyone from Tennyson to TH White to Rick Wakeman to little me retold the stories, altering them to fit our own vision and reflect our own times. So you can do whatever you like with King Arthur: everyone else has. At least, that’s the theory. Now here's Guy Ritchie’s 2017 box office catastrophe King Arthur, Legend of the Sword to destru

Railhead A-Z

In order to save my website it became necessary to destroy it. Before I pulled the plug I rescued the longest post on my old blog. Here it is, like the lone survivor of a shipwreck: my A-Z guide to the ideas behind my novel Railhead. At the time it was written, Railhead had just been published. I'll be putting up some posts about the sequels, Black Light Express and Station Zero , in the coming days. Railhead cover art by Ian McQue A  is for Alternative Forms of Transport ‘What I need,’ I thought, when I’d been struggling on and off for a few years with my space epic (working title, ‘Space Epic’) ‘is an alternative to spaceships…’ I’ve always enjoyed space stories. I first started reading science fiction back in 1977, when the original Star Wars film made me realise that outer space could be just as good a backdrop for fantasy as Tolkien-esque worlds of myth and legend. (Actually, I didn’t see Star Wars until 1978, but its bow-wave of publicity hit these shores the p