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.

Merlin (1998)

I remember Merlin being shown on TV as a two-part mini-series over a bank holiday weekend. The version I found on YouTube is a single three hour movie, but I think it might work better in two chunks, as originally broadcast. It still works pretty well, though. Director Steve Barron is completely infatuated with video editing tricks and slightly primitive CGI effects that I’m sure were state-of-the-art when it was made, but he uses them quite inventively, and there are some very enjoyable performances. Since First Knight was such a washout, I guess this is the definitive ‘90s Arthurian film. Like Excalibur , the definitive ‘80s Arthurian film, it tries to tell the entirety of the Arthur story, but since it’s main focus is Merlin it covers a lot more too, and Arthur himself ends up being a bit of a side-character, with the rise and fall of Camelot packed into the second half. At first glance, Merlin seems to be aligning itself with what I’m coming to think of as the Low Arthurian tradi...

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...

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...

Station Zero

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