F.G. Cottam's Blog, page 5
November 5, 2012
Bad Intentions
When does a complaint become what's actually a kind of compliment?
I ask because some readers have complained about a scary episode in The Colony. It comes early on and involves a reel of cine film shot in 1934 and recovered and restored in the present day.
It was shot on New Hope Island. It might or might not be a clue as to the fate of the community that abruptly vanished from there.
The footage is black and white and dates from a period decades before CGI. It's the work of an amateur cameraman. How scary, by today's jaundiced standards, can it possibly be?
Well, it seems to have raised a few hackles. It's as far as some readers have been able to get. And not because they were bored by the story.
I have to say I take this as a tremendous compliment. I wasn't going for schlock or even shock when I wrote the section describing the film footage. I was going for sinister and disturbing and hoping that the somewhat frayed and ragged subject of the film would stay with the reader for a while.
Not forever, you understand. Just for one or two slightly nervy nights...
To those faint-hearted readers who have stopped, I'd say give it another go. It's just a story. And cine film images don't come to life. Do they?
I ask because some readers have complained about a scary episode in The Colony. It comes early on and involves a reel of cine film shot in 1934 and recovered and restored in the present day.
It was shot on New Hope Island. It might or might not be a clue as to the fate of the community that abruptly vanished from there.
The footage is black and white and dates from a period decades before CGI. It's the work of an amateur cameraman. How scary, by today's jaundiced standards, can it possibly be?
Well, it seems to have raised a few hackles. It's as far as some readers have been able to get. And not because they were bored by the story.
I have to say I take this as a tremendous compliment. I wasn't going for schlock or even shock when I wrote the section describing the film footage. I was going for sinister and disturbing and hoping that the somewhat frayed and ragged subject of the film would stay with the reader for a while.
Not forever, you understand. Just for one or two slightly nervy nights...
To those faint-hearted readers who have stopped, I'd say give it another go. It's just a story. And cine film images don't come to life. Do they?
October 24, 2012
Plotting
A couple of years ago I was taken to lunch by an agent.The food was great, the conversation slightly awkward. He didn't think I was exercising my imagination to its full extent, he said. He didn't quite accuse me of coasting, but said I should think in terms of something really ambitious that involved more than a single book.
Ten weeks later I had written the first novel in a planned dystopian trilogy involving an enigmatic archaeologist, a medieval quest and a cast of central characters younger than I would usually create.
My logic was that the characters would age across the span of three books so needed to be quite young at the outset. They also needed the resilience and optimism that comes most naturally with youth. My problem was that the novel wasn't really typical of what readers have come to expect of me.
Does it matter? Two years on and I'm still prevaricating over it. Maybe I'll put it out as a download-only like I did with The Colony. I think it's a pretty good story with an intriguing premise and deserves to see the light of day. Or the bright, low-energy illumination of a Kindle, anyway ...
Ten weeks later I had written the first novel in a planned dystopian trilogy involving an enigmatic archaeologist, a medieval quest and a cast of central characters younger than I would usually create.
My logic was that the characters would age across the span of three books so needed to be quite young at the outset. They also needed the resilience and optimism that comes most naturally with youth. My problem was that the novel wasn't really typical of what readers have come to expect of me.
Does it matter? Two years on and I'm still prevaricating over it. Maybe I'll put it out as a download-only like I did with The Colony. I think it's a pretty good story with an intriguing premise and deserves to see the light of day. Or the bright, low-energy illumination of a Kindle, anyway ...
October 4, 2012
The Memory of Trees
Can a place be contaminated by evil? Can a particular location be corrupted by the terrible things done there years ago? That’s a theme I have grappled with often in my fiction, probably because I believe the answer is yes.
I’ve been to locations haunted by their own past. Last year I spent six months living close enough to Stonehenge to have a good long look at the site. Just this last weekend I toured Arundel Castle. The oldest part of the castle was built 900 years ago and is as forbidding a rampart against attack now as it was when constructed. The stone circle on Salisbury Plain is so ancient you walk around it awed that anything could endure for that long. These are not evil places, though. They just seem alive, somehow, with events lost in time and particular to them.
So back to that original question and the take on it that has inspired the novel I’m working on now.
Imagine a vast, dense forest cleared long ago and so transformed over the centuries into a benign and featureless wilderness. It’s just grassland now, stretching to cliffs at the edge of the sea. It wouldn’t scare a rabbit or hurt a fly.
What would happen if someone deliberately restored it to how it was in the time of its own malevolent, woodland myths? Would the mischief return? I think it just might. After all, they weren’t called the Dark Ages for nothing, were they? Forests can be peculiar places. And if the worst happens and the mischief does return, it might have some catching up to do…
I had the idea for this one eleven years ago, which is a good five years before I wrote my debut paranormal thriller. It’s waited patiently in the queue for its turn. No complaints, foot-stamping or tantrums. Now, finally, its moment has come.
I’ve been to locations haunted by their own past. Last year I spent six months living close enough to Stonehenge to have a good long look at the site. Just this last weekend I toured Arundel Castle. The oldest part of the castle was built 900 years ago and is as forbidding a rampart against attack now as it was when constructed. The stone circle on Salisbury Plain is so ancient you walk around it awed that anything could endure for that long. These are not evil places, though. They just seem alive, somehow, with events lost in time and particular to them.
So back to that original question and the take on it that has inspired the novel I’m working on now.
Imagine a vast, dense forest cleared long ago and so transformed over the centuries into a benign and featureless wilderness. It’s just grassland now, stretching to cliffs at the edge of the sea. It wouldn’t scare a rabbit or hurt a fly.
What would happen if someone deliberately restored it to how it was in the time of its own malevolent, woodland myths? Would the mischief return? I think it just might. After all, they weren’t called the Dark Ages for nothing, were they? Forests can be peculiar places. And if the worst happens and the mischief does return, it might have some catching up to do…
I had the idea for this one eleven years ago, which is a good five years before I wrote my debut paranormal thriller. It’s waited patiently in the queue for its turn. No complaints, foot-stamping or tantrums. Now, finally, its moment has come.
September 21, 2012
A helping hand
Just because something is entertaining to write, doesn't automatically follow that it will be entertaining to read.
The Colony was nothing but fun to write, for two distinct reasons. Firstly I enjoyed viewing events in the story from the perspective of a range of contrasting characters. Secondly, it was rewarding to make the evil in the story manifest in a physical creature I think gruesome, formidable and quite plausible in the way it came to exist.
Early feedback suggests that readers here are enjoying the novel. That's gratifying, obviously.
But here's the real point of this blog post.
Anyone who likes it - anyone who doesn't, for that matter - would be doing me a huge favour if they could review the novel on Amazon.
I've never gone in for sock-puppetry (reviewing my own books under a pseudonym) and since The Colony is self-published, the only kind of publicity it's going to get comes from my readers. That can be word of mouth or it can be reader reviews and believe me, I'm genuinely grateful for either.
I deliberately made The Colony a relative bargain to buy as a download. Bringing it to the attention of the wider book-buying public, however, requires a bit of help...
The Colony was nothing but fun to write, for two distinct reasons. Firstly I enjoyed viewing events in the story from the perspective of a range of contrasting characters. Secondly, it was rewarding to make the evil in the story manifest in a physical creature I think gruesome, formidable and quite plausible in the way it came to exist.
Early feedback suggests that readers here are enjoying the novel. That's gratifying, obviously.
But here's the real point of this blog post.
Anyone who likes it - anyone who doesn't, for that matter - would be doing me a huge favour if they could review the novel on Amazon.
I've never gone in for sock-puppetry (reviewing my own books under a pseudonym) and since The Colony is self-published, the only kind of publicity it's going to get comes from my readers. That can be word of mouth or it can be reader reviews and believe me, I'm genuinely grateful for either.
I deliberately made The Colony a relative bargain to buy as a download. Bringing it to the attention of the wider book-buying public, however, requires a bit of help...
September 10, 2012
mechanics
Thought I'd share a few details on how The Colony came about.
When Hodder made an offer for Souls back in 2007, my agent told me to create synopses for another two books. Dark Echo was one, The Colony was the other. I ended up doing Echo next because I wanted to write something in the first-person and straight away found the character's rather flowery voice.
My next visit to The Colony occurred in March of 2010 when I wrote the first 50 pages over two very productive days.
The rest of it I wrote in Shaftesbury over the summer last year.
Is it a better novel for having waiting so long to reach completion? It's almost impossible for an author to be objective about their own work. But I do think the finished story has benefited from the novels I wrote between having the idea for it and tapping out the final sentence. I've definitely got older over the last six years. It would be some compensation to think I've also got better.
You lot reach the only verdict that really matters. And you can still download The Colony from Amazon for Kindle for less than the price of a high street cappuccino. Obliged into economy by a tweet, I summed it up as dark escapism, the other day.
So go on, escape to somewhere dark ...
When Hodder made an offer for Souls back in 2007, my agent told me to create synopses for another two books. Dark Echo was one, The Colony was the other. I ended up doing Echo next because I wanted to write something in the first-person and straight away found the character's rather flowery voice.
My next visit to The Colony occurred in March of 2010 when I wrote the first 50 pages over two very productive days.
The rest of it I wrote in Shaftesbury over the summer last year.
Is it a better novel for having waiting so long to reach completion? It's almost impossible for an author to be objective about their own work. But I do think the finished story has benefited from the novels I wrote between having the idea for it and tapping out the final sentence. I've definitely got older over the last six years. It would be some compensation to think I've also got better.
You lot reach the only verdict that really matters. And you can still download The Colony from Amazon for Kindle for less than the price of a high street cappuccino. Obliged into economy by a tweet, I summed it up as dark escapism, the other day.
So go on, escape to somewhere dark ...
August 25, 2012
It's a Steal!
The Colony is now available for download onto Kindle from Amazon. It is priced at £1.53 in the UK and $2.40 in the US. I wanted to make it cheaper, but those prices give me a modest return and it means that you get a 100, 000 word-plus novel divided into 13 chapters for less than the price of a Starbucks latte. For those of you who like an extra shot, you even get an epilogue thrown in …
What else do you get? Well, there’s a rather startling apparition early on. There’s a sea chest belonging to a long dead ship’s captain far wiser left unopened. There’s a character with a psychic gift she would definitely prefer not to have. There’s ego, vanity, violence, intrigue and eventually, there’s the dark solution to an enduring mystery.
I wrote this immediately after finishing Brodmaw Bay. That was a character-driven novel which examined a close-knit family’s gradual absorbing into a closed and ultimately sinister community. After Bay, I needed to write something on a bigger scale with a more diverse cast of characters. In musical terms, Bay was a chamber piece and this is full-blown orchestral. If you prefer metaphors with a rock orientation, Bay was an acoustic solo performance and this is the full band all plugged in with the amps cranked up to 11.
I’m talking about scale there, rather than schlock. Anyone who has read my paranormal thrillers will know that I’m much more attracted to atmosphere than gore. And there’s plenty of scope for atmospheric chills on a remote island off the Scottish coast from which a religious community vanished without trace more than a century ago.
I say a religious community. But they were a cult and they were isolated and what they got up to before they vanished, hardly really bears thinking about.
An uninhabited Island, I could add. Uninhabited since the vanishing, at least by the living, at least by the recognizably human …
Not a place you’d necessarily like to visit, New Hope Island. It’s somewhere better read about, than physically explored. I do hope some of you explore it in words and I hope you’re entertained by what you find there. For the price of a cup of coffee, I think it’s worth taking the risk.
What else do you get? Well, there’s a rather startling apparition early on. There’s a sea chest belonging to a long dead ship’s captain far wiser left unopened. There’s a character with a psychic gift she would definitely prefer not to have. There’s ego, vanity, violence, intrigue and eventually, there’s the dark solution to an enduring mystery.
I wrote this immediately after finishing Brodmaw Bay. That was a character-driven novel which examined a close-knit family’s gradual absorbing into a closed and ultimately sinister community. After Bay, I needed to write something on a bigger scale with a more diverse cast of characters. In musical terms, Bay was a chamber piece and this is full-blown orchestral. If you prefer metaphors with a rock orientation, Bay was an acoustic solo performance and this is the full band all plugged in with the amps cranked up to 11.
I’m talking about scale there, rather than schlock. Anyone who has read my paranormal thrillers will know that I’m much more attracted to atmosphere than gore. And there’s plenty of scope for atmospheric chills on a remote island off the Scottish coast from which a religious community vanished without trace more than a century ago.
I say a religious community. But they were a cult and they were isolated and what they got up to before they vanished, hardly really bears thinking about.
An uninhabited Island, I could add. Uninhabited since the vanishing, at least by the living, at least by the recognizably human …
Not a place you’d necessarily like to visit, New Hope Island. It’s somewhere better read about, than physically explored. I do hope some of you explore it in words and I hope you’re entertained by what you find there. For the price of a cup of coffee, I think it’s worth taking the risk.
August 22, 2012
Slapton...
One evening in the summer of 2001 I arrived at Slapton Sands for a celebration. An old friend with a fondness for Devon had rented an entire guest house there to mark his 40th. A group of us played pool and drank beer in a basement room equipped with a vintage stereo system and a still intact set of LPs to match – nothing more recent than The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Harvest period Neil Young.
Hung-over the following morning, I went for a run along the beach. I saw a black blob a mile away on the shingle. Closer- to it became solid and squat. When it resolved itself into a Sherman Tank, I thought my hangover had taken a hallucinogenic turn.
The tank had been salvaged from the sea bed off the shore. It commemorated a military catastrophe called Operation Tiger. Tiger had been a rehearsal for the D-Day landings and on April 28 1944 had cost the lives of several hundred American troops.
All of this was news to me, despite being reasonably knowledgeable on the subject of World War 2. But Operation Tiger was necessarily clandestine. The whole population of that area of the Devon coast was forcibly evacuated before it was carried out. And the American military establishment never addressed exactly what went wrong to result in such a high casualty toll in what was only, after all, a practice.
I read the inscription on the tank. I looked landward at the gently rising Devon hills in a view unchanged since the Domesday book was compiled and wondered at the farm boys from Omaha and Nebraska who had perished at that spot 50-odd years earlier and decided there and then to write a novel about what happened at Slapton Sands.
My American protagonist, Alice Bourne, investigates the mystery in the summer of 1976. I’d been immersed in a mid-70s soundtrack the night before stumbling on the tank. And that summer was a magical one for me and novelists can of course re-visit lost times and places – it’s one of the perks.
But that was the year of America’s bicentennial. The country had been rocked by Watergate and defeat in Vietnam and was re-evaluating its worth and place in the world. It was not the unequivocal America that had confidently entered World War 2 to fight a morally justified crusade against tyranny.
Alice is a post-grad exchange student at the University of Kent at Canterbury when the novel begins. I was there myself in the endless summer of ’76. I was 19 years old and remember it vividly. Aspects of British life strike her as comical and even absurd. They were – even to me, even then. But the 1970s was a fantastic decade and one of the things the novel tries to do is to celebrate a more innocent and exhilarating time.
I provide what I hope is a plausible account of the Slapton tragedy. But this is a novel, not an investigation of a mystery I don’t believe will ever be conclusively solved.
Why am I talking about it here, now? Because before I became F.G. Cottam and tried to make readers turn the pages with increasing nervousness as the shadows lengthened and the witching hour approached, I wrote four literary novels as Francis Cottam. (F.G. is more sinister-sounding than Francis, don’t you think?) Anyway this was the second of them and it is available for download from today on Bloomsbury Reader. Topicality prompts me to mention it – along with the fact that like most of the F.Gs, its cast of characters features a malevolent ghost. It was originally published in 2004 – before the notion of a book as anything other than a physical entity had ever been thought of.
I hope that some of you take a chance on it. I hope that the story intrigues and entertains you, if you do. And if it moves some among you, I’ll be delighted.
Hung-over the following morning, I went for a run along the beach. I saw a black blob a mile away on the shingle. Closer- to it became solid and squat. When it resolved itself into a Sherman Tank, I thought my hangover had taken a hallucinogenic turn.
The tank had been salvaged from the sea bed off the shore. It commemorated a military catastrophe called Operation Tiger. Tiger had been a rehearsal for the D-Day landings and on April 28 1944 had cost the lives of several hundred American troops.
All of this was news to me, despite being reasonably knowledgeable on the subject of World War 2. But Operation Tiger was necessarily clandestine. The whole population of that area of the Devon coast was forcibly evacuated before it was carried out. And the American military establishment never addressed exactly what went wrong to result in such a high casualty toll in what was only, after all, a practice.
I read the inscription on the tank. I looked landward at the gently rising Devon hills in a view unchanged since the Domesday book was compiled and wondered at the farm boys from Omaha and Nebraska who had perished at that spot 50-odd years earlier and decided there and then to write a novel about what happened at Slapton Sands.
My American protagonist, Alice Bourne, investigates the mystery in the summer of 1976. I’d been immersed in a mid-70s soundtrack the night before stumbling on the tank. And that summer was a magical one for me and novelists can of course re-visit lost times and places – it’s one of the perks.
But that was the year of America’s bicentennial. The country had been rocked by Watergate and defeat in Vietnam and was re-evaluating its worth and place in the world. It was not the unequivocal America that had confidently entered World War 2 to fight a morally justified crusade against tyranny.
Alice is a post-grad exchange student at the University of Kent at Canterbury when the novel begins. I was there myself in the endless summer of ’76. I was 19 years old and remember it vividly. Aspects of British life strike her as comical and even absurd. They were – even to me, even then. But the 1970s was a fantastic decade and one of the things the novel tries to do is to celebrate a more innocent and exhilarating time.
I provide what I hope is a plausible account of the Slapton tragedy. But this is a novel, not an investigation of a mystery I don’t believe will ever be conclusively solved.
Why am I talking about it here, now? Because before I became F.G. Cottam and tried to make readers turn the pages with increasing nervousness as the shadows lengthened and the witching hour approached, I wrote four literary novels as Francis Cottam. (F.G. is more sinister-sounding than Francis, don’t you think?) Anyway this was the second of them and it is available for download from today on Bloomsbury Reader. Topicality prompts me to mention it – along with the fact that like most of the F.Gs, its cast of characters features a malevolent ghost. It was originally published in 2004 – before the notion of a book as anything other than a physical entity had ever been thought of.
I hope that some of you take a chance on it. I hope that the story intrigues and entertains you, if you do. And if it moves some among you, I’ll be delighted.
August 6, 2012
Next ...
Imagine that a religious community of 150 souls vanished as abruptly and inexplicably from an island in the Hebrides as did the crew of the Marie Celeste. They simply disappeared from the face of the earth one day in the 1850s leaving no trace of themselves behind. The New Hope Island vanishing continues to be one of the enduring enigmas of modern history.
That's until a media magnate decides to arrest the dwindling circulation of his flagship news-stand title by solving the mystery once and for all.
To this end he puts together a disparate team of experts. They include a virologist, a forensic archaeologist, a cosmologist, a psychic, an expert cold-case detective and as a sensationalist afterthought - a priest with first hand experience of demonology.
But all is not right on New Hope Island. We know that from a cine film taken there in the 1930s by a reclusive loner trying to scratch a living as a crofter. Recovered and restored, it shows something disturbing and inexplicable.
We know it too from the experiences of a security guard sent to secure the island for the expedition. His unearthly experiences there have nothing to do with the battle trauma he suffered in his earlier, soldiering career.
This is the setting for my first venture into self-publishing, a novel I will price cheaply as a download only and put out, if all goes to plan, next month.
The novel is called The Colony (the title being, I hope, the least imaginative element of the whole story).
I wrote it to see if I could write something with a larger cast of main characters than I would normally create and with events on a more epic scale. Qualitatively, I don't think it differs in the slightest from the five F.G's preceding it.
I plan to price it at 99p - 99 cents in America. There are books you can download for less. You can download some for free. But I don't believe it's conceited to think that 450 pages of fairly consistent scares is poor value at less than a pound.
There's good and bad aspects to self-publishing, but I'm one author excited by its possibilities.
That's until a media magnate decides to arrest the dwindling circulation of his flagship news-stand title by solving the mystery once and for all.
To this end he puts together a disparate team of experts. They include a virologist, a forensic archaeologist, a cosmologist, a psychic, an expert cold-case detective and as a sensationalist afterthought - a priest with first hand experience of demonology.
But all is not right on New Hope Island. We know that from a cine film taken there in the 1930s by a reclusive loner trying to scratch a living as a crofter. Recovered and restored, it shows something disturbing and inexplicable.
We know it too from the experiences of a security guard sent to secure the island for the expedition. His unearthly experiences there have nothing to do with the battle trauma he suffered in his earlier, soldiering career.
This is the setting for my first venture into self-publishing, a novel I will price cheaply as a download only and put out, if all goes to plan, next month.
The novel is called The Colony (the title being, I hope, the least imaginative element of the whole story).
I wrote it to see if I could write something with a larger cast of main characters than I would normally create and with events on a more epic scale. Qualitatively, I don't think it differs in the slightest from the five F.G's preceding it.
I plan to price it at 99p - 99 cents in America. There are books you can download for less. You can download some for free. But I don't believe it's conceited to think that 450 pages of fairly consistent scares is poor value at less than a pound.
There's good and bad aspects to self-publishing, but I'm one author excited by its possibilities.
June 26, 2012
50 shades of fey
I couldn't write porn. I couldn't write soft porn, mummy porn or copycat porn. I couldn't write a 'fan' novel (for which read plagiarism). I wouldn't, frankly, have the stomach for it.
I have nothing against the Fifty Shades writer earning all the dosh her illustrious predecessors in being crap writers have already amassed (and Dan Brown is far from being the only culprit). What's depressing, is publishing houses with good reputations chasing mummy porn tat to try to repeat the formula. For fuck's sake. Where's the enterprise in that?
My problem with writing about sex is nothing to do with puritanism. I was brought up a Catholic - confess your sins later and hey, presto! It's practically a blank cheque.
My reticence on the subject is down to the fact that I find descriptions of sex in novels boring. We all know what to do (that's why there are so many of us here).
Write about something so real you can feel the grit under your eyelids. Write about something so astonishing it opens up new worlds to the people reading your books. Or write formulaic shit and earn a life changing amount of money for your inept and tentative foray into derivative mediocrity.
Quality and success are not mutually exclusive. But a flick through Fifty Shades can make it seem that way. And in the end, choice (and blame) rests with the reader.
I have nothing against the Fifty Shades writer earning all the dosh her illustrious predecessors in being crap writers have already amassed (and Dan Brown is far from being the only culprit). What's depressing, is publishing houses with good reputations chasing mummy porn tat to try to repeat the formula. For fuck's sake. Where's the enterprise in that?
My problem with writing about sex is nothing to do with puritanism. I was brought up a Catholic - confess your sins later and hey, presto! It's practically a blank cheque.
My reticence on the subject is down to the fact that I find descriptions of sex in novels boring. We all know what to do (that's why there are so many of us here).
Write about something so real you can feel the grit under your eyelids. Write about something so astonishing it opens up new worlds to the people reading your books. Or write formulaic shit and earn a life changing amount of money for your inept and tentative foray into derivative mediocrity.
Quality and success are not mutually exclusive. But a flick through Fifty Shades can make it seem that way. And in the end, choice (and blame) rests with the reader.
June 17, 2012
Zombies!
I'm doing something I never thought I'd do and writing a short story involving the undead.
Shaun of the Dead had me crying with laughter. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies had me shaking my head at the thought that anything further or more knowingly ridiculous could be wrung out of this hackneyed subject.
It's a challenge. Stephen King did a brilliant job of reviving and modernising the vampire genre in his story, The Night Flier. Having said which, he's Stephen King ...
So why bother trying?
Because the mythology of the undead, born with African magic, evolving though the voodoo rituals of Haiti and New Orleans, is both terrifying and at its dark heart, plausible.
Most of my story is set in Haiti. And though the events are recalled in the present, they take place in 1934; when aeroplanes were powered by propellers and people travelled on tramp steamers and communicated by Morse Code and Marconi sets and telegrams and pre-arranged long-distance telephone calls and there was more ambiguity in the world because you couldn't film everything on your Iphone and download it directly onto Youtube.
A bit of a cheat, perhaps, staging the events nearly eighty years ago. But they're recalled by an eye-witness and they reverberate right into the present. and the story is more atmospheric with a bit of distance and period detail.
Anyway, in my view at least, the past is vastly more sinister than the present contrives to be.
Shaun of the Dead had me crying with laughter. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies had me shaking my head at the thought that anything further or more knowingly ridiculous could be wrung out of this hackneyed subject.
It's a challenge. Stephen King did a brilliant job of reviving and modernising the vampire genre in his story, The Night Flier. Having said which, he's Stephen King ...
So why bother trying?
Because the mythology of the undead, born with African magic, evolving though the voodoo rituals of Haiti and New Orleans, is both terrifying and at its dark heart, plausible.
Most of my story is set in Haiti. And though the events are recalled in the present, they take place in 1934; when aeroplanes were powered by propellers and people travelled on tramp steamers and communicated by Morse Code and Marconi sets and telegrams and pre-arranged long-distance telephone calls and there was more ambiguity in the world because you couldn't film everything on your Iphone and download it directly onto Youtube.
A bit of a cheat, perhaps, staging the events nearly eighty years ago. But they're recalled by an eye-witness and they reverberate right into the present. and the story is more atmospheric with a bit of distance and period detail.
Anyway, in my view at least, the past is vastly more sinister than the present contrives to be.
