The Thing Behind the Door

Well, hello all.

This blog entry is coming to you completely unplanned and very late at night. The reason I'm writing it is to get down on record what the next book will be following the first trilogy of novels in the Vetala Cycle.

It was Death Fog, which I renamed as The House of Flies, but something else crept up on me this evening that I did not expect. What crept up was this. The House of Flies will be written but not just yet. There is another tale I will be telling in its place, already partially-drafted back in 2009. The title of my fourth novel will therefore be The Thing Behind the Door. It is a story I tried to put down as a failure, partly because I didn't get it right the first time and, more importantly, because it was a story that was genuinely painful to write, even in its initial abortive form.

Now, I'm not talking about the usual writerly griping here of writing late into the night, getting no sleep, getting blocked ecetera. It was painful because it meant tapping into my past, a certain part of it, that is deeply unpleasant to visit, even for a short time. So I tried to bury it but, like one of the undead, it has crawled out of its grave, shaken off the salts of the quicklime that I doused it with, found its way back into my brain and wound itself around my cerebellum.

I've been feeling it there for the last few weeks telling me that I may want to write The House of Flies but actually I need to write The Thing Behind the Door. I need to get it right this time, go back to the bad place and get it out of my system for good.

If this all sounds rather pretentious then you'll have to forgive me.

Admittedly, this also reveals another advantage of self-publishing. I get to choose the project and shunt the order if I need to. So yes, my first release in 2012 will be The Thing Behind the Door and here is the blurb to whet your appetites:

Broken, the old school stands, abandoned and alone, on the edge of town. Decrepit and hated, without purpose. Its windows made blind, warty wood nailed across the flaking panes of glass. Tightly-closed doors thrive with the muttering of worms and a spreading white rot. You can smell the rot, soft, wet and doughy, if you stand near enough to its grounds, but few do. At night, children swear they can hear the old school drawing breath, as if it means to suck them in, swallow them whole, eat them up.

Tonight, he stands alone on its doorstep. He has come home. He was called back here, not by a presence, by an absence. It is waiting for him inside. And it is dark inside the old school, very, very dark, and that darkness is insane.

© G.R. Yeates 2011

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