The Witchcraft of the Word - Parallel Stories and the Growing Threads

As I write this the cover and proofs for the second instalment in The Christopher Penrose novels is being designed. Some time around the beginning of next year it will finally begin to grace book shelves. It is a strange business to have walked with these characters, worn their faces and their voices for over a decade and then have to return to them in their early unformed state as I rework these early novels for publication. It's much like revisiting your younger self.

Earlier this year I put the finishing touches on Book Nine of the series, called  'Love in Fire and Blood' and thus brought Christopher's story to a form of conclusion. But of course when you consciously begin creating characters as a sorcerous working, weaving stories with magical intent, the accumulated power doesn't just evaporate upon completion.

Instead I find myself caught up in an ever expanding web of stories, or a kind of meta-story that threatens and promises to engulf all that I have seen and experienced of this world and others, alchemically distilling them into Art. For this reason when my new series began to take seed in the cauldron of my skull, putting down roots in the shadowy pre-rational base near the back of the neck and slowly growing forward like a vine, I realised that if I have ever been in control of this story, I no longer am.

Lux de Rue and her story and books that will follow, (interweaving with a cunning that seems to not belong to me but to her and the other characters), with Christopher's later story, have their own agenda and will to power. But I don't like to name it.

The moment you put words to the magical intent behind any work of Art you evaporate some of its power or make it into a didactic propaganda piece. You reduce it to less than itself. So suffice to say that there is much of my own Craft in both of these series, there is a strong story about rewilding and the wilderness within us. The magic is strongest at the places where the story threads of the two series touch and cross each other, like serpent lines crossing a ghost road, creating a new sacred site. But there is also an attempt here to breathe life into and synthesis the folklore of the past by bringing it alive through modern story. For this reason I relate to the term 'Folk Horror' to describe the genre of these novels, even though they are as much about beauty as they are about terror.

Although there is a great deal of witchcraft lore to be teased out of all these books for those in the know, it is my hope that the Lux De Rue Books will be able to break into a readership outside the witchcraft and pagan community and seed their strangeness there. In a way I think this new series, being set as it is hundreds of years earlier than the modern novels and perhaps a little less fraught with overt poetry, might have some popular appeal. Either way The Haunted Books have now increased their dominion, expanding into past and beginning to put out feelers into the future.

Below is the first hints of information about the new series to be released to the public, it's name, it's cover and its back cover matter. It is my plan to publish this series concurrently with The Christopher Penrose Novels so that the intersections between the fates of the characters in the earlier time frame and the latter may be better appreciated. This will also cut down the waiting time in between publication of the Christopher books, as I will be presenting this series independently.

Say his name three times at the edge of the forest and he'll come for you…

All her life Lux has been hearing the whispers. They say that her mother just appeared one day in the wolf pits, virid and mysterious. And that Lux is as fey and doomed as her siblings were. Sometimes they even say she can talk to Them. 

When Lux discovers an unspeakable secret her father will kill to protect, she finds herself on the edge of the forest ready to discover if it's true what they say about Robin Goodfellow.