The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

It took me a second to realize that my mother was leaning on the car horn. The blaring volume of the sound seemed jarring and profane in the setting – a scream at a funeral – but when I looked at her I saw my mother’s jaw was clenched and her gaze directed furiously at the police car ahead. She kept her hand pressed down, and the sound continued, echoing around the village.

Books come together in strange ways, and often not in the order the reader ends up experiencing them in. So: this prologue was actually one of the last scenes I wrote in an earlier draft. It was intended to be fairly perfunctory – Paul’s mother driving him to the police station – and it’s fair to say that what she does here, with this aggressive act of defending her son, took me by surprise as much as it does Paul in the story. I hadn’t known she was going to do this until she did. It was a revelation of a kind. It was as though a character I’d considered relatively minor up to that point stepped forward, knocked angrily on the computer screen, and said “you do realise this book is about me too, don’t you?” I hadn’t before. But suddenly now, yes, I did. That meant changing a great deal of what I’d written to follow on from it. The last scene I wrote of that earlier draft became the first scene of the very different one you’re reading now. Which was, in some ways, extremely irritating in terms of being handed a huge amount of work to do. But what can I say? Books come together in strange ways. And you should always listen to your mother.

The place had a gravity that held whatever was dropped where it fell. That included the people.

One of the many amazing things crime fiction can do is shine a light on social issues. What crimes are committed, who commits them, and why – these are all questions to which the answers can tell you a great deal about the power structures and inequalities within a society. And, of course, a police detective has the unique ability, because of their job, to interact with people from many different backgrounds and circumstances. Pound for pound, I reckon there is probably no genre better placed to address many of the pressing real world concerns we all find ourselves facing. That said, I have never been that kind of crime writer. For one thing, I don’t really think of my books as being set in any particular place. For another, I’m not confident I know enough about certain issues to address them effectively and sensitively in my stories. I tend to focus on the psychological, as that feels more universal to me. But social issues inevitably creep in, and I think that even if Gritten in The Shadows is a fictional location, we all know places like it in the real world. Towns and cities that have been left behind through the collapse of industry and the lack of investment. Areas where it’s difficult to find work, where the people don’t feel valued, and which feel impossible to escape from. Places in which the mention of “social mobility” might elicit a hollow laugh at best. And Gritten doesn’t have to be based on anywhere specific, because there are too many of those places, aren’t there?

The angles of the two buildings were slightly off, so that, from the street, the school looked like something that was pulling itself out of the ground, with one shoulder hunched up behind it, awkward and broken.

This actually happened, although I was younger when it did. When I was about to move up to secondary school, which was a few miles away from where I lived, my mother took me on the bus ride to make sure I knew what I was doing. And the description of the school here, on a physical level, was based on how my own future school appeared to me at that point. The comparison ends there, though. For the most part, my own secondary school was nothing like Gritten. It was a generally very good experience, populated by great friends, excellent teachers, and – most importantly of all – a distinct lack of murder. But where’s the fun in that?

Because more memories were arriving now, dark and angry, and I realized that however much I wanted to be done with the past, what mattered was whether the past was done with me.

Every writer wants their next book to be different from what’s gone before, and I’m no different. But I think we all inevitably have our preoccupations – the subject matter we’ve become fascinated by over the years and keep returning to, and which may even be part of the reason we’re driven to write in the first place. It can sometimes be very specific things, but it’s often to do with theme, and one of my preoccupations as a writer has always been characters dealing with an unresolved event in their past. A part of their history that, despite their best efforts to avoid or forget it, is still unfolding. And I think this line here is probably the most straightforward statement of that interest I’ve ever made. You try for nuance, of course, but sometimes bluntness is just the best way forward. So: here the past is personified. You might believe you’ve made your peace with it and that there are no hard feelings – but that doesn’t mean the feeling is reciprocated. Life, like people, can seem to hold grudges, and the repercussions from the things you’ve done are always waiting for you. Just as they’re waiting for Paul here.

Charlie had told us the first thing we needed to do was keep a dream diary. After a week, we should read through the entries and look for patterns. That way, we would be more likely to recognize them in future, at which point we would realize we were dreaming and be able to take control.

I’m not a committed lucid dreamer, but I have dabbled over the years, and I can’t overestimate the importance of keeping a dream diary. Over time, you really do begin to notice patterns – themes and ideas that return over and over again. Here are two of mine. The first is that I frequently dream about being in a place that feels safe and secure, but which at some point I discover is not. I might be at home with all the doors and windows locked, for example – but then I’ll head down into the cellar and find a door open onto a hillside. The horror I feel at that point is absolute: I thought I was safe, but I wasn’t. I can understand the reasons for dreams around this theme. I have always been very careful about security, and the idea there could have been a secret way in the whole time is unnerving to me. The second of my recurring dreams is of being in a hotel room on the morning of my departure, panicking because I have left everything to the last minute and have too many things to pack – whole bookcases; clothes strewn everywhere; boxes of belongings – and nowhere near enough time to do it all in. What dreams like this one mean remain oblique to me, of course, although it’s possible my editors might be able to offer some suggestions...

A small light in the shadows. It was like a candle flame that I wanted to cup with my hands, blow on gently, and bring to brighter life. But, of course, there was always a danger when you did that. Always a risk you would make it go out instead.

This never occurred to me when I was writing the book, but the phrase “a small light in the shadows” obviously includes the US title, and could easily be seen as a metaphor for the story as a whole – the main character, Paul, tentatively finding some light in the darkness of what happened to him as a child. I suppose I could pretend it was a deliberate reference, but honestly, it was an accident. At least on a conscious level. As an aside, I often find myself referencing candles in my work – probably for the simple reason that my father was a candlemaker by trade, and I spent parts of my childhood making them too. I haven’t done so for years. But lots of people sought out crafts-related hobbies to kill time during lockdown in 2020, and I was no different. I decided to buy some candlemaking equipment. My attempts resulted in abject failure and were swiftly abandoned. It’s harder than it looks.

It wasn’t the ones with me in them that caught my eye so much as the older photographs: images so faded it was like the paper they were printed on was forgetting them.

I’m old enough to remember taking a cheap, plastic camera on family holidays and then having to wait a couple of days for my reel of snaps to be developed at the local shop. Most of them would be blurry, of course, and the ones that weren’t have faded with age. But I do have a real fondness for old photographs, and they have a way of working themselves into my fiction. I think it comes down to my preoccupation with how the past affects the present. A physical photograph – taken and developed at the time; picked up and viewed now – is a tangible connection between the two. In light of modern technology, there’s a tendency to look back on the whole process as old-fashioned, quaint and impractical – and of course in many ways it is. But the handful of photographs I have from my childhood are still there, faded as they are, while the thousands of digital photographs I’ve taken since – as vivid as they might be, and as easy and convenient as they were to take – are scattered over the hard drives of various outdated devices I probably couldn’t charge if I wanted to. In a similar way, a few of the stories I wrote as a little kid still exist on paper, as I used an actual physical typewriter to write them, and the ink and paper remain. As I got older, I used rudimentary word processing software on old computers, and then saved the files on floppy disks. Remember them? Honestly, paper might get old and tired, but if I wanted to read any of those later stories now then I’d probably need to steal the hardware to do so from a museum.

‘I’ll miss you so much,’ she said. ‘But I’m happy for you. I want you to go out and do great things. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. For you to get away from this place, and everything that happened here. I want to throw you as far as possible, so you can grow big and strong somewhere better. So you can have a good life. I don’t care if you ever think about me at all. I’ll think about you instead.’

I’ve always been wary of anyone saying “you have to be a parent to understand this”, because I think that’s really silly and lacks imagination, and I absolutely think that in this case too. But the sentiment being expressed here feels like an almost Platonic definition of love to me. While love can take many different forms, I think in its purest form it has to be selfless, and perhaps it’s just that being a parent offers an easy opportunity for you to do that. Certainly, after becoming a parent myself, this is all I’ve ever wanted for my son – and I would consider anything else on top of that a bonus. It’s not about me, basically. Knowing he’s living a good and happy life would be more than enough to make me happy. But that’s all in the future right now. In the meantime, he needs to put down the PlayStation controller for a few minutes, do his homework, and tidy his room. I am realistic, though, so I’ll happily settle for one of the three for the time being.

She heard movement from inside, and then the door opened a few seconds later.

Sometimes you create a character simply because you need them. In this case, the story required Amanda to talk to a computer expert, and because my imagination often heads off in slightly disturbing directions, I decided to go with the idea of the dark room. As I wrote this sentence about the door opening, I had no real idea who was going to be on the other side of it. They were only a minor character, after all – a walk-on part at most. But as it turned out, Theo surprised me a little. I suppose a subconscious part of me must have been imagining an unlikely person to find working there, but I’ve found myself thinking about him since. Who is he? Why was he drawn to this kind of work, and how might it affect him? And so, despite my original intentions, he appears briefly in my next novel (The Angel Maker in the US; The Half Burnt House in the UK), and I’m not ruling out returning to him again. For now, he’s working behind a closed door in his basement room. But I do wonder if, at some point in the future, he might have a story of his own to tell.

‘Then you should keep it a bit longer. Get your homework done. Because they’re all good. There are some real classics in there – ones you should definitely read.’

I chose Stephen King as a reference point here because, like so many people, I read him voraciously as a teenager. (And still do, of course.) Pet Sematary has always resonated with me as being a perfect horror novel, and the link to The Monkey’s Paw is an obvious one. But as it happens, the themes of both stories apply neatly to this book, in that they’re both about how refusing to accept horrible and traumatic events in the past can end up poisoning the present. More importantly, there was much more of an emphasis on the short story collection Jenny lends Paul in earlier drafts, and so – with his permission – I credited the editor as being Ramsey Campbell, a living legend of the horror genre, as a nod of respect to him. For various reasons, and to my regret, that got lost in subsequent drafts. And so, for the record, let me state that while this short story collection does not exist in the real world, it was edited by Ramsey.