My homage to Stephen King, echoes of ‘IT’ and bringing back maps and illustrations!
It was about seven years ago when the idea for Black Hare Valley first presented itself to me, but back then, I only knew a few things about it. At the time, my eldest son was 12, and had recently dived into ‘IT’ by Stephen King. I was a similar age myself when I first discovered King. Having recently re-read the book (because it is one of my all time favourites), it became a topic of conversation between my son and I.
I told him I wanted to write a big chunk of a book set in a strange small town that seems quaint and peaceful on the surface but is anything but underneath… I wanted a group of misfit teenagers, a missing kid, and an undercurrent of fear and paranoia. That was about all I knew.
I think it was my son who suggested creating the town first and so one evening lying side by side on the lounge floor, we started creating a map on a long sheet of roll-out drawing paper. I’ve still got that map but it’s a bit scruffy these days. Years later I asked my son to recreate an A4 version and that is the neater one that appears at the front of the book.
We didn’t really have a plan. We added whatever felt natural: shops, schools, churches, petrol stations, hills, rivers, streams and woods… It was a lot of fun. Around that time I visited one of the iron age hill-forts we are lucky enough to have in our area and I was feeling very inspired by that too. I decided it should be a valley town, with one main road going through it and the town built up around that. On each side of the town would be sweeping hills and man-made hill-forts, or the remnants of. There would also be creepy woods, mysterious and ancient graves and ruins where the kids could hang out.
We had a lot of fun creating it and then that was it. I didn’t have anything else for the story yet but over the next three years, the characters started to grow in my head. Then in 2023 we had a five day power cut thanks to a storm, and even once the power came back on, we had two weeks without an internet connection.
It was on the first day of the power cut, sitting in the lounge with only the flames of the fire and some hastily strung up fairy lights to see by, that I suddenly knew how I would start the story of Black Hare Valley. A scene popped into my head. The group of teenagers were now fully formed and all had character bios in a notebook. I was working on loads of other books at the time, as I often am, and I wasn’t really meant to write it at all, but the power cut meant I couldn’t use my laptop, so I had no choice.
I picked up a notebook and started writing in longhand. That first scene was so real to me and had already played out in my head like a movie or an episode of a TV show. Jesse Archer, one of my main characters, lurking in an alley way waiting for his friends, who had agreed to help him set fire to the school. He would be interrupted and then arrested by Sergeant Aaron Mayfield and this scene would reveal a dark and mysterious relationship between the two of them.
Once I started writing I could not stop, and over the next three weeks the entire novel poured out of my pen and into several A4 notebooks. I wrote it every day, constantly. I’d be sitting in the car before work and writing. I’d be in the kitchen cooking dinner, and writing. And suddenly, it was done.
It then had to sit and be ignored while I went back to finishing off other projects.
Some time in 2024 I started typing it up and as I typed, I changed, deleted, and added to the book. I then knew there had to be another book, and before long I had a series on the go, which was not something I initially wanted! But the universe I had created just kept on growing and I could not have stopped it if I tried.
By this point I was fully in love with my main characters and heroes: Jesse, Willow, Jaime, Ralph and Paddy. And as I wrote each next book, more answers revealed themselves to me until one day I knew how it all ended, how it all tied up and who or what would ‘win’ in the end.
This book is a true labour of love, a homage to Stephen King’s ‘IT’ and a story about friendship, love, revenge and youth. It’s also a story steeped in folklore, from fairy rings and realms, to May Day traditions, shape-shifters, the green man, the hare, and much, more more.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the inspiration behind it and don’t forget that at the moment the ebook is 99p to preorder from this link: https://books2read.com/u/4EO5DE
I will be back next Friday and the paperback link should be live by then!
See you next time!
The Glorious Outsiders 