Introducing Spirit Street

One of my oldest ideas, I came up with this in Secondary School, or high school, if you're American. But back then, it was just about the paranormal investigators. The central character, of Ophelia Hastings, I decided upon in early 2021. Back then she was called Daphne Livingstone and went through several iterations until I finally decided on Ophelia Hastings, whose introduction to the world coincided with Taylor Swift's "The Fate of Ophelia". Just like Shakespeare's Ophelia, my character is a tragic one, destined to die, and she is introduced submerged in a cold, horrific element; in the case of Shakespeare's character, it is water, and in the case of my character, it is snow.

My obsession with Jack the Ripper very much haunted this new book, though not just Jack the Ripper, also the Zodiac Killer and H.H. Holmes. A.B.C. Webster the killer is like this malevolent personification of a spider, someone who weaves a gigantic web of clues and riddles through their writing. Sound familiar. A.B.C. Webster is like a jokey self-portrait, right down to how they speak German. Yes, I'm still fuming about how that one reviewer called me a Nazi all that time ago.

Webster is a silly children's author but, crucially, he's not the main character and he's not meant to be the most interesting character. Ophelia is the most interesting character. She's a girl out of time, who discovers what a horrible mess the twenty-first century is and then, at the end, is dropped back in the nineteenth century to fix it. Of course, she can't fix it.

And then there's Peter. Something of another twisted self-portrait. Just as I would have been a know-it-all smug academic, Peter is a know-it-all smug academic. He wears a tweed jacket and a baseball cap, as I am prone to do. At the end, he gets his just desserts.

The circus crash was based with my frustration on how the accidents in the Final Destination movies were never truly insane, batshit crazy. Here, I came up with such an idea so nuts it nearly stops the book dead.