MY NEXT BOOK LORD CATERPILLAR ORPHANS

A preview

My next book, which I hope to release very soon, will be the fourth installment of Lord Caterpillar. Orphans. This book will take place in between Lord Caterpillar Tales and Lord Caterpillar Underworld but, in reality, will be a prequel that focuses on Mary Pierce's childhood.

It won't be news to many that this world has become a truly horrible place for children. We've all seen the pictures from Gaza. I listened to the U.N. officer describing the place as a "graveyard for children". That war, and its effects, now seems to be happening solely to children is one of the most horrible, disgusting facts of our century. Before, many years before, war was between enemy combatants. Now, it seems to entirely be which side kills the most civilians.

That so many children are being killed in Gaza, and that there is nothing we can do about it, is something that is genuinely causing me distress. This is not a post to bash Israel or to advocate any extreme politics but, in general, I am simply horrified by what this will do to the psyche of millions. That we expect children to suffer in war; that war is now not war at all but child-killing. Child-murder.

Hence when such horrible things happen in fiction, we should no longer accuse that fiction of being tasteless but, sadly, realistic. In the original James Whale Frankenstein movie, when Boris Karloff kills the little girl by accident it is the movie's single most horrifying and upsetting scene. Now, watching that scene, we would expect the girl to die.

Therefore in the new book, I am trying to bring back the sanctity of life when it comes to the lives of children. In the Victorian-era, children were fed into the Industrial machine with reckless abandon,even if their lives were idealized in literature. I am trying to write a book that makes people realize how horrible it is a thing to kill a child. The morals in this book are very black and right. The villains, while complex and nuanced, are outright, downright evil.