My Next Book: Spirit Street

The new book I’ll be writing is my single oldest idea. This dates back to when I was in my mid-teens. It’s the story of a girl, Ophelia, who is murdered in the nineteenth century and resurrected in the twenty-first to hunt ghosts. Think of it as a very dark Ghostbusters .

The book I’m writing is much, much darker than what I had planned originally, with a much more complex and spotted morality concerning the twenty-first century character. It’s much more nihilistic. How could you not be nihilistic with everything that’s going on?

The original story was conceived during the early 2010s UK coalition government and it must be said, even if I didn’t like the coalition government, it is very coalition government with its slick oxbridge-educated men, experts, techno-London, London-centric, etc. This version, coming during the Labour Government which is erm, almost indescribable, very hard to pin down ideologically, is far more sad and frightened. We feel like hostages in this century, beholden to events we cannot control just as the Labour Government (even if they’re erm in power) probably feel like hostages to the inevitability of Farage and the exploding world around them. We’re on a rollercoaster that we can’t get off of. I mean, I sound depressed just writing this.

But NO, the book advocates a solution. And that solution is uptight, buttoned-up Victorianism. Hence the book’s ending. Somehow, some way, Gladstone, Disraeli et al managed to ride out the century without a wave of British populism. This book, in harkening back to the Victorian era, has a very, very conservative message.

Does that mean undoing a century of civil rights/ workers rights? No, of course not. I don’t want an era with Jack the Ripper, colonialism, etc. What it does mean is the emotional state of Victorianism, the gothic, the reserved, introverted, etc.