The Making of Lord Caterpillar Orphans: An Introduction

Okay, so this book was a mistake.

After I put "the fifth book in the Lord Caterpillar series" on Lord Caterpillar Underworld with the brazen confidence that only comes with stupidity... well, never underestimate the inevitability of stupidity. I had forgotten there was no fourth book. Duh. So, now that I had made my stupid mistake instead of simply correcting the book cover, I decided to write a fourth book. In a way, this would be a prequel as well as an explanation as to how Mary and Brady Scarborough got out of the chemical vat.

The big influence on this book was Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. I loved that book series. So gothic, bleak and nihilistic but with a quaint, Victorian, even, sense of humour that kept you reading. This was what I went for with my prequel tale of Mary and Freddy's tangles with their stepfather.

Their stepfather Dr Gill is the biggest monster I've ever created. I'd be hard pressed to name a worse individual than this one. He's a personification, really, of today's news stories with his child-killing tendencies. The stuff in Gaza is so crashing and tragic and depressing to hang over our heads every day -- how will future generations deal with knowing so many children were murdered, on purpose, and we did nothing? Hence the book was my therapeutic way of saving, at least, some children.

I've talked before about how pissed I was at Neil Gaiman making The Sandman into a DC superhero; in this book's epilogue, I try to bring the great Hoffman's creation back to its roots.