The Making of Tonight: An Introduction

Or The Perils of Writing a Back to Normal Book, when things aren't normal anymore.

It was the autumn of 2021, Covid was "over", all the political problems of the last few years had been "settled", and I was meant to be happier than ever. Except that no, I was on edge and thought that I was entering a period of my life that was going to be as turbulent as that in early 2021. It was like I was fighting a Forever War, and so I decided to write a book about weathering the storm. Tonight isn't really a book about weathering the storm, although there is a snowstorm raging outside in the book and there is a constant fear of going outside, encountering those monsters lurking in the alleys, it's not quite the Blitz, is it?

That said, there's a lot of very Blitz stuff in this book with the whole "keep calm and carry on" attitude and the copious amounts of tea the characters drink. There's a sense that if you go outside, you will die. I loved writing about the nineteenth century as a prologue to the twentieth century -- of course, this is absolute nonsense and plenty of stuff happened in the 1800s that impact the modern world etc. But the horrors the characters encounter in this book, right at the start of the 1900s (literally in the year 1901) do create a sense of foreboding as to what would happen later that century. The flash that occurs at the end of the book -- when Claire ascends to Purrsha -- was deliberately meant to evoke an atomic weapon; this new-age horror incomprehensible by many.

The seed for this was reading a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, seeing the Reichenback Falls on the cover, and thinking this would be the ultimate horror and epitome of tragedy in the 19th century, compared to the utter oblivion of the twentieth century. I guess that, pitting Sherlock Holmes against new-age horrors, pre-empted the entire book.

The religious stuff was all modelled after Cats by Andrew Lloyd Weber, and that's the plot of the book in a nutshell: what if Sherlock Holmes had to deal with a religious cult, similar to that in Cats? The idea of these creatures existing in real-life is terrifying. I'll admit, though, to ripping a bunch off Aliens.

The book draws a lot on nursery rhymes and that kind of simplistic nonsense imagery, such as that depicted by Edward Lear in "The Owl and the Pussycat". It really shouldn't be taken too seriously. For god's sake, the last word is a tip of the hat to Andrew Lloyd Weber. In the winter of 2021, though, when I wrote the book, I was also having something of religious revival and was on my way to becoming a born-again Christian; this petered out somewhat the start of 2022, but most of the religious aspects of the book -- those which come near the beginning -- were written during this curious phrase in my life. Never again have I flirted with religion again as I did during this book.