The Making of Torn Pages: An Inconvenient Spring: An Introduction

Torn Pages: An Inconvenient Spring is a dark sequel to a book I still look back on fondly. The book, while intended to be a nostalgic trip back, quickly became jet-dark, nightmarishly dark, as I found myself torturing and mistreating these characters with something of a vengeance. The snowflakes and fizzling blue fire of Torn Pages have been replaced with an austere girls' school and edgy jokes about vapes, cigarettes and underage drinking. If Torn Pages was a song of innocence, An Inconvenient Spring is one of experience.

The sadness and the bliss of 2017 was never going to be recaptured by myself in 2023 as I found myself drinking heavily and, finding a new job, making a huge and cold transformation to leave Bristol and live in Birmingham. The latter of which was a huge and steely city, and that certainly informed the way the fantastical is treated here, both vast and terrifying, rather than cosmic and wondrous as it was in Torn Pages. Much of my life in Birmingham was spent at night, and this contributed to the downbeat atmosphere of this book, its ending something of a self-pitying requiem for itself.

Still, the darkness of this book attracts me. There are jokes about Carrie and school-shooters. The trees are like alligators, lurching out of the dark. Alice, the saviour of the universe, is treated as a pariah and pelted with shit. This book is one long thorny primal scream.