The Making of Torn Pages Brothers Grimm: An Introduction

" Harry Potter meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"

It's here. My newest, bloodiest novel. Experience the madness. The murder. The movie references! Mrs Collins! We're going deep into fairytale land here, with trees that come alive and castrate people. So many man-eating trees, all of them drooling saliva and ready to eat children. Some of these trees have eaten children. And I guess you could say the implications of this are so brutal and horrific, this might just be the most violent, most disturbing I've wrtten since, oh, erm, my last book Torn Pages Cerberus.

That book was sadder, more Freudian. This book is more insane, more violent, less Freudian, less psychological and is a straight out, pedal-to-the-metal horror novel with a finale that owes more to Night of the Living Dead than it does to any classic works of fiction. Okay, so I'm more indebted to Zombie movies and Shrek than I am to any classic work of literature. No true! This book is classic Hero's Journey with the main character being called to leave their village, refusing the call, and, at the very end, having this divine revelation. For all the talk of Satan and devil worship and all the ultraviolence, the book (I almost said film) has a Christian message. At the start, Billy and his friends subscribe to small-town superstitions with little in the way of true religious trust and believe but, by the end, they develop true Christian thoughts, minds and feelings by saying the Lord's Prayer and dedicating themselves to a true cause: saving the children.

Structurally, the book (again, I almost said film) resembles Richard Adams' Watership Down in that the book (almost said film) begins with the main characters having to leave their doomed territory and venture off to find new surroundings, and then there's a second half in which they find themselves fighting for survival. Say what you like about these books resembling movies more than they do books, but the big inspiration for the animal attack sequences was Nedry's death in Michael Crichton's BOOK Jurassic Park, which is far more violent than the film, and includes this harrowing scene where our narrator realizes his head is in the beast's mouth. Crichton is often tagged as sci-fi writer but he could write great horror sequences and that in the original JP book is one of the very best.