The Making of Torn Pages Orpheus: An Introduction

The roots of this book were born while I waited in a Hollywood Vampires concert for the show to begin. Earlier that day, me and my friend Dan from work had walked past Brimingham's finest hotel and seen a few people waiting with Johnny Depp Funkos. We looked it up and saw Depp was in town with his band and playing at the Utilia Stadium that evening. I walked there after work, found there were still tickets, and managed to get a seat near the stage. As I sat there talking to others, it might have been that I had Johnny Depp movies spinning around my head while, at the same time, thinking about horror flicks and why I had never quite written a Torn Pages story that felt like a horror book yet. I had initially envisioned a horror of accidental circumstances as Alice took a bunch of unsuspecting boys to various classical literature stories and watched them all die.

It was there in the audience that I came up with the scene where Tom, our main character, watches his friends being executed by the Queen of Hearts. Later, I settled on the main novels that were to be featured would be Victorian classic children's stories, though including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Greek Tragedy of Orpheus, and my original Torn Pages.

I was very angry while I wrote this book, and I feel that the crocodile incident halfway through the book was a subconscious warning to myself. The crocodile has always been an animal that's represented anger in my dreams, and it was as if I was saying to myself: don't be devoured by your own rage.

The main themes of Torn Pages Orpheus are Chaos, Madness, and Punishment -- I wasn't in a good state when I wrote this book. The chaos of the Alice in Wonderland section I think comes close to one of my favourite things I've ever written -- I'm so, so sorry Lewis Carrol, but I loved desecrating this great book and putting my characters inside to be tortured and tormented by its terrible world.

I didn't want to immediately follow up An Inconvenient Spring as that would be a bleak book following Juliet in the Greek Underworld. It was more fun to follow Alice's perspective. I'll have to write the Underworld section eventually, but it'll be rough.