Torn Pages: Pumpkin Season

I wrote Torn Pages through the Fall of 2017 into the Spring of 2018 and, while I'm somewhat cagey about that certain aspects of that period, it was a wonderful time. My nostalgia for that time, which wasn't perfect, is why Torn Pages gets plastered on so much merch of mine. There are other books but they'll never be another Pumpkin Book. Not even the nine sequels that followed. That may look like a burning pumpkin to you but to me it's a sunny-sun. For once, things seemed to be headed in the right direction.

Torn Pages for me is like a dictionary of happiness. The book begins with snow, porches, Victorian designs, gargoyles, pumpkins, Halloween, and books, lots of books. It's not that we're taking a whistle-stop tour through my favourite books (I've never cared much for Agatha Christie) but for me, a journey that includes James Joyce and Frankenstein is my favourite kind of journey. Even now, writing this, I'm getting chills. Even if I think the writing in Torn Pages is nowhere near as good as it is in Ugly Botany.

Torn Pages was written at a very particular moment in history, well into one year of Trump's first term and into many months of Brexit-debate. It was rightly agreed that the world was a mess back then, and by god, it is a mess now; though Torn Pages represented a cosy conservatism that many of my peers would have still balked at. Yes, there's the SJW Mia character (that I feel bad about now) but there's also a lot of progressivism in the book and it's not a jingoistic novel in the way Realm would be. There's no sex and there's not much violence, and if were to take period it represents, it is very much the Reagan/ Spielberg/ Stephen King eighties with its magic bicycles, zombie trees, and monster-movie feel.

I can't be too nostalgia about that period. Those days are over. The fraught background (Brexit and Trump) was like a scary nightmare woods behind what felt at the time like the Garden of Eden. Finally at Bristol University, for a while, I felt accepted for who I was and there wasn't the cagey, angsty paranoia that marked the Eldritch Nights/ First Howl years.

Yet, those days are over. While they'll never be another Pumpkin book, I did decide a year ago that Ugly Botany was my favourite period of my life, taking place at Christmas and then going to a winter wonderland Chicago in January, and the book that resulted was pretty good, wasn't it? Torn Pages Underworld, as well, was a very happy time. As was Salem-to-Salem and Rosalie. Much of where I was headed during Torn Pages (well on my way to a PhD), I later abandoned, and there's probably not going to be another Torn Pages book for a while.

Still, this is the book I feel represents the sun; all that is good and sunny inside me. I feel like it's my Superego. Make of that what you will. But it is what it is.