Jonathan Pryce-Davis, Bishop of Middenmere, July 1870.īill Blackthorne woke up with a start, sat bolt upright in bed and looked around the room with a sort of dazed, wild-eyed glare. – Extract from Sleeping Gods – A Treatise on Ancient Paganism If this should happen then Christianity will be doomed, as would the modern world, which the pagan gods despise, being miserable old so-and-sos. It would not take much in the way of rituals and spells to bring it all back. Their old and wily magic is woven into the fabric of Britain, its power is steeped in every root and branch, every ancient village and standing stone. But do not underestimate their doom-mongering powers. The old pagan gods have fallen away and are slumbering in the four corners of the kingdom. The fiery old pagan gods of days gone by have been subdued by church building, the power of the monasteries and the brave Knights Templar. A tale of Gothic Victoriana, of 1970’s grooviness, of pagan legends, student romance, teenage angst, and mystery galore!Īnd it must be said that the pagan threat is not to be underestimated. Middenmere is a city every bit as complex as a real one, and its people (from now and its distant past) haunt it in every way imaginable. After a huge bout of writing, fine tuning, rewriting, and generally fiddling about, an entire world revealed itself. Even the legends of vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies can trace their roots to a common pagan source.Īnd so, these various strands swirled around and mixed in my mind. Christianity has many tropes, like Christmas Trees, Yule logs and Santa, that stretch way back to long forgotten pagan beliefs. The final influence was one of the ancestry of ancient belief systems. Those long dead are with us, in our imagination, with all the cultural baggage that entails. It’s the closest most of use will ever get to seeing a ghost (note how I say most of us!). When looking at old photographs, you glimpse a world long gone, a vision of the dead, earnest, or smiling, living their lives. The social aspects of the world gone by and the people who lived before us is always something that has fascinated me. One very strong influence was what I call “The Spooky Past”. Rowena Ramsbottom’s rambling journal owes a little nod to Jane Austin. We even became fans of Sheila Keith, an actress from the time who played a lesbian prison warder with such unalloyed evil delight that she was a joy to watch.Īnother influence came from the Victorian books I was reading at the time, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley and other gothic literature. We went through Hammer and Amacus horror films, British New Wave, and a number of weird pieces by a director called Pete Walker - crazily deranged films like House of Whipchord, House of Mortal Sin and Frightmare. When I started thinking about what I wanted The Bill Blackthorne Chronicles to be about, I was watching, whilst curled up on the sofa with my wife and a bottle of wine, a lot of obscure British films made in the 1970s. In a climatic end that threatens to destroy everything they hold dear, Bill and Arthur are thrown into a desperate race to save those they love. Their dabbling sets off a catastrophic chain of events that forces Bill to remember his very bizarre past and realise his amazing destiny. The girls are secretly witch-freaks use the boys in a terrible way to dabble in powerful and ancient magic they don’t really understand. They meet two very pretty but intense and dark girls, Lilith and Ophelia, who invite then to a very unusual party to do something very unusual to the boys. Arthur goes off to study at the ancient university of Middenmere, but Bill is also taken there for his treatments and they bump into each other.
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He is desperate to escape the clutches of the smothering and subtly sinister Apostles, and when he befriends Arthur Small from the nearby village of Underwood, he knows he has met someone who will help him. Bill doesn’t like the sound of this at all. He is enrolled into a secret society called the Apostles, who tell Bill he is very important – that he knows a great and profound secret, vital to their cause, which they intend to extract from his clouded memories with strong psychotropic drugs and ‘sixteen-volt electro-convulsive treatments’. Bill’s earliest memory is waking up in gloomily gothic Brimstone Manor, where a strangely deranged middle-age woman called Beryl tells him she is his mother. He has no recollection of his past and can see horns and yellow eyes on people who appear perfectly normal to others.
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Bill Blackthorne is a shy and nerdy young man with some very serious problems.