Don't Go Back

Happy fourth birthday!

This February marks the fourth anniversary of my debut mainstream thriller, DON’T GO BACK, being published by The Book Folks. A lot’s happened since then (including six more novels published) but I thought, to mark the occasion, that I’d write a little piece about how the book came about and what it meant for my writing career moving forward.

I started out writing horror, first with short stories and then with novellas (and a novel), publishing in the UK and US small press from 1999. In 2014, Pendragon Press published my novella DRIVE which was kind of treated as horror but, in reality, was more of a dark thriller. I enjoyed the process, it got a lot of good feedback and it was nominated in 2015 for a British Fantasy Society Award (I lost out to the great Stephen Volk). It also got me thinking that in order for my work to be more commercial (a phrase that always made me feel a little uncomfortable, until my good friend Sue Moorcroft impressed on me its importance), maybe I needed to shift away from horror.

In 2016, I decided to make that move. I talked my old friend David Roberts into upping the frequency of our monthly walks to weekly – what became our Friday Night Walks – and we plotted out that first novel and I wrote it and submitted it, feeling quietly confident. Nobody wanted it. I got a couple of nibbles, but nothing happened so I took the little bit of feedback I’d had and we plotted and I wrote a second thriller. That got the same response and, by then, I was really feeling the failure.

DON’T GO BACK came out of that.

In trying to write a thriller, I found that I’d held back on some of the darkness and violence that ran through my horror stuff and kind of lost my own voice a little. So we talked about it and I said “fuck it”, we’ll go darker. As it was, we plotted out almost the entire thing – the dual timeline, the characters, the ending and THAT opening – in one evening, wrote a load of notes, brainstormed the timeline and off I went.

Then the pandemic hit.

DON’T GO BACK became my safe place and I loved exploring Seagrave (created for the book) and enjoyed spending time with the characters, both in their past and their present. So much so, in fact, that the first draft was 215,000 words long (that’s a lot – the final version is about 94,000), but we both felt I was on to something.

I sent the manuscript out, my previous experience telling me not to expect a great deal and while I did get some rejections and ghosting (I’m still waiting to hear back from a couple of agencies), I also caught the attention of The Book Folks. Erik Empsen liked what he read, he gave me more feedback and editorial input and the book was published on February 20th, 2022.

While I didn’t really have any expectations, other than wanting it to sell enough to justify Erik taking a chance on me, it did a lot better than I thought. As I write this, it has over 1,100 ratings on Amazon, has sold enough units that it’s performing “well above average” by metrics and the feedback has been lovely. I assume some of the response is “ooh, look, he’s trying something new, let’s see how well the monkey dances”, but I’m happy to take that – a lot of people took a chance on the book (it sat comfortably in the top half of the Top 100 for a good while) and, from all accounts, they liked what they read. And, as a writer, that’s absolutely the best thing to hear.

The key thing DON’T GO BACK gave me was the chance to keep going and publish a further six novels with The Book Folks (who were absorbed into Joffe Books last year). It also gave me some confidence in my own ability (most writers will tell you this is something they sorely lack), as well as a sense of how to pace a thriller and build in cliffhangers and, best of all, it gave me back a real joy in the art of writing.

So where did the story come from?

I’ve long been a fan of the coming-of-age story and I also like novels where something from the past impacts on the future in a way that nobody could have foreseen. I think, on that fateful night, I might have said the same to David and pretty much the whole thing came out in one go. In order to show the past and present, we decided on a dual timeline (which was much harder to work on than I expected) and I wanted to set it in a place that would almost become a character in its own right (and, wonderfully, Seagrave has become just that, with almost all of my novels since being set there).

We also had that opening sequence on the first night, though neither of us can remember now exactly who came up with it. But the urban legend clearly works and it gets a lot of comment from readers.

Things did adapt and evolve, obviously and although the ending was in place from the off, a few of the details (including the fate of Wendy) changed. As it was written during the lockdowns, I would often talk through ideas with my son on our lunchtime walks and I’m sure, by the end, he was sick to death of hearing me say “So, Dude, what do you think if this happens”. But he was always there with a helpful word and suggestion, as was David – we carried on our Friday Night Walks, each in our own town, talking on the phone – and I think we both knew, when it was done, that we’d caught something special.

Part of the fun of writing is to put in little bits and pieces that mean something to the writer (and his/her family and friends) without detracting from the plot.

A couple of items I remember from the writing of this is that the main baddie, Nelson Blake, is so named because for the first little while, David & I referred to him as ‘Nasty Bastard’ and I wanted to keep the initials. Also, the book was written as Alison and I were really getting into The Killers and was called “Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine” until quite late in the process (it’s also a line of dialogue Beth has – my friend Wayne Parkin wrote to me when he came to that, saying ‘I love it when you see the title in the book!’) and while I like DON’T GO BACK, I still sometimes call the book Jenny.

I have a real soft spot for Beth, Nick, Frank, Jenny and the rest of the gang and I hope, if you haven’t yet taken a chance on the book, this might have inspired you to give it a go.

If you’re interested, the book can be ordered through Amazon on this universal link - https://mybook.to/DontGoBack

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