Plot Outline:

Cassique is a time travelling Fixer in AD 2853. It's his job to nip back into the past and fix problems which threaten to wipe out the world of the twenty-ninth century. But the longer Cassique spends in those past times, the more he comes to wonder if the docile, VR-obsessed people of his present would actually benefit from a reset. It's a dangerous thought, because that would mean taking a stand against Father, the world-running super-computer, and Father takes a very dim view of any form of rebellion.

When Cassique teams up with a couple of relatively famous figures from the past, they start trying to formulate a plan to make time travel work in their favour, and return the reins of control to humanity. But they have to be exceedingly careful, because Father might be listening...

A darkly comic cross between 1984 and Time Bandits, this science fiction work shines a light on the dangers of putting too much power in the hands of a computer, and is more timely than ever when framed against the recent debate concerning the rise of AI.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

Following the burial of an old, dear friend, Archie returns to the Merge. He's enjoying his stay in a realm of waterless canals and upside-down pyramids, but when a day trip to a beautiful sinkhole goes terrifyingly awry, he winds up imprisoned in a brutal, isolated hellhole. With a collection of fellow locksmiths, Archie is forced to work on a plan to restore a deadly tyrant to their throne. As he desperately searches for a way to outwit the demons who hold him in their clutches, he must also struggle to come to an understanding of the strange demon he carries within. Everything is on the line, and Archie's choices will decide not just his own future, but the destiny of the Merge...

This is the Complete Volume Three of the Archibald Lox series, bringing together books 7, 8 and 9 -- Archibald Lox and the Sinkhole to Hell, Archibald Lox and the Pick of Loxes, and Archibald Lox and the Legion of the Lost -- and presenting them as a single story, the way they were originally written.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

All is lost, but the plans of mad tyrants never die, and if Archie is to save his friends, he's told he must make the most monumental of sacrifices.

As he desperately searches for a way to outwit the demons who hold him in their clutches, he must also struggle to finally come to an understanding of the strange demon he carries within.

Everything is on the line, and Archie's choices will decide not just his own future, but the destiny of the Merge...


The ninth, final book of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

When Archie finds himself trapped in a claustrophobic zone from which there seems to be no escape, he's thrown a lifeline by the most unlikely of allies.

A showdown with a troubled royal ends in chaos and betrayal, and Archie is abducted and imprisoned in a cold, forgotten area of the Merge.

With a collection of fellow locksmiths, Archie is set to work on an apparently unpickable lock, but if he manages to do what no other Lox has achieved, he might also seal his doom...


Book eight of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

When an old friend shuffles off their mortal coil, Archie travels to New York for the funeral, and from there to the Merge, to do some work with his mentor, Winston.

In a realm of waterless canals and upside-down pyramids, he patiently teaches royals how to open a portal to the ancient Crypt, and learns some more of the Merge's many secrets.

But when a day trip to a beautiful cenote goes terrifyingly awry, it looks as if Archie's story might have come to the end of its line...


Book seven of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

When a couple of assassins catch up with Archie, he's forced to flee to the Merge in search of friendship and safety. In a city of ice, the greatest grop players of the six realms have assembled for a legendary Tourney, and Archie ends up with a ticket to every match. But plans have been drawn up to kidnap a prince, and Archie soon finds himself fighting for his freedom and his sanity. Having become a pawn in a cunning game of political chess, he must travel to the heart of an enemy empire, but it's a dark, menacing place from which he might never return...

Volume Two of the Archibald Lox series brings together books 4, 5 and 6 -- Archibald Lox and the Forgotten Crypt, Archibald Lox and the Slides of Bon Repell, and Archibald Lox and the Rubicon Dictate -- and presents them as a single book, the way the story arc was originally written.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

The kidnapping of a prince shocks the Merge and turns the Grop Tourney on its head.

In New York, a desperate Archie and Inez play a cunning game of chess with the fates.

But if they are to force a checkmate, they must travel to the heart of an enemy empire and face down the rulers of a merciless realm...


Book six of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

The Grop Tourney has kicked off, and it's the biggest draw in the Merge.

Archie has a ticket to every match, and is soon caught up in the excitement.

But when a scheming king sets his sights on the young locksmith, all thoughts of grop are swiftly forgotten, and Archie might fight for his freedom and his sanity...


Book five of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

When a couple of assassins catch up with Archie, he's forced to flee to the Merge in search of friendship and safety.

As his skills develop in that parallel universe, he opens a gateway to a long-forgotten crypt, where ancient secrets are revealed.

In a city of ice, the greatest players of the six realms have assembled for a legendary Grop Tourney, but a small group of plotters are more interested in kidnapping...


Book four of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

When a young locksmith finds his way into the Merge, he discovers a parallel universe filled with an infinite number of bizarre, remarkable worlds. Setting off on the adventure of a lifetime, he soon makes allies and friends who help inform and direct him, but he must also overcome the threat of cold-blooded killers, ravenous hell jackals, evil Empresses and more. As his skills develop, he finds himself part of a perilous mission to save a realm from the forces of tyranny, but he holds the key to its success or failure, and he fears he might not be up to the task. The greatest challenge of his life awaits...

Volume One of the Archibald Lox series brings together the first three novels - Archibald Lox and the Bridge Between Worlds, Archibald Lox and the Empress of Suanpan, Archibald Lox and the Vote of Alignment - and presents them as a single book, the way the story arc was originally written.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

The end of Inez's mission is in sight, but the most difficult part is still to come.

Archie is determined to help save an entire realm from falling under the rule of the vicious SubMerged.

But old foes stand in his way, and the greatest challenge of his life awaits...


Book three of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

Archie thought he was finished with the Merge, but he was wrong.

Teaming up again with Inez, they must pit their wits against the infamous Empress of Suanpan.

In a city of gamblers, Archie must stake everything he owns, even his freedom...


Book two of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

There is a universe beyond our own, known as the Merge.

A young locksmith called Archibald Lox is about to cross worlds and explore it.

As he learns about these lands of wonders, he will have to face cold-blooded killers, rivers of blood, hell jackals and more...


Book one of the Archibald Lox series.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

Eyrie Brown used to serve in the Army, until a tragic loss forced him to return to civilian life earlier than planned. Now he drives one of London's iconic black cabs. On a dark, wet night, he gives a lift to a wounded gangster, and everything changes from that point on.

When the mob lord gets in touch later, offering Eyrie a small fortune if he will take care of a mysterious young woman for a weekend, Eyrie is hesitant. He can see trouble ahead, but the money will change his life, so he reluctantly agrees to become a temporary guardian. But murder is on the cards, and his vengeful "moll" turns out to be far more of a handful than he had ever anticipated. As twist follows twist and bodies start to mount, Eyrie gets backed into a blood-soaked corner and must resort to desperate, inventive measures if he is to stand any chance of seeing his mission through and making it out of the weekend alive.

Fast-paced, action-packed, gritty London-based noir, inspired by the likes of Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, with a large tip of the hat to the Billy Wilder movie Some Like It Hot.

Author Notes:

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Plot Outline:

The Midsummer Players stage an outdoor version of A Midsummer Night's Dream every year. The actors are dreadful and audience members almost never attend more than once. Except for...

...the fey folk!

All of the fairies named in the play are obliged to attend every performance, due to a deal that they struck with a mischievous Master Shakespeare. In an attempt to break up the Players on the eve of their twentieth anniversary, Oberon and Puck hire a human agent of chaos to infiltrate the actors' ranks and set them against one another by focusing on secret attractions and grudges that have been lying dormant up to now. Sparks will fly, and everyone will come to blows, but it's all executed with a wink and a grin, and there will be more smiles than tears by the end. At least, that’s the plan...

This comedic fantasy is for lovers of Shakespeare, chaos and fairies everywhere.

Author Notes:

I had the idea for Midsummer's Bottom on 26th June 1997. I wrote a few pages the next day, but didn't start work properly on the novel until 29th September 1997. It went on sale on 21st June 2018.

On the 25th of June, 1997, I went to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in St Mary's Cathedral in Limerick, performed by a local group called Island. I wasn't overly familiar with the play, but liked it a lot. The next day I had the idea for writing a book about an amateur group of actors who performed an outdoors version of the play every year on Midsummer's Day, and who were absolutely awful. This was no reflection on the Island players, who were excellent -- I just felt there was a lot of fun to be mined if I put the play in the hands of a less talented cast.

I spent a few months working on the plot -- I also had to read the play -- before starting work on in in late September that year. I finished the first draft on 27th February 1998. Five months was a long time for me to be working on a single draft back then, and reflects the fact that this was a long book, especially in first draft form, which was a good bit longer than the finished book -- I edited it down a lot, and tightened things up, over the years.

This was my first time trying an outright comedy, and my opinion of the book changed pretty much every day as I went along. On some days I loved it, on others I hated it. The real test, for me, is time. Whenever I write a book that I'm unsure of, I leave it to rest a while (years, or even decades). If it fades from my thoughts, I reckon it's best not to return to it. But if I find myself musing about it every now and then, I figure it merits another look, and usually I find that I'm able to knock it into shape. That was certainly the case with Bottom. It was far too long and sluggish in parts when I came back to it, but the structure was sound, the relationships intriguing, and it tickled my funny bone.

I based some of the character names on the actors in the Island show, and, as usual, also worked in a few references to friends and acquaintances. The agent in the book, Christopher Big, for instance, was a wry nod to my agent Christopher Little.

The structure was designed to mimic that of the play, so it features pretty much the same number of acts. I also tried to have the dramatic and comedic rhythms of my book mirror those of the play -- although I didn't lash myself TOO firmly to that particular mast! While my novel riffs on the play big time, it also had to stand on its own two feet and work on its own terms, so that it could make perfect sense to anyone who knew nothing about Shakespeare's original work.

I had fun with the poems at the beginning and later in the book. I used to write a lot of poetry in my earlier days (mostly morbid, moaning-teenager stuff) and it was nice to tap into that side of my creative mind again. I was never a big fan of iambic pentameter as a reader/watcher, but I found it easy enough to work with as a writer. Having a firm poetic structure that I had to adhere to was a nice change from just my usual freestyling, and I had much more fun with it than I had anticipated. At the same time, I was careful not to go overboard and put in too many rhymes, as I knew I'd exhaust a reader's patience very swiftly if I went OTT on the old IP!

I plotted the book VERY carefully, and in minute detail. The amount of prep work that I do on a book varies from project to project. Sometimes it can start with me jotting down just a few quick notes and adding nothing else to them as I go along (as I did with Cirque Du Freak). Other times I'll plan it out chapter by chapter, beat by beat. I always leave room for change -- a good story takes on a life of its own and can lead you in directions you hadn't anticipated -- but sometimes it's important to lay down a very clear intended path from start to finish, especially if the plot is as twisting and tricky as this one.

My agent liked the book when I sent it to him, and did try to find a publisher for it, but nobody could quite figure out where in the market to place it, and it was turned down by everyone that he approached. There are pros and cons to self-publishing, but the main pro is that since it doesn't cost very much, you can take chances with unusual stories as a self-publisher that more traditional publishers automatically shy away from. It would have been nice to have others help me take Bottom out into the world in search of a audience for it, but at the end of the day, I think it's a Bottom best bared to a few rather than clothed in obscurity from all... :-)View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Get ready to journey to An Other Place... where time and space are fluid... where the moon changes colour and savage beasts run wild... where teeth are used as currency and love-making is a perilous proposition... where cannibalism occasionally comes into fashion and the dead are swiftly forgotten... where strange sandmen offer sanctuary in times of danger and a mysterious Alchemist rules over all.

When Newman Riplan’s flight into the unknown turns into a nightmarish slide between worlds, he must explore an unnamed city where unpredictable terrors are the norm. By the end of his first day adrift, his life has spun completely out of his control, but the most mind-twisting and soul-crushing revelations are only beginning. As he desperately searches for meaning and a way out, he starts to realise that perhaps only madness can provide him with the answers, while surrender might offer him his only true hope of escape...

Dark, dystopian sci-fi is on offer in this widely-praised, mind-bending trip of a novel.

Author Notes:

I had the idea for An Other Place on 8th February 1998. I began writing the first draft on 27th April 1998. I did my final edit of it more than 18 years later, and it eventually went on sale on 1st December 2016.

This is my diary entry from the 8th of February 1998:

"Had an idea for a new - VERY strange - book, provisionally called "The Land Of Dallas, Texas." There's a lot of it I have yet to work out, but it's an exciting and unusual project, a challenge the type of which I haven't met before. I got the idea for it while watching "Solaris"..."

Solaris is a Russian sci-fi movie that was remade in the USA years later. I'd forgotten that it provided the spark for An Other Place, and to be honest, I can't quite remember how it happened, except that it's a slow-moving movie that affords viewers plenty of time for introspection, and I guess a few of the ideas for the book started to sprout in my brain while I was filling in that time.

The dreadful working title didn't last very long -- by the end of February I was already referring to the book as An Other Place. I always tell budding writers not to worry too much about details like a novel's title or the opening line. You'll have plenty of time to fix those as work on the novel trickles on. The most important thing is to grab your central ideas and start writing. Get the bones of your story down on paper -- then you can fiddle with it and re-shape it as many times and in as many ways as you wish.

1998 saw me firing like a shooting star on the writing front. Regardless of the quality of whatever I was writing (I like to think that most of it was pretty good, but that's of course a subjective view), I was writing a LOT. By the time I started An Other Place on April 27th, I had written a couple of hundred pages of Midsummer's Bottom to finish it off, written three complete novels (including the first draft of Tunnels Of Blood), and edited a couple as well -- all since the start of January of that year. Ideas were flowing, I was writing fast, and I was taking on every sort of story imaginable, a mix of books for adults and children, and which covered all kinds of different genres. I hadn't published a book yet. There were no market expectations of me. I was free to experiment and try anything I liked. I had no money -- I was living with my parents, and getting £25 per week on unemployment benefits -- but I'd sold Ayuamarca (my first published novel, which would come out in 1999) and was in the process of selling Cirque Du Freak, so I had hope for the future, and creatively it was a glorious, unbelievably productive time.

An Other Place was maybe the apotheosis of my creative freedom. I'd done some weird, ambitious books before, and I'd do some strange, even more ambitious books after, but probably nothing quite this surreal, cerebral and utterly uncommercial. I didn't think there was an audience for this kind of story, but I didn't care. It intrigued me, and I wanted to see where it would lead, so I sat down and wrote it.

The first draft was something of a slog -- I didn't use quotation marks in the original draft, and there was a lot of descriptive passages and little action -- but on the 8th of May I noted in my diary: "I'm enjoying this more than I thought I would. It can be tough going at times, but there's a tongue-in-cheek flavour I hadn't anticipated that helps, and it's flowing quite nicely by and large."

I finished the first draft on the 4th of June 1998, just five weeks or so after I commenced work on it -- like I said already, I was a shooting star back in those days! But it then sat idle for jut over 18 years, until I began a second draft on the 20th of June 2016. I edited it three more times in quick succession after that, releasing it under the Darren Dash banner before the end of 2016.

Why the long break? Well, as I've explained in notes for my other adult books, my YA career took off big time, and with a crazy release rate (which was always of my choosing -- sometimes I had to pretty much force my publishers to release my books as swiftly as I wanted them to) and a massive amount of related touring, I had to prioritise, and my adult novels took a back seat for a while.

But I was also very unsure of what sort of a reception An Other Place might meet with. I never showed it to my agent, and over the years I'd chuckle to myself whenever I contemplated returning to the book and taking it to a publisher -- "Nobody in their right mind is ever going to publish THAT!" I confidently predicted to myself. (To my surprise, when I did finally publish, the book met with rave reviews, and has attracted a growing cult following.)

Then the ground shifted. By self-publishing my adult books under a different name, I put myself in a position where I didn't have to worry about trying to win over a publisher. Absolute freedom was mine again, and although An Other Place was the third Darren Dash book that I published, it loomed heavy in my thoughts when I was first making the decision to go down the self-publishing route. One of the things that made up my mind for me when I was considering self-publishing The Evil And The Pure was the knowledge that, if I started releasing books myself, there would be nothing to stop me putting out An Other Place, and by that stage I was REALLY curious to see what sort of a reaction it would receive -- not just from the buying public, but from myself, as I hadn't even looked at it in almost a decade and a half.

To my surprise and pleasure, the novel was in pretty good shape, and I didn't have to do TOO much work to get it ready for publication. Some fine-tuning, adding a little bit more action, working on some of the more problematic scenes... and it was good to go.

The biggest change I made was the ending. In the first draft, Newman didn't become the Alchemist. He simply got swallowed up by the sky at the end, in a deliberately vague finale that would have left readers in even more confusion than the rewritten ending. But that didn't work for me when I revisited the novel. While it remained an experimental, elusive piece of fiction, I felt like I needed to leave readers with SOME kind of a concrete conclusion -- not answers to all the questions that the book throws up (this was always a story where the questions were more important than the answers), but something to give Newman's story at least a semblance to a traditional narrative arc.

Although, in the first draft, Newman wasn't actually called Newman -- his name back then was Nurt Riplan, the Nurt short for Nurture. (His parents were hippies.) That didn't feel right when I came back to it. While considering alternatives, the name of Newman from the Seinfeld TV show (which I'd only recently watched for the first time) popped into my head, and it felt right -- the pun of New Man tickled me -- so I went with it.

His wasn't the only name-change. His best friends in Amsterdam were Chas and Dave in the first draft (after a pair of famous Cockney musicians) -- I changed them to Hughie and Battles after a couple of friends of mine. Nurt's girlfriend was called Crayleen -- Newman's girlfriend became Cheryl, after another friend of mine. There were minor characters with names like Tyrus, Plaim and Yermi, all named to add to the tripiness of the story, but in retrospect I decided things would play better if I gave the cast more normal names, so pretty much all of those got changed.

As weird and surreal as An Other Place is, it's also in many ways one of my most personal novels -- indeed, it's largely a form of self-therapy. As I've already established, I was writing up a storm in 1998. Everything was rosy on the creative front. But creativity was almost ALL of my life at that time. I'd watch two of three films every single day, along with a few episodes of various TV shows. I'd do some reading. And I'd do an awful lot of writing and editing. And that was pretty much that. I had almost no social life. I felt alone and lonely. Part of that was financial -- I couldn't afford to go out drinking, or off on holidays -- but a larger part was simply ME.

I've always been a touch OCD, and in the mid-to-late 90s that side of my personality was in the ascendancy. I had very carefully defined routines, and I would follow them obsessively. I had a few friends, but they had to slot in around everything else -- if I was going on a rare night out, it had to be carefully planned. There was little spontaneity or social variety in my life. I was having a wonderful time as a writer -- but I wasn't overly happy, or really enjoying my life as a human being.

In many ways I wrote An Other Place to try and change the course of my life. For all its weirdness and unfathomable angles, it's a very reflective book. I challenged myself with it, held up a mirror and made myself stare into it long and hard. The reason there's no glass in the book? That's because I didn't want any barriers between Newman (Nurt) and the outside world -- I had cut myself off in many ways from the world beyond, and this was my way of removing some of those barriers in the hope that my real world would be influence by the world of the book. Newman makes his living as a teller of tales in the book, and while he does it very well, he still feels isolated from everyone around him, cut off, adrift in a place that makes no sense to him -- that was where I was in life too, and I was saying to myself that it wasn't enough to be an aloof story-teller, I needed to start engaging more with the world around me, otherwise I would end up as lost as Newman.

An Other Place is a book about madness and loneliness, and it was a very conscious attempt on my part to pull back from my own madness and loneliness, to try and force myself to become a bit more "normal" and balanced. I think it worked, or at least played a part in helping me push myself more into a world that has always felt somewhat alien to me. I'm better at friendships these days, at socializing, at being able to chat and interact with my fellow human beings -- I even have a wife and children, and so far I haven't eaten any of them!

In truth, I think I'll always be "passing for normal" at best, an outsider like Newman doing what he can to slot in with the strange (to him) beings around him with their rules and ways of living that are at odds with his own. But "passing for normal" can be enough. It's certainly, in my experience, better than isolation and loneliness, regardless of how creatively glorious that can be. Everyone's different, of course. Some people can no doubt embrace their more anti-social aspects and thoroughly thrive in their own little worlds, but I need an anchor to normality -- otherwise I fear the darkness of the universe would swallow me whole, as it did to Nurt at the end of the first draft of the book.

One final word, about the "self-pleasuring" scenes when a naked Newman roams the city giving life to a whole menagerie of creatures. To me it's the wildest, most crazily enjoyable part of the book. I had the idea for that element years earlier -- initially I was going to write a short story (or a short comic story to be illustrated) called "Z is for Onanism." I never got round to writing that, but the idea stuck with me, and I returned to it later in An Other Place.

As ludicrous and amusing as those scenes are, they were also an important part of my self-reflection. As someone who was finding relationships hard, confusing work, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about people rather than trying to connect with him, viewing women as objects for my fantasies, where I could easily control them and make them do as I wanted, the way I was learning to control words and make them do what I wanted. But I knew I was really doing that because of fear -- fear of intimacy, fear of opening up to other people, fear of being rejected. This part of the book was me telling myself it was time to stop being afraid, to start talking with people rather than just observing them, to take chances on messy, complicated human relationships, rather than play it safe and confine myself to worlds of my own imaginative making.

In short, those scenes were me giving myself a big kick up the bum and telling myself to put the fantasies on hold for a while and go out in search of a real-life girlfriend!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Bigfoot in Bulgaria! When three friends go on holiday, protecting themselves from sunburn is their only concern. But when they run into a nightmarish, fantastical beast unlike any they've ever imagined, it becomes a savage fight for survival. They will burn in the day... but the night holds even darker terrors in store.

A tale of friendship, holidays, relationships, sacrifice and growth, where one painfully vulnerable young man must come of age or perish at the hands of a monster like none you will have seen before.

A grisly retelling of a legend as old as time.

Author Notes:

"Sunburn," my 6th published novel for adult readers, and the second that I released under the name of Darren Dash, went on sale on 1st May 2015.

Most of my Darren Dash books to date have had their roots far in my writing past. I was an incredibly prolific writer throughout my 20s and 30s, and I wasn't afraid to experiment. I tried lots of different types of books, horror of course, but also fantasy, science-fiction, noir thrillers, humour, and others that defied categorisation. I've always loved variety as a reader and movie viewer, and I wanted that to be reflected in my work as a writer. After all, Shakespeare was free to write whatever he wanted and jump around between genres and style, so why shouldn't a modern day writer be just as free?

Well, I think, if my experiences are anything to go by, that despite his skills and breadth of subject matter, old Will would struggle in this modern world to be quite as experimental as he was back in his own day! We live in a time when publishers, booksellers, and indeed a lot of readers want their authors to be very easily pegged. We're supposed to fit neat little niches -- thriller writer, horror writer, YA author -- and people don't like it when there's an overlap.

I valiantly fought against stereotyping in my early days, hoping I could be an exception to the rule, proof that an author could try all different sorts of stories and succeed across the board. But I ran into one brick wall after another, even while I was enjoying huge success as the YA novelist Darren Shan. I dunno -- maybe the novels I was writing just weren't commercial enough to work for a large audience. Or maybe they were TOO commercial to work for a more discerning audience. I still scratch my head when I can't find a normal publishing home for the likes of The Evil And The Pure or An Other Place. They're dark and weird, sure, but as a writer I'm convinced that they're original and inventive and engaging, and they garner hugely positive reviews from readers who share my opinion. Am I wrong? Are my readers wrong? Are he brave, happy few... deluded?!?

Anyway, I'll be honest -- there was a lengthy spell when I retreated from the adult battlefield. My YA books were beloved and selling up a storm... I was galloping around the world on an endless tour to support them... I didn't have as much time to write as I used to have, and I had to prioritise when I was at home... and the Darren Shan work ended up taking first priority. They paid the bills, of course, but that's not why I focused on them so much. I was sick of getting kicked in the teeth on the adult front. Rejection HURTS, even if you're a bestselling author. If people keep telling you your work is so worthless that they're not even going to take a chance on publishing... well, it's hard to keep going. I think I WOULD have kept going if I'd had nothing else in my literary life -- I write because I love to write and I NEED to write -- but I was very lucky to have the YA books, which I loved writing and which lots of other people loved too.

Eventually, as I've detailed in notes for my earlier adult books, I returned beaten and bruised to the field of adult publishing -- only to get beaten and bruised again! But this time I was determined to press on and put my adult work out there, even if I had to self-publish, which in the end I did.

I have quite a large back catalogue of novels that I wrote and have never published, and these have formed the bulk of my early Darren Dash career -- indeed, the plan is to have them form the bulk of the next several years of my Dash career too. I think some will never see print, but I hope that I'll be able to knock most of them into good enough shape to be able to share with the world, so that those few loyal (deluded?!?) fans who want to genuinely read everything that I've written will be able to finally see the full breadth of my imagination and ambition -- for better or worse. (Hey, I'm not saying every one of them is a certified winner!)

But at the same time I felt it was important to bring some new stories to the table as well. I don't want my Dash work to JUST be blasts from the past. I want to create some newer works too, to explore my adult imagination anew now that I'm in my 40s and beyond. So, when I decided after Lady Of The Shades that I was going to go down the self-publishing route with my future adult books, I stepped back into the ring and started work on something new.

That book was "Sunburn."

I'd been planning it for a few years, actually. Sunburn has been the bane of my life. I have pale skin and have often been scorched pink. Every time it happens, I curse myself for being so foolish, and vow never to let it happen again... but it invariably does! After one especially bad burning (in Ballybunion, in Ireland, of all places!) I started playing with ideas for a novel about a character who gets badly sunburnt and then runs into a monster. I guess I was hoping that I could use one of my stories to teach myself a valuable life lesson, since I didn't seem to be learning anything from life itself!

The story percolated at the back of my creative mind for several years, and when I finally sat down to write it, it flowed swiftly and easily. To my relief, the years away from adult fiction hadn't hampered me, and I blew through it at a fine old speed -- I started the first draft in February 2012, and did my final bit of editing three years later in March 2015. Three years is a long time for most authors, I suppose, but compared to my other Darren Dash books, this one was written in virtually the blinking of an eye!

The first half of the book was deliberately action-free. That didn't endear me to every reader (one potential traditional publisher heard I was working on an adult horror novel, approached me about the book and asked to read it, then noted with confusion, "You do know nothing much happens in the first half of the story, don't you?") but I've always enjoyed experimenting with pace, and stand by my call 100%. The second half of the story moves as a breakneck speed, and I felt it would carry more weight if we'd spent the first half getting to truly know the characters as they travelled around like any normal tourists.

Those characters aren't the most perfect of people, and that brought a few tutting remarks as well. It confused me when some readers complained about characters in their early 20s drinking a lot and acting selifishly and pettily, as if that was unheard of among young adults of that age who are still finding their feet in this world -- I dunno, maybe the 20somethings that I know (and have been) are very different to the majority of 20somethings out there in the world -- or maybe some people just have a very sanitized recollection of what they were like at that age!

"Sunburn" is the most throwaway of my Dash novels so far, and that was deliberate. Although I spent a lot of time working on my three main characters, I wanted this to be an over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek gorefest. It was horror writ large, not meant to be taken TOO seriously, a book to hopefully cause some readers to squeal with delighted disgust, rather than mess with their minds and cause them to question the ways of the world, the way I'd done in The Evil And The Pure and would do in An Other Place.

Martini Martinez is maybe my favourite character name ever! My friends Sarah and Juan were expecting a baby and we were discussing possible names. Juan is Mexican, and I came up with Martini Martinez, which tickled my fancy no small end. (We may have had a few drinks in us at the time!) Since "Sunburn" was going to be tongue-in-cheek, I thought the name suited it nicely, and I went with it.

The mischievous Curran was named after another friend of mine, Declan Curran, aka Dr Dec. And Liz was named after a friend of my wife's, who had read all of my books and complained that I'd named lots of characters after other friends, but not after her. Of course, we don't actually see Liz in this book, we just hear about her -- that was a little in-joke, my way of going, "OK, you want to be in one of my books? Fine, but you're not REALLY going to be in it!" (I actually named a real character after her later on, in one of my Zom-B books, and she even appeared on the cover, so all was well that ended well.)

As of writing this, I've never actually been to Bulgaria. I considered quite a few different locations for the story, but in the end something about Bulgaria appealed to me more than anywhere else. I did think about going there on a trip to check it out, but then I started researching the country online, and wondered if it would be possible to use modern technology to gather together all the bits and pieces that I would need to make the backdrop believable. I set myself the challenge of writing the book without going to Bulgaria -- figuring that if I felt it wasn't working, I could visit between edits and rewrite it. In the end I felt like I'd got away with it, and was delighted a few years later when I met a Bulgarian fan at one of my events, and she told me that I'd captured the country down to a tee!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

A dark, twisting crime thriller, set on the bloodstained streets of London. A gangster is trying to raise funds to buy legitimacy. A drug dealer is scheming to move up in the world. A degenerate man is exploiting an innocent young woman. A depraved priest is preying on his flock. A killer has returned to his old stomping ground.

A mob enforcer will draw these men of evil together, and in the darkness they will confront their demons -- and each other.

Author Notes:

PART ONE -- a "short" career break.

The Evil And The Pure was released on the 1st of February 2014, and marks the point where I started to use a completely different name for my adult books. I commenced work on the book on 25th April 2001, and finished my final edit a "mere" twelve years later on 10th August 2013!

First of all, I didn't spend twelve years slaving away on the book! Since very early in my career, I've juggled books around -- I'll do a first draft of a book, then set it aside for several months while I work on other material, return to it and rewrite or edit, set it aside for a few months again, and so on. Usually the process is spaced out over a two or three year period, but in this case there was a rather long gap between edits.

What happened was... my Darren Shan career. I've had two parallel and separate experiences as an author. Commercially speaking, on the one hand I've been a hugely successful YA author, while on the other hand I've been a struggling adult author. My books for younger readers took off and sold by the millions, but my books for adults never did, and sales have always stayed down in the thousands.

While I'm disappointed that my books for adults haven't done better, it's hard to be too downhearted about it, given how well my YA books have sold. In fact it's kind of neat to have a secret other life, one where I can do very different things, where I don't have to worry about having to please an editor and a publishing house, where I also don't have to worry about pleasing a large existing fan base -- because on the adult front I don't have one. Every book that I've published has meant a lot to me, regardless of its critical reception or sales -- I judge The Evil And The Pure just the same as I judge Cirque Du Freak, even though in terms of sales they're books that exist in totally alternate universes to one another.

I started out writing for adults, and for a time I was rotating pretty evenly between books for adults and children -- I'd write one or two Cirque Du Freak books, then a book for adults, another few CDF books, another for adults. But as my YA career went from 0 to 100 miles per hour, something had to give. Success makes demands of a writer. I toured aggressively and extensively in support of the books. I gave loads of interviews. I wrote a lot of supplementary material for the website -- indeed, I designed and uploaded everything on the first Darren Shan website, and maintained it by myself for quite a few years. I also went on quite a lot of holidays, and bounced back and forth between Limerick and London on leisure time -- I wrote in quiet and seclusion in Limerick, but lived the high life in London and abroad, going to loads of football (soccer) matches, fancy restaurants, art galleries, the theatre, and so on. Hey, I'm all for hard work, but you've got to enjoy the fruits of your labours too!

There just weren't enough hours in the day to maintain two careers. Something had to give, and when my adult publishers didn't come back for more after Hell's Horizon came out to minimal sales, it was an easy decision to make. I decided to put my adult books on hold while I focused on taking my Darren Shan novels as far as I could. I didn't mean for it to be as lengthy a break as it ended up being, but time has a way of slipping away unnoticed when you're busy and enjoying life, and several years swiftly passed without me working on any new adult material.

Then, as I've explained in my notes for The City trilogy, my YA publishers Harper Collins got interested in my earlier books for older readers and asked me if they could republish them. I re-edited Procession Of The Dead and Hell's Horizon, and returned to work on finishing off City Of The Snakes. The City trilogy sold quite well -- a lot better than they did the first time round -- but the books weren't bestsellers and my publishers struggled to break me into the adult market. I think a large part of the problem was that they published the books under the name of Darren Shan -- I always felt that was a mistake, and I objected to it at the time, but I was over-ruled, and reluctantly went along with it.

We ended up taking my fourth adult novel, Lady Of The Shades, to a different publisher, Orion, who had also published Procession Of The Dead (as Ayuamarca) when it was first released in 1999. They had a good plan to turn me into a writer of mainstream thrillers in the line of Lady Of The Shades, which sold well for them -- but, alas, I had other ideas. I'm a big fan of authors who can churn out high quality thrillers of a similar vein -- writers like Robert Ludlum, Lee Child, Michael Connelly -- but as a writer I've always been drawn to experimentation, trying new things, mashing up all sorts of genres, going where the wind and my imagination blow me.

Orion wanted another book like Lady Of The Shades, but I only had one of those in me. I presented them with a few different options -- I had lots of unpublished books in my back catalogue, and I'd written a new one about a guy who gets badly sunburnt in Bulgaria -- but they weren't keen. My first choice was The Evil And The Pure, which I had intended for quite a few years to be my next book after Lady. Orion actually worked on it with me, almost up to the point of publication, but then god cold feet and asked if they could cancel the deal that they had agreed when they signed me up. I might have been able to force them to publish it, but I didn't think there was any point in making them go with a book that they clearly weren't happy with, so I agreed to terminate our contract and we parted on amicable enough terms.

I knew I would face similar reservations if I took the book to another publisher -- and even if I could one who wanted to publish it, they would no doubt be looking for something similar as a follow-up, whereas I knew I was next going to release that book about the sunburnt guy in Bulgaria. So I decided, after much thought, to go down the self-publishing route. That wouldn't have been possible when I wrote the first draft of Evil, as the world of publishing was a different place back then, but much had changed and ebooks had made self-publishing a much more viable prospect. I knew nothing about that world, how to publish a book, or how to market it. The only thing I was certain of was that it was going to be a real tough struggle. But I've never let the prospect of a tough struggle put me off, so I rolled up my sleeves, started to do some research, and (having bandied around a number of possible pseudonyms) embarked on a new life as the unknown indie author, Darren Dash.

PART TWO -- a love song to London.

As with pretty much all authors, my literary influences are legion. I draw inspiration from all over the place, from things that happen to me or that I see, from movies and TV shows, and of course from books. Ever writer is in one way or another the product of the books they've read, and I've always worn my inspirations proudly, happy to openly tip my hat to the authors and books that have fed into my work. Sometimes they're not easy to credit, as the inspirations come from my subconscious -- for instance, the Little People in the Cirque Du Freak were inspired by the movie Phantasm, but I'd completely forgotten about it when I was writing the book, and it was only year later when I came across it in my DVD collection that I went to myself, "Oh yeah!" But I always knew that The Evil And The Pure was in large part the product of my love for James Ellroy's novels.

Like many people, I came to Ellroy through the movie of L.A. Confidential. I was blown away when I saw it, and swiftly started working my way through his entire back catalogue. Some of his earlier books were very rough around the edges, and he took his curt writing style a bit TOO minimal for my liking in some of his later work, but those classics in the middle... damn, they were great! I loved the speed at which the stories moved, the darkness they explored, the troubled and often unlikeable yet sympathetic characters at the heart of the plots. He usually pinned a story around two or three main characters, and of course they were mostly set in Los Angeles, a city that he probed just as deeply and beautifully as he probed the psyches of his flawed creations.

I was born in London, and although I've spent most of my life in Ireland, I've always bounced back and forth between the two. In the late 90s and early noughties I started spending more time in London than ever before, because as I started to get paid for my writing, I was able to travel more freely. I felt like I wanted to write a novel that served London as a dark love song, in the same way that Ellroy's novels eulogised L.A. And although I'd written most of my books with one main character at the core, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take a leaf out of Ellroy's books and cast four flawed, evil men as my narrative foils.

Actually, I guess if London could be classed as a fifth character, this was really a story of six characters -- the sixth being Evil. I've always been fascinated by evil and its workings, and have explored the nature of evil in many of my books. In this one I decided to go further than normal, to look at evil in as many of its distinct and different hues as I could. Thus, each of my four man characters represented a different type of evil -- a gangster who is a decent guy in many ways but who will commit terrible acts as part of his job; a nice, easy-going guy who will happily sell drugs that destroy lives, caring only about the money he makes; a thug who is full of rage and fear, who lashes out and kills to feed his dark urges; and a dangerously obsessed man who feeds on a lurid perversion and will sacrifice everything in pursuit of it.

Each character came together with speed and ease. I often find that the dark, troubled characters are the easiest to write about, and this was a book full of villains who would have been the key bogeyman in any other novel -- there were others in addition to the four I mostly focused on, such as the fallen priest and the mob boss who wanted to go straight.

The only real difficulty I had with the book was pulling back from the darkness over the course of the rewrites and edits. The first few drafts were even darker than the finished book. I gave my cast more leeway, wrote about their dark acts in greater detail, took the hypothetical readers closely and intimately into their warped worlds. That's something that I often have to do when writing about extreme characters -- to fully get under their skin, I have to go with their dark whims. It sometimes takes me into very uncomfortable zones, places where I know most readers won't want to follow. The task is then to whittle the story down, to draw back at times rather than always follow. It's not about watering down the darkness, but making it more palatable. I wanted these to be nightmarish creations, but not so repulsive that they drove readers away.

I based most of the book around the southeast of London, around landmarks and streets that I had explored as a child and later as an adult -- in many ways, even though the story has nothing to do with my life, this is my most personal and autobiographical work. I'd lived in an area called The Elephant And Castle, and stayed there when I was an university, so that featured heavily in the book. I had a great-aunt called Nora, who lived on Long Lane close to Tower Bridge and London Bridge, and I used to stay with her when I'd visit London in the late 90s and early noughties, so those areas fed into it too. The church where the foul Fr Sebastian lives was modeled after the English Martyrs church, which was my family's local church when they lived in the area -- my parents were married there and I was baptised there. The lab where the imprisoned Dr Phials works was based on a garage in a cul-de-sac a row or two along from Walworth Avenue, which is where my grandparents lived and where I stayed when I went to university. And so on, and so on.

A few of the characters were named after (but not based upon) real people too. The vile Kevin was named after a cousin of mine. And the taxi driver who appears late in the book, Dave English, was named after my taxi driver friend who has popped up in more than one of my novels -- if I come to a scene that requires a cabbie, I usually name him after Dave!

There's no denying that The Evil And The Pure is a dark, troubling book, but I hope I layered it with enough light and purity at the same time to render it an enjoyable read too -- ultimately it IS a story about good triumphing over evil, and shows that in even the bleakest of environments, there's always hope. I have to admit that this is a book of 99% evil and 1% pure, but that 1% is enough for light to win out over darkness in the end. I like to think it always will be.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

This is the end! B Smith is drawing near to the end of her journey, but there's still time for the biggest fight and biggest twist of her life. This is NOT going to end with a whimper...

Author Notes:

Zom-B Goddess, the 12th and final book of the series, went on sale on 22nd March 2016 in the USA and Canada, and 7th April 2016 in the UK.

I wrote up my plot notes for Zom-B Goddess on the 9th of September 2011 (the same day that I wrote up my notes for book 11), started writing it in October 2011, and finished my final edit on the 5th of November 2014.

*WARNING* These notes contain MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS about the ending of the series. I do not recommend reading on unless you have read the book. *WARNING*

I had a fairly good idea of where I wanted to take the story of Zom-B when I started writing the books back in 2008, but I wasn't sure exactly how many books it would involve (I guessed somewhere between nine and fifteen), or how many side-alleys I would go down with the story, or how exactly I was going to work my way towards the end. But one thing I was certain of was that ending. It burnt like a torch, drawing me forward. I wanted this series to serve as a warning to readers -- if we don't take a stand against the evil in our world... if we let the powerful and power-hungry manipulate us... if we just breeze along and pay no interest to what is going on around us... then we risk losing everything. To hammer that home, I wanted to write a series where everything WAS lost. Harking back to some of the darker sci-fi films of the 1970s, I planned to deliver a killer blow at the end, where the protagonist destroys the world in order to thwart the plans of the victorious villains. I even knew what the last line would be -- B Smith, thinking of what she had done, and all that was lost, would shrug and mutter, "Good bloody riddance to the lot of us."

Fade to black.

That's the ending I wrote in my notes in 2011, but by that time I'd started to realise that I didn't want to end the books that way. No -- I COULDN'T end the books that way.

I don't know much about my characters when I begin my books. They mostly grow out of the story-telling process, and I learn more and more about them as I progress. In B's case, she changed more than most of my heroes. I discovered depths to B Smith that had never crossed my mind when I began writing the first book. She was braver than I understood, tougher than I knew, more tormented by her mistakes than I'd anticipated. To have taken her through all that she'd had to endure, and then leave her there, at the end of the world, all alone and with only death to look forward to... it left a bitter taste in my mouth. It was the ending B had engineered for herself. Indeed, it was the ending she wanted, death a blessed relief after all she'd been through. But it wasn't what I now wanted for her. I wanted her to have more than that. I wanted to find a way to reward her, to leave her on a hopeful note rather than a crushing one.

But how? The story was set up in such a way that the end of the world was unavoidable. I wasn't prepared to change that, to have B save the survivors of humanity from the crazy schemes of Dr Oystein. That crucial point still needed to be made -- if we let the ruthless and the greedy use us as puppets, they will in the end destroy us. But I started to sense that there was a way out, that all could fall, making the point, but that I could have at least a hint of a light in the otherwise overwhelming darkness.

The babies were the answer. Holy Moly had also grown over the course of the books, becoming far more important a character than I'd foreseen, and that relationship proved to be B's salvation. Since B had truly become a mother to Holy Moly, why not carry that theme through, and have her also be the mother of a generation of hope? Why not tweak things so that love ultimately triumphs over hate, so that the babies save B the way she had hoped to save everybody else? I already had the Groove Tubes, which would allow B to sleep through the apocalypse and wake on the far side. All it required was a little leap of faith -- the idea that Mr Dowling could have found a way for his engineered babies to survive the unleashing of the viruses -- and B could live to fight another day.

I wasn't sure, at first, if that was a cop-out, so I went ahead and wrote the ending as originally planned. And I was right -- it was just too damn bleak. If we hadn't come to like B so much, it could have worked, but B became one of my all-time favourite protagonists, and readers came to reflect that view (not that I could be certain of that at the time, as I wrote the book before the first book had been released, but I had a pretty good hunch they would come to identify with her as strongly as I had). I couldn't just let her die, a goddess of complete destruction. So I set about turning her into a goddess of rebirth, and I stand behind that decision 100%. The ending that exists might not have been what I set out towards in 2008, but it's the ending the series deserved and needed. A good writer should never inflict their authority on a story, but rather follow where it leads, and this is where B and her colleagues led me.

Of course, the irony is that, in B's triumph, Dr Oystein actually got his wish, and so HE was ultimately triumphant too. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing, is it? I mean, he was nuttier than a squirrel's horde, I agree, but his goals were pure. The evils he identified were real. The threats to our existence that he feared were also real. The way he went about his business was skewed and wrong, but I'm not altogether ill at ease at the thought of his spirit enjoying a wry little smile in the afterlife. I don't think B would begrudge him that either.

As soon as the book was released, some fans wanted to know more about the future world. They asked if I would write about B again, detailing her adventures a thousand years from now, describing the world of Holy Moly and the other matured mutants. Sorry, but that's not a path I want to go down, and it's also not a path I think readers would enjoy. The ending of Zom-B Goddess is all about hope and rebirth. What I wanted to say with it is that the future is a blank page. WE get to decide what gets printed on that page. WE get to choose whether humanity soars with the angels or sinks with the demons. As bleak as things ever get, we always have that option of turning them around and righting whatever wrongs we've been part of. You don't need me to tell you what happens a thousand years from now, because that's a decision all of us make with every step and choice that we take in this life. That's not really B Smith stepping out into the future at the end of the book. That's YOU.

I hope you enjoy that future as much as you've enjoyed this small journey towards it.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

B has broken free of Mr Dowling's lair, and is desperate to make her way back to County Hall, to deliver a vial to Dr Oystein that will swing the battle his way and restore control of the world to the living. But her enemies are in hot pursuit, and there are dangers and foes that she isn't even aware of -- but she's about to find out...

Author Notes:

Zom-B Fugitive, book 11 of the series, went on sale on 10th September 2015. I started work on the book almost exactly four years earlier, on the 9th of September 2011, and finished my final edit on the 1st of August 2014.

This book features a couple of truly horrible twists, one in the first half and one at the end. I discuss both of those in these notes, so there are massive SPOILERS, so if you have not read Zom-B Fugitive, I VERY strongly urge you not to read these notes until you have.

OK, before we get to the twists, let's deal with some other issues first...

Early in the book, B has a run-in with a couple of mutants called Glenn and Ossie. Even though their time in this series is brief, I tried to give them a memorable scene, and in a way I regret not introducing them in Zom-B Bride, as it would have been fun to let them bicker a bit more! But there wasn't really room for them in book 10, so I had to squeeze as much as I could into their few pages in this one. Like many of the characters in the series, they were named after real people, but in this case not after people that I actually know. Rather, they were named after Glenn Hoddle and Ossie Ardiles, two of my favourite Tottenham Hotspur football players when I was a child.

We get to see much more of Holy Moly in this book, and I loved writing the little one's scenes. I think Holy Moly might well be the sweetest character I've ever created, albeit in a very weird, menacing sort of way.

I was happy to bring back some of the supporting characters, B's room mates and the twins, although it's a bittersweet reunion, given the circumstances. And it was a sheer joy to lob Barnes back into the mix -- I doubt if anyone saw that return coming! It can be a dangerous thing, bringing back a character who hasn't featured in a series for a while, especially if that character's reappearance comes out of the blue. The temptation is to weave the character back into the storyline at an earlier date. It would have been an easy thing to do -- Barnes could have returned to the fold in an earlier book, perhaps when B made it back from her mission in book 8. But I liked the shock of him just suddenly being there. This is a series, more than any of my others, where the shocks are as important as anything else. I've been hitting readers with them since book 1 and the reveal that B was actually a girl, and I didn't want to let up at this late stage. Hence... tah-dah! It's Barnes!

The Prospect of Whitby is a real pub. Back around the time when I was starting work on Zom-B, I moved flats in London. While I ended up going central (hence all the scenes set around County Hall), I spent a lot of time looking in the East End. Wapping was one of the areas I explored, and I had a drink in the famous old Prospect of Whitby while I was in the area. The pub made a big impression on me and I filed it away for use at some point in the future.

I really liked the scenes of B and Barnes together. They're a pair of battlers who have both lost so much that the fight hardly seems worth fighting, yet still they go on out of a sense of duty. He's the father she deserved and might have had in another life, while she's the daughter he would have been so proud of. I wish they could have sailed off into the sunset together and enjoyed a long, quiet, happy life. But they couldn't, of course, because the true villain of the series still had plans for Becky Smith, and he couldn't let her go, and Barnes was in teh way, so... :-(

And now, folks, it's time to talk about...

Dr Oystein Dowling.

There are very few random things in a Darren Shan book that don't link up with the key plot lines at some point. When we first met Dr Oystein back in book 4, he mentioned in a throwaway statement that Oystein was his first name, not his surname. That should have set warning bells ringing! Heh -- I love those clues which are so obvious in retrospect, yet totally slip by readers first time round. The truth about Dr Oystein was there from the beginning, and I'm sure lots of fans kicked themselves for not picking up on them. Although, having said that, a few fans did ask me over the years if the good doctor was as well-meaning as he seemed. They sensed something lurking beneath the still waters. When Mr Burke met his unexpected end in County Hall, there were murmurings among the Shansters -- had he really been sent to kill the doctor by Mr Dowling, or was there more to it than met the eye?

At the same time, harking back to the things we learnt about Mr Dowling in book 11, it's not a simple black and white issue. Dr Oystein isn't rotten to the core. There's far more to him than that. His story is as tragic as his brother's (and, indeed, his nephew's) and it is finally told, shorn of any lies or cover-ups, in book 12, the final book in the series, which also manages to feature some huge twists, along with the biggest fight scene of the series. I tried with this series to save the best for last, and I think I just about pulled it off!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

B Smith has been reunited with the murderous maniac clown, Mr. Dowling. To her shock and consternation, he's desperate to make B his partner in crime. Mr. Dowling disgusts her, but B thinks she can see a way to control him and maybe even save the world. But it will involve a sacrifice far greater and more surreal than any she has contemplated before...

Author Notes:

I started work on Zom-B Bride on the 8th of June 2011, and finished my final edit on the 19th of June 2014.

After the horror... comes the romance! I'd known from quite early on that B was going to be wooed by Mr Dowling -- I'd even jotted down the title, Zom-B Bride, in my notes of 4th of August 2009, when I was trying to flesh out ideas from book 4 onwards, although a lot of the plot was still unclear to me at that stage. What I knew for sure was that B was going to get married, and that it would be a wedding quite unlike any other!

Back in 2009, I didn't know how many books there were going to be in the series. By the time I came to this book, the structure had solidified into a nice quartet of trilogies, similar to the structure of The Saga Of Darren Shan. (It's interesting to note that I didn't intentionally set things up that way in either case -- it was simply the way the stories resolved themselves.) The first three books were about establishing the ground rules, running B through the early stages of the zombie apocalypse, following her as she wanders through the chaos of London under siege, introducing a lot of the main characters without telling readers too much about them. Books 4 to 6 were about slotting her in with the Angels and introducing the rest of the main cast. Books 7 to 9 focused on the one hand on B's struggles with Dan-Dan, but in reality were mainly about lining her up with Mr Dowling, and putting her within reach of that all-important vial of Schlesinger-10. And books 10 to 12 would follow her as she attempted to get Schlesinger-10 into the hands of Dr Oystein, in a bid to vanquish the zombies and hand control of the world back to the living.

Having said that, in 2011 Schlesinger-10 wasn't actually called Schlesinger-10, and Clements-13 had a different name too. My working titles for the pair of viruses were Zomex and Pandortia. When my editor pointed out that these names were confusing, I renamed them in honour of two ladies who worked with my agent, Emma Schlesinger and Rachel Clements. It was tricky, to be honest, keeping the names and viruses clear inside my own head. I often got them mixed up, or got the colours wrong! Luckily I was able to catch all those mistakes (I hope!) over the course of the editing process.

I had lots of fun describing Mr Dowling's lair. Although he's a huge presence in the series, we see very little of him over the course of the first nine books. In fact, I think fans might be surprised by just how little he features -- if you read back through the series, and look for scenes that he's actually in (as opposed to scenes where characters are talking about him) you'll find there are only a handful before Zom-B Bride. This was deliberate on my part. One of the thing's I'd learned from my other series was that if you show too much of the villains, you risk diluting their essence, of rendering them less monstrous in the eyes of the readers. So this time round, I was determined to keep Mr Dowling's involvement to a minimum. (Though I did succumb to temptation and give him a starring role in the additional short book, Zom-B Circus, as a little treat for fans who wanted to see more of him.) While I describe his lair in a lot of detail in the early drafts, I ended up writing even more about it, when my editor asked me to really ramp up the grossness factor -- that's the sort of editorial input I like!

The key thing in this book, though, wasn't about grossing readers out, but in revealing a very different side of Mr Dowling. The main theme of Zom-B has been not to make assumptions about people in life, to keep an open mind. The world can very rarely be boiled down to simple black and white explanations, and I've tried to show at every turn along the way that this is really a world of greys, where the good guys can do terrible things, and where the bad guys can in reality be a lot more humane than they seem. It wasn't about trying to make Mr Dowling suddenly develop a good streak, but rather to show how he is to a degree a victim of fate, a man who could have been good, but who wound up going the way of evil for reasons beyond his control. And he's also a man who is open to the possibility of change, reaffirming another of the touchstones of the series, that there's hope for all of us, that even the worst person in the world can pause, re-evaluate their life, and change.

We don't meet any new characters in this book, but one of my favourites from the series is finally given a name -- Holy Moly! I wasn't sure if the name was too corny or not, but it seemed to suit the adorable little menace, so I went with it. Holy Moly is another character that we don't see a lot of in the first nine books, but the baby will feature heavily (and crucially) in the last three, and as I already said, it becomes one of my favourite characters by the end. I hope my readers end up being as taken with the mini monster as I am.

It was nice to bring back Mrs Reed too. I'd planned to have her return from the beginning, although I wasn't sure in what capacity -- I hadn't sussed that she would be a great teacher for the babies, but when I got near to this point and began thinking about how I might reincorporate her, it jumped out at me and I saw that it could only ever have played out this way.

I knew the marriage wasn't going to last, and that it would all end in tears, but there still a lump in my throat when I was writing the wedding scene. I tried to bring as much true romance to the table as I could, within the warped framework of the series. When they wed, B honestly hopes that she can make a go of it as Mrs Dowling, and I hope that readers feel that way too. When she's forced to turn on her husband, she's genuinely regretful, and I shared that regret. In an ideal world, I'd have let them enjoy a long, happy union. She would have been a positive influence on Mr Dowling, and the clown would have adapted and regained his humanity. They would have worked to clear the world of the living dead and its other menacing tyrants, to make it a safer, happier place.

But, hell, that wouldn't have made for an exciting final couple of books, would it?!?

And those two books WILL be exciting. Zom-B Bride slowed the pace down, which was necessary after what had happened in the last couple of books, but it picks up again in Zom-B Fugitive, when we start our wrapping up of B Smith's tale. It's going to be fast, it's going to be frantic, and it's going to be furious. The sprint to the finishing line starts here...View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The 9th book in the series. After being betrayed and captured by the most heinous survivors of the human race, B Smith lands back in the clutches of a fiend she had hoped to never see again, someone who is intent on making her suffer in the most tortuous ways. Discovering the fate of loved ones from B's past adds to the agony and calls into question just how much B is willing to sacrifice in the name of justice.

Author Notes:

Zom-B Family, the ninth book in the series, went on sale on 25th September 2014. I started work on the book on 14th March 2011 (although I'd figured out the main plot and written a brief synopsis of it a year earlier, in April 2010) and finished work on it on 11th January 2014.

I knew this was going to be the hardest-hitting book in the series, since a large section of it was going to have to focus on Dan-Dan's torture of B. With the first draft, I had to let him do far more to her than you read about in the finished book. To know exactly what was going on, I had to write about it in detail. I knew that I would have to cut out a lot of what I was writing, and that my editors would demand I tone it down in places, but it was important to map it out as carefully as I could in the beginning.

I actually had an easier time with my editors than I'd imagined. They could see that the torture wasn't for show, that it was a vital part of the book -- indeed, of the entire series, as the plot of the next book could only work if B ended up in a broken, isolated state. Although, having said that, B isn't really broken. Physically crushed, yes, but her fiery spirit remains bruised but intact, and I think this is why the book proved such a hit with readers -- it shows that no matter what the world does to us, we can overcome anything if we stay true to our convictions and refuse to bend to the iron hand of our would-be oppressors. The short message of Zom-B Family is that you can kill us, but you can't destroy us. There's a lot more to humans than just their skin and bones.

So, while my editors certainly urged me to trim down the violence, and draw back from some of the most shocking scenes, they afforded me a lot more room to manoeuvre than they might have. I think this is where I got to reap one of the advantages of being an established author. If this had been the work of a beginner, they would have been more worried, and might have demanded more cuts. But I've been around long enough for readers to trust me, to know that I don't throw in gore and bloodshed just for the hell of it. There have been hardly any controversies about my books over the years, because readers can see the moral underpinnings. If Zom-B Family had been the work of a first-timer, people might not have been so willing to go along for the ride -- it might have read as a bit of evil, twisted "fun." But those who've been following my work over the course of the series (and before) knew there was nothing salacious about this, that I was taking them down this dark path for a very good reason, and that there would be light (of a sort) at the end.

Although I trimmed a lot of the book, I only made one key change in response to an editorial suggestion. It regarded the death of Dan-Dan. In the early drafts, B let the children whom he had tortured kill him. This seemed like poetic justice to me, and it was something I had planned for a long time. I was pleased with how it read, but my editor argued that B had changed over the course of the series, and while she might have let something like that happen earlier in the story line, by this stage she would want to do all she could to protect the innocent. I reflected on that and decided that my editor was right. B had outgrown my original vision of her, and it would have been wrong of her to allow the children to become killers. So I changed it. Having said that, I liked the original scene a lot, so here it is, in all its chilling, cynical glory!

* * * * *

“This creep’s mine,” I tell Rage, ready to fight to the death if he tries to rob me of the pleasure.

“I wouldn’t dream of getting in your way,” Rage purrs. I grin tightly and move forward. “However…”

“What?” I roar, turning to glare at him, ripping a knife from its holder in the belt and pointing it at his head.

Rage doesn’t flinch. He simply smiles and says, “I know you’ve suffered a lot and want this more than anything. But don’t you think that lot are more deserving of the honour?” He nods at the children gathered around the balcony.

I stare at the kids, then at Rage. “You can’t be serious,” I croak.

“We’re tough bastards, you and me,” Rage says softly. “We can take any sort of torment in our stride. But they were innocent before he got his filthy paws on them. Can you imagine what it would have been like if you’d fallen into Dan-Dan’s clutches when you were a normal, young girl?”

“But… no… it would be wrong to make them…”

“I’m not talking about making them do anything,” Rage says. “If they don’t want to soil their hands, fine, you’re more than welcome to him. But I think they’re due their revenge if they want to take it.”

Rage reaches out and takes the belt from my unprotesting fingers. He removes the knives and flicks them at the floor in turn, so that they stick in it lightly, heads embedded in the soft oak boards which Dan-Dan probably had installed, hilts and handles quivering hypnotically. “Take them if you want,” he tells the wide-eyed children, then looks to me for approval.

“Yeah,” I mutter weakly. “But decide quickly. I’ve got to be out of here. There are others who need help too.”

Dan-Dan’s darlings gaze solemnly at the knives. Then one of them steps forward. It’s the boy who kept on singing that first day when I was being tortured, the one who seemed afraid of the nightmares that sleep would bring. He picks up a knife, nods grimly at me, then turns to face his captor.

The other children follow suit. There aren’t enough knives for all of them. Those without a weapon hook their fingers and bare their teeth. Not one of the kids holds back. All are hellbent on following this through.

“Please,” Dan-Dan weeps as they advance. “Little ones… darlings… you know I love you. Be nice to Dan-Dan.”

One of the youngest girls screams. The rest of them take up her anguished howl. Then they fall on him in a pack, stabbing, plucking, tearing. Dan-Dan screams as well, but not for long, disappearing beneath them. The last thing I see of him is his beloved sailor’s hat, torn in half and tossed away as a rag by one of his rabid darlings.

I watch the slaughter numbly, a monster coolly observing a monstrous act. I don’t feel as much satisfaction as I wish, or as much shame for having turned these children into killers as I should. This is simply the way of things in this brave new world, and the most emotion I can muster is a dull sense of gratitude that I don’t have to worry about Lord Wood… Daniel… Dan-Dan any more.

“The fleet has sailed, sailor boy,” I whisper, throwing a mock salute his way, even though he no longer has eyes to see me with. “Bon voyage!”

* * * * *

Dan-Dan's torture of B provides the backbone of the story, but of course this book isn't really about the child-killer at all. What it's really about is family and racism. I knew, back when I was writing the first book, that B and her father had unfinished business, and that I needed to further explore the issue of how racism warps your view of the world and leads you to commit horrific acts. We knew from our initial encounter with him that B's dad was a nasty piece of work, but I wanted to take that further and show the end results of unrestrained racist behaviour. Intolerance can have cataclysmic consequences -- World War II taught us that, and one would have thought that it was a lesson we'd never forget, but recent global events and the turn in many countries towards extremism and xenophobia, shows that sadly the human race taken as a whole has a short memory.

It was important for me to not turn B's father into a complete monster. He's even more of one than he was when the story began, but he's still capable of bravery and sacrifice. For me that's the most troubling thing about racists -- if we could dismiss them as pantomime villains, they would be relatively easy to deal with, but they come wrapped in all manner of contradictions, the same as most people. To confront and defeat evil, it's important to full understand it, and what I was trying to show in this book was that haters will sometimes have their positive, even admirable points -- but it's vital to never let that blind us to the hate at their core. B's dad was made of noble stuff in many respects, and if the racism had been stripped from him, he could have been a hero. But he made hatred of other people the centre of his universe, and that reduces him to the level of Dan-Dan, Justin Bazini and their like -- a potentially good man, lost forever to the darkness.

In terms of the overall story, Zom-B Family is the real turning point of the series. Things have built to a head over the course of the last couple of books, and from this point there's no turning back. B has been betrayed, ground down, and abandoned. The fight hasn't been knocked out of her -- the scene in the cage, where she tries to save Vinyl, is proof of that (and, by the by, is probably my favourite out of all the fight scenes that I have written) -- but she has been weakened and stripped bare of many of her strengths. Her rescuer is a man far more dangerous than those who came close to annihilating her in this book, and who knows what he has planned for her -- maybe the worst is yet to come. One thing's for sure -- we're about to find out, as book 10, Zom-B Bride, sees us delving into the home and lair of everybody's fave psychotic clown -- Mr Dowling! What happens next is going to shake B -- and you, the reader -- to the bone. Things are about to take a very strange turn indeed...View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The eighth book in the series. B and her fellow Angels fight to retake control of New Kikham from the Klu Klux Klan, but that is only the starting point for this devastating entry in the series. Back in London, troubling answers and explosive secrets from Dr Oystein's past will be revealed, while Dan-Dan's presence stirs up angry feelings among his captors, which will lead to a shocking showdown and a startling unmasking. The stakes are rising... the heroes are dropping... the end is nigh...

Author Notes:

Zom-B Clans went on sale on 3rd July 2014. I started work on the book on the 31st of January 2011, and finished work on it on the 16th of October 2013.

The book was called Zom-B Klan for most of the time that I was working on it, but my publishers were very nervous about putting it out under that title, or about featuring a member of the KKK on the cover (which was my suggestion before they settled on the dog, Sakarias). While that was disappointing, I had expected it -- even though this series has tackled racism head-on since the first book, it's a very sensitive subject, and I understand the reluctance of my publishers to bring the anti-racist angle to the forefront. A straight-up horror book is an easier sell than one that throws in the problem of dealing with racism, so I was happy enough to compromise. But for me the book will always be known as Zom-B Klan.

Book 8 followed on smoothly from book 7, Zom-B Mission. I had ended that book mid-action, so the beginning of Zom-B Clans was one of the easiest starts of any of my books, since I was able to carry straight on from where I had left off. It was a fun way to kick things off, with a large-scale action scene that would have been the finishing point for most other books. I relished siccing the Angels on the Ku Klux Klan, although it was a more sobering moment when I came to deal with the treacherous survivors in the aftermath of the big battle. This is one of the problems we face in everyday life -- it's easy to confront a violent extremist who launches an attack on us, but how do we deal with lesser degrees of racist and intolerant people who live and work among us, whose views create only small chasms between us and them, who aren't overtly evil, but who do bad things or allow bad things to happen because of their beliefs? I don't think there are any simple answers to these questions, and I don't offer any here.

I loved showing a bit more of Owl Man and his pet, Sakarias, but Dan-Dan was the real guilty pleasure of this book! He's such a slimy, disgusting creep, but he has a certain charming quality as well -- as much as the Angels loathe him, they find themselves liking him in an odd sort of way, and I think many readers will feel that way too. That's one of the hidden dangers of the world -- the most deadly menaces are those with an easy smile, who find it easy to win people over, who charm their way into positions of power, which they can then abuse and turn to their own advantage. While zombies will probably remain a fictional threat in the real world, vile manipulators like Dan-Dan are all too common.

I also loved the way Rage's development continues. Rage is one of the more complex characters in these books, someone who can swing any which way. It often seems as if he makes his choices on a whim, but we're never sure if that's just a charade, if he thinks about everything in-depth and at great length before he acts. The real beauty of the character is that we never know for sure -- indeed, by the end of the series, we'll probably still be none the wiser. All we know for definite is that everyone should be keeping a careful eye on Rage at all times, because he has the capacity to be friend or enemy, hero or villain, depending on how the winds inside his strangely-wired head blow...

The two big twists near the end of the book were probably my favourite twists since the pair near the end of book 1, where B turned out to be a girl and was then killed. I don't think these twists are quite as earth-shaking as those, since a lot of readers will have anticipated them, given the way the series has been shaping up... but they're pretty damn close! They also set up the next book marvellously -- could there be any excuse for what Rage did? Could the figure who appears at the end turn out to be B's salvation or doom? Which of them should we be more scared of?

The character of Coley returns in Zom-B Clans, having featured in Zom-B City and Zom-B Gladiator earlier in the series -- but he wasn't actually in the early drafts of the book. I hadn't planned to bring him back -- I thought his part in the story was over and done with. But as I went on editing the series, I started to get curious, wondering what might have happened to him after we last see him in book 6. I began to feel that we had unfinished business with him, so I looked into the possibility of how to work him back into the story, and teaming him up with Dan-Dan again just seemed the most likely way -- having served the child-killer once, it was logical that he should look to link up with him again.

I was sorry to say goodbye to Jakob in this book. He was one of the Angels I most enjoyed writing about. But I felt it was important to show that there could be a connection between the living and the living dead, that any group in life can overcome any differences that might exist between themselves and people who they don't have much in common with. We're encouraged by many of our leaders and people who profit from wars to believe that there are insurmountable differences between certain sectors of society, and that armed conflict is the only way to resolve those differences. I don't believe that. I think we can almost always find common ground if we look for it, and work together if we're brave enough and open enough to accept people as they are. I say "almost" because sometimes certain groups DO put themselves beyond the reach of others, and DO create a situation where conflict is unavoidable -- but those sorts of cases would be a lot rarer, I believe, if we could look inside ourselves for understanding and tolerance before looking at others with suspicion and loathing.

We learn about Schlesinger-10 and Clements-13 for the first time in this book, and they're the key to what happens over the second half of the series -- indeed, everything from the beginning has been building to this. The viruses are actually named after two good ladies who worked for my agent when I was writing Zom-B Clans, Emma Schlesinger and Rachel Clements. Owl Man's real name was also inspired by someone I know -- Tom White is the husband of one of my aunts!

Zom-B Clans ends on another cliffhanger -- indeed, it's like that all the way to the end of the series from this point on. Having worked some huge cliffhangers into certain books in my other series, I thought I'd go all-out this time round -- good news for those who enjoy such ending -- but hell on Earth, I know, for those who don't! Oh well, at least now that all the books have been released, you don't have to endure a wait to find out what happens next, unlike the readers who were following the storyline as each book was originally released.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Cat Ward is a bored, unhappy teacher in B Smith's school. On the day of the zombie apocalypse, she does anything she can to escape, and actually starts to enjoy life more in the following days and weeks than she ever did before. But somebody has an eye on her... somebody who is intrigued by her ruthlesness... The circus has come to town. The ringmaster is calling the shots. But what does he want with Cat Ward?!? A short, additional book, not part of the main storyline, though it does tie in with it. Best read between books 4 and 8 of the series.

Author Notes:

Zom-B Circus was published on 17th April 2014. I started the novella in July 2013, and finished work on it in February 2014, one of the shortest periods I've ever spent working on a published book.

My publishers wanted to pitch a short Zom-B book to the organisers of World Book Day 2014, and asked me if I had any ideas. It wasn't something I'd thought about before, but I put my thinking cap on and came up with this surreal little gem. I thought it would be fun to tell a story that didn't revolve around B Smith, that let us see what some of the living survivors had got up to while we were focusing on B's story. Once I had the idea in mind, I ploughed ahead and wrote the story as soon as I could, even before we had heard back from the WBD folk about whether or not they actually wanted to include the book in their lineup.

As it turned out, they didn't! My publishers pitched them the plot of the book, and they turned it down without even waiting to read the finished novella. They said it was because it was too dark for their target audience, which surprised me a lot several months later, when Lord Loss was listed among their Top 50 Children's Books of all time! For me, World Book Day should include teenagers as well as younger readers, but apparently the WBD crew that year didn't share my view.

The rejection by WBD threw up something of a problem -- what could we do with the book? I was determined to release it, as I thought it was a really neat story. I would have liked to release it as an unofficial World Book Day title, in direct competition with the official WBD list, but my publishers were wary of doing that, as they didn't want to upset the WBD team -- unlike me, they'll have to work with them again in the future. In the end, after much discussion, we decided to release it as an eBook, but also to make a physical version which we would give away free with SFX magazine (who were great in their support for the project) and via Easons in Ireland. It was also picked up for release by my American and Canadian publishers as an eBook.

The main character, Cat Ward, was actually named after my publicist at Simon & Schuster, Catherine Ward! I get on very well with Catherine -- she was also one of my publicists at HarperCollins years ago -- so I was a bit wary of naming such an unpleasant character after her, but luckily she was delighted to get the nod. I also named the Bearman family after real people -- Jules works for my agent, Paul is her husband and George is her son. And the mutant Claudia is named after Jules' daughter.

Although Cat's story isn't part of the main storyline, I was keen to have it tie in with B's story in certain key ways. So we get to see some of the characters from the series -- B, Mr Dowling and Kinslow are obvious additions from the Zom-B books, but there are some lesser players in among the mix too, and some of the characters and artifcacts from this book will also crop up in the books in the second half of the series, so watch out for them!

I also wanted to use this book to keep Mr Dowling and his babies fresh in the minds of readers. We don't see much of the clown in the middle third of the series -- he's a lurking but unseen presence. This was a chance for me to remind fans of how dangerous and deranged he is. And it was also a way to write some more about the babies. In fact, this is the first time that we get to see more than the single baby that we met in Zom-B Baby. I think most fans assumed there would be more than one, but it's not until you read this short book that you find out for sure that there are lots and LOTS of the small menaces on the prowl -- and I'm not giving too much away when I confess that we'll be seeing a whole lot more of them very shortly...

I'm really pleased with the way Zom-B Circus turned out. While it's not absolutely essential, I think it's a good addition to the series, and I'd recommend fans check it out if they want to get the FULL story. Of course, the only difficulty for me now is, do I describe my Zom-B series as being 12 or 13 books in length?!?View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The seventh book in the series. B Smith and the other Angels are relieved to finally receive their first mission - to safely escort a group of human survivors from the zombie-infested streets of London to New Kirkham, a barricaded safe haven in the country. But after battling through crowds of undead monsters, B discovers that the survivors of the town don't necessarily represent the best of humanity. And when evil influences make their way to New Kirkham, unearthing demons from B's past, the humans will be forced to choose between being honorable and being safe. The second half of the series starts here, and it will be a fast-paced, roller-coaster ride all the way from this point until the end...

Author Notes:

Zom-B mission was released on 27th March 2014. I started it on the 30th of August 2010, and did my final bit of editing work on the book 3 years later, in August 2013.

Book 6 brought the first major movements of the storyline to a close. I didn't know, when I started book 7, that the series would neatly split into two halves of equal length -- at the time I thought there could be anywhere between 10 and 15 books in the series. But I knew I had finished introducing all of my main characters, and that the storyline would kick up a few notches from this point onwards, as I began to weave together the various plot strands and set about bringing all of the major players back into the action.

I'd always planned to set a portion of the story outside the confines of London, so that we could see what was happening elsewhere in the country. The series could have actually accommodated a longer stretch outside the city, which is why I wasn't certain how many books I would need to finish the story. It would have been very easy to have B move on to a few other places like New Kirkham, the town that features here, and to run into a variety of friends and foes beyond the familiar streets of London. But ultimately I decided against that, as I felt there was no good reason to stretch the series any further -- New Kirkham gives us a taste of what it's like elsewhere in the world, as the shattered remnants of humanity strive to piece their lives back together, and a taste is all we truly require.

I wanted the second half of the story to be more sharply focused than the first. When the series began, it was important not to reveal too much too quickly, and to give each book a different feel, to create a sense of disorder and unease -- B wanders randomly through the streets of London (well, it seems random to B), desperately trying to find her place in a world gone mad. By the start of Zom-B Mission, she has found her place (or so she believes) and has settled into life as a zombie Angel. B is much more relaxed and confident in this book, as close to true happiness as she has been since the downfall of humanity -- indeed, in a way, she's the happiest she has ever been. While there are still a lot of twists and surprises in store for B, she's more purposeful in this book and those which follow, taking control of her destiny and actively working to make the world a better place.

Zom-B Mission is where the stakes start to rise. B has trained hard and is ready to take the battle to her enemies, but that means stepping further into the ferocious madness and exploring even more of the darkness than she has in the first six books. Up until this point, B has been running away from the horrors of the new and twisted world. This book is where she stops to face them -- but facing true horror is never an easy thing, and the extra responsibilities she takes on will mean that she has to endure challenges far more testing than any she has endured to date. B thinks she's ready to deal with those responsibilities. Dr Oystein thinks so too. But neither can know for sure until she tackles the demons of the world beyond and conquers or is conquered by them...

As in the earlier books, I have featured names of people I know, along with places that are important to me. The base where B meets up with her old friend Vinyl again is actually the building where my original publishers, Harper Collins, were based when I was writing these books. Even though I ended up taking Zom-B to a different publisher, I'd enjoyed my years as a Harper Collins author, and kept the reference point for nostalgia's sake -- though it also helped that, geographically speaking, it slotted in nicely with the direction B was heading!

Pearse and Conall, the pair of Angels who are working with Vinyl, are named after cousins of mine. They're both ginger, which is why the characters are ginger too, and Pearse is small like his counterpart in the book, while Conall is burlier, again like the character based on him -- at least, that's what they're like as children, though that might change over the years to come! And the reason they're playing cards when we first meet them is that I used to play cards all the time with their father when we were their age.

The little girl who features on the cover, Liz, is named after one of my wife's friends. Liz has read all of my books, and had jokingly complained a few times over the years, wanting to know why I hadn't named anyone after her, when I'd named lots of characters after friends who didn't read my books. I've named a character after Liz in one of my adult books (not yet published), but the character is only talked about in the book -- she never actually appears in the story! I was going to leave things at that, but then I relented and decided to feature Liz in this book too -- and, not only that, to put her on the cover. Hopefully that's the end of the real Liz's complaints!

When we get to New Kirkham, we run into the town's no-nonsense mayor, Biddy Barry, who is named after... my mother! My mum's real name is Breda O'Shaughnessy, but her maiden name was Breda Barry, and when she was a child her nickname was Biddy Barry The Snob! I'd already used the surname of Barry in the series, in the prologue of book 1 (Brian Barry, one of the first casualties), but I figured it would be OK to use it again. In real life the pair are related -- my mum is Brian's aunt -- but there is no connection in the novels -- at least, none that I'm aware of!

We also run into the KKK in this book. I'd known from early on that I was going to return to the issue of racism, since it's one of the key themes of the series. While the KKK have never established themselves in the UK, I figured this would be a good time for them to step forward, since organisations like this tend to prosper when times are tough -- when people are scared and angry, they often turn to extremists who promise them a simpler way forward. We've seen that in real life over the last decade, following the economic crisis and the so-called War On Terror, and I wanted to reflect it in the world of Zom-B.

We also run into a dog with a difference in this book. We've seen the hound before, in Zom-B Baby, but it looked like a normal, harmless sheepdog in that book. Here, we get to see that it's a whole lot more -- proof, if any more was needed, that in the world of Darren Shan, you need to be wary of everyone... and everything...View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The sixth book in the series. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, B Smith has decided to live -- and to fight for good as long as possible. However, London is overridden with the brain-eating undead and swarming with human mercenaries whose sense of right and wrong dissolved when society did. When they lay a trap, B is captured. And it'll take dozens of battles -- and the fight of a lifetime -- to escape. Filled with gripping, bloody action sequences, the sixth book in Darren Shan's horrifying Zom-B series promises the fright -- and the fight -- of your life.

Author Notes:

The sixth book in the Zom-B series went on sale on 2nd January 2014. I wrote a brief plot outline (although it was called Zom-B Gladiators at the time, as originally I meant to have other Angels involved in the action) on the 4th of August, 2009, but it was the 6th of April 2010 before I started to flesh out the ideas and set to work on the book. I did my final edit of the book more than 3 years later, near the end of May 2013.

I was really looking forward to this book after the quieter, less action-packed double-hitter of Zom-B Angels and Zom-B Baby. Those books were essential to B's development and grounding the series, but it was nice to be able to throw in some truly gripping, dramatic fight scenes again. Plus I got to introduce a whole host of new villains for B to contend with, including one of my all-time favourites from any of my books -- the despicable Dan-Dan!

Dan-Dan was named after my wife's nephew. His name is Daniel, but he was a young boy when I was writing this book, and everyone referred to him as Dan-Dan. It was a such a lovely, sweet name that I thought it would be the perfect contrast for the disgusting child-killer in the book.

Since Dan-Dan wasn't the only villain in the book, I decided I'd use the names of more of my wife's family member for most of the other members of the Board. Justin Bazini is named after her brother (I tweaked the surname slightly -- it's actually Basini). Vicky Wedge is named after his wife at the time -- she comes from the Wedgewood family, which is where the surname originated. (While the Wood part of it became the surname of Dan-Dan and his brother.) Lord Luca is named after my wife's other nephew, and Lady Jemima after her niece.

The Basinis are a lovely family in real life, and I've always enjoyed spending time with them. I hope they enjoy what I've done with them -- they certainly seemed to like it when I read out an extract to them the Christmas when the book was released!

The characters of Emma and Declan were also named after real people -- my brother and his wife. I'd actually used Declan in a book before, in The Saga Of Darren Shan, but I figured there was enough distance between the two series for that not to be an issue.

I had to tread cautiously with Dan-Dan. He's a deliciously over the top villain, but because there's nothing fantastical about him, I had to be careful not to make him TOO disturbing. Fantasy allows you a lot of leeway as a writer -- since Lord Loss was a creature from another dimension, i.e. a pure fantasy creation, I could have him ripping people to shreds, left, right and centre, and nobody minded, because he was clearly not real. But since genuine monsters like Dan-Dan do exist, he's far more unsettling than Lord Loss or Desmond Tiny, so I had to be careful not to push this into the realms of adult literature. To be fair to my editors, they let me go a long way with him, and only occasionally asked me to rein him in.

The HMS Belfast played an important role in this book. I visited the cruiser as a child, but haven't been back to it since. I meant to go back and do some research, but then I found plans and videos of it online, and I was able to use those instead. Some writers insist on experiencing everything in person that they write about, e.g. if they set a scene in a specific place, they go visit that place and write about what they find. But I love the internet and I make as much use of it as I can. Sometimes it can be limiting, and I have to get out into the field to do research in the flesh, but I'm constantly being amazed by just how much I can find out with a few Google searches and a bit of imagination.

We get to see just how far B has come as a character in Zom-B Gladiator. From being a shallow, selfish, borderline (arguably over the border) racist in book 1, she's now come to a point where she's prepared to risk her life every day, and go through all sorts of torments, in an attempt to help others. We also see how she's developed as a fighter -- that training under Master Zhang really pays off here!

The book marks the end of the first half of the series -- B's growth as a person -- and that's why it's the only one of the twelve that doesn't end on a cliffhanger. I wanted readers to be able to pause at this point, reflect on what has gone before, and smile at B's accomplishments. The story line moves forward quickly from book 7 onwards, and it's an adrenaline rush from there until the end, with B facing all sorts of challenges and twists. The ending of this book is a chance to pause, draw breath and take stock, before the REAL madness kicks off in book 7.

A quick note about the covers. Although they featured different designs, my British and American publishers used the same artwork (by the uber-talented Cliff Nielsen) on most of the covers, but in this case they chose to go with different images. They both stem from the same scene in the book -- a bound and hooded figure being menaced -- but the American cover featured a long shot from early on in the scene, while the British one sported a close-up from a few chapters later. I loved them both -- the UK cover is more immediately horrific, but the American cover makes me think of the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photographs. For me, these covers taken together perfectly sum up what I was trying to do with my Zom-B books -- write a series that would thrill and scare readers, while at the same time provide them with plenty of food for thought.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The fifth book in the series. B is trying to settle into life with the Angels, but finds it hard to believe some of Dr Oystein's claims. When she decides to seek refuge elsewhere, she scours the streets of London in search of a place to call home. But what she finds will lead B to question everything that she has ever held to be true.

Author Notes:

The fifth book in the Zom-B series went on sale on 26th September 2013. I began work on it on 17th February 2010, and finished my final draft 3 years later. But the actual genesis of this book, along with books 4 and 6, goes back to August 2009. That was when I plotted out the story arcs of the next three books in the series, having finished my early drafts of the opening three. The first arc of the series (books 1 to 3) focused on B's chaotic early experiences in the months following the zombie apocalypse -- they were about bewilderment and chaos. The next arc (books 4 to 6) would focus on B's struggle to fit in with the Angels. It would be a time of answering questions, introducing major new characters, and revisiting the first three books to draw everything together and set us up for the frantic second half of the series.

The story line explored in Zom-B Angels and Zom-B Baby was originally meant to fit in one book. (See my author notes for Zom-B Angels.) When I realised the book would be too long if I did it that way, I split the story in two and added in some extra elements to bring Zom-B Baby into line with the rest of the series. This wasn't about just making the book bigger, but about doing more with the characters and adding exciting new scenes -- one of my favourite parts of the book, where B and Rage set out to climb the London Eye, was only conceived at this stage of the process, and would never have made the cut if I'd had to squeeze everything into a single book.

In a way, Zom-B Baby acts as a reverse image of book 3, Zom-B City. In that book, B wends her way westward from the east end of London -- in this book, she travels in the opposite direction. But where B found sanctuary at the end of book 3, here she finds only a nightmare impossibly come to life.

Zom-B Baby could be seen as autobiographical in certain respects. At the time, I was starting to consider the prospect of having babies with my then-girlfriend (and now-wife) Bas. On the one hand, I loved the idea of having children of my own. But on the other, I was terrified. The problem with waiting until later in life to have babies is that you have too much time to think about it. In their 20s, most people feel fresh and ready for anything -- they just take on the challenge of raising a child without blinking. But by their late 30s, most people are settled and comfortable with their life -- having a baby in those circumstances is a huge game-changer. Did I want a baby or didn't I?!? I wasn't sure, and I think that certainly fed into the books that I was writing.

While the babies (yes, I don't think I'm giving too much away when I reveal that there will be more of them!) that feature in this series are vital to the plot, I also think they were a way for me to examine some of my darkest fears. Whether that was useful or not, I don't know. Usually I'd say that it's a good thing to confront your worries -- but the baby in this book was so spine-chilling that maybe it sent me running for the hills, if only temporarily! Anyway, I conquered my fears during the rewrites of the book, amd when a baby did come the way of myself and Mrs Shan in 2014, I felt like I was in a better place to deal with it than I would have been back in 2010.

There's a scene, early in the book, set in the London Dungeons. Originally that took place in the Dali Universe, which was situated in County Hall. But then the gallery moved out, so I had to change it to a series of empty rooms. Then, just before I was due to hand in my final draft, I heard that the Dungeons were going to move in, so I quickly tweaked the scenes to make reference to this. That's the trouble of using real settings in a book -- unless it's a place that is definitely not going to change any time soon (e.g. a mountain, or a famous old building that is protected by law) then there's always a risk that the world will move on and you'll end up dating your story. I've tried to avoid this as much as I can in my books (it's one of the reasons why I didn't supply any place names in my original vampire books), but with Zom-B it's impossible to avoid, since the city is such an integral part of the plot -- in fact, it's almost a character. I get around it as best I can, but I'm treading on fragile ice all the way -- for instance, there's another scene in the book, set in a skating park on the Southbank, and there's a very good chance that the skaters are going to be moved on to a different location in the very near future. Oh well -- some you win, some you lose! In truth, it doesn't matter too much, as only very observant Londoners will notice the discrepancies over the years to come. Still I do what I can to minimise the risks, in the hope that my books are still going to be read years from now -- if I'm wrong about that, and nobody is reading this series in 5 or 10 years, then it won't be an issue!

I namecheck several areas of London in Zom-B Baby which are personally important to me. There's the Elephant And Castle, which is where I lived when I was a child. Tower Bridge Road gets a mention -- a great-aunt of mine lived just off of it, and I visited her often there over the years. And I used to rent a flat just off of Brick Lane, which is an area B returns to, having originally explored it in Zom-B City.

I think Zom-B Baby moves the story forward nicely. Not a HUGE amount happens, but we get to see more of the supporting cast, and we get to see B start to change and adapt to the world. We see more of what life is like in a city of the undead (including spending some time with a group of zombies). And ultimately the book features some of the most chilling scenes that I've ever written, when the baby of the title makes its appearance.

One last comment -- when the book came out in the UK, it ended up being removed from the shelves of a prominent supermarket. Because books are treated like any other item in a supermarket (e.g. a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread) the staff in those stores aren't aware of the literary differences between a book for a 4 year old and a book for a 14 year old -- hence, all "children's books" tend to be lumped together. This meant that Zom-B Baby ended up being stuck very close to copies of the Peppa Pig books, and angry parents complained that the VERY scary cover was frightening their young ones! I guess that answers the question of who would win in a battle between zombies and Peppa Pig!!!!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

When Hagurosan is told to take an offering to the shrine, he reluctantly begins his trek up the mountain. But when he gets hungry and eats the cake meant for the spirits, things take a turn that no one could have expected. Now Hagurosan must face the consequences of his actions.

Author Notes:

Hagurosan went on sale on 15th May 2013, although the short story that it was adapted from first saw print back in 2002.

Even though the Zom-B books came out fast and suriously (an average of one every three or four months) I sill found time to release some other work in between undead releases. The first of those was Hagurosan, a book produced by publishers Barrington Stoke, who specialise in work for reluctant readers and readers with reading problems, e.g. dyslexia. It was adapted from a short story that I had released in a collection called Kids Night In back in 2002. I didn't add a huge amount to the story, so it's the shortest book I've ever release by a long way, but Barrington Stoke did a beautiful job with it, adding lots of incredibly detailed interior artwork by Zack McLaughlin.

I first visited Japan in 2002, when the World Cup was on. I went to support my country, Ireland. I had a fabulous time in Tokyo, meeting up with lots of other fans, teaching locals football songs, trying to make it to every Irish pub in the city! I went to all three of the games involving Ireland and had an amazing time. The warmth and friendship of the Japanese people was incredible.

Although I spent most of my time in Japan watching football, I also did a bit of work when I was there, and arranged a short trip out of Tokyo to see more of the country — which was how I came up with the idea for Hagurosan.

First, in Tokyo, I did a large event in a shopping mall. It was my first ever event in Japan and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew my books were popular, but would people actually come and see me? How would I get around the language barrier? Would it be fun for those who came?

I arrived early at the mall and was astonished to see hundreds of fans already waiting for me! I was told that it was a ticketed event, but that a lot of fans without tickets had come just to watch. It was an astonishing turnout and the next few hours passed in a happy blur. I posed for LOADS of photos, shook hands with every fan, and tried to say the few words of Japanese which I had learnt (but I sometimes mixed up “Konichiwa” with “Sayonora” or “Ariagato”!!!).

I came away from the event in a happy daze. I felt like a pop star! I made up my mind to do two things after the event — come back to Japan (which I have done, three times since), and write a story which would always remind me of this first visit.

I also wanted to write a story for another reason. I had agreed to write a story for a collection of short stories called Kids’ Night In. I had a very short, not very special story in mind, but I wanted to come up with something better. My girlfriend, Bas, worked for the charity organisation which was publishing the book, and I didn’t want to disappoint her!

I had bought a couple of guidebooks about Japan and read through them, trying to find somewhere outside Tokyo where I could visit, to get a small taste of what the country was like away from its big cities. There were lots of places I wanted to see, but in the end I decided to go to a holy mountain called Hagurosan.

The trip up by train was lovely. There were lots of Mexican fans on the train out of Tokyo, going to a game, and they kept running up and down the carriages, singing and dancing. They got off about halfway there and it was a much quieter journey after that. I remember travelling along the coastline for part of it. I loved the rugged scenery, the sea, and peering out at the small towns that we passed. I was especially interested by the cemeteries that I saw — I’m sure it comes as no surprise for you to learn that I’ve always liked cemeteries!

Even though it was off-season, it was a lovely sunny day when I got off the train and caught a bus to the foot of Hagurosan. I was all alone when I started up the path, and only passed a couple of people on the trek up the mountain to the temple at the top, where I had booked to stay that night. I had lots of free time, so I went slowly up the path and took some detours, exploring the countryside. I remember a gorgeous old pagoda, a snake crossing my path (the first snake I had ever seen in the wild), the views out over the countryside, stopping at a small shop to buy some gifts and exchanging a few broken words of English and Japanese with the charming people who worked there.

I was ecstatic. I felt as if I was in a different world, all alone, on a very special adventure. The mountain gave me a creative burst and I found myself making up poetry for the first time in years (most of the short poems in the story were composed that day). I wanted to write something which celebrated the mountain, which would remind me in years to come of what I had felt.

As I continued up the mountain, I saw areas – grottoes, we call them in Ireland – to the side of the path with small, strange-looking stone statues. Offerings of coins, sweets and other gifts and been left in front of some of the statues, and scraps of cloth had been tied to others. My guidebook explained that people came to pray at these statues, and leave offerings at those which meant a lot to them.

I felt that I was in a very spiritual place. I was all alone as I explored one particular grotto, but I didn’t feel any fear. This was a peaceful, tranquil place. I was respectful of the mountain, and if spirits were present, I like to think they welcomed my curious visit.

As I was leaving, I spotted a coin on the ground near the exit. I decided to place it at the feet of one of the statues, to restore someone else’s offering to its rightful place. It felt like the right thing to do. I wished the spirits well as I set the coin down, bowed farewell and turned to leave.

Then I spotted another coin.

I smiled as I picked up the second coin and placed it at the feet of a statue. I wondered what would happen if I saw a third coin … and a fourth. What if the spirits were putting the coins there, and I saw a coin every time I turned to leave? How long would it be before I decided to ignore the magical coins and flee? What if I didn’t go — what if I stayed there for the rest of my life, collecting coins sent by the spirits?

There wasn’t a third coin, but the seed of a story had been planted, and it grew inside my head as I continued up the mountain. It was the story of a small boy, and when I came to write it, I chose to name him Hagurosan, in honour of the mountain which had given the story to me. And I do believe I was given the story. Hagurosan isn’t a story of my creation — it was a gift from the spirits of that holy mountain, one that I was very pleased to share.

There were two other Irish fans staying at the temple on Hagurosan the night I was there, and we were the only three guests. I was welcomed by a caretaker who didn’t speak much English but who was very friendly. He made it clear where dinner was, showed me the onsen (a hot bath --- I made the mistake of using the ladies’ onsen later that night, but luckily there were no ladies staying in the temple at the time!) and took me to my room. I went exploring around the temple complex and the top of the mountain in the evening, then returned for dinner.

I sat with the caretaker and the other two Irish fans. As we ate, we watched Brazil play a football match on a small television which the caretaker brought out. I loved the mix of the old and the new — the carefully prepared, traditional meal in an ancient temple, and the twenty-first century television set in the corner!

I went to bed on a futon that night. It was the first time I’d ever slept on a futon and I found it quite strange and a bit uncomfortable. Luckily I found a couple of other futons in the room, and I stacked them one on top of each other — I slept like a baby after that!

The next day, as I caught the bus and the train back to Tokyo, I jotted down my ideas for the story in a notebook. As soon as I got back to Ireland, I wrote the story, then submitted it to the people who were putting the book together. They liked it, as did the staff at BarringtonStoke years later. I like to think that the spirits of Hagurosan liked it as well. But most importantly, I hope YOU like it too!

https://www.barringtonstoke.co.uk/books/hagurosan/View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The fourth book in the series. B finds refuge with Angels, a group of teenagers who are dedicated to the task of restoring order back to the living. They are led by a mysterious, kindly doctor who can answer many of the questions that have been thrown up so far in the series -- where did the zombie virus come from? How did it spread across the globe so quickly? What sort of creatures are Mr Dowling, Owl Man and the mutants? The answers come as B trains to find out if she is good enough to serve with the Angels, but they are so terrifying and mind-blowing that B soon starts to wonder if maybe she was better off before...

Author Notes:

The fourth book in the Zom-B series went on sale on 20th June 2013. I plotted the first three books of the series in April 2008. I had a rough idea at the time of where I wanted to go with the series, but I had by no means figured out all of the twists or turns. On the 4th of August, 2009, with first drafts and rewrites of the first three parts in the bag, and having spent a lot of the inbetween sixteen months mulling things over, I sat down and plotted out book 4.

I knew that book 4 would have to do a lot of explaining. It actually serves a similar overall function as book 4 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. In "Vampire Mountain" I had to explain a lot about vampires, their customs, how they lived. We hadn't learnt much about them over the course of the first three books, and in book 4 I needed to slow the pace down a little and fill readers in, before picking up pace again with the next book. I was worried about hitting readers with too much exposition in both cases, but fans had reacted positively to "Vampire Mountain" (I still get fans coming up to me at events who say it is their favourite book of the series), so I felt more confident this time round. Still, I did everything I could to add some action, make the explanations clear and concise, and move things along as swiftly as possible.

I'd planned to include more info in book 4 than I ended up incorporating. I realised, when I started writing it, that it would end up being a very large, facts-heavy book if I didn't change tack. I didn't want the book to be a slog, so I ended up splitting it into two, and having it spill over into book 5. Luckily there was a natural break point in the story line which allowed me to do this and still give the book a cliffhanger -- not a very dramatic cliffhanger, true, but one that shifts the story up a few levels into a very different, perplexing and troubling place. B is presented with some "facts" in this book that she finds hard to swallow, and I want readers to go on that journey of uncertainty with her. It's one of the key themes of the series -- what is true and what isn't? Who can we trust in life, and can we trust everything they say? Are people with supernatural beliefs deluded, or can they really be prophets who see layers to this world that the rest of us can't see? Religion has always fascinated me. I've touched on the subject lightly in the first three books, but here is where we dive fully in. I think if a zombie apocalypse ever did happen, many people would believe it was tied in with religion, and that was something I wanted to explore -- especially the possibility that those people might be right...

I chose to set "Zom-B Angels" in County Hall because I had an apartment in the building when I was writing the book. Not the main building at the front overlooking the river, where the Angels base themselves, but in the building behind that. I thought it would be fun to house the Angels in the complex where I was spending a lot of my time -- it certainly made it easy to do research! Before book 1 was released, my publishers held a launch event for booksellers, and they asked me if I had any ideas about where we could host it. I immediately suggested County Hall, and that's where it ended up taking place -- in one of the rooms on which the end scene of book 3 and start scene of book 4 was based. Luckily for us, truth didn't entirely replicate fiction, and it was a zombie-free event!

The County Hall setting actually ended up being a real gift, and I've made as much use of it as I can. First of all, I think it will make it easier for people who don't live in London to visualise the setting. Most visitors to London have popped by the London Eye, which sits out front of the building, and even if you have never been to the city, you've surely seen the Eye on TV or in films. There is an arcade in County Hall, so I was able to set a scene there -- it's a place where I have taken young cousins of mine bowling in the past, so I had the Angels bowl there too. (Although I had to tweak the real world a bit -- the pins in the bowling alleys are attached to strings, but I wanted them to be freestanding, so I discreetly got rid of the strings, figuring nobody would ever know the difference! But if anyone ever asks, the Angels cut them!) County Hall also houses a first-rate Aquarium, which i was able to work into the story. The Aquarium is very cool and well worth a visit -- for one of my birthdays a few years back, my then-girlfriend Bas (now Mrs Shan) named a piranha after me and we went in to see him swimming around with all the other little potential people-eaters. And when the London Dungeon moved into the building in 2013, it let me set a scene in book 5 there as well. Sweet!

Carrying on from the first three books, I continued naming some of the characters after people that I know. County Hall's living dinner lady, Ciara, is named after a good friend of mine. The zombie twins, Cian and Awnya, are named after my cousin John's real-life twins (although I changed the spelling of Aine's name to make it easier for readers). The chain-wearing Shane is named after my web designer's son. One of the Angels, Ingrid, is named after the children's MD at Simon & Schuster at the time. And another Angel, the nimble-fingered locksmith Ivor, is named after a competition winner -- who ended up being a retired teacher who has come to lots of my events over the years!

As for Dr Oystein... he was named after a fan in Norway! I was there on tour several years ago, at the Norsk Litteraturfestival. When signing for fans, I asked them to write down their names on some pieces of paper, so that I could spell them the right way. I kept a couple of those pieces of paper, and looked through the names when I was working on the character of the good doctor. There were some good ones that I could have chosen, such as Thorstein, Peder (which I used for one of the Zom-Heads in book 2, Zom-B Underground), Malin and more, but Dr Oystein seemed to have a perfect ring to it, so that's what I went for.

"Zom-B Angels" as I noted above is a grounding novel, one that lays the ground rules for what is to come. While it's probably the least action-packed book of the series (although I loved writing B's training scenes, and I think they'll give readers a kick) it sets the stage for everything that is to come. There's barely a pause for breath from the middle of book 5 onwards, so I think readers are going to appreciate this chance to pause, think about what has happened, and learn some of the reasons why. There's a chance that not everything we're told in this book is 100% true... but as book 5 is going to show, there's also a very good chance that it IS. Ultimately all of the questions will be answered before the end of the series, but for now YOU are in the same position as B, and YOU must decide what to believe and what to treat with suspicion. Then wait and see if time and the remaining eight books of the series will prove you right!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The third book in the series. B explores the streets of London, where we get our first glimpses of what has happened to the world in the wake of the zombie attacks. It is a city of the dead and undead, but there are survivors at large too -- some of whom are more dangerous than the zombies. B wishes to help the living, but there are forces at work that might make that impossible. Send in the clown!!!

Author Notes:

It's been a long time since I read Stephen King's "The Stand" and I've forgotten most of the details. But I do remember vividly many of the early scenes, describing the desolation of America, especially one chapter set in New York. I remember similar scenes in "Day of the Triffids" and the movie "28 Days Later," where characters move in a daze through the eerily deserted streets of major cities and towns. A plot must always kick in, of course, for the book to develop, but those early, grounding scenes are often the most potent in a post-Apocalyptic tale.

That's why I was looking forward to "Zom-B City" so much, while worrying about it at the same time. Looking forward, because this would be my chance to show a world laid waste. And worrying, because what if I fudged it?!?

I wrote the rough plot outlines for the first three books in the series on April 7th, 2008. I didn't know much of what would happen after that, but having a guideline for the first arc of the story was enough to give me the confidence to start writing. I knew book 1 would be set mostly in B's school. Book 2 would take place in an underground complex. And book 3 would be where the action opened up and we finally got to see what had been happening while B was locked away.

It was almost a year later, in February and March 2009, when I set down to plot out book 3 in detail and start writing. I had spent much of that time wondering what to show, and how to pepper the book with action and suspense. I didn't want it to be a book where B wandered the streets aimlessly. I knew there would be some parts of the book that were self-contained, that wouldn't drive the main plot forward, but I wanted most of the elements to be instrumental, to introduce some characters and plotlines that I could return to later and develop. For me that's the most important part of a long series like this, setting up the players and storylines, then carefully weaving them all together over the course of the series.

So, although I could show anything I wanted in the corpses-strewn city of London, I thought long and hard about what I would focus on, and how to link what B sees in this book to events in later entries. I knew I would be exploring religious themes in later books, so I wanted to get that ball rolling here. I knew it was important to have human survivors as part of the ongoing story, so I needed some of those. I wanted to show how "ordinary" zombies acted and hunted, and how the other type of zombies in this series would get by in the new world. I wondered what the army would do to try and restore order. I felt it was time to re-introduce some familiar faces from the first book. And, of course, I was keen to show a bit more of everyone's favourite clown from book 2, the oh-so-loveable Mr Dowling!

Continuing on from book 2, I named many of the new characters in this book after people I actually know. Coley, Essex and Tag were all named after friends of my girlfriend Bas (Essex and Tag are women, but I changed them into men!). Another of Bas's friends, Clare, used to work for a company that made snacks (sweets), and so her friends used to call her Snacks Clare -- which is where I got Sister Clare Of The Shnax from!!!! Real-life Clare's boyfriend when I was working on the book was a guy called Sean, so I included him too. The brutish mutant, Kinslow, was also named after one of Bas's friends, a female teacher. Finally, the artistic Timothy Jackson was named after a couple of artists whose work I admire, both of whom I've been lucky enough to meet, Tim Shaw and Philip Jackson.

I also worked other familiar elements into the fabric of the book. For instance, the hunter, Barnes, is named after a place in London where the university I went to was situated. The hat B sports is based after an Australian slouch hat that I own and often wear on holiday! When B walks from London's East End to the centre, it's past an area where I used to live, and many of the streets and landmarks are familiar to me. St Thomas's Hospital is where I was born. And the reason I had B wind up in County Hall is because, when I wrote the book, I had a flat in there!!!

One of the real places I mention in this book (and it will crop up again further down the line) is the London Dungeons. I've always loved visiting this place, and in the early drafts of the book B described walking past it on Tooley Street, where it had stood for as long as I had remembered. Then, shortly before my final draft was due, I heard that the venue was moving -- to County Hall!!! It was a wonderful opportunity for me to include it in a bigger role in the books, but it also made me aware of a potential problem -- because London is an ever-changing city, there's a danger that some of the references to real buildings might date. If I'd released Zom-B City just a year earlier, I would not have been able to change the Tooley Street reference, and it would have become an anachronism.

I've tried to limit this danger as much as possible, by being as vague with references as I can, but when you base a story in a real city like London, it's an unavoidable trap. I've already have another near-miss with Battersea Power Station, which features in later books -- I had originally described it as a run-down wreck, which it has been for all my life, but recently I read about plans to develop it, so I've had to tweak my description. In other places I might not be so lucky, so if you're reading these books 5 or 10 or 20 years from now, I hope you'll make allowances!!!

Zom-B City ends with one of my most enigmatic cliffhangers. Join me again in June, when I'll be talking about that, and revealing all sorts of secrets about the Zom-B Angels...View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The second book in the Zom-B series. Waking up in an underground military complex, months after the zombie outbreak, B has no memory of the last few months. With no idea what has happened in the outside world, B is forced to focus on life underground. As B learns more about the zombies held in the complex, and the scientists keeping them captive, unease settles in. Why exactly was B saved? What are the soldiers and scientists planning? And is there anyone left in the world to trust? For B Smith, death is not the end...

Author Notes:

Zom-B Underground, the second book in the series, went on sale on January 3rd 2013.

First of all, going back to Book 1 (and you REALLY should not read on unless you have read the first Zom-B book, as there are HUGE SPOILERS ahead!)...

As many of you screeched with disbelief when you finished the first book: "B is a GIRL?!?"

Well, yes, of course -- whatever made you think that she wasn't?

:-)

Heh heh! That's just my little joke. Of course you were meant to think that B was a boy. I wrote the book very carefully to work in that twist. I knew from early on that I wanted the main protagonist in my zombie series to be a girl. At the time I wasn't sure why, exactly (although that becomes clear over the course of the series -- you will find out that it couldn't have worked the way I wanted if B had been a boy). I just knew that my gut instinct was telling me that B was a girl, and that I would be a fool to doubt it.

I also knew that I didn't want readers to KNOW that B was a girl until near the end of the first book. I had read a book like this when I was at university, The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, by Gene Kemp, and it had stuck with me. It wasn't a case of me thinking, "Oh, that was a good idea, I must use it one day." But I knew that my zombie books were going to serve as warnings in many ways -- along with lots of action and exciting plot twists, I was basically going to be saying to readers that they should be careful about who they trust and what they believe. The key message was going to be: Always ask questions, always doubt your first assumptions, always search for the truth. What better way to get them to do this than by showing they were wrong to even assume that the character they were reading about was a boy? The twist about B's gender sets the tone for the rest of the series -- we all make basic assumptions about things in life, but sometimes those assumptions are WRONG. We must never trust in what we assume, only in what we KNOW.

It's very difficult to disguise a character's gender, as many reviewers have realised when writing a review of Zom-B. Writing in the first person definitely made it easier, as it allowed me to say "I did this... I did that..." rather than trying to find a way not to say "She did this... She did that..." I could have made it work if I'd written the book in the third person, but I think most readers would have guessed something was up, as my avoidance of the main character's gender would have attracted attention. By doing it in the first person, I neatly sidestepped that problem, and based on the feedback I've received, hardly anyone realised that B was a girl until THAT scene near the end!

And then, of course, there was that OTHER scene right at the very end, where B dies staring at her ripped-out heart. Again, I knew from early in the process that B would die at the end of the first book. I had no interest in writing a standard series about survivors running and hiding from zombies. That's been done too many times. I wanted to go in a very different direction, the way I did when writing about vampires, by taking readers into the mind and world of the walking dead. That wouldn't have been possible with ordinary zombies, because they're unthinking killing machines, but as we start to see in Book 2, my zombies were going to be far from ordinary.

The origin of the zombies was crucial for me, and I spent a few years trying to figure out where the undead would have come from, how they would have been created, and why. I wanted (needed) thinking zombies in order to give me something to identify more closely with and write about, but I didn't want to just throw them into the mix. Many zombie books and films don't explain where the undead come from, and in most cases that's fine, as it's not necessary to the story being told. But in this case it was vital, as I was looking to write about conspiracies and the abuse of power. Without giving too much away, these zombies aren't the random result of an experiment gone wrong. There's a very good reason why they exist, and why some of them regain the use of their mental faculties. And over the course of the next 10 books, we find out.

I was a bit concerned about setting the story of the second book in a single complex, given that most of book 1 took place in a school. But I had a lot more fun with the story than I anticipated. The confined setting actually worked in its favour, letting me create a claustrophobic atmosphere, and I think it heightens the sense of mystery -- we have no idea what is going on in the world above, and I think that's a good thing at this early stage. All we know is that B has fallen, both physically and metaphysically, and the question is whether or not she can rise again and start searching for the redemption that she craves after what she did in Book 1. Ultimately this is a story about one person's quest, not to right a terrible wrong (since she can never put right what she did to Tyler), but to try to do something that at least partly atones for it.

We didn't get especially close to B's friends in the first book. That was deliberate -- I wanted them to serve primarily as zombie fodder. But the zom heads are different, and I give them more time and space to develop. I actually named a few after people I know. Cathy Kelly is a good friend of mine, and for years she has pestered me to include her as a leather-clad character in one of my books -- this is her reward! And Rage is named after another friend of mine, who is every bit as bulky and clever as the character in this book -- only nowhere near as mercenary. (I hope!) And Danny is named after real-life Rage's brother. And Gokhan is named after a lovely Turkish guy who is married to one of my cousins (I used her name in The Demonata -- she was the witch, Mrs Egin, in Demon Thief -- and their children, Jordan and Yasmin, have featured in other books).

Sticking with names... I wrote the first draft of the book while the Cirque Du Freak movie was being named, so Josh Massoglia is a combination of the names of its two leading teenage actors, Josh Hutcherson and Chris Massoglia. Reilly, mais oui, was named after John C Reilly, a brilliant actor who I felt was perfect as Mr Crepsley in the film. And Dr Cerveris was named after Michael Cerveris, who did such a wickedly wonderful job as Mr Tiny.

And then there was Mr Dowling...

The world's creepiest clown was actually named after a bookseller in Ireland, who used to work for Hughes & Hughes. Her surname was Dowling. (I think her first name was Sarah, but I might be wrong about that.) She drove me around to events a couple of times years ago. On one of the journeys, she told me that she was afraid of clowns, and I began to immediately play around with ideas for a freaky clown. As one quickly formed inside my head, I chuckled and told her about him, and said that I would use him in a book one day, and in her honour I would name him after her. And so I did!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

When news reports start appearing of a zombie outbreak in Ireland, B Smith's racist father thinks it's a joke-- but even if it isn't, he figures, it's ok to lose a few Irish. B doesn't fully buy into Dad's racism, but figures it's easier to go along with it than to risk the fights and abuse that will surely follow sticking up for Muslims, blacks, or immigrants. But when zombies attack B's school, B is forced on a mad dash through the serpentine corridors, making allegiances with anyone with enough guts to fight off their pursuers.

Author Notes:

The first Zom-B book was released on 27th September 2012. I started the first draft of Zom-B more than four years before its release, on the 7th of April 2008, and it was the most daunting task I've yet to face as a writer.

It was daunting for two reasons. One was the scale of the thing. I knew this was the first of what would be a multi-book series. I wasn't sure of the exact number, but I was guessing between 10 and 15 books. This was actually the first time that I had set out to tell a story across that sort of length. The Saga of Darren Shan and The Demonata both started with less grandiose ambitions. With The Saga, I thought I might write a handful of low-key books. Lord Loss meanwhile was intended as a one-off novel when I first wrote it. In both cases, the story led me further and further in, and I advanced without knowing what I was truly taking on. With Zom-B I knew from the start that I was locking myself into a hugely testing task, one that would take several years to complete. I like to compare it to climbing a mountain -- with The Saga and The Demonata I couldn't see the peak of either story's mountain -- I started up what I thought was a hill, then another apparent hilltop revealed itself, and so on. But with Zom-B I could see the top of the mountain from day one, and that was terrifying, since I knew the full exactitude of what I would have to climb.

But it was also daunting because I knew I would have to take on the mantle of a racist, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to make that work in a children's book. If I'd been writing for adults it would have been different -- I don't feel that adults can be influenced by a book in the same way that a child can, and I never worry about treading a moral high ground in my books for older readers -- I feel like I have more of a license to take readers into uncomfortable areas, to explore the dark regions of the human experience without feeling the need to present any counter-arguments, figuring by the time you reach adulthood, you should have learned the difference between right and wrong, and if you haven't, then there's probably not a lot that a writer can do to reach you.

It's different when I'm writing for a younger audience. I never set out to preach to them, and I certainly take them into many troubling moral waters, but I do feel like I have to wear something akin to a teacher's hat. I think children and teenagers have lots of yet-to-be-directed potential, and it's important that writers bear that in mind. It doesn't mean that you have to fill your books with unbridled hope and optimism, as many YA writers believe, but I do think you have to be careful if leading your readers into the darkness. You don't need to hold their hands, but you should provide some sort of a guiding light.

How to do that when writing a book about a racist? How to structure the book in such a way that readers can sympathise with a character who in many ways is truly hateful? It wasn't easy, and for several drafts I failed. The early drafts of the book were much bleaker than the finished product, with more emphasis on B's racist traits, and less focus on how B ended up in that situation. Yes, it was implied that it was because of B's openly racist father, but I didn't come out and openly show that. Ultimately I found a way to make B more relatable for those of us who are not actively racist, without ever making B truly likeable. It was crucial that B not be a character we could love, at least not in the beginning, as I felt that wouldn't have been true to life, and I wanted this to be as realistic a novel as I could write, albeit one with the fantastical backdrop of a zombie invasion...

The zombies were actually secondary to the racist angle when it came to putting the book together. As with The Thin Executioner, I wanted to write a book that dealt with the state of the world post-9/11. I didn't travel much throughout my teens and twenties (I had no money, and I wasn't brave enough to go backpacking), so I hadn't been exposed to much of the world. I wasn't a political creature. But when my books started to do well, I got to travel all around the globe, and meet people from all sorts of different places. In my experience, the vast, VAST majority of people are pretty much the same wherever you go, basically decent, honest folk who care about family and friends, who welcome strangers, and who only want the good things from life. But certain sections of our society and media want us to believe differently. They try to paint certain groups as vicious threats, to tar all people of a certain race or religion with the same brush. Since the Taliban (and later ISIS) were Muslim, these people try to tell us that ALL Muslims are evil.

Of course that's nonsense, yet many people believe the lies, especially people who (like me when I was younger) don't travel much or get to mingle with people from other cultures. I felt I had to do what I could to get young readers questioning the ways of their elders, to decide for themselves what is right or wrong, to look for the truth behind the cloud of lies. The main message I wanted to impart was -- QUESTION EVERYTHING!

But I didn't want to write a dry, serious, message-laden book about racism. That's not my style. It needed to be an exciting, fast-paced, action-packed story. I think that's the best way to get people thinking, when they connect with a story and the message, whatever it might be, seeps through. So I thought about it a lot, and decided zombies were the way to go. I remembered how George A Romero had used zombies to hold a mirror up to society in his early films, and felt that I could do something similar with them, use them as a way to get us thinking about the REAL monsters in our midst. Drawing the two different styles of story together was by no means a straightforward or easy task, but I kept thinking and bouncing ideas around, and eventually I figured out a way that I could maybe do it. And so I took a deep breath and got stuck in!

***My notes for the origins of the series will continue in my Zom-B Underground notes. There are certain twists in the first book that I don't want to spoil for those who have not read it yet, so I will address them in my notes for Book 2, in the hopes of protecting readers from the surprises of Book 1 if they read these notes before they read the actual novel.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

With the darkness of John Connolly and the quirkiness of Neil Gaiman, Lady of the Shades is a dark supernatural thriller for adults from the number one bestselling YA author, Darren Shan.

Ed, an American author on the hunt for a story for his next book, arrives in London looking for inspiration. A stranger in a strange city, he's haunted by a deadly secret that refuses to stay buried, and no matter how hard he tries he cannot escape the manifest sins of his past.

What Ed wants is answers, what he finds is something he definitely didn't bargain for: the beautiful and untouchable Andeanna Menderes. Andeanna is a woman who is dangerously bound to one of London's most notorious crime lords, and if they are caught together it could mean death for them both.

Ensnared in an illicit affair that can only be conducted in the shadows, Ed's world is turned upside down as a series of shattering revelations blurs the line between what's real and what's not...

Author Notes:

Lady of the Shades, a stand-alone novel for adult readers, went on sale on 30th August 2012. I started work on Lady Of The Shades on April 5th 1999, and finished my final edit on 29th May 2012. So it was just over 13 years in the making!

Why so long? Well, my career as a children's author took off like a comet from early 2000, when Cirque Du Freak was first released. I was full of ideas for books for younger readers, I was having a great time writing them, and I ended up spending a lot of my time touring to promote them. That didn't leave a whole lot of time to focus on my adult books. Also, the first couple of books for adults that I released didn't do very well, so there was no real demand on me to write any more! But when I returned to that world with The City trilogy years later, I knew immediately that the next book I would want to release was Lady.

I'd never forgotten about the twisted love story. Although I've written several first draft books for adults which I will probably never return to, I always knew that by hook or by crook, I would release Lady of the Shades. It was important to me. As an author, you have to stand up for the stories you believe in, even if others are sceptical, and this was a story I believed in 100%. I was delighted when I got the chance to go back and rewrite it and edit it into final shape. When I sat down with it, it was like only a few days had passed since I'd last worked on the book -- the story sucked me straight back in.

Lady began as my attempt to write a book that captured some of the spirit of the old film noir movies that I loved so much, like Double Indemnity. Hell's Horizon had started life in a similar fashion, but both times I felt like it wasn't enough to simply ape what I enjoyed -- I had to find a way to put my own stamp on things, to make the stories work in a very different way, in MY way. The ghosts were the key in this instance. Without them, it was a familiar tale of a lonely, resourceful guy falling in love with a beautiful married lady, who tricks him into murdering her husband. But with the ghosts it became something else entirely, and I was able to take the story off in all sorts of crazy directions, to really mess with the minds of readers, and get them to question what is real and what is not.

I knew from very early on that I wanted my main character to be a writer. I try not to do that too often in my books, as I think a writer should put themselves into the shoes of a variety of people, not just write about writers all the time. But in this case the story required a writer to work the way that I wanted. And he needed to be a writer of horror fiction, who was researching for a new book. At the time I was a big fan of the magazine Fortean Times, and I looked to that for inspiration. It was important that the book-within-the-book felt real, that you could believe that it was a book that was being written, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the plot that the writer was working on, trying to make it almost as intricate as the main story -- indeed, I got into it so much that I have at times thought about maybe using that secondary plot in a different book one day! Who knows, maybe in the future I will...

Anyway, as I flicked through my back issues of Fortean Times (I didn't have access to the internet back in those dark days, so there was no surfing the web for me!) I was drawn to the subject of Spontaneous Human Combustion, or SHC, and decided that was what I would focus on. I drew together as many facts and theories about SHC as I could, then fired ahead and began to weave my twin plots, setting Ed (I'd chosen a name for him) off on his long and twisting journey into the shades.

There was much more about SHC in the first draft. It was important for me that Ed's book felt genuine in every respect, so I paid more attention to it than I really needed to. Ultimately I pared those scenes down to the bone, cutting out huge chunks about the book that Ed was working on. That happens quite a lot in writing -- you come up with more than you need, then trim it down to the essentials. While it might seem like a harsh job, cutting scenes that you've spent weeks or months working on, in the end it's all about what works and what doesn't. Everything in a finished book needs to serve the story. But it's rarely wasted work, even if you cut a scene entirely, as what doesn't make the final draft can be as important in defining the story for you, the writer, as what does.

Apart from the SHC scenes, I didn't have to alter the book too much when I returned to it after my time away. It needed a bit of updating -- I introduced mobile phones and the internet to the equation -- but not as much as I thought it might. The story, in many ways, is timeless, the way all really good stories are. Take away the minor technological references and it could have taken place in 1980, 1960 or 1940. Deception and betrayal never really go out of style!

I often get asked which of my books I would love to see made into a film, if I had a choice. While the answer is that I would be happy for any of them to be filmed, if I could choose just one to be adapted, it would be Lady of the Shades. It was inspired by movies probably more than any of my books, not just the old film noir classics, but more recent fare such as The Sixth Sense and a 1990s Irish film that I can't name because it might give one of the big twists away! I think it would be a tricky film to cast, but if you get the central roles right, it could work a treat. Of course, like almost every other author, I DON'T have a choice, so I'm just going to have to wait and see if Hollywood comes calling. But hopefully, one day, Lady of the Shades will make it to the silver screen (or, indeed, the small screen, where it might be even more suitably served), and poor Ed can fall in love and be tormented all over again...View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Picking up Larten's story several years after "Palace of the Damned," this begins with the vampire in an unusually content place. With a young vampire to mentor, a family of sorts in Paris, and important work as a Vampire General to deal with, he is as happy as he has ever been. Then a name from his trouble past resurfaces and Larten's life is thrown once again into violent chaos. Setting out on a twisted, dangerous path, he crosses the world in search of an elusive foe. His star within the vampire ranks keeps on rising, but he has never felt so lonely and wretched. He thinks he has hit rock-bottom, but what he doesn't know is that the worst is yet to come. His darkest hour still lies ahead of him...

Author Notes:

Brothers To The Death, the fourth book in The Saga Of Larten Crepsley, went on sale on 26th April 2012. I wrote the first draft of the book in May 2007, shortly after writing the first three in the series. (I would have written it in April, but I had to go on tour to the States that month.) I did my last bit of work on it (and on the entire series) on November 1st 2011.

When Darren first met Gavner in The Vampire's Assistant he was told that Gavner and Larten had been on a secret mission together sixty or so years earlier, during which they had been forced to share a coffin. I knew I would have to deal with that in this book. When I put my thinking cap on, and started looking at the timeline, I realised it tied in fairly neatly with the period when the Nazis were on the rise in Europe. Since it's widely known that many Nazis were interested in the supernatural, it seemed natural that they would seek out vampires and try to form an allegiance -- and that gave me my starting point for the book.

We also knew from the original series that Mr Crepsley had almost been appointed a Vampire Prince, but had chosen to break away from the clan, without discussing his reasons with anyone. This for me was the crux of this series -- all four books have been about arriving at the point where Larten abandons his destined path, about explaining why he turned his back on the world of power, respect and happiness. I didn't want it to be over some trivial argument, so this book had to feature the most troubling, gut-wrenching and powerful few chapters of the entire series. I have to be honest -- they were hard (emotionally speaking) to write. I hated hurting Larten so much in this book, but I knew that I had to, in order for his story to all tie together and make sense.

As sad as this book is, I also think that, taken in context, it makes the following chunk of his story (i.e. the sections described in Cirque Du Freak and the other books about Darren Shan) all the more empowering. Larten's story has, since the start, been one of overcoming setbacks. Every time that the world kicks him in the teeth, he picks himself up and pushes on. That's what makes him such a fascinating figure. When you put these four books together with my other vampire books, it shows the full picture of how he managed to recover from a tragedy that would have marked the end of most people. So while you might shed a few tears reading this, don't forget what came next in his life -- or, if you haven't read The Saga of Darren Shan, press on and do so as soon as you can!

There were a few other loose ends that I had to tie up in this book, to link it with the following series, and I had lots of fun doing that. Some of the links were minor in the grand scheme of things -- such as explaining how Larten came to know Jimmy Ovo (how many of you remember HIM?!?). Others were major -- like introducing Madam Octa into the storyline. But the one I had the most fun with was revealing the secret behind Vancha's green hair -- you might never look at him in the same way again once you find out where the "dye" comes from!

p.s. In October 2010, I auctioned off the naming rights for one of the characters in Brothers to the Death, in aid of an autism charity. The winner of the auction wanted the character named after a girl. The character I originally had in mind was a man in the earlier drafts. When I changed the character’s genre, I had to rewrite that section of the book, and it brought a whole new dimension to the scenes, so I ended up being very pleased at being forced to make the change! The name to look out for in the book is Holly-Jane Galinec.

p.p.s. I sometimes get asked if I get sad when I kill off characters. The answer is usually no -- as a writer, I tend not to be as emotionally involved with my characters as my readers are, because I know everything that's coming in advance, so there's a certain amount of emotion distance for me. But the scene on the skyscraper near the end of this book left me with a lump in my throat, which came back every time I edited the book. I truly felt for Larten here, the pain he went through, how awful it must have been for him, the years of grief and guilt that he had to deal with afterwards. I know most of you cried (or came close to it) when reading Killers Of The Dawn, but this is the one that got to ME the most.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The book starts almost immediately after the end of "Ocean Of Blood", with Larten and the baby stranded in the icy wastes of Greenland. Larten searches for death in the snowdrifts, but is spared by a very unexpected twist of destiny. The action then jumps forward several years, to Paris at the turn of the 20th century. Larten is in love, and successful in business, but a face from his past threatens to lead him astray and undermine his happiness. In this sweeping novel, Larten also returns to Vampire Mountain, takes part in the First World War, and takes responsibility for the sins of his past in a showdown in a volatile Russian city...

Author Notes:

Palace of the Damned, the third book of The Saga Of Larten Crepsley, went on sale on 29th September 2011. The book is a bit like a David Lean movie in its scope. It crosses the globe, features action, suspense, treachery, romance and war. Eat your heart out, Doctor Zhivago! :-)

I wrote the first draft of the third book of the series in March 2007, straight after the first two. This was always going to be a crucial book, because it covers the period where we see Larten grow and learn and become a man. That made it particularly challenging. In the first two, I knew I could write the character in such a way that children would be able to relate to him, since from a mental viewpoint they cover his childhood and teenage years. In this book he becomes an adult, and the problem was in handling that in such a way that my younger readers would still care about him.

One of the ways in which I tackled the problem was by giving Larten a young sidekick. In "The Saga of Darren Shan", we saw him through his relationship with Darren, and I think that's why he was so popular -- he was an adult, but seen through a child's eyes. I couldn't do that here, because the series is written in the third person, but by focusing on his strained relationship with the growing baby, I was able to (hopefully!) make him interesting and sympathetic to children. I don't want to say much more about that sidekick, because I don't wish to spoil the surprise. Except that when I was first plotting the series, I couldn't see how to make the second half work -- until I managed to figure out who the baby was, and then everything fell neatly into place. If I hadn't put two and two together at that point, I think I'd still be sitting here, scratching my head, unable to start!

I knew in this book that I would have to touch on a few "facts" about Larten's past which were mentioned in the original series. Although Larten never said much about his exploits before he met Darren, we did find out in the first set of books that he had been in in Paris in 1903, that he had been engaged to a human woman, and also that he had flown in one of the early versions of an aeroplane. That last fact wasn't too important to the plot, but I wanted to work it in, as I felt it would be a fun scene.

I quickly figured out a way to pull all three "facts" together, but there was a problem. To fit into the story, the plane scene would have to happen while Larten was in Paris. Timewise that wasn't a major issue, since the Wright Brothers flew their first plane in 1903, which fit in quite neatly -- but the Wright Brothers were based in America, not Europe! Following some research, I learnt to my delight that the Wright Brothers were not the only aviation pioneers at work at that time. In fact, a key figure in the history of manned flight was a guy called Alberto Santos-Dumont, who built what many people consider to be the first "true" airplane -- the Wrights used catapults to help their plane get off the ground, whereas Santos-Dumont relied on wheels, making his craft the first to take off purely under its own power. Alberto was orginally from Brazil -- but spent much of his life in Paris -- hurrah!

Once I pegged Alberto as my man in the air, the only fly in the ointment then was the timing. It was 1906 before he launched his 14-bis into the skies. I struggled with how to explain how Larten's engagement could have taken place in 1906, while on the painting of him and his fiancee it said 1903. The answer, in the end, was quite simple, but it took me a hell of a long time to figure it out!

I love how Larten matures over the course of this novel. This is when we first start to see the adult whom we initially encountered in "Cirque Du Freak". He completes his training, settles into his life, and finds real peace for the first time. Obviously we, the readers, know that he still has a rocky path ahead of him -- the most dreadful part of his life is still to come, the event that will cause him to sever all ties with the clan and embark on a lonely career with the Cirque Du Freak -- but now he is equipped to face it on his feet, calmly, as a man. This book covers some of Larten's happiest, most content years, before destiny once again led him astray, into the darkness of the night.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Larten and Wester have cut themselves off from their master, Seba Nile, to run with the Cubs, young vampires who have not yet fully committed to the demands of the clan. They drink and womanise their way across the world, and revel in warfare. Following the death of a friend, Larten and his blood-brother link up with Seba to resume their studies. After they meet with Evanna (and a familiar assistant!) for the first time, Seba takes the pair to Vampire Mountain to train. Larten makes swift progress, but he is unhappy in himself, and feels like he has abandoned the human world too soon. To Wester's dismay, Larten cuts short his studies and sets off by himself. Feeling lonely and purposeless, he is "adopted" by a young woman who has big plans for him. As they cross the world together, Larten has no idea of the dire dangers they will face when they board a ship bound for lands far away, across an ocean that will soon run red with human blood...

Author Notes:

Ocean of Blood, the second book in The Saga Of Larten Crepsley, was published in 28th April 2011. I started the first draft in February 2007, directly after finishing work on the first book (Birth of a Killer). The second installment of his story focuses on Larten during his most indecisive years. While most of my books are fantastical, dealing with vampires, demons and magic, at the same time they are ways for me to look at the real world and explore real-life issues. I know that many teenagers and young adults feel lost as they take their first tentative steps into the world. It's a hard thing, leaving your childhood and family home behind, deciding what you want to do with the rest of your life. Many of us make mistakes and take wrong turnings before we find our way and settle on a path of our own choosing.

While Larten has always loved the world of the clan, he is not sure if he is worthy of a place within it. He doubts himself, his strengths, his desires. He spends time with the Cubs -- the vampire version of those people who go to university primarily to drink lots of alcohol and live a wild life for a few years! As he starts to mature, he realises he can't go through the rest of his life at this hard-living level, so he tries to be a good student under Seba Nile again. But he still has itchy feet and wants to see more of the world, try different things, explore other options. He's not sure what exactly it is that he wants to do with his future, and indecision causes him a lot of sleepless days and troubled thoughts.

This was one of the most interesting periods of Larten's life for me. We could see a lot of traces of the man he would become in the young boy we first encountered in Birth of a Killer. But this book grants us an insight into his complexities -- Larten was never a straightforward, one-dimensional character. He was a man who endured much over the course of his life, who didn't have a smooth ride all the time. I think that life for most people is a struggle at one time or another. As children and teenagers, we don't always see that in our parents and other adults. We see the finished articles that they have become, and assume that they were always this way. But our elders were young once too. They did foolish things. They experimented. They got stung. They learnt and matured and developed, in some cases quickly and easily, in other cases slowly and with many difficulties. Just like we do, and like our children will, and theirs after them.

Ocean of Blood sees Larten at his most vulnerable and lonely. He feels lost in this world. There are people who try to help him -- I think all of us can find friends when we need them, it's just that sometimes we don't realise they're there, because we're only looking inwards. But Larten rejects the offers of assistance. He's not always sure why -- he just feels like he has to push forward by himself. The book, ultimately, is a warning that no man is an island, that nobody should try to stand alone. We all need help at one point or another, and the world is a far more dangerous place if we don't accept the offer of a hand-up when we're down.

That makes it sound like this is a very gloomy book. And, to be fair, it IS one of the darkest books I have ever written. I felt sorry for Larten while I was working on this chapter of his life. I wanted to ease his pain and make things easier for him. But we've always got to take the bad along with the good, and to explain how Larten became the man that he did, I had to show him in his darkest hours too. Having said that, it's not ALL doom and gloom! I think the Cubs are fascinating creatures, who redefine what we think we know about the clan. Vancha is a source of humour. We get to meet Evanna for the first time, along with some other characters who will become major factors in Larten's life in later years. There's an encounter with a little-known author who is trying to write a book about bloodsuckers. And we meet a boy who will cook up a storm for Darren Shan a couple of centuries further down the line... (For those who failed to make the connection, you might want to have a quick look again at book 10 of the original series, Lake Of Souls, in particular the rather unusual sailor that Darren and Harkat hook up with during the course of their travels.)

But, for all its lighter touches, there's no escaping the fact that this is a bleak, heart-wrenching book that will leave you feeling almost as hollow as its protagonist by the time you turn the last page. Larten is about to set sail on deadly, sorrowful waters, and you're going to be there with him for every roll of the blood-speckled waves. It's not a journey you will forget any time soon. Even though it's one you might wish to blank from your memory as you lie in bed at night, shuddering and maybe even weeping softly...

p.s. A very important character in Larten's life (and, indeed, in Darren's) first appears in this book late on in the action, but isn't name-checked in its pages. If you haven't read the book before, see if you can figure out who it might be when you do. The answer is revealed in the first half of book 3, Palace of the Damned.

p.p.s. My Granny, Mary Barry, nee Griffin, passed away on April 29th, the day after this book's release, so I will always remember it with a hint of sadness that has nothing to do with the book itself. My Grannny was like a second mother to me and I still miss her all these years later, but I know I was lucky to have had her in my life for as long as I did, and feel blessed that I was graced with such a loving, funny, intelligent, warm grandmother. Even in death may she be triumphant!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Larten Crepsley's life as a human ends one grey day in the factory where he has worked since he was eight years old... and his life as a vampire begins! The first of a four book series, this charts Larten's early years as a vampire's assistant, and his formative experiences once he is blooded. We meet some familiar faces from The Saga Of Darren Shan, along with new characters who were instrumental in his growth. It all starts here!!

Author Notes:

PART ONE -- "I NEVER MEANT FOR THIS TO HAPPEN"

Birth Of A Killer, the first book of The Saga Of Larten Crepsley, went on sale on September 30th 2010.

I never meant to write a series about Larten Crepsley. It was the furthest thing from my thoughts when I was working on "The Saga of Darren Shan". My Japanese publishers actually sounded me out about the possibility of a Mr Crepsley series several years ago. "The Saga" was hugely popular in Japan -- some of the books topped the general bestsellers chart -- and books about Mr Crepsley's past would have gone down a treat. I'm sure my other publishers would have been equally eager to publish them. From a commercial point of view, it was a no-brainer. But I have never written with one eye even half on the financial side of the business. For me, the story is everything, and I approach my work today exactly the same way I did when I was first starting out more than twenty years ago. I launch each new project from as pure a position as a can, not thinking about how it might fare in the marketplace, just trying to write the very best story that I can. Back then, I had no creative interest whatsoever in writing a prequel to "The Saga" -- I was already hard at work on "The Demonata" -- so I respectfully declined the opportunity.

I finished "The Saga" in late 2004 and ploughed ahead with "The Demonata". But as I was working on that series, I occasionally found myself thinking about Mr Crepsley. I didn't know much about his past when I was writing "The Saga". He was very mysterious in that series. He didn't like talking about his history. He was a lonely, aloof figure, one who had cut himself off from the world of vampires, and there were hints that he must have had a troubled background (we learnt through Gavner Purl that Mr Crepsley could have become a Prince, but had chosen to turn his back on the clan). But he wasn't a person who would discuss such things with his young student. And since I was trying to be as much like Darren Shan the character as I could be, I didn't pursue the truth about Mr Crepsley. I figured he was entitled to his privacy and his secrets.

But over a three year period, the thoughts kept coming. I'd wonder about Mr Cresley and what his life might have been like, how he first became a vampire, how he rose through the ranks, what sort of missions he might have been involved with, and of course most crucially, why he had walked away when he did. I figured out his starting point very early on, how and why he had run away from his human life. Bits of the rest began falling into place over the next few years, but slowly, and not always in order, a scrap here, a scene there. I wasn't actively pursuing the ideas. I still didn't plan to write a series about him. I was just curious. I wanted to know what his life had been like. It didn't matter if I never got to share my discoveries with other people -- I needed to know for myself.

"Dracula" was the turning point. The famous old vampire has been at the centre of the vampire world for more than a century now, and all other night creatures are still measured by his standard. I've read the book, of course, and seen many of the film versions and spin-offs which it has spawned. In 2006 the BBC filmed a TV adaptation of the book. It was a so-so version, nothing spectacular. But when I was watching it, I had an idea for a scene in Mr Crepsley's life. It was based on the ship scene in the "Dracula" book, when he is travelling across the sea to England, and kills everyone on board. The BBC movie fluffed the scene big-time -- it was a tame, forgettable scene in that version -- but as I watched it, it reminded me of the power of the scene as it was originally written. I always loved that part of the book, the vampire picking off the humans one by one, the terror of identifying with those unfortunate passengers and imagining what it would have been like to be on that ship, knowing a force of darkness was getting ready to move in on you as soon as the sun dropped...

My mind turned to Mr Creplsey and I found myself picturing a scene from his life which was set on a ship. It wasn't a riff on the "Dracula" scene -- my vampires are not evil killers -- but it was inspired by it. I'd thought about different parts of Mr Crepsley's life by that point, and imagined several scenes from his long back-story. But it was all academic, nuggets of information as opposed to full-blooded, dramatic scenes. This was different. This was like a movie clip playing inside my head, a huge, important moment in his life, and I could see it unfold in all its spine-tingling detail. It was a scene that refused to stay implanted in my head. It demanded to be shared with others. I knew instantly that it was too juicy a scene to waste. It had to be written down. But for me to do that, and give it the context that would make it powerful, I would have to write the rest of Mr Crepsley's story. It wouldn't work by itself. I could only do it full justice if I wrote a series of books about Mr Crepsley in which I could include it.

And so I set to work.

PART TWO -- ASSEMBLING THE CAST

I had several scenes in mind by the time I committed myself to writing a series about Mr Crepsley. Plus I had a title -- to tie in with the first series, it was always going to be called "The Saga of Larten Crepsley". (In the USA, of course, my first series was called "Cirque Du Freak", but that was the decision of my publishers -- I argued against it, but I was a young, powerless author back then, and I was overruled). I also had clues to his history from the original "Saga" -- for instance, we knew he was approximately 200 years old; that he had been in Paris with a fiancee around the turn of the 20th century; that he had mated with Arra Sails; that Evanna had given him his scar; that he had been on some sort of a mission with Gavner Purl; that he had a longstanding friendship with Mr Tall.

Luckily, I hadn't given TOO many details away already. If Mr Crepsley had spoken about his past a bit more in the original series, I would never have sat down to write a story about him. I had no interest in telling readers a story they already knew. Although there were certain bits that would be familiar, the vast bulk of it needed to be new material, stories which hadn't been mentioned or maybe even hinted at in "The Saga of Darren Shan." For the series to work, it needed to have its own dramatical rhythm, a rise and fall of plot lines that would carry readers along and thrill them and excite them and -- most crucially of all -- surprise them. I think my plot twists are one of the reasons my fans like my books so much. It wasn't going to be easy, shocking readers with twists when I was writing about a character whose ultimate end was known from the books already published, but because he had been so secretive in "The Saga of Darren Shan" it wasn't mission impossible either!

I gave a lot of thought to the story I wanted to tell. I didn't want to simply fill in the blanks and deliver a dry history lesson that would only be of interest to hardcore fans of the original series. This needed to have a life of its own, a reason for existing, a story worth telling. It quickly became apparent that this needed to have the same things at its heart that the original "Saga" had -- it needed to revolve around family and friends. Darren Shan's story sucked us all in because of the relationships that developed over the course of that series -- with Mr Crepsley, with Steve, with Debbie, with Harkat and the others. Larten Crepsley would only really work if I explored his story on that same level. Some relationships were set in stone from the start -- we knew that Seba would be a father figure, that he would have a romantic entanglement with Arra, that he would be close friends with Evanna and Mr Tall. Others would be with brand new characters who had never been mentioned in the first series -- again, because Mr Crepsley had said so little about his past to Darren, I had the freedom to do this, to put people into his life who were every bit as important to him as Arra and Seba, but who he would never have mentioned to his assistant.

But, crucially, I was also able to tweak Mr Crepsley's relationships with some of the characters that we knew from "The Saga", to add a new element to them. For instance, I'm sure everyone remembers Mika Ver Leth from the first series, and we knew that Mr Crepsley knew him -- but by having a young Mika develop an interest in a young Arra Sails, I was able to add a bit more intrigue to the relationship between the two men!! This was vital for the series to work. We had to see more of the people in Larten Crepsley's life, character we knew vaguely from Darren Shan's point of view, but who were actually integral to Larten's life when seen from his own point of view in the past. Getting the cast right was paramount. Without them, the books just wouldn't be interesting enough to pull readers in.

Most of the characters fell into place easily enough. I knew Seba would be a crucial figure in book 1. I also knew I needed to give Larten a brother-type figure, a best friend. And I figured out his love-life fairly swiftly -- there are three women who are particularly important to him (well, four if you add Evanna into the mix). But it was one of the "tweaked" characters that proved most central to the structure of the series. I was pretty sure that I could make the first half work, when Larten was young and finding his way in the vampire world. But the second half was proving more problematic. Then I had a brainwave for giving Larten a completely unexpected link to one of the characters we know well from the first series. It became the backbone of the second half of the storyline, and once I had that in place, it was all systems go! (You'll find out who I'm talking about in book 3. I think it's one of the best and most bitterly sweet twists of either series...)

PART THREE -- WHEN IS A TRILOGY NOT A TRILOGY?

On January 7th, 2007, I started physical work on the series. First I went back through all 12 books of "The Saga of Darren Shan", jotting down all the facts abut Mr Crepsley and others from his past that I could find. It was vital that the two series tied smoothly together. I didn't want the new books to contradict the old. It was essential that if you were a new reader, and you read all four of the Larten Crepsley books first, and then read "The Saga of Darren Shan", that you wouldn't spot any mistakes or clashes of information. The Crepsley books do cast new light on many of the characters from the Darren Shan books, but the two had to be perfectly in sync in all other ways.

When I had my notes in place, I started writing down plot notes for all four books, experimenting with ideas, trying to piece different scenes together. I knew the storyline would cover 200 years, which is a massive amount of time for any one book to focus on, so I would have to be selective. I didn't want the series to drag, so that would mean leaping over certain years and decades of the vampire's life. I had to decide which parts of his life were most important from the point of view of the story I wanted to tell. The main narrative thrust of the books revolves around his decision to walk away from the clan -- that's what everything ultimately leads towards. It wasn't something he just blithely decided to do one day. So I decided to mainly keep in the parts that would link in with that. There are a few asides which perhaps were not utterly essential in terms of the key plot development, but not many. In a way, this is a detective series. We know that Mr Crepsley walked away from the clan at a key time in his life. This series sets out to uncover the secrets behind that decision.

When I started writing down my ideas, things began falling into place very quickly. I often advise young writers not to think TOO long and hard about their stories. You normally learn more by writing than you do by thinking about it. When I start jotting down ideas, that usually sparks more ideas, and it makes it easier to pull them together and make sense of them. Within a week of starting work on my notes, I was ready to begin, and with a fair amount of nerves, I threw myself back into the world of the orange-haired grouch and started writing.

One thing I was certain of when I began was that this would be a trilogy. I had thought of it as a three-book story arc since Day One. In its most basic terms, I saw the series as breaking down into three parts, each of which covered a core part of Larten Crepsley's life -- child Larten, teenage/early 20s Larten, adult Larten. But as I worked my way through the first draft of Book 1, I realised there was just too much story to tell. Even though I had decided to streamline the novels, to focus on the most vital parts of Larten's life, it was still a very large story, and if I went with my original structure, Book 1 was going to be massive, twice the size of Books 2 and 3. I realised I had to split that section of his life into two, to re-imagine the structure in simple terms as a four book series -- child/teenager Larten, early 20s Larten, late 20s/early 30s Larten, mature Larten. (I must stress, the series doesn't divide up quite as neatly or simplistically as that makes it sound -- that was just the guideline that I gave myself when starting out.)

The change of structure threw up a problem, in that I now didn't have a last dramatic act for the end of the first book. The scene on the ship, which had initially inspired me to actively start work on the series, was originally supposed to come at the end of the first book. I now saw that it would have more impact coming at the end of Book 2. I played around with the idea of creating a big fight scene to round out the first book, but ultimately I felt that would feel forced, and wouldn't tie in with the main thrust of the series. So in the end I took the rather bold move not to have a big cliffhanger at the end of the first book -- although it does end on a rather ominous note, and points the way towards the difficult years which lie in store for the character. Some fans might feel the end of the first book is a bit of an anti-climax, but trust me, there are gory, twist-filled climaxes galore in the next three novels!

Finally, the title. For a long time the four books had different titles to those that they ultimately came to have. Larten uses a few different names over the course of his life (we heard about one of them, Vur Horston, in the first "Cirque Du Freak" book) and my original idea was to name each book after these names. Book 1 was going to be called "Larten", book 2 would have been "Quicksilver", Book 3 was "Vur Horston", and book 4 would have been "Mr Crepsley". But having thought about it for a few few years, in the end I decided the books required sharper, more enticing titles. The second, third and fourth proved quite challenging when it came to finding an apt title for them, but the first was relatively straightforward. In the book, Larten murders a man early on, abandons his human life and is spiritually re-born as a child of the night. Hence, "Birth of a Killer".View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The boys and girls in the graveyard were shouting, but Koyasan no longer heard them. The world had become a wide, grey void. She could hear deep rasping sounds, the breath of creatures which had been human once but weren’t any more…

Koyasan is too scared to cross the bridge and play in the graveyard like the other children. But when her sister’s soul is stolen, she must find the courage to enter a realm of evil, shape-shifting spirits.

A spellbinding tale from the internationally bestselling author of Cirque Du Freak and Lord Loss.

This book was specially written and published for World Book Day 2006.

Author Notes:

On 2nd March 2006, HarperCollins published a short book by me, called "Koyasan". It was one of the World Book Day books -- each year, a selection of short novels are published in the UK for World Book Day, and are sold for £1 each. I was asked to do one for 2006, and luckily I had "Koyasan" bubbling about at the back of my mind, so it was the perfect opportunity for me to write it.

"Koyasan" entered the Official UK Top 50 chart at Number 4. That was the OVERALL chart -- including adult books as well as children's. That's the highest placing any of my books have enjoyed in the UK. Of course, WBD books traditionally sell very well, because lots of children in the UK receive £1 book vouchers, which most use to buy one of the WBD titles. Still, it was great to see one of my books riding so high in the charts, and hopefully it helped introduce lots of new readers to my other novels.

I visited the holy mountain of Koyasan on my third trip to Japan, in January 2005. After a fast, furious, hugely enjoyable weekend of events, my publishers and agent took me on a tour around some of the country, as they had done during my second visit. (That second trip was a of great relevance to the creation of this book, and will be explained further down...) We went to Kumano, Matsusaka and Nagoya, among other places. But we started with a trip to Koyasan.

A few of my publishing team came with me, and so did Maiko, my main contact at Tuttle Mori, my Japanese agency. I first met Maiko in Bologna in the early noughties, and we became good friends over the years. We always try and meet up with each other when we’re in the same country, even if it’s not for work.

Koyasan is a beautiful place. We stayed in an ancient temple and I ate a vegetarian meal which was so delicious, it almost persuaded me to stop eating meat! (Alas, in the end, the lure of hamburgers proved too strong!) It had been snowing just before we arrived and everywhere was white.

During our stay, we explored a vast, very old cemetery. I was a bit grumpy to begin with — the grips on my shoes were not very good, and the path was slippery when we first entered the cemetery, so I had to concentrate on trying to keep my balance. But as we progressed, the snow faded and I was able to relax and enjoy the cemetery sights.

And what sights! It was the most amazing cemetery I’d ever visited. There were over half a million tombs. Many dated back centuries, but modern companies also had tombs or monuments, adorned with company symbols, photos of some of the board members, etc. And some of the companies had installed carved models which were associated with their company's product, e.g. cars. The most impressive and astonishing was a 30 foot tall rocket! I’d never seen anything like this before!

But the most special part of the day came when we reached a stream. There was a temple on the other side. Maiko had told me in advance that she was nervous about this visit. Although Maiko is a true twenty-first century woman, who has travelled the globe independently, she has a strong sense of tradition. It’s a mix which fascinates me about Japan — the intertwining of the ancient with the ultra-modern. On my second trip to Japan, I had visited a place called OsoreZan, a spooky, volcanic part of the country, where the spirits of dead children are said to rest before making their way to the next world. Maiko told me that she had been very sick after our time in OsoreZan, and believed a malevolent spirit had possessed and upset her. Modern medicine had been unable to cure her, and in the end she had gone to a faith healer, who had driven out the evil spirit.

In the cemetery on Koyasan, Maiko had a bad feeling about the temple on the other side of the stream. She felt it was a place of dark spirits and she thought she might get sick again if she crossed the bridge over the stream. So she stayed behind while the rest of us went to see the temple.

On our way back, I gently teased Maiko and made up a story about spirits which might have been living over the bridge. But rather than try to scare her, I came up with ways to defeat the imaginary spirits, to show that there was no need to be afraid of them. I think we both enjoyed the crazy scenarios which I invented.

I knew even before we left the cemetery that I had the idea for a cool little story, but I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to release it, given that I was in the middle of getting ready to launch my Demonata series, which would run for several years. But when I got back home, I was asked to write a short novel for World Book Day. "Koyasan" seemed like the perfect story, an the timing was just right, so I sat down and wrote it.

I would have liked to call the main character Maiko, after the real Maiko who inspired it, but I felt it was important to honour the spirits of the mountain of Koyasan, so I named another character Maiko instead. Although the real Maiko is more worried about spirits than I am, in most ways she is much braver and tougher than me. She climbs mountains in her spare time, something I wouldn’t dare do! She has the same courageous soul as Koyasan, so it gave me great pleasure to dedicate the story to her, and to thank her for all the help, guidance and friendship she has offered to me every time I have come as a visitor to Japan.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Jebel Rum is a thin, scrawny boy. His father is the famed executioner in the city where they live. When Jebel is humiliated in public, he sets off on a quest to gain great strength and invincibility. If successful, he will be able to compete in a gruelling contest to prove himself and replace his father as the wielder of the axe. Failure, on the other hands, means certain death.

To win the favour of a fire god, Jebel must make a human sacrifice. He finds a slave who is willing to pay this grisly price, and the pair set off on a trek through lands deadly and unwelcoming. In the course of their travels they will encounter hatred, bigotry, slavery, death and a whole lot more. It is the nightmarish adventure of a lifetime…

Author Notes:

The Thin Executioner went on sale on April 29th 2010, but it started life in February 2002. I often get asked where I get my ideas from. Usually I can’t answer that directly, as a book can have many sources. But in this case I can. It owes its existence to a short book by Philip Pullman, called The Firework-Maker’s Daughter.

The Pullman book is fun, but it wasn’t actually the story which inspired me. Since it was a short novel, for younger readers, it was heavily illustrated. One small picture was of an executioner. It was, if I remember correctly, the typical cartoon rendition of an executioner — a burly, bare-chested man, with a large axe and a hood over his face. I chuckled at the drawing and turned the page… Then I paused and turned back.

I’d just had an idea. In every drawing I’d ever seen, executioners were large, muscular men. It made sense — you need to be big to swing a heavy axe and chop off a person’s head. But what if there was a young, skinny, weak boy whose dream was to become an executioner when he grew up? And what if he set off on a quest to gain magical powers which would give him the strength to cut off heads?

I smirked wickedly. I thought it was a good idea for a short, humorous, illustrated children’s book, a bit like the Pullman novel that I was reading. It would be a subversive twist on those encouraging books where an unlikely child becomes a hero by being true and brave. A novel whose message was that you could achieve anything in life if you set your mind to it and worked hard… but in this case the hero’s goal was to be become a trained killer!

As I played around with the notion, I started to have more ideas, and it quickly became apparent that if I was to go ahead with this, I’d have to abandon my initial concept. The story was much bigger than I had first imagined. It wouldn’t fit in a short, illustrated book. And it would need to be written for my regular audience, not for younger kids.

I didn’t rush into the book. For the rest of the year I let it simmer away at the back of my mind. I’d think about it occasionally, come up with some ideas, imagine some scenes. I found myself recalling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I hadn’t read it in 20 years, but I could remember a lot about it, and I wanted to incorporate some of that book’s spirit into my story — if I went ahead with it.

Then I went away on holiday to Jordan for Christmas, and that’s where everything clicked. I knew the basic outline of the potential book already, but Jordan inspired lots of new ideas. The desert scenery of Wadi Rum and the majestic old city of Petra literally blew my mind, and several key scenes pretty much wrote themselves inside my head. By day I would tour and relish the sites, by night I would jot down story ideas.

In March of 2003, I went ahead and started work on the first draft. To honour Jordan’s influence on the growth of the novel, I decided to name almost all of the characters and places after Jordanian landmarks. This gave the story a more exotic feel, and I ran with that, coming up with a fantasy world called Makhras. I drew a rough map to help myself picture the terrain. I wrote up notes about the people who lived in the different countries, what they believed in, how they acted and dressed. I spent a lot of time thinking about things which wouldn’t be needed in the book, but which I needed to know in order to make the world as believable as our own.

The first draft was MUCH longer than the finished book. I explored the world of Makhras in great detail, covering politics, history, sociology, religious beliefs and a whole lot more. I ended up cutting out a lot of what I had written in later drafts, but it was essential to get all of my thoughts down on paper to begin with. First I made the world “real” and multi-layered, then I whittled it down to its main story.

I worked hard on the book over the next several years. I tightened it up, made it more of a pacy read, re-worked many of the facts about Makhras and its people. Although this is a fantasy book, I wanted it to be about the world in which we live. In many ways the book is a reaction to the war in Iraq, to 9-11 and the world of fear and suspicion which has resulted. I wanted to write a book that dealt with those issues, that asked readers to examine their beliefs and prejudices, that explored the need for tolerance and acceptance of people who are different to ourselves. I think there should be room for all sorts of religions and ideas in this world, and that it should be possible for everyone to get along in peace together. This book is my way of working my ideas into an exciting, action-packed story, in the hope that they might have more of an impact that way.

The Thin Executioner isn’t a criticism of any specific race or religion. I don’t think anyone is perfect, that we all have flaws. The key message of the book is that we should all pay closer attention to what we think and say and do, that we should always question the wisdom of our elders, listen to our hearts, try to be more open-minded.

Having said all that, I do think the assault on Iraq was unjustified, that a small group of people in America and the UK used 9-11 as an excuse to oust Saddam Hussein. I’m not making any excuses for him – he was a nasty, vicious tyrant – but he didn’t pose any real threat to the West, so we had no valid reason for toppling his regime, killing him, and reducing Iraq to a chaotic warzone. It was an example of two strong nations flexing their muscles and bullying a weaker nation into submission, regardless of the law or morality. So, to express my disgust at what happened, I decided to name two of the characters in the book after two of the biggest political rogues I think we’ve seen in a long time. Therefore we get the dubious re-pairing of two of the early twenty-first century’s political bogeymen — Master Bush and Master Blair!

Off with their heads!!!! :-)

I've said many times since its publication that The Thin Executioner is my personal favourite out of all the books that I have so far written. Something about the story touched something deep inside me, and I responded to it more warmly than to any of my other tales. Even now, as I'm writing these notes years after its publication, this still stands as the book I would pick if someone was to tell me that I could only keep one book out of everything I’ve ever written. I always love it when a fan says that one of my books means a lot to them, but I can't deny that I get an extra special buzz if that book happens to be The Thin Executioner.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The final, never-before-published volume in the noirish, gritty urban fantasy for adults from the bestselling Children's author. 'The Cardinal is dead -- long live The Cardinal'. For ten years Capac Raimi has ruled the City as The Cardinal. Created by the first Cardinal to rule after him and continue his legacy, Capac cannot be killed. But that doesn't stop his enemies trying. And he has a lot of enemies. In the past Capac's always been content to wait his adversaries out, safe in the knowledge that he can't lose playing a long game. But things are changing. Rival gangs are gaining power in the City. And figures from Capac's past are reappearing -- people only he remembers, the first Cardinal's other creations, who disappeared with him ten years ago. It can only mean one thing -- the mysterious Incan priests, the ancient powers behind the City, have never been happy about ceding control to Capac. Now they have a plan to take the City back.

Meanwhile, Al Jeery has spent the last decade meting out violence and death on the streets under the guise of Paucar Wami. His is a world of desperation and bloodshed. When he receives a call from Party Central, he is drawn back into the riddles and mysteries which destroyed his life first time round -- the Incan priests plan to manipulate Al the same way they are manipulating Capac. But Al is older and wiser now, and he finds unlikely allies as he progresses. Raising the dead is a dangerous game, and this time the priests' meddlings might just work in Al's favour. Retribution, power and love are all Al's for the taking. But he wants even more...

Author Notes:

Although the first two books in The City Trilogy (Ayuamarca and Hell's Horizon) went on sale in 1999 and 2000, the third wasn't released until year later, when the series was rebranded and re-released by HarperCollins. The re-titled first book, Procession Of The Dead, came out in 2008, Hell's Horizon in 2009, then City Of The Snakes went on sale on March 4th 2010.

I began work on the book on the 7th of June 2000. I completed my final edit on the 22nd of November 2009, so the book took almost nine and a half years to complete, which was pretty short for one of my City books! Although, having said that, the book did “cannibalize” an earlier, unfinished book of mine, a book about a vigilante in London which I had tried to write when I was a teenager. I only got a handful of chapters or so into the story before realizing I had bitten off more than I could chew and putting it aside. But I remembered it years later and worked in some of the themes and scenes. So, in a way, you can go back about 20 years to its “true” start.

I originally planned to call it City Of The Sun, but changed the title on the second day of prep work on the book, and never looked back. In my diary on the 8th June 2000 I wrote, “Wrote up the entire rough plot outline… It looks pretty good, though there are still plenty of blanks to fill in and [plot] points to resolve.” I spent the next few days fleshing out the plot and breaking it down into clearer chapters. Then, on Monday June 12th 2000, I started to write the first draft. It took just over two months to finish — I wrapped up work on the initial draft on August 17th 2000. In my diary I wrote, “Came up with a nice finale too. I think it will be the best of The City books once I go back over it and tidy it up. But will anybody publish or buy it…???” The reason I was worried about its prospects was that Hell’s Horizon had been released a few months earlier, to virtually complete indifference. I was pretty sure that Orion wouldn’t come in for the third book, though I was hopeful that if my books for younger readers were successful (Vampire’s Assistant had just been released in the UK) the perhaps some other publisher would take an interest in my adult books. I was right, but it took several years before I was proved so!

City of the Snakes was the 30th book that I had written. I had been banging away at novels for about a dozen years by that point, and I’d come a hell of a long way. I was able to tell a far more involving story now, and also get to the heart of it much quicker than I could even just a few years earlier. Where Hell’s Horizon took four completely re-written drafts to pin down, the first draft of this book didn’t differ hugely to the published book more than 9 years later — it was just a case of fine-tuning what I’d created first time round, correcting a few flaws, polishing it up. Less than five years separated the first drafts of books 2 and 3 of this series, but I had made stellar leaps during that time.

Except, of course, book 3 was actually book 4! As I explained in my notes for Hell’s Horizon, I wrote another book set in The City, in 1996, involving many of the characters from the first two books, set about twenty years before them. That book explored the relationship between young Bill Casey and the vicious Paucar Wami. It was a dark, disturbing story that detailed the ruination of a decent human being. I have never returned to that book, and while I might do one day, it seems unlikely at the moment. But even if it never sees print, the writing of it was crucial. Because while I was writing it, and afterwards, I learnt a lot more about the characters and nature of The City, and came to realize that I definitely wanted to write a fourth book, one set a decade after Ayuamarca and Hell’s Horizon, that took all of the story lines forward and wrapped them up.

In February 2001 I edited the first 40 or so pages of the book, the Capac sections. (The book is mostly narrated by Al Jeery, but begins with Capac as narrator.) This was in response to some suggestions from my agent, to set the scene a little more clearly for readers who might not have read the first two books. Then, having done that, I focused on my children’s books, which were doing very well — I had written the first 11 books of The Saga by this time, and had started the first draft of Lord Loss. It would be almost 7 years before I would do any more work on City Of The Snakes.

Having been convinced by HarperCollins in 2007 to re-visit the series and prepare the books for republication, I went back and edited the first and second book, before turning my attention to the third and final book of the trilogy in January 2008. I wasn’t sure what to expect, given that I had never taken it much beyond its initial first draft stage. To my delight, the book was in very good shape, and didn’t require anywhere near as much work as I had feared it would. I polished, tightened up and tweaked over the coming two years, but radical surgery was never required.

My original feeling, that City Of The Snakes was the strongest of The City books, proved to be correct, at least in my view. This book was always about taking the best elements of the first two books (along with what I had learnt from writing the original third book, the one about Al and Paucar Wami in the past) and combining them to create the perfect mix. I took the more fantastical features of the first book, merged them with the more strongly plotted and paced style of the second, wove in some of the darkness and backstory of the third, and added plenty of dollops of new stuff too. Everything came together smoothly, neatly, diabolically. This is a book that never gives up and never slows down, a book where the characters are strongly drawn and the twists more surprising than ever before. Leftover questions from the earlier books are answered, showdowns are faced up to, destiny is decided. Of all the books in the series, this was the most enjoyable for me, and the ending... of all my books, that's the ending I'm fondest of. I never read my own work, but I occasionally do flick back through certain passages, and every now and then I find myself reading the last page or two of City Of The Snakes and finding myself smiling softly, whispering, "job well done."

Ladies and gentlemen, won’t you let me be your escort as you come with me one last time… to The City.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The second volume in a noirish, gritty urban fantasy for adults from the bestselling author otherwise known as Darren Shan. The Cardinal is the City and the City is The Cardinal. They are joined at the soul. When Al Jeery is seconded by The Cardinal from guard duties at Party Central to investigate the murder of a woman at a hotel he little suspects that the dead woman will turn out to be his girlfriend. Soon he is involved in a terrifying mystery that draws in the dead, the city's Incan forefathers, the imposing figure of The Cardinal himself, and the near-mythical assassin, Paucar Wami. Wami is a law unto himself, a shadowy, mysterious figure who can apparently kill anyone he chooses without fear of punishment or retribution. And Al is about to find out that he has a lot more in common with Wami than he could ever have imagined...

Author Notes:

Hell's Horizon was first published in February 2000, with the re-edited edition going on sale in March 20009. It is, hands down, the hardest book I've ever had to write, requiring the greatest amount of rewrites and fresh approaches. It was a book that failed three times, that should have been scrapped, that seemed to be going nowhere, but which ultimately became what I look upon as my own personal greatest triumph.

It started simply enough in September 1995. I've always liked detective fiction, the works of Chandler, Hammett, Spillane. I don't read a huge number of books in the genre, but I've seen loads of noir movies over the years. I wanted to add one of my own stories to the mountain. I planned to write a short, sharp, throwaway novel, full of sexy ladies and a cynical private detective who made wisecracks about everything. I was attempting all sorts of books at the time, playing around with styles and genres. I wanted to have a varied career, to try different types of stories, not tie myself down to one specific area. I'd attempted weird, ambitious novels. Now it was time to see if I could do a fun hack piece. In my diary, on Monday September 4th, 1995, I wrote: "Had an idea for a new book. Its a mystery novel called Hell's Horizon. I'm a bit hazy on the finer details at the moment, but I think it could be good."

I soon found out that I sucked at writing a straightforward detective story! What I know these days is that I'm at my best when my central character is sucked into a situation, without knowing too much about what's going on. I identify best with non-professionals who find themselves out of their depth, who have to struggle to keep afloat. Like the best Hitchcock movies, I need to focus on an Ordinary Joe, an Everyman who isn't as smart or as cunning or as experienced as those he finds himself up against, but who fights hard, refuses to give up, and comes good in the end by sheer persistence more than anything else. I don't handle experts very comfortably. In the first draft of Hell's Horizon, my central character - Al Jeery - was a professional detective, and I just could't make it ring true. He didn't sound right. His cynical wisecracks rang hollow. It didn't work.

Regardless of that, something in me liked something in the book. I started writing on Sunday, September 10th. I was still working for a TV cable company called Horizon in Limerick at the time, so I only wrote at the weekends. I finished up with them on September 22nd and began working full-time on the book on the 26th. I added new kinks and twists as I went along, expanding slightly on my original plot. I finished the first draft on October 30th. In my diary that day, I wrote: "I'm happy with the final result. Maybe it&'s a bit too bare, a bit too simplistic, but I think it stands a chance."

Over the next couple of years I worked on a variety of first drafts of different books -- eight, in total, including a book for younger readers called Cirque Du Freak, which was to change the entire direction of my career for the next decade or so! One of the novels I wrote during that time linked in with Ayuamarca and Hell's Horizon. It was set a few decades before those books, and gave us a look at younger incarnations of quite a few characters from those two novels. It also introduced a new character by the name of Paucar Wami. The assassin, who later became a key player in the series, didn't appear in the first draft of either Ayuamarca or Hell's Horizon. It was only when I wrote the third book (which isn't scheduled to be published any time in the near future -- it was VERY dark, even by my standards, and I'm not sure it's a book I'll ever want to release) that I came up with Paucar Wami. I was editing Ayuamarca at the time, and I worked Wami into it over the course of several rewrites and edits. Then, on July 27th, 1997, I started on a rewrite of Hell's Horizon. In my diary I noted, "Lots of it will need fiddling with, but I think it's going to turn out well. It's working Paucar Wami into the plot that's going to be the tricky bit."

The first draft of the book didnt link in with Ayuamarca directly. The story was set in the City, and Ford Tasso had a small role in it, but otherwise it didn't connect. My vague plan back then had been to use the City as a setting for different types of unconnected stories. As I worked on the second draft of Hell's Horizon in August 1997, that plan was still pretty much in place. I worked in a few more links to Ayuamarca, and gave Paucar Wami a small role in the book. But it was still trying to be a normal detective story -- Al still worked for a firm as a detective, and instead of Incan priests, he dealt with a group of Satanists during the course of his investigation. I wasn't sure if I could release the novel as a sequel to Ayuamarca. I had sold the rights to that book to Orion by this stage, and they wanted to see what I had planned for a follow-up. Although I was enjoying HH, it had no fantastical elements. I thought, if it was going to be released, that maybe I would have to release it under a pseudonym.

I finished my second draft of Hell's Horizon on August 28th and sent it to my agent, not feeling too confident about it. I didn't think it was a particularly strong book, and it didn't link in with Ayuamarca, but I needed a second opinion, just in case I was wrong. Well, as it turned, out, I was, but perhaps not as wrong as I thought! A guy called Gerry Vaugan-Hughes, who worked for my agent, read the revised HH and made some recommendations for was in which it might be improved. Encouraged by this, I came up with some new ideas (including the link between Al and Paucar Wami, which became a core element of the plot) and did another complete rewrite in October 1997. This draft was more multi-layered, with extra mysteries worked in, and it linked up more closely with Ayuamarca. But Al was still a private detective, and it still read like a flawed attempt to do a Mickey Spillane book. I wrote in my diary: "I'm very happy with this version. As good as Ayuamarca? I don't think so. But in the same ball-park now."

My agent didn't think it was in the same ball-park. On January 30th 1998 we had a chat on the phone and he told me it didn't cut mustard and that we should shelve it. And he was absolutely right -- it wasn't working. But I couldn't drop it. Something about the book still appealed to me. I had a feeling that it could be made work -- I just didn't know how! I worked on other books over the coming months, trying to find the right book to follow up Ayuamarca. I had all sorts of novels ready to go, but nothing in that mould. As I continued editing Ayuamarca, my thoughts returned again to Hell's Horizon. What was wrong with it? Why wasn't it working? What could I do to fix it? Somewhere along the line, I had the idea of changing the character of Al, making him one of The Cardinal's employees instead of a private detective. And that was the key which unlocked the novel's potential.

I began my fourth draft of Hell's Horizon on July 17th, 1998, and wrapped up work on it on September 23rd -- it had taken longer to write than the first draft! It was a completely different beast by the time I'd finished. It was much longer now. The Cardinal was in it. Paucar Wami's role had been expanded. Al was no longer a wise-cracking smartass, but a troubled, likeable guy who get manipulated by just about everyone close to him. I broke everything down and built it all up again, working in more fantasy angles, tying it in more closely to the story I'd told in Ayuamarca. By the end, I was sure I'd done good, and in my diary I said simply, "I think its quality."

I wasnt alone in my opinion. I met Gerry again in London on October 9th. He'd only had time to read the first quarter of the book, but he now thought it was even stronger than Ayuamarca. On November 20th I spoke with Chris, and although he wanted me to do a bit more work on the book, he thought I'd done a great job and summed it all up by saying simply, "It's there." Then, on September 30th, Chris told me that my editor at Orion had read the book and loved it, and that they were going to make an offer. There was still plenty of work to do on the book, lots of editing, sharpening and tweaking. But everything from this point on was fine-tuning. Even when I returned to the book more than nine years later, in December 2007, to begin preparing it for its re-release, I didn't have a huge amount of work to do on it. I tightened it up a bit, and cut out a few things which I felt the book didn't need, but for the most part I was able to leave it as it was. After four complete rewrites, I had found the story at last. I'd also found my style, and if any one book of mine can be said to have defined my career, I think it's Hell's Horizon. I was a writer looking for a voice up until this point, even though I'd already sold a couple of books in Ayuamarca and Cirque Du Freak. But Hell's Horizon was when it all clicked and everything came together. I still experimented with books after Hell's Horizon, and some of the novels I attempted didn't work out quite as well as others. But from this time on I wrote with confidence. I'd faced every sort of challenge going with Hell's Horizon, and I'd come through them all. I was on my path, I'd found my way, and I didn't think that anything in the world could stop me from pursuing my dream now.

And so far, it hasn't.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

The first volume in a noirish, gritty urban fantasy for adults from the bestselling author otherwise known as Darren Shan. Quick-witted and cocksure, young upstart Capac Raimi arrives in the City determined to make his mark. As he learns the tricks of his new trade from his Uncle Theo -- extortion, racketeering, threatening behaviour -- he’s soon well on his way to becoming a promising new gangster. Then he crosses paths with The Cardinal, and his life changes forever. The Cardinal is the City and the City is The Cardinal. They are joined at the soul. Nothing moves on the streets, or below them, without the Cardinal’s knowledge. His rule is absolute. As Capac begins to discover more about the extent of the Cardinal’s influence on his own life he is faced with hard choices. And as his ambition soars ever higher he will learn all there is to know about loss, and the true cost of ultimate power!

Author Notes:

Procession Of The Dead was published on March 3rd 2008 under the name of D B Shan, but was actually first published as Ayuamarca back in February 1999, under the name of Darren O'Shaughnessy (my real name). It was my first ever published novel, and sold about 2,000 copies when it first came out -- happily it sold a lot more than that when re-released years later!

I began writing Procession of the Dead, then known as Ayuamarca, on October 18th 1993, when I was just 21 years old. I finished the first draft in a month, wrapping it up on November 17th. It was 227 pages. I typed it, so I can’t give an accurate word count.The original idea came to me when I was watching the movie Barton Fink. I loved the weirdness of the Coen Brothers and wanted to write a book that captured some of that style of eccentricity. I had an idea for a quirky book about a young man who gets into the insurance business and hooks up with a very wacky mentor. As I mulled it over, it became apparent that the mentor needed to have more power than a normal insurance agent, and I began to gravitate towards the notion of making him a gangster. While I didn’t move all the way away from my original quirky intentions, I quickly realised it needed to be darker and more multi-layered, and the book steadily developed into something more serious than I had initially invisaged.

The Incan angle came almost by accident, after I’d already plotted most of the book. I wanted a weird-sounding name for the novel, and vaguely recalled something in a Fortean Times diary which had been released earlier that year. (The Fortean Times is a magazine devoted to strange occurrences, UFOs, ghosts, etc.) Flicking through the diary, I found a page which listed the names of the months as used by the Incas. As soon as I spotted the word “Ayuamarca” and read its translated description - “procession of the dead” - I knew I had my title. But I also knew I had my structure — if I broke the book down into twelve parts, I could give the name of each month to the chapters, and also use some of the names for my cast of characters. Although the book changed drastically between its first draft and it’s publication and now its subsequent re-publication, that twelve act structure is almost exactly the way it was when I first came up with it.

The Incas weren’t essential to the story I wanted to tell, but having gone with the title of Ayuamarca, I wanted to do a bit more with them. At some stage between the first and second draft, I saw a TV programme about Macchu Picchu and this provided me with fresh material which I could incorporate — the watana, the villacs, the Inti Watana, etc. I visited Macchu Picchu after the book had been published. I wish I could have gone while I was still writing and editing the novel, but back then I had virtually no money (I was drawing the dole for most of the time!), so a working visit wasn’t a possibility.

I wrote the second draft of the novel in 1994 and 1995 (maybe even just 1995 — I’m not 100% certain). I had a job in a TV cable company at the time, and worked on the draft at weekends, writing an average of 20 pages each weekend. The second draft was almost double the length of the first. Without altering the structure dramatically, I found ways to flesh out characters, extend scenes, and do more with the bones of the story I’d lain down more than a year earlier. Ayuamarca was a sharp learning curve for me. I’d written several first drafts of novels by that stage, but this was only the second time I’d re-written a book, and it seemed like I was figuring out more about the craft of writing every weekend. Knowledge of editing would come later, as I’d gradually come to realise that less is sometimes more, but this was when I first began to stretch myself and take stories beyond the barest bones stage.

I was proud of the second draft and I decided this was the perfect time to test the waters of professional writing. I quit my job, went on the dole, and started writing full-time. I was living at home with my parents, so I was far from uncomfortable, but I had very little play money for the next 5 or 6 years. But I was writing for a living, and that was all that mattered to me — I was living the dream.

I got an agent fairly quickly. Having read The Writers And Arists Yearbook some time earlier, I went through its list of agents and picked out five at random. (I had submitted the first draft directly to publishers, to see what sort of a response it would draw, but swiftly realised that was a waste of time — I think a good agent is essential if you want to carve out a career as a writer, especially today, when the business is more cut-throat and fine-tuned than ever before.) I photocopied the first 50 pages of the book five times, wrote up a covering letter, and sent it off into the night. I was ready to go to another five if I drew a blank first time round, and another five after that, and another five after that. I knew how difficult even getting an agent could be, and I was prepared to be patient. I was in this game for the long haul.

As things turned out, I never needed to face that second round. I went to London for Christmas and New Year’s 1995. Early in January, the telephone rang and a man called Christopher Little asked for me. He’d responded to my submission a few months earlier and asked to see the rest of the book. Now he wanted to let me know that he liked it, and was interested in possibly representing me. He said the book needed a lot more work, but if I was prepared to re-write, he’d try to help me knock it into shape. I said I was more than happy to have another crack at it, and more than twelve years later, Chris is still my agent (and still helping me sharpen up sluggish early drafts!!).

With the help of Chris and one of team, a guy called Gerry Vaughan-Hughes, I did some strong editing, tightened up the book, and added some new elements. One of those elements was the sinister Paucar Wami, who became one of the lynchpins of The City series. I’d already written the first draft of Hell’s Horizon (the second City book) by this stage, and that was where Paucar Wami originated. I decided to include him in Ayuamarca too, and although he doesn’t have a huge role in the book, I think he gave it a nice extra dimension which it was previously lacking.

Eventually the book was ready to be submitted, but the path to publication was far from smooth. Publishers weren’t sure what to make of the book. It had a bizarre title, and it couldn’t be easily categorised. I still have difficulty putting the book in a corner — is it horror, fantasy, mystery, sci-fi? I don’t know. I don’t think it matters either - it’s just a damn good book - but publishers don’t see things the same way that writers do! It took us about a year to convince a publisher to take a chance on it, but finally Orion came on board and snapped it up for the grand sum of £5000. That was big money for me back then!!!

I liked my editor at Orion, a young guy called Simon Spanton. He helped me work some more on the book and made some very good suggestions. But although I worked quickly, it was a slow oad to publication, and the book didn’t see print until February 1999. In truth, I probably could have done with another six months to polish it off to my satisfaction. I was still learning about the editing process, finding different ways to pace and tell a story. Ayuamarca was at least one more draft shy of being, in my mind, a really good book. It needed one more round of tightening and pruning. But time ran out and I had to publish it as it stood. I was never entirely happy about that, and always looked upon the book as unfinished business. I promised myself that if the book was every republished, I would go back and re-edit, to do true justice to the story. It took eight years, but in the end I got to do the edit I wasn’t advanced enough to execute first time round. I also gave the book its new name — one of the things I realised early on was that people couldn’t pronounce Ayuamarca, nor understand it if I told them the name in conversation. Simon had strongly urged me to change it, but being a first-time author, I hadn’t wanted to start my career with a big capitulation. While I’m glad in a way that I stuck to my guns, I’m a lot gladder that I now have the opportunity to give the book a title which I can at least state clearly and confidently when giving an interview!!!

Ayuamarca was originally slated to be published by a New Fiction branch of Orion, but during the drawn-out publication process, it got moved to the Millennium imprint, an outlet for pure science-fiction books. I always felt uneasy about this, as there’s actually very little sci-fi in the novel, and indeed the only real criticism that came the book’s way in reviews was from sci-fi reviewers, who complained huffily that it wasn’t what they considered science-fiction.

But in all honesty there were very few negative reviews. Most were very positive, and although the book wasn’t widely reviewed, the clippings that I collected were far more encouraging than any first timer has a right to expect. But, despite the good reviews, sales were slow, as they so often are for debut authors. It shifted about two thousand copies in its first year, which is where it stuck. I think the title certainly played against it. And I think it was misrepresented as science-fiction, which didn’t help. But also, being as objective as I can be, I think the book was a bit bloated. Chapters were longer than they needed to be. I’d find a good way to say something, but then spend another three or four lines elaborating on my description. It wasn’t as pacy as it needed to be. It had a confusing prologue. I look back at it now and I have to say, hand on heart, that while two thousand copies sold was probably a bit less than the book deserved, it doesn’t count as one of the most cheated books of all time!!!!

But that’s not to say it was a bad book. On the contrary, I believed that with a bit more work - that one last edit which time had denied me - it could be a VERY good book. I was backed up in this belief by the responses of a small group of very fervent fans, most of whom picked the book up having read my children’s books (Cirque Du Freak et al) which I began to publish in January 2000. These guys LOVED Ayuamarca. Indeed, some hailed it as my best work. They were furious that it had failed commercially, annoyed that it was so hard to find a copy of the sequel, Hell’s Horizon, and aghast that they couldn’t read the third book of the trilogy. A few tried mounting petitions to force my publishers to bring out City of the Snakes, or pleaded with me to make it available online. I did consider that option, but I wanted to wait a while, to see if any publishers came back into the equation. I’m a very patient person when it comes to my books. I didn’t mind waiting five years … ten … maybe even more.

Fortunately for those fans chomping at the bit, I didn’t have to wait quite that long. The publishers of my children’s books, HarperCollins, became interested in my adult novels. They asked my agent to read them. They liked them. And they asked me if they could republish them.

And I said no.

I was reluctant because they wanted to publish the books under my Darren Shan name. I realsed Ayuamarca as Darren O’Shaughnessy, and the reason I changed it for Cirque Du Freak was so that children wouldn’t pick up Ayuamarca thinking it was a kid’s book. I wanted there to be a clear distinction between the books I wrote for adults and the books I wrote for younger readers. When Collins approached me and asked to buy Ayuamarca and release it as a Darren Shan book, I had no hesitation in turning them down. I was anxious to see the book republished, but not at any expense.

Luckily, they gently persisted. They didn’t let the matter drop. They really liked the books and wanted to publish them. They presented a strong case for letting them buy the rights, and agreed to compromise on the name if I was willing to keep the Shan brand. I suggested O D Shan which could stand, of course, for OverDose Shan, but also Older Darren Shan. That tickled my fancy, but nobody else’s!!! In the end we settled on D B Shan, D B being the initials of two of my middle names — my full sobriquet, as listed on my birth cert, is Darren William Barry O’Shaughnessy.

Having agreed on the name, I was happy to let Collins have the books, and once the contract was signed, I returned to Ayuamarca - now firmly established in my mind as Procession of the Dead - and set to work on re-editing it in 2007. It had been 8 or 9 years since I last worked on the book, but I slipped back into the world of Capac and The Cardinal with incredible ease. The story was still alive somewhere inside my mind, and it was like I’d only been away from it for a few weeks. But although I was instantly familiar with the work, I was now a much better writer than I had been back then, and I edited it at a furious pace, trimming it down without any sentimentality at all, cutting what needed to be cut, shortening what needed to be shortened, changing some bits that needed to be changed.

The resulting book is a novel I like to think the 21 year old me would have been delighted with. It’s what I was dreaming of doing with the story when I first thought of it. The curse of young writers, I think, is that we can sense what we want to do with a tale; we can picture it exactly the way we want it to be; we know where it should go, what it should do — but we don’t have the experience to do our vision justice. I always knew there was a good book in this story — it just took 14 years to squeeze it out!!!!!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Hell's Heroes, the 10th and final book of The Demonata, starts just after the events of book 9. Grubbs bids his uncle Dervish an emotional goodbye, then returns to the world beyond with a blind, captive Kernel, to take the fight to the demon armies which are crossing more and more frequently. But he knows that his true foe is waiting for him in the universe of the Demonata. And he is also fairly certain that Bec has pledged herself to Lord Loss.

When Grubbs finally decides to face Lord Loss on his home turf, it is the start of the final ever war, in which the fate of our world and universe will be decided once and for all. The stakes have never been so high. The cost of failure has never been so deadly. And the three parts of the Kah-Gash have never been so fractured.

With heroes like this, who needs enemies?!?

Author Notes:

Hell's Heroes, the tenth and final book of The Demonata, was released on October 1st 2009. I started work on Hell's Heroes on July 13th 2006, and finished my final edit on June 5th 2009. In total, I worked on The Demonata for more than 8 years, from February 6th 2001 to June 5th 2009.

Book 10 was relatively easy to write, as I knew pretty much everything that I wanted to do with the story by this stage, and it was simply a case of bringing all of the plot-lines together and rounding them off. I had the ending for the series in mind from quite early on, at least 2003 or 2004, even before I knew exactly how or if I was going to get there! While books 7, 8 and 9 all presented challenges of one kind or another, I always felt confident that I could breeze through the last book, and that more or less proved the case. Each day was exciting and I tore through the first draft and subsequent edits.

I didn't change a huge amount of the book in the editing process, except to tighten it up. But there was one major change -- the fate of the lesser demons. In the first draft, and through most of the editing, I killed off ALL of the demons except for Lord Loss. I figured that my three heroes would be angry and eager for vengeance, and it made sense to me that they would be merciless with the Demonata. In the early drafts they exterminated every single living demon, leaving their universe a blank, uninhabited shell. It was neat and nasty, a fitting ending for a vile, vicious species which had done all in their power to wipe out the universe of mankind...

... but something about it sat uneasily with me. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was wrong. My demons were evil, inhuman beasts from another dimension -- but was that any justification for genocide? I kept trying not to think about it that way, because I wanted to kill off the demons. Having identified closely with my protagonists, I shared their pain and sense of fury. Because of the Demonata, Dervish was dead, and Meera, and Bill-E, and so many others. They deserved to be slaughtered, each and every one of them. Didn't they?!?

The answer, I finally realised, was NO. In my mind, there must be no situation where genocide is ever acceptable. There are times when our enemies must be killed, when it's a true case of us or them, but it's vital that we always recognise who exactly those enemies are, that we not tarnish an entire race with the same brush. All demons were evil in this series, yes, but most were not able to pose any threat to mankind, so why kill the powerless along with the powerful? If I did that, I would be doing it purely out of spite, and I would be just as evil as the demons I was wiping out.

Thus, in one of the last drafts, I rewrote the scenes where Grubbs and co lay into the forces of the Demonata. Bec, as usual, was the voice of the reason, the one to see what I had initially missed, the one to save Grubbs and Kernel from making what would have been a calamitous and costly mistake, one that would have possibly cost them their sanity and humanity in the long run. For the universe to be healed, it had to be mended, and that meant putting ourselves above the demons we were pitted against. We must never stoop to the level of our lowest enemies, or in victory we will simply become them. I lost sight of that a bit during the writing of the book, but thankfully my characters led me back to the path of reason in the end.

I knew since early on that I was going to spare Lord Loss, and also that I wanted to use the poem from book 1 again, to neatly bookend the series. I considered using it at the very end of the book, but ultimately decided to bring it forward by a few chapters, when we get our last glimpse of Lord Loss, as it made more sense including it at that point. Also, I didn't want the last word to go to the demon master!!!

The repeated poem was also another example of the circular nature of the series. One of the points I tried to impress over and over throughout the course of the ten books was that history repeats itself and time, in a way, is circular. I've commented previously on the order of the narrators, the symmetry of the series, how they are the same back to front as they are front to back. The first line of Bec was the same as the last. The first book ended with a sort of shaggy-dog style joke -- so did the last. I knew that I was going to end the series by bringing time back to its start and letting it unravel all over again, and I wanted to plant seeds that would prepare readers for that, albeit slyly and subtly.

The last chapter of the book owes a lot to an Isaac Asimov short story, "The Last Question", in which a computer is asked to figure out a way to save mankind from the ultimate destruction of the universe. It spends trillions of years working on the solution to the problem, and ends up outlasting not just mankind, but the universe itself. Ultimately, when it has the answer to hand, it wants to inform someone, but there are no living beings left -- so it re-creates the universe and starts life over again, pretty much the same way that Grubbs does at the end of Hell's Heroes. As with the sci-fi nods in book 9 which reference Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Hawking, this was my way of acknowledging and paying homage to a genius of the genre, a man who had a huge influence not only on what sort of stories I write, but the way I think about the world and our universe.

I was conscious, when writing the last few chapters, that fans might compare it with the ending of The Saga and claim that I was very limited when it came to ending long series! Both series end with time travel and a re-start of sorts. In an ideal world, I wouldn't have followed the ending of The Saga with the ending of The Demonata after such a short time -- I would have written lots of other books between the two. But that's not the way things worked out, and I always think you have to play to a story's strengths, regardless of all other factors. e.g. I'm sure there are some writers at the moment who would refuse point blank to write a vampire story, because they know that they would be accused of trying to cash in on the Twilight-inspired craze. But I think that a truly good story should always be told, even if there are a dozen other stories out in the market just like it at the same time. You can't be afraid of competition -- even if that competition comes in the form of your own books!!!

I was pleased when fans didn't react unfavourably to the ending of The Demonata (indeed, most seemed to prefer it to the ending of Sons Of Destiny), and I think that's because they realised the two endings, while both involving time travel, were fundamentally different, and left readers with completely different feelings about what had just happened. I've been obsessed with time travel since I was a young child, and have written a couple more books in which it's a vital factor. I hope to publish them one day, but it won't be any time soon. I plan to leave time travel alone for a while now -- UNLESS a great time travel story hits me out of the blue and demands to be written, of course!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Dark Calling , the 9th book of The Demonata, is set around the same time period as Death's Shadow and Wolf Island, so certain events near the start of the book overlap. Kernel is the narrator. While Grubbs was struggling with his wolfen half on Wolf Island, and while Bec and Beranabus were facing the Shadow in the hold of a zombie-plagued ship, Kernel was facing up to some REAL problems!!

Since he rebuilt his eyes after the events described in Book 6, Kernel has been seeing strange lights (even stranger than usual!) and hearing mysterious voices, telling him to "Come..." The Old Creatures which we first encountered in Bec have returned to Earth, with the sole purpose of taking Kernel away from it. Against his wishes, he is dragged across the universe by a creature older than time, who promises to reveal the secrets of creation to him.

Kernel's wild journey is a dangerous one, and the more he learns about the past and his role in the universe, the more he wishes he had been left alone on Earth. The truth is that the stakes are far higher than the Disciples ever imagined, and ours is not the only world at risk. A war had been waged between demons and the beings of our universe since the start of time, and it is reaching its conclusion, one in which victory for the demon forces seems all but assured. The Old Creatures have a plan for Kernel, but it's not that he likes, and it's not going to save Earth from the savage forces of the Demonata...

Author Notes:

Dark Calling, book 9 of The Demonata, was released on 1st May 2009. I started work on the book on February 14th 2006, and did my final edit in November 2008. It sold more copies in its first week than any other book of mine had done before, but failed to hit the #1 spot because it was released during the middle of the Twilight craze -- oh, the irony, held off the top by books about vampires!!

I was very pleased with the title of this book, partly because it suits the book very well and has a few different meanings (which become apparent when you read the book), but mostly because it's the most difficult time I've ever had coming up with a title! Titles vary from book to book. Sometimes the name will come to me first, and I'll have it in place from the very beginning. Other times I'll come up with it during the writing process. And occasionally it will only come late in the day, when the book has been edited and is nearing the printing stage. In this instance the first working title was The Divine Horror. I was never happy with that, but at least it gave me something to call the book. A year and a half later, I shortened it to Divine Horror, in case that would grab me any more, but it didn't. Nearly a year after that, I changed it to Eternity's Crux. I liked that title, as it tied in very neatly with the story line and hinted at the sci-fi elements that play an important part in the book. But I suspected it was a title that other people wouldn't warm to, and as soon as it went to my editor, that was confirmed. The trouble was, we couldn't come up with anything else that both of us liked. It needed to be short and snappy, yet it also needed to relate to the plot. But book 9 had a very complicated plot! We bounced ideas back and forth. Some of the titles in the mix included Destiny's Eyes, Creatures of the Dark, and Dark Matters. We both liked the "dark" theme, so I played with it a bit more and came up with titles such as Dark Eyes, Monsters of the Dark, and Call of the Dark. That last name struck a chord with me. I knew it wasn't quite right, but I sensed I was close. With the production team baying for a title (we literally came within 24 hours of the deadline!), I played around with Call of the Dark on my way to the theatre (I was going to see a play called Fat Girl), and came up with Dark Calling. I instantly knew the problem had been solved, and luckily my editor agreed straightaway as soon as I sent it to her. And so the title of book 9 finally came to be.

Dark Calling wasn't the most difficult book of the series to write (that was Bec, because of all the research it involved), but it was by far and away the most difficult to edit. The first draft of the book came quite easily, but I knew when I was writing it that it was too long as it stood -- but I needed to get all of my ideas down on paper, so I just went with it, knowing that I'd have to cut out a lot of what I was writing at a later date. That draft came in just under 62,000 words -- the final draft, nearly 3 years later, was 43,500 word, meaning I cut out almost a third!

Before anyone starts moaning about the discarded material, and asking for a "director's cut", I must point out it was all material that needed to be cut. As I said above, I knew even while I was working on the first draft that I couldn't go ahead with it as it stood. The book came to a virtual standstill in the middle, with all sorts of theories and explanations being bandied around. There was almost no action between the first and final thirds, and far too much talk. It was vital to set me on the path to the final draft, to bring together all of the ideas which were whirling around inside my head, so that I could then study them on paper and decide what needed to stay and what could go. I enjoyed writing the first draft immeasurably, but I knew that nobody else would enjoy it as it stood, so I then got stuck into the long, complex task of knocking it into an entertaining shape.

Book 9 had the difficult task of explaining much of the background to the series, where the demons came from, why they were so powerful, who and what the Old Creatures were, why the kah-Gash fractured, the exact nature of its power -- it even had to explain the Big Bang and the origin of our universe! As I explained in my notes for Demon Thief, that book was actually the sixth in the series that I wrote, written after Lord Loss, Bec, Slawter, Blood Beast and Demon Apocalypse. I was still putting together my ideas about the Demonata while writing those five books, trying to figure out all of their history, where Grubbs and Bec and the Disciples fit into a bigger story. I knew how I wanted the series to end, but I needed to know more about the demons in order to get there. It was when I came up with the ideas for Demon Thief that everything came together, and that I realised the order in which the books needed to be released. At that point it became clear that Kernel Fleck would have to serve as the "answers man" in the series, the glue which would bind the other books together and explain everything that was happening in them. We learnt a lot about the demon universe in Book 2, when Kernel was the narrator. In Book 9 we would learn even more, not just about the demon universe, but ours too.

The question I get asked more than any other (and I'm sure every other writer gets asked it the most too), is where do my ideas come from? The answer is, I take them from all over the place, from books, movies, TV shows, things I see in real life, things I learn about when I travel around the world, stuff I read about in newspapers or on the web, etc. etc. Ideas come from anywhere and everywhere. Normally I can't trace a book to a particular source -- they're a mishmash, blending bits and pieces from all over the place, mostly on a subconscious level. But I know precisely where the ideas for Dark Calling first began to come together inside my head, even though it would be many years before I found a way to run with those ideas -- it began with the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, a novel called Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke (who also wrote the screenplay for 2001), and A Brief History Of Time, the non-fiction book by Stephen Hawking. Surprising source material for a horror book, you might think, but then Dark Calling isn't any ordinary sort of horror book.

As much as I love horror, I love fantasy and sci-fi too, and I always look for ways to blend those genres into my books. Thus the fantasy angle of Lake of Souls, in The Saga, and the time travelling, science fiction bits in both Sons of Destiny and Demon Apocalypse. I don't see my books as "just" being horror books -- I like to think they're much more than that, a mix of genres, which is why they appeal to so many readers. I first saw 2001 at a pretty young age, and it made a big impression on me. It's a film I've watched many times, and plan to continue re-watching over the years to come. I loved its scope, the way it questioned our origins, the advent of intelligence, the path we have trod as humans. Later I read Childhood's End and that was similarly impactful, urging me to wonder about our role in the universe, the evolution of our species, what might be coming next. While studying in university in the early 1990s, I also read A Brief History of Time, and it fascinated me. The book has a reputation as being the most unread book ever, i.e. millions of people bought copies, but apparently lots of people who bought it didn't read it -- they either just wanted to show it off, to make themselves look clever, or they couldn't get past the first few pages. I don't know if that's true or not, but I certainly enjoyed the book. It was an accessible, intriguing look at our universe, our concept of time, and a whole lot more.

That movie and those two books have influenced a lot of my writing in all sorts of ways, but I drew upon them more than usual in Dark Calling. I saw this as a chance to put my own spin on the matter, to add my story to that of countless others which purport to explain how life first began. I don't mean for Dark Calling to be taken literally (I don't really believe that there was a universe full of demons in existence before ours!), but it does tie in fairly closely with what Professor Hawking proposed. There's often a thin line between science fiction and science fact, and I like it when the two blend. I think you can't have one without the other -- sci-fi often throws ideas out into the world, which "proper" scientists later seize upon, explore fully, and transform into fact. e.g. the idea of rockets began with science fiction. Dark Calling isn't meant to be read as a factual book, but I hope it will get readers thinking about the nature of time and space, the structure of our universe, the possibility of places that operate differently to ours, and that it maybe leads them to A Brief History of Time or other such work -- or at least gives them some new and fun things to consider in their idle moments.

Anyway, as I said above, I drew all of my ideas together and put them down on paper when I wrote the first draft of Dark Calling. Then I went through it several times over the coming months and years and turned my theorising into exciting fiction. I trimmed the middle section massively, and added as much action as I could. In the first draft, the Old Creature appeared only as a ball of light -- in later drafts, I realised that was too alienating, and had him adopt the features of a couple of characters from earlier books. Kernel experiences life on other worlds in this book, and in the first draft I went into more detail about the aliens he encounters -- when I re-read, I realised this bogged the book down, so I trimmed back a lot of those details. I threw in a few fight scenes, re-writing dry passage to include attacks by demons. And always I fine-tuned, tightened up, and did all that I could to make the book as readable and fun as possible.

I think all that hard work paid off in the end. Dark Calling is a book that will hopefully "blow your mind" and lead you off in all sorts of unexpected directions. But it's an enjoyable read too. It's not quite as fast-moving as other books in the series, but it belts along at a fair old pace all the same -- Kernel is on the move from first page to last. It also features an explosive final third, when Kernel returns to Earth from his adventures and links up with Bec and Grubbs again. It would have been a glorious reunion in any other series, the three heroes coming together smoothly and wisely to put their experiences to good use and save the world. But this is a series about the lost and the damned, and things aren't going to run quite as neatly as that! By the end of book 9 and its dark, unexpected climax, I'm hoping readers are going to feel as sickened and doomed as Kernel and the other Disciples. The end of the world is coming, people, and the "heroes" who were meant to save us are the ones we probably need to be most afraid of...

Welcome to the Dark!

p.s. While I was working on the editing process, Waterstones in the UK proposed a competition in which the winner would get to name and design and demon for inclusion in the book. I was dubious of the idea at first, but then I spotted the perfect place where I could put such a creature, and I gave the competition the go-ahead. The winner, Tom Woodhead, came up with a horrible little demon called the Sligstata -- and I was so impressed with it, I asked HarperCollins to use a picture of it on the cover of the book!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Wolf Island, the 8th book of The Demonata, is set around the same time period as Death's Shadow, and certain events overlap. Grubbs is the narrator. Having accepted his role as Beranabus's assistant, he has been getting on with the job of trying to find out more about the mysterious Shadow by tracking down demons and making them talk. But he hasn't learnt very much. When he hears that Dervish has been attacked, Grubbs and his companions (Beranabus and Kernel) return to Earth.

To try and find out the truth about who was behind the attack on Dervish and Bec, Grubbs heads off in pursuit of Prae Athim, the sinister leader of the Lambs. Meera Flame and Shark lend him their expertise, and Shark puts together a team of bad-ass soldiers, in case the hunt gets nasty!! But when they set down on the rooftop of the building where Prae Athim works, they walk into the middle of mystery, one whose many questions can only be answered by a visit to the ominously named Wolf Island.

On an island overrun by werewolves, Grubbs and his team will face one of their toughest-ever challenges, and Grubbs will once again have to face the beast which lies dormant within him. Grubbs is about to mature very swiftly, but it's a coming-of-age tale like no other. In the wilderness of Wolf Island, Grubbs Grady is about to learn more about himself than he ever imagined. His life will never be the same again...

Author Notes:

Wolf Island, book 8 of The Demonata, was released on 1st October 2008, but I started work on the book on September 2nd 2005, and did my final edit in July 2008.

I had a blast writing this one! I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do something in the style of the action movies that I've always loved, such as The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare. Except I wanted to do it with werewolves! I was keen to return to the werewolf strand of the storyline which had been introduced in Lord Loss. I think lots of fans thought we were finished with that after book 6, when Grubbs subdues his wolfen half, but I knew that part of the story wasn't over. Grubbs evolved from book to book, learning new things about himself each time round. i.e. in Slawter he learnt that he was a magician, in Blood Beast he learnt that he had the curse of the Gradys, in Demon Apocalypse he learnt that he could control it. I was determined to carry the at learning curve forward -- I think it's what makes Grubbs such an interesting character.

I also wanted to return to the issue of the Lambs. I hadn't done much with them over the first seven books. We see Prae Athim briefly in Slawter, where we also get to see the Lambs in a dream scene; they pop up VERY quickly in book 6; and they're name-checked in book 7; but we hadn't seen anything else of them. One of the things I like about working on a long series like this is introducing plot strands early on, then letting them lie idle, a bit like a bomb waiting to go off. I did it with Steve Leopard in The Saga, and this time round it was the turn of the Lambs. In the bigger scheme of things, the Lambs aren't that important, certainly not compared to the likes of Lord Loss or the Shadow. But in the personal terms of Grubbs Grady, they've always been a menacing presence, and this book was their time to shine.

The book is a companion piece, in a way, to Slawter. Like that book, much of the action takes place on a "set" after which the novel is named, and although it plays an important role in the telling of the overall story arc, it can also be enjoyed as a stand-alone book. It's fast and furious, with a gradual build-up, then an explosion of action. Only I think this is an even stronger book than Slawter. It's a more savage book too. As dark as the series was up to this point, this one took us into an even darker realm, as we came to see a side of Grubbs that we'd been blind to before, a side of him that we weren't necessarily going to like...

I was very interested in debunking the myths of "heroes" in this series. While I love a good, old-fashioned hero as much as anyone else, I suspect very few of them actually exist or ever existed. People are a mix of good and bad. We all have the capacity for good and evil, and most of us do a little of both over the course of a life, especially if exposed to extreme circumstances. We see the noble parts of all three of the series' main characters over the course of the first six books. In the latter stages, I wanted to explore their darker sides. Grubbs, Kernel and Bec are all decent people at heart, who want to do what's right for the world. But as the stakes mount against them and the pressure comes on stronger than ever, will they crack? Will they stay true to their calling? Will they become the heroes they have the potential to be -- or will they end up crumbling and succumbing to the darkness in which they find themselves embroiled?

As dark as Wolf Island is, it's also one of the books I had the most fun with. Because it started life with the aim of emulating films such as The Dirty Dozen, I remained true to some of the staples of big action stories like that. So, yes, there IS a crack squad of soldiers, put together solely to complete a one-off mission. And lots of them ARE just canon-fodder -- you can tell, as they're very quickly introduced to proceedings, that, just like second-string actors in big action films, lots of them aren't going to see this through to the closing credits. And YES, there is a smooth-talking villain. And YES, there is treachery in the ranks. And YES, there's a private helicopter, a cool gun, and explosions galore!

We also get to meet one of my personal favourite characters of the whole series -- the eccentric but effective Timas Brauss. I felt it was important, given the darkness of the last four books, that I introduce a couple of characters who could lighten the mood and stop things from getting TOO miserable. We met the first of those in Death's Shadow, the cowardly Kirilli Kovacs. Timas is the second of those characters, but he's a VERY different kettle of fish to Kirilli. In fact, Timas isn't like any other character in any of my books.

The main new character, though, is a guy called Antoine Horwitzer, a high-ranking Lamb who is central to the success or failure of the mission. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it should -- it's a play on the name of Anthony Horowitz! As long-time fans know, I like to name-check friends and family members in my books. In this one, I also decided to name-check Anthony. I'm good friends with him, and I love his Alex Rider books, so I thought it would be fun to work him into the story. He's also name-checked me in one of his books (as Darren O'Shaughnessy), giving me a small part -- and, later, in response to Wolf Island, he wrote a short story called "The Man Who Killed Darren Shan!" I decided to give his character a big part, but since his name is so well known, I tweaked it slightly. But there's no doubt who this guy is based on -- just like Anthony, he's smooth, suave and a big hit with the ladies!

Some of the other characters are named after friends. Liam, Marian and Stephen have been three of my closest friends for a long time now, going back to when we first met when we were 12 or 13. The character of Terry is named after a guy I used to go to football with. And James Farrier... well, James was the winner of a charity auction to have his name featured in one of my books! Actually, his Mum bid secretly on his behalf, and only revealed it to him on his birthday! I was keen to give James a juicy part (I'd promised in the auction that the character of the winner would be killed off in the book), and because of his surname, I was able to do a lot more with him than I'd initially planned.

Wolf Island is one of my favourite books in the series. It's fast, furious fun, while at the same time being one of the darkest, grittiest books I've written -- not a bad balancing act! We saw in book 7 that the odds were mounting against our band of heroes, and in this book they continue to rise. There doesn't seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel that Grubbs, Kernel and Bec have found themselves in. Will book 9 offer a sudden burst of hope for them?

Heh -- what do YOU think?!?View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Death's Shadow, the 7th book of The Demonata, is set several months after the events of Demon Apocalypse. The narrator is Bec, newly returned from the dead. Life isn't easy for a teenage girl in the 21st century, but it's especially difficult for a girl who was born more than fifteen hundred years earlier!! Her struggles to adapt to the modern-day world aren't helped by her guardian, Dervish. In mourning, more alone and confused than he's ever been since Grubbs came to live with him, Dervish sees Bec as a link to the nephew he lost, and treats her with contempt and disdain. Bec finally makes up her mind to challenge him, but just when it seems like they might be about to make peace, their world is thrown into chaos and they must fight desperately to stay alive.

A new menace has arisen in the universe of the Demonata. Mankind faces its greatest ever threat, and this time it looks like even the power of Beranabus and the Disciples might not be enough to drive back the demon hordes. The clock is ticking, and each member of the Kah-Gash (Bec, Grubbs and Kernel) must set off on a quest to uncover answers and solve deadly mysteries, before it's too late. But will those answers help them, or will they just confirm what Lord Loss already believes -- that mankind is finished?!?

The race to save the world starts here ...

Author Notes:

DARREN SHAN BOOKS -- 22 -- DEATH'S SHADOW.

Death's Shadow, the seventh book of The Demonata, went on sale on May 5th 2008. It went straight to #1 on the children's bestseller charts in the UK and Ireland, and remained in top spot for three weeks in both countries. Around the same time, Demon Apocalypse (the States were catching up with the UK schedule, but were still slightly behind at this point) cracked the Top 10 of the New York Times Children's Bestsellers chart in the USA. Happy days!!

Death's Shadow was the first book of the series that I had written in its correct sequence since Lord Loss! As I've explained in my other plot notes, each of the following five books was written out of the order in which they were published, e.g. Demon Thief was actually the 6th book I wrote, even though it was published second. This was a series that came together in a chaotic, roundabout fashion, and it was only at this point that I actually got everything straight in my head and realised what the overall direction of The Demonata was. Having finally drawn all the various characters and story-lines together, I was now free to move forward in a more linear fashion, and from Book 7 onwards, each book was written in sequence -- no more frantic jumping about for me!

In a weird way, Death's Shadow is when the main story of the series actually kicks in for real. Although the overall story builds since Book 1, and each book offers glimpses of that story (as you'll see if you go back and re-read them after you've read Book 7), it's only here that everything comes clearly into focus. There is a threat to the world, greater than any we've faced before. In fact, as we see in later books, it's not just our world that is threatened, but the entire universe. The war between humanity and the Demonata is drawing to a close. One way or another, there WILL be a victor, and soon. Lord Loss thinks that the demons, with the aid of their new ally, are going to win, so he sides against humanity. Beranabus and his Disciples want to believe that they can win this final battle, but the odds are stacked against them. Their only hope lies in finding out who or what the mysterious Shadow is (the creature glimpsed briefly near the end of Book 6), and then trying to find a way to fight it.

I wasn't sure of the exact structure of the series when I was working on the first 6 books. Grubbs was clearly the main narrator of the first half of the series, but would he remain the focal character in the second half? How would I fit the stories of Bec and Kernel in around those of Grubbs, without making the other two-thirds of the Kah-Gash seem like secondary characters? I finally settled on the structure - the order in which the narrators would appear - when I wrote Demon Thief. If you've never carefully looked at the order of the narrators before over the ten books (i.e. if you think it's random) have another look and you might be surprised -- and bear in mind that in this series I was very interested in exploring ideas of cycles and symmetry...

One of the problems that symmetrical structure posed was how did I go about fitting in Beranabus' back story? I'd thought hard about the mysterious magician, and pieced together much of his past. He had a fascinating story to tell, and ideally I would have liked to give him an entire book of his own, tracing his growth from infant to adult, over a period of thousands of years. But there was no way of comfortably squeezing that into the 10 book series that I had come to envisage -- and, as you'll see when you work out what the structure is, there HAD to be 10 books, no more, no less. I thought about leaving his past a mystery and one day writing a one-off book, or even a mini-series about him. But I was reluctant to do that, since I felt fans needed to know more about him during the course of the series, where he came from, why he fought so hard, how much he had put into protecting the world, how strongly mankind unknowingly had depended upon him over the centuries. Fortunately the character of Bec provided me with the answer, and I was able to include a few chapters about Beranabus in this book, giving us some tantalising insights into his life, the way he was born, how he came to be mankind's champion, how he evolved from the simple boy we saw in Book 4 to the masterful magician we'd met in the modern-day books. It's a slight cheat on my part -- it breaks up the present-tense narrative that has been a feature of the other books -- but there was no other way to fit it in, and I felt VERY strongly that it needed to be included. So, in essence, you're getting two books for the price of one in Death's Shadow -- wahoo!

I started Death's Shadow in May 2005, 3 years before it was published. Having worked up a hefty set of notes, I began writing the first draft of May 23rd, and finished it on June 10th -- I worked quickly on it, because I was so excited about it! But the first draft didn't include the sections about Beranabus' past -- I wrote those on June 10th, 11th and 12th. The book has a three act structure, end each act revolves around an attack by different creatures in different locations. I imagined it almost as a three act play, in which each act needed to take place on a specially designed set. Act 1 -- Dervish's home. Act 2 -- a hospital. Act 3 -- a ship.

The book was originally called S.S. Demonic, since it climaxes on a ship. I liked that title, but I was nervous about using the word "demon" too often (especially as book 6 was called Demon Apocalypse). When my editor said she hated S.S. Demonic, my course was clear, and I set about searching for a new title. It took a long time, and lots of bouncing about of ideas between myself and my editor, but finally we settled on Death's Shadow. I really like it, especially as it one of those (such as Sons Of Destiny) with a double meaning that only becomes clear right at the very end of the book...

I used some names of people I know in this book. There's a character called Kealan, after one of my cousins. (He's from a family of five, and the others -- Meara, Ronan, Lorcan and Tiernan -- have all made appearances in earlier books. I was saving him for a special occasion!) Another character, mentioned briefly, is Zahava Lever, named after the daughter of an independent book store which I've visited several times over the years. And some of the other characters are named after fans in Hungary! I visited Hungary on tour shortly before starting work on D7, and because the people's names were very difficult for me to spell, they had to write them down on sheets of paper. I kept those sheets and took the liberty of extracting a few names to use in the book.

One piece of advice -- if you're reading Death's Shadow for the first time, I'd suggest you take a good deep breath before you begin -- it's fairly frantic, and I don't think you're going to put the book down too often while you're reading it! Also, it's worth bearing in mind that while I won't be jumping back and forth in time in the last four books of the series, there IS a temporal overlap to deal with in books 7, 8 and 9. Don't worry -- it's not as complicated as it sounds! Basically there are certain scenes which appear in each of those three books, but seen from a different point of view. So, when you come to read book 8, if you get a sense of deja vu, don't worry, you're not going crazy!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Demon Apocalypse is set directly after the events of Book 5. Grubbs Grady is trapped on a plane with demons and seems doomed to die. Salvation comes from an unexpected quarter, but soon Grubbs wonders if he might have been better off perishing on the plane!

Grubbs becomes a reluctant assistant to an ancient magician and sets out on a life fighting demons. He finds himself unsuited to the job, but when the lives of those he loves most are put at risk, he must try to face his fears and come to terms with his magical powers.

But the world is poised on the brink of an apocalypse. All seems doomed. The Demonata are on the verge of winning the centuries-old war with mankind. If Grubbs is to save his loved ones, he'll also have to save the world. And that's a big ask for a teenager who hates magic and is still worried that he might turn into a werewolf!!!

Author Notes:

Demon Apocalypse, the 6th book of The Demonata, was released on October 1st 2007 -- although we made the book available a few days earlier, at the Bath Book Festival on September 29th, which was when we first revealed the title and cover. I'm not sure you'd be able to keep such a surprise now, as technology has developed so swiftly, but back then it was still possible, and we had great fun keeping everyone in the dark until the day of release! It sold sweetly too, getting to #5 on the overall Amazon UK bestsellers chart!

Demon Apocalypse was the fourth Demonata book that I wrote, after Lord Loss, Bec and Blood Beast. I wrote the first draft in March 2004 (over 3 years before it was published). I originally intended Blood Beast and Demon Apocalypse to be one book, and plotted them that way, but I quickly realised that would be a very big book, and since the story had a natural cliffhanger halfway through, I decided to split it in two. The book's working title was DEMONATER (a play on one of my favourite films, The Terminator). I liked the title, as it gave the impression that the main character - Grubbs - was a demon-destroying machine, but ultimately I didn't like it enough to stick with it, and came up with the final title further down the line.

This was the first book in which I wrote about Beranabus and Kernel Fleck. I knew that Beranabus was going to be Bran from Bec -- but only if I decided to publish Bec. At the time I didn't have a series planned out and I wasn't sure if Bec would fit in with the three books I'd written about Grubbs Grady. I thought about maybe releasing the three Grubbs books, one after another, and then perhaps releasing Bec as a standalone prequel later. I was also considering the possibility of creating another standlone prequel, about Beranabus, and I did think about weaving the two of those books in with the Grubbs books, but I wasn't convinced I could make it work.

I didn't know much about Kernel at this stage. Although he was powerful, he didn't have the special power that I would come to give him later, of being able to see panels of light and form them into windows. At this time he was just another Disciple, like any other. I actually planned to kill him off when I was writing my notes (!!!) but later, when I was writing the book, I decided to keep him alive, although I wasn't entirely sure why...

I wrote the following scene in which Kernel tells Grubbs a bit about his early life:

“I was eleven when Beranabus found me. I’d been driven out of my home and village. I’d always been different, able to work magic since I was a very young child. But in recent months it had gotten out of hand. I’d frightened people. Accidentally set fire to the roof of my home. Destroyed a cow.”

“What?” I blink.

“I was trying to make it float,” he says sheepishly. “It was a dare. I lost control. The cow exploded.”

I burst out laughing. “Sorry,” I gasp. “I can’t help it.”

“I know,” he says, smiling humourlessly. “Sounds like fun, making a cow blow up. But I came from a poor, agricultural village. Cows were valuable. A cow meant wealth, food, milk, security, life. Killing one was no small thing. It wasn’t the final straw – that came when the crop failed, which actually had nothing to do with me – but it was one of the last. They thought I was evil. I guess I thought it too. They drove me out. I was subexisting on the fringes of the village, always near starving, no friends, no family. Then Beranabus came along.”

Kernel looks over at the magician again, but with fondness this time. “He saved me. Took me away. Told me the truth about myself. Taught me how to master my powers and use them for good. The downside to that was — I had to fight demons. There was no either/or. He put it to me plain. He’d turn my life around, lift me out of the gutters in which I’d been living, but in return I’d have to do as he said and help him slay the Demonata.”

“But he can’t force you, surely,” I protest.

“No,” Kernel sighs. “But he doesn’t have to. He’s the only family I have. The only true friend. He took me into the other universe within days of bringing me here. That’s how he works with students now — he throws them straight in at at the deep end. It was different when he had a whole class. He worked in this world then, teaching them, bringing them along gradually. Not any more. Now, if he reckons somebody has the power, he tosses them at the demons, stands back and leaves them to it. If they survive, he has a student and partner. If they fail…” Kernel shrugs. “Beranabus has to be ruthless when the occasion calls for it. He doesn’t like it, but that’s life. If you want to fight monsters, you have to be monstrous sometimes.”

I changed virtually all of that when I came to write Demon Thief, and went back in later drafts and re-wrote the Kernel scenes in this book, but that's how he started life. That often happens in books -- you need a starting point in your mind for a character, but they'll later develop in a completely different way than you first imagined. I never worry too much about my characters when I'm plotting a book -- I always trust that they'll lead me in directions of their own, and so far (thankfully!) they have.

The Kah-Gash is another example of how a book can change in subsequent drafts. There was no mention of an ancient demon weapon in the first draft. Grubbs and Bec simply tapped into the power of the Demonata and used that to work their magical spells. At the time I knew that wasn't satisfactory, that there had to be a better explanation for how they achieved what they did (and how Bec cheated death), but since I couldn't think of anything better, I just went along with what I had to hand. The important thing with a first draft is to finish it. Sometimes you have to gloss over problems and errors. I never worry about that -- I know I can return to the story several times and fix the weaknesses then. With a first draft i just want to get the whole thing down on paper, so that I have a rough idea of what it will look like when fully assembled. I address loop holes and logical mires in later drafts. I think it's a good way of working -- by forcing yourself to write, you force yourself to confront and deal with these problems. Otherwise I might still be sitting in my office, all these years later, still playing around with the story ideas inside my head! You can never work everything out in advance -- sometimes you have to make a leap of faith and trust yourself to come up with answers later.

I also didn't know what the shadowy creature glimpsed in the cave was. I didn't think it was that important at the time -- Beranabus did mention it at the end of the book and said he was going to try and track it down, but I didn't know if I'd ever write a sequel to Demon Apocalypse, so it wasn't a big issue.

This was the key book to what became the structure of the final series. First, it made me want to go back and do another Grubbs book, set between Lord Loss and Blood Beast. Because Grubbs wasn't especially powerful in the first book, and because he became SO powerful in this one, I felt there needed to be an in-between book, charting his rise, to make it seem more gradual and realistic. As I was wondering how I could do that, I recalled the idea I'd had to write a book based around a movie set, and the germs for Slawter were born. While I was planning that, and after I wrote it, I kept coming back to the problem of the time-travel and how Grubbs and Bec came by their powers. I realised I needed another book - and another main character - to set up the situation and draw together the various plot threads of the Grubbs Grady books and Bec -- Bec's story didn't fit in with the other books as it stood; something was missing, and eventually I figured out that "something" was Demon Thief, which led me to go back and re-think the character of Kernel Fleck. I decided that he would become the third main character (having toyed with the idea of introducing someone as yet unmentioned in any of the books), and since he lost his eyes in Demon Apocalypse, I figured his special gift should have something to do with his sense of sight, as that would make it more of an issue when his eyes were poked out ...

I had to re-write quite a lot of this book, as the characters of Kernel and Juni evolved. In the first draft Juni met Dervish for the first time, so I had to develop their romance very swiftly -- when I saw an opportunity to include her in Demon Town (which became Slawter), that allowed me to give their relationship more time and space.

Knotting things together is one of the hardest parts of being a writer. Linking a character or event in a scene in one book with a scene in another can be VERY tricky. It's at the heart of what makes a good series, so it's vital to do it well, but you can't always know what's coming in later books, so if you write the series one book at a time, you're limited in certain ways. By juggling several books around over a 2 or 3 year period, I give myself the opportunity to include more "knots". It's a chaotic way to write, and scary because there are times when you're not in control of what you're working on -- but, hell, it's FUN! And when it works, it allows you to create something much more multi-layered and interconnected than you originally imagined.

Some readers have noted that Demon Apocalypse reads like the last book a series. It was certainly written that way -- while I thought it might be possible to write a sequel or two, I didn't plan to do any more books about demons after this one (except for the prequel or two), so I threw in everything I could, kitchen sink and all! I wanted to write a breakneck, thrilling, rollercoaster ride of a book, one that would let me go out in high style. When, much later, I realised I wanted to continue the story on past this point, I faced a HUGE challenge -- how to top a book that, by its very title, seemed almost untoppable?!? The answer lay in that shadowy beast I included as a whim, and although it took me a long time to figure it out, when I did, I saw that there was a LOT more I need to say, and even stranger places I had to go.

Most book series would end on an apocalypse, but in The Demonata the apocalypse isn't the end. In fact, in many ways, it's only the real beginning of the MAIN storyline...View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Blood Beast is set about a year after the events recounted in Slawter. Grubbs Grady is back in Carcery Vale. His life seems to have settled down at last. He's getting on well with Dervish. He has lots of new friends at school. He's sweet on a girl and he thinks she might fancy him too. Apart from a few bad nightmares, all should be fine.

But it isn't.

Grubbs has been struggling to contain the magical talent he discovered in the town of Slawter. He doesn't want to become a Disciple and he hopes his abilities will fade if he hides them long enough. But they're starting to bubble to the surface and he suspects he's reaching a crisis point.

He also suspects he might be turning into a werewolf.

So much for an easy life!!!!

Things come to a head when a playful treasure hunt leads Grubbs and a couple of his friends to the find of a lifetime. But there's more to this treasure than meets the eye. When tragedy strikes, Grubbs's life threatens to spin out of control. There are a number of strange, seemingly malevolent forces at work. Dervish stands by Grubbs and tries to help him through the tough times, and he receives further help from an quarter. But has he finally faced one beast too many????

Blood Beast is the first half of a two-part storyline. It ends on a HUGE cliffhanger. The story will be concluded in Book 6.

Author Notes:

PART ONE -- "ORIGINS OF THE BEAST"

Blood Beast, book 5 of The Demonata (and the 20th book that I had published), went on sale on the 4th of June 2007. It became a #1 Children's Bestseller in the UK, and also go to #5 on the overall hardback bestseller chart in the UK. This was the first time that I'd had a #1 children's bestseller in the UK, so it was a BIG thing for me! It had taken seven and a half years, but I'd finally made it to the top of the pile -- at least for a little while! The book also hit the top in style, selling more than 70% more copies than the #2 places book each of the weeks that it was at the top -- sweet! It also hit the top spot in Ireland, and as a bonus it was shortlisted for the first ever UK Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Book Award!

Blood Beast was the third Demonata book that I wrote, after Lord Loss and Bec. It started life around the same time as Bec, after a visit I made to Mitchelstown Caves. (You can read more about that in my Bec notes). I thought it would be cool to write a scene where humans have to fight demons in a cave. As I played around with all sorts of stories which would allow me to write such a scene, I came up with the threads of a book set in the past, which became Bec, but I also toyed with the notion of doing a book set in the present.

As I've said before, I never planned to write a series of connecting Demonata stories. When I first contemplated ideas for this book, Grubbs wasn't going to be the main character. I thought I'd probably work Lord Loss in, but even that wasn't a definite in the early days. But as I teased at the story and worried it like a dog gnawing a bone, I realised this was a perfect story for Grubbs Grady. When I finished Lord Loss I assumed that was the last I'd ever write about Grubbs, but he wouldn't go away inside my head, and the more I thought about the new story, it seemed like they were a perfect match for each other. Once I made that link, the story developed swiftly as I saw how to fit Grubbs and other characters from Lord Loss into it -- and also, crucially, how to connect the new story to Bec. When I wrote Bec, I didn't plan for it to tie in with Grubbs's story -- it was going to be a stand-alone book. But now that I had returned to Grubbs, I realised I had to either not publish Bec or else find a way to link her story to that of Grubbs -- otherwise it would make no sense. Well, obviously I didn't want to sacrifice my Celtic book, so I put my thinking cap on and luckily I came up with some answers.

Finding links is the really difficult, magical part of writing. The question I get asked all the time is, "Where do your ideas come from?" But, as I always answers, everyone has ideas. We all have dreams and nightmares, and our minds wander and we imagine ourselves kissing a beautiful lady or fighting a monster or whatever. What I do differently is try to make stories out of those ideas. I do that by asking questions and trying to come up with stories to link scenes together. Sometimes it's easy -- with Cirque Du Freak I had a couple of early ideas, about a boy meeting a vampire at a circus, and walking off with the vampire as his assistant. It was relatively easy to link those ideas together -- boy has to meet vampire, boy has to do something to get vampire interested in him, something has to happen to make the boy agree to become his assistant, etc, etc.

It was harder with this book. A LOT harder. There were no logical links with Bec. For a long time I couldn't think of a way to build a bridge between the two novels. I figured out early on that Bec and Grubbs could be distant relations (that's why I went back later and put in the scene with the werewolves in Bec -- that wasn't in the first draft), but in terms of a connected series that was a fairly thin link. That wasn't reason enough to release Bec. I had to give readers more than that. Bec had to be more than an interesting experiment -- I didn't want to write a historical novel and then return to the present and just dismiss it as a side-story.

Finally I saw how I could do it. Like everything in life, it was obvious in retrospect, but figuring it out was one of the hardest and most complicated things I've ever had to do. When you read this book, and book 6, it will all be clear. My master plan will reveal itself and you'll have no problem following the flow of the story. In fact you'll probably think, "Of course! Why didn't I see that coming? It had to happen that way. It couldn't have worked any other way." But, trust me, nothing was clear early on -- for a time I was juggling ideas wildly and it was complete chaos inside my mind! I'm still not sure how order emerged out of the mayhem, how I whittled the ideas down and pieced the links together. But a writer doesn't need to know HOW his brain works -- just as long as it DOES work!!

Once I had most of the kinks figured out, I sat down on the 12th of January 2004 and wrote up my plot notes -- three pages, outlining the full story. I started writing the book soon after that. I'm not sure when exactly I realised that the long story would work better if I split it into two, but at some point I made that decision, and after a short break I began writing book 6 in March 2004.

PART TWO -- "TEENAGE ANGST"

One of the things that interested me most when I was toying with the idea of writing another Grubbs Grady book (and remember, Blood Beast was written BEFORE Slawter, so this was the second Grubbs book that I wrote) was exploring the relationship between Grubbs and Bill-E. Relationships are central to most of my books -- The Saga Of Darren Shan, for instance, was built around the bonds between Darren and Mr Crepsley, Darren and Steve, Darren and Harkat, Darren and Debbie, etc. I think those books have proved so popular not just because they were fast-paced and action-packed, but because fans liked the way Darren interacted with other characters -- you could see him fall out with Steve, suspect and then grow close to Mr Crepsley, and so on. For a story to be interested, you need interesting characters, and over the course of a series you need to see the relationship between characters change and evolve, like relationships do in real life.

In Lord Loss, Grubbs and Bill-E connected instantly, because Grubbs was lost and lonely -- he would have become friends with anyone who was nice to him at that time in his life. Bill-E was also lonely -- I didn't make a big deal of it in the book, but I think the fact that he hung out with Dervish so much, and never mentioned any other friends or brought them around to see Grubbs, hinted that all was not as coolio in his world as he was letting on. Fan opinions on Bill-E after Lord Loss and Slawter were divided -- a lot of people thought he was just a wiseass, a smart-alec, a bit full of himself.

But Bill-E is actually one of the loneliest, saddest characters I've ever created. Like many teenagers, I wasn't especially happy. I did have friends, and I enjoyed school, and I was never really bullied. But I became self-conscious in my teenage years. I withdrew from the world a lot. I found it hard to make new friends, and my relationships with those I had from when I was younger underwent a lot of change -- a guy might be my best friend one month, then we might be hardly talking to each other a month later. It was a weird, chaotic time. The ground felt like it was shifting beneath my feet. I never knew what the next day was going to bring, or when a friendship might fall apart. I often felt out of place, awkward, lonely. It was a hard, sometimes miserable time -- but the good news for any of you going through similar trials is that things DO change -- teenage angst ISN'T forever, and better days ARE ahead -- you just have to sigh and see out your teen years, then get on with the rest of your much more adjusted and evenly-keeled life.

But back to Bill-E. Although he had a big role in Lord Loss, I felt there was much more I could do with him and Grubbs. And Blood Beast was my chance to explore their relationship in real depth. Grubbs has grown a lot by the start of this book. He's become popular at school. He has other friends. He hangs out with a cool crowd, and there's a girl he fancies -- and he thinks she fancies him! He's more confident than he was before, enjoying life again, more like he was when we first met him at the very start of Lord Loss.

But Bill-E isn't part of Grubbs's new group. Bill-E has always been an outsider and he can't change, even though Grubbs wishes he could, so that they could still be friends. Grubbs hates the way he's losing Bill-E. He wants them to be just like they were, best friends. He wants Bill-E to be part of his new gang, to hang out with him, to laugh at his jokes. He can see what nobody else can see in Bill-E. He feels sorry for his small, shy friend. But, being a typical teenage boy, he can't verbalize his feelings or do anything to help -- he just lets the world roll over him.

Blood Beast is by no means a slice-of-life story. This isn't a gritty, realistic book about the hell that school can be. It's a book about magic, transformations, secrets, death and horror. But it also covers ground which I haven't really explored in most of my other books. I think it comes closer to the real world than any other book of mine. And I think that lends it an extra depth -- I hope fans will really FEEL for these characters and identify with them, and that when bad things start to happen (as they always do in a Darren Shan book), you'll share their sense of desperation and hurt -- because you'll have seen that for all their magical trappings, underneath it all, these people are just like YOU.


PART THREE -- "BITS AND PIECES"

Book 5 is where the storylines of the first 4 books start to come together. It doesn't become crystal clear until the sixth book, but eagle-eyed readers should be able to spot many of the links and start drawing the story threads together by themselves. Pay attention to the minor details -- there are clues everywhere!

Remember Lord Sheftree's legendary stash of buried treasure from Lord Loss? How Bill-E and Grubbs went hunting for it regularly until events distracted them? If you thought that was just a bit of side-nonsense which was never going to be mentioned again... you were wrong!

This book is set about a year after Slawter. Although I've never mentioned Grubbs's age, I think it's pretty clear that he's in his mid-teens, so he's about 15 or 16 in this book. And, like most teenage boys that age, he's interested in girls. One girl in particular. And he gets to put the moves on her in a game of Spin The Bottle! But anyone who thinks this is going to turn into a slushy chick-lit kind of story is gravely mistaken!

Some familiar faces pop up again in this book -- in some ways it's like Book 8 of The Saga of Darren Shan, when I started bringing back characters from earlier in the story. Only not all of the old faces are familiar straight away!

I played around with a number of names for this book. Blood Beast was a working title from quite early on (I think!) but I considered a number of other options. One of them -- the earliest -- was "Of Wolves and Demons".

Book 5 ends on a HUGE cliffhanger -- so be prepared to left tearing your hair out at the roots if you don't have book 6 close to hand when you finish!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Bec is a young orphan living in a small ring fort in Celtic Ireland. She is studying to be a priestess. She's not especially powerful, but she has an extraordinary memory and her teacher, Banba, believes she can one day prove herself useful to the clan they live with. It is a time of great change -- Christians have come to the country and many clans have already converted to the new religion. Bec's clan still cling to the old ways, but they know they cannot stand against the tide of Christianity for much longer. Bec is worried -- where will a priestess of ancient magic like her fit into the new world? But then her people are faced with a far greater threat -- demons invade and take over much of the country. Night becomes a time of fighting and bloodshed. The world seems poised to fall to the demon invaders.

In the middle of the nightmarish war, a strange boy comes to Bec's village. He's a simple-minded youth who can run very fast but can't even tell them his name. As addled in the head as he is, he carries a message -- his kinsmen are in trouble and need help. The warriors of Bec's village are suspicious of the boy, but, for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she persuades them to help him. A small band of warriors are sent with the boy, to brave the demon-ravaged lands beyond the village. It will be a journey of great danger, savage fighting, stunning revelations and lots of bloodshed.

And Bec is going with them.

Author Notes:

AUTHOR NOTES -- PART ONE -- "THE BIRTH OF BEC"

"Bec," the fourth book of The Demonata, was released on October 2nd 2006.

"Bec" was actually the second demon-based book that I wrote, a couple of years after I finished the first draft of "Lord Loss". As I've said elsewhere, "Lord Loss" was never intended to be the start of a new series -- it was meant to be a one-off book, with no sequels. But I'd been thinking about demons quite a bit in late 2002 and early 2003. I was drawing near to the end of my work on "The Saga of Darren Shan" and had pretty much decided I wanted to follow the series with "Lord Loss". I liked the character of Lord Loss and I wondered if there was anything else I could do with him, or with other demons. I didn't plan to write a connected series, just to maybe do a few stand-alone books about Lord Loss or demons in general.

In February 2002, I first met Bas, who would swiftly become my girlfriend (and later my wife). Most of our early courting took place in London, where she was living. But as our relationship developed, she began to visit me in Ireland. At first we'd stay close to home, so she could get to know my family and friends. But, as she spent more time here, we began to explore the area around Limerick. I took her to places I hadn't been since I was a child, like Bunratty folk park, the Cliffs of Moher, Killarney and so on. I liked showing her the sights and places of interest, and telling her what I could recall about Ireland's mystical past. It was also interesting for me to revisit these places as an adult, to think about my Irish history and what life was like in the past, to reflect on where we'd come from and what the country must have been like many centuries ago.

As we travelled around, I began to piece the Irish countryside together with demons. For instance, the Cliffs of Moher are a spectacular sight -- you can crawl to the edge and look straight down onto the crashing waters below. A beautiful, tourist-friendly landmark. But imagine how much more breathtaking they would have looked if you lived in an age when most people didn't travel outside the village where they were born, if you'd never seen the sea before, and walked for days on end, only to find yourself at this awesome place. And imagine how terrifying such a place would be if demons attacked and you had to fight on the edge of the cliffs, a deadly drop at your back.

I'm not sure of the chronology of the story, of the order in which I visited the various sights, or how long exactly it took for the plot of "Bec" to fall into place. From what I recall, it came together gradually, over the space of many months. I didn't visit sights to get ideas -- I'd simply pick things up during the course of our travels, and those notions and story scraps were gradually woven together by the story-weaver inside my head who is the real creative force behind everything I write!! (Whenever people ask me where my ideas come from, I never mention the fact that I have a "story-weaver" inside my head who works in ways I can't fathom -- I think I'd be locked up if I did!!!!!!!)

What I DO recall perfectly is the key visit, the place which really kicked the story into life. Bas and I were doing a short tour of Cork and Kerry. On one of the days, we meant to drive around the Ring of Kerry, a famous tourist route. But the weather was awful that day, rain lashing down -- we weren't even able to see mountains at the sides of the roads!!! We decided there was no point doing a scenic drive, so we started thinking of other places we could go. We both love caves, and had been to an intesting place called Crag Cave some months before. On this day we were close to Mitchelstown Caves, and since the weather doesn't matter underground, we opted to go there.

We adored the Caves as soon as we arrived. Unlike other caves, there was no tourist centre -- the caves are located in a field at the back of a normal farmer's house, and you have to knock on the door of the house and buy your tickets from the people who live there!! It was a wet day, off-season, so there weren't many people with us, maybe 4 or 6 at most. A very friendly and knowledgable guide took us down, and the caves were AMAZING!!! They're probably the best caves I've yet to see. They haven't been over-developed ... the features are incredible ... and they just have a magical feel. We came away buzzing, really excited and impressed.

But I was buzzing a bit more than Bas. Because while I was down there, I'd had a thought, a flash of an action scene. That's how a lot of my stories begin life -- I think of a certain scene, maybe a fight, or a conversation, something dramatic or intriguing. It's like seeing a clip from a movie inside my head. The "movie clip" I saw on this day was of demons breaking through into the cave. Imagine what that would be like ... trapped underground ... a window open between our universe and the Demonata's ... having to fight in this beautiful but deadly, claustrophobic trap.

The scene followed me from the Caves like a hound. Over the coming weeks, it echoed through my thoughts, tormenting me. It was a scene I hungered to write. I could tell it would work great on paper, a small band of heroes trapped in a cave, up against demonic forces, maybe the future of the world at stake. It would be like fighting in a massive coffin -- if you died here, it would serve as your grave. I could feel the tension every time I played the scene out in my thoughts.

The trouble was, I didn't have a story to go with it!!! I approached the scene from a number of different angles. I think initially, I wasn't going to link it to Lord Loss. But then I began to realise that I wanted him there, that this was the sort of place and situation he'd love and perfectly suit. That moved me forward a bit on the plot front. But did I want to set the story in the past or present? My first idea was to set it hundreds of years ago. I had a few ideas, based on other places I'd visited in Ireland, and I could sense the cave becoming the focal point for those vague story-lines. But I also had some ideas for a more modern story. Which to go with?!?

In the end I opted to go with the story set in the past. I was interested in exploring a new avenue of writing (new for me, at least) -- HISTORICAL HORROR!!!! I've always been interested in history, but most historical stories are quite dry, especially for someone who loves fantasy and horror. What if I could tell a story that was like the myths of ancient races, that combined historical fact with a strong dose of fantastical adventure? That's how people used to record history before the advent of writing -- they'd make up tales of gods and magicians and witches, and use them to make a story memorable. For instance, if they wanted their children to learn the names of mountains, they'd invent stories in which gods battled on those mountains. The kids would remember the stories because of the exciting fight scenes -- but they'd also learn the names at the same time!! Learning through enjoyment -- it's something a lot of teachers today seem to have forgotten!!!!!!!

Once I'd made that decision, "all" that was left for me was to put together a solid storyline, figure out a way to work Lord Loss into it, undertake research to find out what Celtic Ireland was really like, invent a realistic excuse to introduce demons into that world, and get on with the writing. Easy!!!!!!!!!

NOTES -- PART TWO -- "THE RESEARCH"

Apart from Mitchelstown Caves, the other place in Ireland which played a key part in the conception and writing of "Bec" was the Craggaunowen Project. This is a Celtic theme park in County Clare, where they have recreated as much of ancient Ireland as they can. For instance, they've built a wooden ring fort, which is similar to the enclosed villages where many of the people in Celtic times lived. There are pits for cooking food and an explanation of how food was cooked in the past. There's a crannog, which is a fenced village built on an island in the middle of a small lake. They have dolmens -- tombs where the bodies or ashes of the dead were laid to rest. An old wooden road which has been dug up from a bog, upon which carts used to trundle. And lots, lots more.

Craggaunowen was exactly what I needed to kickstart the book into life. From what I recall, I had most of the plot worked out by the time I visited -- I realised I wanted to set the story around the time of Saint Patrick, when the country was converting from paganism to Christianity. That must have been a time of upheval and mixed emotions -- people were being asked to abandon gods and beliefs that they'd respected for countless generations. A time of chaos and change. The perfect time for demons.

I got more ideas from Craggaunowen, but also the confidence to undertake the research necessary for the book. I'm not a natural researcher -- I prefer to let stories flow naturally, smoothly, without worrying too much about making sure all the minor details are correct. For instance, in "Cirque Du Freak", I describe Madam Octa's body bulging out and deflating as she breathes. In reality, spiders' bodies don't act that way, but it was a great image, so what the hell!!!! But in this case, I knew I'd have to pin the facts down. I couldn't just set my imagination loose and hope for the best. I was going to be setting the story in a specific place, at a specific time, and if people were going to believe in the world I was writing about, it would have to be an accurate recreation. I'd be adding demons to the mix, so it was obviously going to be a work of fantasy, but apart from that I wanted it to be a totally true depiction of Celtic Ireland, so that even historical scholars couldn't find fault with the framework.

At Craggaunowen, I felt for the first time that I could really pull this off. Walking around the structures and monuments, I began to get a feel for what Celtic life was like, and a belief that I could put myself into that mindset and write a story that was both true to the time and place in which it was set, but which would also be pacy and involving enough to excite modern-day readers. I went to Craggaunowen wondering if I should make an attempt to write "Bec" or if I should just forget about it and dismiss it as a fanciful but impractical idea. I came away determined to conclude my research and push on with all guns blazing.

That research involved a lot of reading. I went to Limerick, bought several books about Celtic Ireland, and ploughed through them, one after another. I learnt a lot about the Celts that I'd never known before, how they lived, their customs, their beliefs, their power structures. They lived in small kingdoms known as tuatha (we'd call them counties today). They arrived in Ireland about 400BC. Some were sailors and they captured and kept slaves from Britain and Gaul (France). Druids knew about gods, history, the measurement of the Earth and stars, and were not subject to the laws of normal people. Divorce was common, as was fostering for children of a certain age. Women had legal rights -- they held onto property if they divorced. Many warriors fought naked. There were four social classes -- kings, noblemen, freemen, slaves. Wedge tombs (long, rectangular burial chambers) were more common in the southeast -- where the story is set -- than the smaller dolmens, and almost all of the dead were cremated. (I made this a part of the story when I came to write it.) Etc. Etc. Etc.

I knew I wouldn't use everything that I noted -- I didn't want to bog readers down with an overload of facts. But I needed to know as much about Celtic Ireland as I could find out, so that I could create as natural an effect as possible. In a weird way, it's a bit like the world of "Star Trek". On the original show, they never explained about weapons or how the ship worked or the history of space travel -- the logic being, the people who lived in this place and time would have a natural understanding of such things, and so wouldn't talk about them in their day to day lives. But the people who wrote the show had a "show bible", which listed all the facts about the universe in which the stories took place. A lot of fantasy writers like to create similar "bibles" for their books, but I usually prefer not to -- I think it can be a distraction, and a lot of writers get so involved in the creation of their world, they lose sight of the power of the story!! But in this case I broke one of my own rules and put together a rough "bible" that I could refer to during the writing of my book.

As part of my reasearch, I needed to find out what people were actually called in Celtic Ireland. I love coming up with weird, unusual names for the characters in my books, but in this case I'd need to use real names -- or at least modern equivalents which readers would be able to decipher and pronounce easily. I found a book that listed loads of Celtic names, and went through it, drawing up a longlist, which I then narrowed down. At that time, I had no title for the book, and no idea what my main character was going to be called. But as soon as I came across the name Bec -- which is derived from the word beag (pronounced byug), which means little one -- I knew that was the name of my girl. I also decided to use it as the title. I figured I'd work out a better title later -- but, the more I lived with the book, the more I grew to like the simplicity of calling it after the lead character -- and so "Bec" stood.

NOTES -- PART THREE -- "Making it fit"

As I said already, "Bec" was the second demon-based book that I wrote, after "Lord Loss". At the time, I had no plans to write a lengthy series about demons. I knew I wanted to include the character of Lord Loss in this book, but I didn't mean to link it to the story of Grubbs Grady. The first draft differed substantially from the finished book. The overall structure was the same, but I've added to it since then, tying it in with the other stories of the series.

It wasn't until some time after I'd finished "Bec" that I realised it was going to be part of a series. I had an idea for another demon book, set in modern times, in which a cave like the cave in "Bec" would feature. In the early days, before the story had fully come together, I thought maybe I would connect it to either of my other demon books, i.e. "Lord Loss" or "Bec", but instead make it a stand-alone book, in which the demon master, Lord Loss, was the only connecting link -- I thought I could maybe write a few books which were linked by Lord Loss, but where were otherwise unrelated. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew I wanted to tie these various story strands together. I wanted the cave in "Bec" to be the same cave in my new story, and I wanted Grubbs Grady to be the modern-day boy who discovered the cave, and I wanted to find some way to make Grubbs' story link up with Bec's.

But how??? Bec was a girl who lived sixteen hundred years in the past. Grubbs was a 21st century boy. They come from different times, and their lives -- and the stories I'd told about them -- were completely unconnected. It was impossible ...

... or was it?!?

Thankfully, over a number of months, I began to see ways to weave together the stories of the three books. I went ahead and wrote the new book (which actually became 2 books -- the two-part story of what will be Books 5 and 6 of the series), then went back and rewrote "Bec", adding new layers and finding ways to sow seeds which I could reap later. "Bec" might seem, on first read, to be only marginally linked to the story of Grubbs (and Kernel, whose story came even later), but as you read on through the series, you'll see how the little girl from Celtic Ireland has more to do with Grubbs and Kernel than anyone could possibly imagine.

The most enjoyable part of writing "The Demonata", for me, has been finding ways to twist structure and people's anticipations around. It's not a straightforward storyline like "The Saga" was, and it's only as you read "Bec" and the books which follow that you'll start to see just how twisted yet interconnected all these stories and characters are. A lot of the mystery will reveal itself when you read book 6, which is when you'll see all the knots which bind these stories in place. Until then, my advice is to just go along for the ride. By all means look for clues and construe some theories while reading "Bec", but don't worry about it TOO much. Everything will be made crystal clear in the end ...

NOTES -- PART FOUR -- Celtic terms and how to say those awkward Celtic names

To make "Bec" as authentic as possible, I needed to use certain terms and words which people in Celtic Ireland would have used on a regular basis. I tried to minimise the use of Celticisms, in order not to confuse readers too much, but incorporated them wherever I felt I could comfortably fit them in. I also used Celtic names (or more modern-day, Anglicized derivations of them) for all the characters. To make life a bit easier for readers, I produced a glossary of the Celtic words, and a guide to name pronunciation, which we have included at the back of the book. (I'm already regretting not putting the glossary at the front -- I think a lot of readers won't realise it's there until they've finished the book and it's too late!!! Oh well, I can't change that now!) But for those who want to be one step ahead of the game, I'm including the glossary here too, for your enlightenment and entertainment ...

CELTIC TERMS

Rath – Raff — a round fort, surrounded by a wooden fence.

Coirm – Kworm — an alcoholic drink.

Fomorii – Fuh-more-ee — an ancient tribe, reputed to be part demons.

Souterrain – soo-tur-ane — an underground tunnel, often used to store food and drink, or as an escape route.

Tuath – Chew-ah — a county.

Tuatha – Chew-ah — counties.

Sionan’s river – Sun-un’s river — river Shannon.

Quern – Kern — a bowl.

Cathair – Ka-hair — a round fort, surrounded by a stone wall.

Crannog – Kran-ogue — a fort built on an island in the middle of a like.

Dolmens – Dole-mens — tombs made of three upright stones, set in a pyramid type shape, capped by a flat stone. Normally one person would be buried beneath them, or their ashes might be left in them.

Wedge tombs — tombs in which lots of stones are stacked side by side, in the shape of a wedge, then topped with large flat stones.

Seanachaidh – Shan-ah-key — a story-teller or poet.

Brehons – Breh-hons — law-makers, an early type of judge.

Ana – Ay(as in “play” or “way”)-nah — the mother of all the gods.

Nuada – Noo-dah — the goddess of war.

Cashel – Cash-el — a stone fort.

Neit – Net — a god of war.

Ogham stones — owe-am stones. Stones with lines cut into them — an early form of writing.

Curragh – cur-ah — a small boat, like a canoe.

Pict – Pick-t — an anicent tribe from Britain.

Bricriu – Brick-roo — a trouble-maker.

Macha – Mack-ah — a female goddess of war.

Tir na n’Og – teer na nogue (rhymes with rogue) — a mystical land where people never got sick or grew old.

Leprechauns — the Little People if Irish legends.

Banshees — the souls of dead women who wail loudly when somebody is about to die.

Morrigan’s milk — Morrigan (More-ee-gan) was a war goddess.

Hurling – Her-ling — a traditional Irish sport, the fastest team game in the world. It’s played on a rugby-sized pitch, 15 players per side. Each player has a stick which ends in a curved, flat head. They use it to hit a small, hard leather ball about, and score goals and points by hitting it into their opponent’s goal or over the bar.

Geis – Gesh (rhymes with mesh) — a curse.

Balor’s eye — Balor was a one-eyed giant, one of the Fomorii.

NAMES

Banba — Bon-bah.

Goll — rhymes with doll.

Conn — Kon.

Connla — Kon-lah.

Bec — rhymes with Deck or Heck.

Ninian — Nin-ee-an.

Amargen — Am-are-gen.

Lorcan — Lor-can.

Ronan — Row-nan.

Fiachna — Feek(rhyme with speak)-nah.

Ena — Ee-nah.

Scota — Scow(rhymes with sow or low)-tah.

Erc — rhymes with perk or work.

Nectan — Neck-tan.

Cera — Keerah.

MacCadan — Mac-Cad-an.

Tiernan — Teer-nan.

Bran — rhymes with man or ran.

Orna — Or-nah.

Padraig — Paw-drig. This refers St Patrick. (The book is set in Ireland in the middle of the 5th century AD, when St Patrick was converting Ireland to Christianity.)

Drust — Jrust (hard D sound, like in dread or dry).

MacRoth — MacRoff.

MacGrigor — Mac-Grig-or.

Torin — Tore-in.

Ert — rhymes with Hurt.

Fand — Fond.

Aideen — Aid-een.

Dara — Darr-ah.

Aednat — Aid-nat.

Fintan — Finn-tan.

Struan — Strew-an.

Brude — rhymes with crude.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

"There are no happy endings ..." This is what Grubbs Grady has just found out. Life should be perfect after he and Dervish got the better of the demon master, Lord Loss. But the battle has left its marks and Dervish is a haunted man. When an offer comes along to get involved in the making of a horror movie about demons, Dervish seizes it, hoping the change of scenery and challenge will help him clear his head of all the bad memories whirling around inside. To protect Grubbs and Bill-E from the sinister Lambs, he takes them with him, figuring they're a lot safer with him than in Carcery Vale.

Wrong!!!!

Grubbs enjoys life on the set of "Slawter" to begin with. But when a member of the cast vanishes after a gory death scene, Grubbs gets the feeling that the demons are real. Everyone mocks him, even Dervish, but as the bodies start to mount up, and Grubbs begins to tap into magic in the air, he becomes more convinced than ever that something foul is afoot. But even if he can persuade the others of the danger they're in, is there any way out of the demonic web of "Slawter"??????

Author Notes:

"Slawter" -- book 3 of "The Demonata" -- was released on 5th June 2006. It hit the #2 spot on the children's bestseller chart in the UK, and was #1 on the children's hardbacks bestseller chart for three weeks in a row -- proof that The Demonata was starting to take firm hold on the imaginations of older children and teenagers in the UK!

The book is set a few months after the events of "Lord Loss". It started life after I'd paid a couple of visits to the "Harry Potter" film set. Several years earlier, the movie rights to "Cirque Du Freak" were optioned by Warner Bros. The producer who set up the deal was David Heyman, who produced the Potter films. David very kindly invited me to pay a visit to the set. They were filming the first movie at the time. I went with two young cousins of mine, Ronan and Lorcan. We met lots of the actors (many of whom were fans of my books), and even had lunch with some of them. At one stage during lunch, Daniel Radcliffe (who later sent me a fan later!) did a little party trick and burped the alphabet! Lorcan responded by sticking a hand under his armpit and making farting noises! Daniel tried to copy him but couldn't quite get the hang of it -- though he gave it a damn fine try!!!!!

Later (when they were making the second movie), I paid another visit to the set, this time with my girlfriend (now wife) Bas. We were escorted around the set on this occasion by Linda Lewis, mother of Matt Lewis, who played Neville in the films. Linda was closely involved with taking care of the various children on the set, and had some amusing tales about the kids and how they were coping with the fame that had come their way since I first met them.

Around that time, I began playing with the idea of writing a book based on a film set. It was going to be a non-fantasy story, a funny, realistic tale of life in the movies, inspired by some of the stories Linda told me, mixed up with invented stories of my own. In the end this didn't come to anything and I lost interest in it. That often happens -- I'll play around with an idea, decide it's not for me, and drop it.

But I still liked the idea of doing a movie-based book, exploring the lives of a bunch of kids on a film set -- only with some sort of a fantastical twist. I'd written another couple of Grubbs Grady Books by that stage (eventually released as Books 5 and 6 of "The Demonata"), as well as a novel set in the past (book 4), but hadn't quite figured out the structure of "The Demonata" series. I didn't have any big overall story arc. This was before I wrote "Demon Thief", and I couldn't quite see a way to pull all the novels together and build them up into one big, inter-connected series.

Was it possible, I wondered, to do ANOTHER Grubbs book, but set before the other two? A book to bridge the gap between "Lord Loss" and the other Grubbs books, to flesh out the universe I'd created and maybe help me find the way to the heart of the BIG story that I could sense lurking somewhere beneath the surface of the individual books I'd already written? What if ... what if ...

What if I sent Grubbs and Dervish to a movie set, and wrote a book which both spoofed over-the-top horror movies and worked as a fun bit of over-the-top schlock horror itself?!?

And that's when the idea for "Slawter" was born.

* * *

As I said, the idea for "Slawter" started with a trip to the "Harry Potter" film set. I was first invited onto the set by the movie's producer, David Heyman. He had also optioned the rights to my book back then (when Warner Bros were involved), and one of the perks of that was an invite to drop by and see the massive Potter set. I don't normally take much advantage of my position as a writer -- I don't look for tickets to advance screenings of movies, or pester people for free books or advance reading copies, or hang out with "celebrity friends" in cool, chic locations. But this was one opportunity I wasn't going to pass up!

David's a really nice guy, with an interesting past. He started out in the film business working for David Lean -- one of my all-time favourite directors -- on "A Passage to India". The deal with Warner Bros didn't work out in the end, but that wasn't David's fault, and I have no hard feelings about it whatsoever -- I'd happily go through the same process again with him if he ever showed interest in any of my other books. Because I liked him so much, I decided to pay homage to him in the book that grew out of my visits to the set. But, as those who know me have learnt to their cost, I like to twist things around a bit when I put people I know into my books. Thus, my brother Declan and my best friend, Paul (Pablo) Kenny, became a pair of tramps when I worked them into "The Saga of Darren Shan"! My cousin, Sharon Egin, became an exploding witch in "Demon Thief"! Etc. etc.

So, although one of the key characters in this book is based on David Heyman, the pair aren't quite the same. For a start, Davida Haym is a woman. She's a slightly batty horror producer-cum-director, who's probably seen a few too many gruesome flicks in her time, and has got a bit too close to the work she does. She's not nasty, just a bit ... strange. She serves as the book's catalyst -- she's the one who invites Dervish to come to the set, and who says it's no problem if the boys tag along. She's also written the demon-strewn screenplay, and is personally overseeing the creation of the demonic props. Is it possible, as a rather hysterical Grubbs postulates at one stage, that she's in league with the Demonata hordes? Or is she a victim of happenstance? Or is Grubbs just imagining the whole threat?!? You'll have to read the book to find out!!!!!

But, in the meantime, sate your curiosity with this small nugget of information, and wink knowingly at your friends when you read the book and let them know the origin of the oddly named producer ... Davida Haym. (aka David A Haym -- she doesn't like horror fanboys to know she's a woman, so she hides behind a man's name!!)

* * *

The title of Slawter came to me very late in the day. I'll often have the title of the book clear in my head before I begin writing, or will have come up with it by the end of the first draft. But sometimes the title takes longer to fall into place. Slawter was one of the trickiest I've yet to land! The working title of the book was Demon Town. In fact, that was still the title I had up to a few months before publication. I wasn't overly keen on it, but at the same time it was quite punchy and accurate. I think, if there hadn't been other considerations at work, I might have stuck with it. But ... Book 2 was called Demon Thief. That title was absolutely perfect, so there was no way I was going to change it. But I felt Demon Town was too similar, especially coming so soon after Demon Thief. My agent and publishers agreed, but couldn't think of any better title for it. So I had to go searching!

I toyed with lots of different ideas and approaches. I wanted something that would reflect what happens in the book, but also the fun nature of it (and, as dark as it gets in places, this is one of my more fantastical and wryly humourous books). After a while I began playing with the word slaughter. I transformed it into "slawter" fairly swiftly, but at first I didn't think that was enough. I wanted another word to go with it. I came up with a whole variety of names -- Slawter's Den ... Slawter's Lot ... Slawter's Edge ... etc. I was having a hard time choosing, so I sent a list of them to my agent and my publishers. My UK editor, Stella, immediately zoned in on Slawter and said that was the best name for the book. And, after much thought and deliberation, I saw that she was right. And thus Slawter was chosen! I then had to go through the book and change all the Demon Town references (that was the name of the movie set in the book in the early drafts) to Slawter.

The only voice of dissent came from my American publisher. They wanted to go with a two name title, as I had originally planned. They liked the titles of Lord Loss and Demon Thief, and wanted to stick with two name titles for every book in the series. Well, I normally let my foreign publishers do what they like with the names of my books, but I felt they were wrong in this instance, so I resisted. The UK and American markets are very close to each other, and I've already tasted the confusion of promoting a series with a different name in one than in the other. (In America, The Saga of Darren Shan is known as The Cirque Du Freak Series.) I think it's easier to have the same name for a book or series in America as in the UK, and since I felt Slawter was the best name out of all the proposed titles, I strongly urged Little Brown to go with it. And since they're such nice people, they agreed -- hurrah!

* * *

I've talked in previous notes about why I use those strange arrows at the start of the chapters in "The Demonata" but here's a bit more about them.

When I wrote "Lord Loss" I started to write it in the third person. After a couple of pages I realised it wasn't working, that the story needed to be quicker and more personal. So I switched to the first person and present tense, and it flew like a guided missile from there. Because I wanted it to be fast and punchy, with short sentences and chapters, I decided to do something with it stylistically, to provide an actual visual pointer to its super-fast speed. Hence the arrows -- I wanted them to draw attention to the action immediately, to point to the words as if to exclaim "LOOK!" A bit obvious, perhaps, but I thought it was a nice touch.

I actually got the idea for the arrows from Kurt Vonnegut. He used the arrows in his book, "Breakfast of Champions", which was the first book of his I ever read. (I didn't think much of it the first time. When I read it a second time, having read lots of his other books, I fell in love with it.) Vonnegut is one of my favourite writers, and his short, snappy style has been a big influence on the way I've written "The Demonata". So the arrows were also my way of tipping my hat to him, of acknowledging his influence. (As an aside, when I told this to my Japanese editor, she ordered a copy of "Breakfast of Champions" -- only to discover that in more recent reprints the arrows have been removed!!!!!)

As I've explained elsewhere, "Lord Loss" was never meant to be the start of a series. It was intended to be a stand-alone book. But then I had an idea for another book about demons ... then another ... and another. As I worked my way into the series and slowly figured out what the hell was going on, I realised I wanted to tell a large-scale story that featured three main characters. The stories of those characters wouldn't connect early on in the series, but as it progressed I planned to draw their stories together and show the links that existed between the three leads. To that end, I decided to use the arrows for Bec and Kernel Fleck, who are the other two narrators. Even though they don't narrate quite as quickly and snappily as Grubbs, they do tell their stories in the present, and the arrows unite them. The arrows are a clue for readers -- they let you know that although these three teens might not seem to be connected to each other, at some level their stories are linked, and at some stage during the series they (or their stories) will bleed into one another, to reveal the larger, over-riding storyline of "The Demonata".View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Kernel Fleck's a lonely child. He's always been different -- he can see strange patches of light in the air around him. Other kids think he's mad. But when he manages to link some of the lights together, he creates a window into another universe, and disappears for several days. When he returns, his memory a blank, his panicked parents whisk Kernel and his younger brother, Art, away from their home, off to an isolated village, to start a new life.

One year later, Kernel is enjoying himself. Life is good. Until one day a crazy old woman summons a demon. The beast slaughters many of the children, then kidnaps one of them and retreats back to its own universe. The child it has kidnapped is Art.

Can Kernel find the courage to step through the window after the demon in a desperate attempt to rescue his brother? And if so, what wonders and terrors will he discover in the crazy, barbaric universe of the evil, twisted Demonata?!? Find you when you read "Book 2 of The Demonata -- Demon Thief".

Author Notes:

The second book in The Demonata series went on sale in the UK & Ireland on 5th December 2005. I can't remember why it seemed like a good idea to release a new book in the middle of the Christmas season bookselling madness! It was the only time we did this -- we stuck to a June and October release schedule for the rest of the series.

"Demon Thief" was set roughly 30 years before the events described in "Lord Loss" -- so Grubbs Grady wasn't in it. This confused some readers, but it became clear as we went along that there are three main characters in The Demonata and the story moves backwards and forward in time over the course of the series. Grubbs was the first, and we saw the story of book 1 through his eyes. Kernel was the second, and he took up the narrative reins in book 2. (The third was Bec, who we first met in book 4.) The advantage of having three different narrators was that any one of them could pick up the story in later books. In "The Saga of Darren Shan" readers always knew that no matter how perilous the situation, Darren would pull through and survive. He had to, since he was the person telling the tale! But here, the rules were different. If one of the main story-tellers perished, the other pair could carry on regardless. That meant that any of the three main characters could die at any stage along the line...

Although the book was a prequel to "Lord Loss", and Grubbs wasn't in it, a couple of familiar faces from the first book popped up in unexpected fashion!

We didn't learn a huge amount about demons and magic in the first book. Lots of questions went unanswered -- where do magicians get their magical powers from? What is the universe of the Demonata like? How do demons cross from their universe into ours? And if they're so powerful, why haven't they wiped out humanity?

This book answered all those questions, and a whole lot more. It also lay the seeds for what was to follow in later books. At first it might seem to tie in only very loosely with "Lord Loss" and the next couple of books, but by the time of books 5 and 6, reader were able to see how everything connected, and all the various plot-lines and ideas started to come smoothly together.

Each book in the first half of the series was meant to be read as a stand-alone novel. You could read "Demon Thief" without having read "Lord Loss" and be able to easily follow everything that happens. It was the same with books 3 and 4. As readers progressed through the series, they started to see a bigger picture emerge, and ideas and plot-lines click together. But in the beginning, each book was designed to be read and enjoyed by itself.

"Demon Thief" was actually the sixth book of "The Demonata" that I wrote. Like I said in the Book 1 notes, I didn't plan to write a series. The second book that I wrote, in 2003, was set sixteen hundred years in the past and, among other things, explained how Lord Loss developed his love of chess. That became Bec, book 4 of The Demonata. After that, I wrote two more novels (a two-part story), which became books 5 and 6. Then I decided to write another book, set between "Lord Loss" and the new novels. This ended up as book 3 of the series.

As I was writing all of those books, the overall storyline was slowly coming together inside my mind. It was a discovery process -- only by writing the books did I manage to figure out what the BIG story was. I could sense a huge, single story lurking somewhere in the tangled web of first drafts, but I couldn't see the overall puzzle. The final piece clicked into place when I had the idea for "Demon Thief". Suddenly everything became clear, and I saw how to link all the books up and make them work as a single, massive story. It meant a lot of re-writing and re-working of the books I'd already written, but that was OK -- the final result was hopefully worth such literary contortions!

It was a bit like when I came up with the idea of the Vampaneze and the War of the Scars when I was writing "The Saga of Darren Shan" -- when I wrote the first two books of "The Saga" I had no idea that I could spin out a large-scale story -- it was only when I started to plan book 3 that I realised how far I could take things. The difference here was, I'd already written the next four books in the series!

The period of my life from when I started to edit "Lord Loss" to when I came up with the idea for "Demon Thief" (approximately early 2003 to late 2004) was an exciting, chaotic and often frustrating time for me. I had lots of ideas for demon-related books, but I didn't know which book I should release after "Lord Loss" or if they would all link up and make sense. Sometimes I thought I should junk them all and move on to something different! But when I had the idea for "Demon Thief" everything fell neatly into place, and I realised that not only had I not been wasting my time for the past two years -- I'd actually created something original and multi-layered... a story which is told by three different characters... which moves backwards and forwards in time... which covers lots of ground, ideas and themes... which deals with some very complicated issues... but in which each book is as easy and exciting to read as any of my vampire books.

"Demon Thief" is one of the most enjoyable books I've ever written -- partly because I was so relieved to have finally worked out all the secrets of the universe of ideas which I'd created! It's a big, action-packed, demon-filled rollercoaster of a book, that barely slows down for even an instant. If you like reading it even half as much as I enjoyed writing it, you're in for a page-turning, heart-pounding treat!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Grubbs Grady is an average kid. A bit bigger and slyer than a lot of boys his age (he loves to play evil, ingenious tricks on his sister), but nothing special. He leads an ordinary life, and expects it will always be that way. But when his parents and sister behave strangely ... and Grubbs decides to stick his nose in ... his entire world is thrown into chaos. He discovers that demons are real, and that terrible things can happen right in front of your eyes.

As Grubbs slowly and painfully tries to deal with his new situation, help appears in the form of a friendly, eccentric relative. Grubbs moves to the countryside to recover, and starts putting his life back together. But there are secrets to be uncovered and hard truths to learn, and Grubbs is about to find out that as crazy and deadly as the world now seems, life is about to get a whole lot worse!!!

"Lord Loss" is the first book of "The Demonata", a ten-book series which will take readers into new worlds and universes, all of them populated or threatened by demons. Fast-paced and bloody, horrific and fantastic, frightening and exciting. You might never look at the world in the same way again ...

Author Notes:

Lord Loss, the first book of my Demonata series, went on sale in the UK and Ireland (and Japan, where they had caught up with the British schedule, and Taiwan shortly after) on 6th June 2005. It got to #1 on the overall bestseller chart in Taiwan, was the #1 children's bestseller in Ireland for five weeks in a row, and got to #2 on the children's hardback chart in the UK (#7 on the overall children's chart).

How could I possibly follow an epic, international, multi-million selling series like "The Saga Of Darren Shan"?!? In retrospect the answer was simple -- by creating one of the fastest, hardest-hitting stories ever written for children! (These were in the days before YA was a common term, so The Demonata was classed as a children's series.) But it could have all been oh so different...

Originally I hadn't planned to write another series. I wrote the first draft of "Lord Loss" back in February 2001, and assumed it was a one-off book -- although "Lord Loss" would prove to be the entry point for readers into the world and ways of The Demonata, it was originally intended to be read (and still can be) as a single, stand-alone book. Like "Cirque Du Freak", I managed to squeeze all of my plot notes for it on to a single A4 sheet of paper, and that was what I worked from and built the book up out of. (Although I did put the names of the characters, and brief descriptions of them, on another sheet.)

I knew I couldn't release "Lord Loss" until "The Saga" was over, so I set it aside for a couple of years and focused on completing my vampire series. In May 2003, I returned to the book, did a second draft and got stuck into the editing process. I'd had some ideas for other books about demons during the intervening two years, but didn't think I could work a series out of them. I thought I'd simply do a few books which featured the character of Lord Loss, but were otherwise unrelated.

That changed utterly and completely over the next year and a half, as I was led on a bizarre and unorthodox chase through my imagination and an ever-expanding universe of demonic ideas. By the end of it, I was looking at a 10 book, tightly interconnected, non-linear, ultra-ambitious series about demons, magic, and the origins of life, the universe and everything -- but more about that later!

It starts viciously -- chapter 2 is probably the most shocking thing I've ever written in a children's book. There were two reasons why I chose to place this scene so early, and to make it so violent. First, I wanted to make it clear to readers from the beginning that we were in a world where the rules are different. There weren't many out-and-out villains in my vampire books. I tried to keep all of the characters as human as possible, and to explain their motives if they went off the rails and committed wicked acts. But the demons in these books are entirely without human emotions. They're monsters straight out of a nightmare. They don't play by our rules. They're cruel and destructive. I felt it was important to stress that at the start.

But I also started in such fast, brutal style because I didn't want to upset my readers too much! It might sound strange, but I really do think a lot about what I put in my books, and I try not to throw in gratuitous violence which will revolt more sensitive readers. Normally I'd have developed the relationships between Grubbs and his family, and given them several chapters together -- like the way I sketched in the details of Darren's home life in "Cirque Du Freak." But I didn't want readers to get too attached to these characters, because I knew that would make it more upsetting when they had their unfortunate run-in with Lord Loss. So, by not spending too much time on Grubbs' family, I hopefully lessened the blow of what happened to them.

"Lord Loss" actually started life several years before 2001 -- as a poem! I wrote the poem which appears at the front of the book in the early or mid 1990s, and it was supposed to be published in a book called "Quiet Moments", in January 1997, by International Society of Poets. There are certain money-making publishers who publish books with hundreds of poems in them, all by amateurs. They then sell the finished books to the people who contributed. It's a form of vanity publishing. I sent "Lord Loss" in out of curiosity, to see what the process would be like. I never bought a copy of the book, which I was a bit sad about now, until a very generous fan tracked down a copy of the book years later, to give to me as a present, only to discover that the Lord Loss poem hadn't been included! I guess they only bothered to print the poems of people who had agreed to buy a copy of the book. What a swizz!

Anyway, I wrote a lot of poetry in my teens, and even into my early 20s, but I quickly forgot most of them. (They were usually morbid, cynical rants -- the sort of stuff moody teenagers excel at.) But "Lord Loss" stuck with me. I often thought about the ghoulish character I'd created, and wondered if there was more of a story to him than I'd first thought. One day I was playing around with ideas for a werewolf story, and trying to find an original way to write about wolven shapeshifters. I recalled my poem about Lord Loss and wondered what would happen if I introduced demons into the mix -- and I was off!

The first chapter is called Rat Guts, and in it, the character of Grubbs wraps a mound of rodent's guts into his sister's towel, to play a nasty trick on her. Pretty twisted, I know. But in the first draft he played an even sicker joke on her! Here's the original opening to the book:

→I’d have to go back hundreds … thousands … maybe millions of years to locate the true origins of the madness, nightmares and desolation. But for me the terror starts with my sister screaming:

→“Grubbs — you bastard!”

Why was Gret so mad? Well, because he drew little vampire faces on her tampons! (She then tried to stuff them into his mouth to pay him back!) I thought it was an unexpected, novel way to kick things off, and it also served as a nice backwards nod to my vampire series, but my agent (quite rightly, I admit) called for its immediate removal and replacement. Sometimes we writers have to be protected from our wilder ideas...

I used the arrows at the of each chapter as a homage to one of my favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegeut. Similar arrows had appeared in a copy of one of his books that I'd read years before, so I thought it would be a nice way to acknowledge the influence that he'd had on me -- but I found out in later years that the arrows don't appear in most printings of the Vonnegut book!

If I'd known that Lord Loss was going to be the start of such a long and complex series, I might have thought twice about beginning it. The scale of the project might well have troubled and scared me, and perhaps I would have judged it too ambitious a jump. Proof that sometimes it's best not to look too far down the road, but just to focus on immediate goals.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 12 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. Showdown!!! The Hunters must face Steve Leopard, to fight for control of the night. Will Steve emerge victorious and wipe out the vampire clan? Or will the Hunters prevail? An added problem for Darren is that if the vampire triumph, he is destined to become the Lord of the Shadows and destroy humanity!!! Is he cursed by fate, or is there some way to trick Des Tiny?!?

Find out in the action-packed, mind-bending, twisting, long-awaited conclusion to The Saga Of Darren Shan!!!!!

Author Notes:

The 12th (and final) book of The Saga Of Darren Shan was released on October 7th, 2004. It sold like hot cakes in the UK, hitting the #1 spot on the Children's Bestsellers paperback chart for a couple of weeks, and I went on a month-long tour to promote it. It was lovely to end the series on a high.

As I said in my notes for book 11, originally I planned to write more than 18 books (I thought it would be somewhere between 18 and 24). So, why stop at 12?!? Well ... it's complicated!

When I wrote the first book, I didn't plan to write a big long series -- I thought maybe 3 or 4 books at most. It was only when writing book 2, and planning book 3, that I began to visualize the overall shape and length of the series. I had loads of ideas, lots of story-lines, and heaps of different things I wanted to do with this character who shared the same name as me (even if it's not my REAL name!).

Back then, and for a long time after that, I thought there would be anywhere between 18 and 24 books. The reason there were going to be so many wasn't because I enjoy repeating the same story over and over again (like Enid Blyton or R.L. Stine), but because halfway through I planned to change the whole tone and direction of the series, and take it fully into a fantasy setting -- the world and time of book 10. Basically, my plan was to wrap up the hunt for the Lord of the Vampaneze, then shift the action into the future, when the world had fallen to the Lord of the Shadows. I'd have taken some characters and story-lines through to this second half of the series, but also introduced a lot of new plots and people.

Then an odd thing happened. As I prepared to write the first draft of book 11 (which was where the first half of the series was meant to end), I realized that the ending of the Saga (which I've known since around the time of book 2) could fit in here just as easily as it could at the end of the second half.

Well, at first I just smiled at the thought -- I had no intention of stopping. The books were selling well, I was enjoying the ride, and looking forward to playing out the rest of my ideas. So I went ahead and wrote the book, and then, several months later, I also wrote the first draft of what WOULD have been book 12 -- and that was called THE CANNIBAL KING.

The trouble was, while writing book 11, and during the months between 11 and 12, I couldn't get the thought out of my head that the series could end here. And, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that it SHOULD end here! There were many reasons why. Here are a few of them.

(i) Darren's age. This is a series meant for children and teens (even though lots of adults read them too), and so it's logical that the main character should be a child/teen. Which Darren had been for a long time, thanks to his vampire blood. But the time had come for him to grow up. I couldn't keep him trapped in a youth's body any longer. And even though I looked for ways around it (and found them!), I found that I couldn't keep his "voice" young. Darren had become an adult, and he spoke and thought like one, and that presented me with a very big problem -- how could I get children to relate to a main adult character?

(ii) Darren didn't fit into the future. I quite liked THE CANNIBAL KING, but it was all-out fantasy, and although I'd already done a fantasy book with Darren (Book 10), this was different. A different time, with different people, and Darren didn't suit it. I thought this would be one of the strengths of the second half -- exploring Darren's alienation in an unfamiliar world -- but I quickly found that it just made him look out of place and unsuitable for what I planned to do with him.

(iii) Des Tiny. I'd been learning about Mr Tiny all the way through the series. He revealed himself to me bit by bit, becoming more and more important and powerful, book by book. By the time of book 11, I realized the full extent of his power and import, and realized that he was just too damned BIG for Darren to go up against (one of the themes I wanted to flesh out in the second half was mankind's battle against destiny, and if we have the power to make our own future). We learn in book 12 just how influential Mr Tiny has been in Darren's life, and how Darren, the vampires, vampaneze and many humans have basically been pawns, used by Mr Tiny to turn the world the way he wants it turned. Knowing this took the edge off of the action scenes in THE CANNIBAL KING and the others I planned -- knowing that the characters involved were just playthings of Des Tiny made them seem less significant and interesting. That bloody meddler had grown to the extent that he dwarfed all around him and ruined a lot of my planned plots!

There were other reasons too. Lots of them. And the more time passed, the more reasons I found, even though I didn't want to find them. I still thought I could pull it off, which is why I ignored my gut instinct and wrote THE CANNIBAL KING, but by the end of it I knew I had to allow the story to do what it wanted, and finish.

It wasn't an easy decision. Hell, it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do! For an entire year I fought against what the story was telling me, and held to the notion that I was going to carry on. I argued with myself constantly, trying to find holes in my reasons for stopping, refusing to admit the possibility of ending early.

And then, one day, when I finished The Cannibal King and realized it wasn't working, I sat down and asked myself what my reasons for carrying on were. And I discovered that I only had one reason to continue, and that was:

FEAR.

I was afraid people would mock me, or be angry that I'd stopped early. I was afraid people would think I'd run out of ideas, or lost my nerve and decided to quit while I was ahead. I was afraid nobody would want to read anything else once I stopped, and that my earnings would nosedive. (A very serious concern -- with the books doing so well, I lost out on a LOT of money by not writing 6 or 8 more books of the Saga!) I was afraid my fans would turn against me and never trust me, feeling I'd let them down.

And as soon as I realized all that, I made up my mind instantly to stop. Because, you know what? You should NEVER let fear make your decisions for you. I believe we should all act positively, following our minds and hearts, doing what we believe is right, not acting to please other people or to fit in with what others think is right.

I've always written "purely." I enjoy telling stories, and I've always written stories that I've enjoyed, simply because I enjoy writing them. Some of those stories (The Saga) have been huge successes. Others haven't. Want to know something crazy? I don't really care. I mean, sure, it's wonderful when they sell well, and loads of fans come on board. But I enjoyed writing the "failures" just as much as the "successes", and the ones which have sold in the hundreds are every bit as important and dear to me as the ones which have sold millions of copies all around the world.

To make it short -- I've never sold out. I write what I want to write, because I like writing. If some of my books succeed and make lots of money -- fabulous! And if movie or TV companies want to buy the rights, and make merchandise, I'll happily take their money -- that provides me with the financial freedom to continue writing what I want, without having to worry about how I'm going to pay my bills. But I've never written a book or story JUST to make money. Nobody's ever paid me to write a book, or told me what to write. And I've never written something just because I'm afraid of what would happen if I didn't write it.

So -- I stopped. The series wanted to stop at book 12, and it was the best place for the story to end. This is a coming-of-age story, a story of two best friends who become worst enemies, a story of a boy who learns to stand on his own two feet and deal with whatever life throws at him. It's Darren Shan's story, and when book 12 came out, I'd said all I needed to say about Darren. To have carried on would have been futile.

And that's why there were "only" twelve books.

p.s. For anyone wondering about The Cannibal King, it's VERY unlikely that this will ever be published, certainly not in the near future, since if I DO write a follow-on series to the Saga (which is unlikely, but not impossible), I'll be using some of the ideas from TCK, so naturally I won't want fans knowing about them in advance! But maybe, one far-off day, I'll release it in one form or another, just so people can see what the second half of the Saga would have been like if I'd gone the way I originally planned. But no promises, so don't bug me about it!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 11 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. Darren's going home. Back to where everything started. The town's changed a lot in the years that he's been away -- but then, so has Darren.

Plagued by nightmares of what the future seems to hold, Darren feels uneasy revisiting the place where he was re-born as a child of the night, as though the universe (as though destiny) is plotting to throw something very nasty at him on the streets of his old home.

It is.

Travel home with Darren in the penultimate book of the Saga, then join him on his final outing in book 12, Sons Of Destiny!

Author Notes:

The 11th book of The Saga Of Darren Shan went on sale on June 7th, 2004. The series had really started to take off around the globe -- book 8 scored a #1 hit in Taiwan (overall bestseller, topping the adult charts as well as the children's) and book 7 spent three weeks on the New York Times Top 10 Children's Bestsellers chart. In the UK it finally began to impinge on the charts too, spending four weeks in the top 10, though it got no higher than #7. Still, it was a sign that things were picking up on the home front as well as abroad, and my fanbase continued to snowball from here.

Lord Of The Shadows was game-changer for me, in the most literal sense of the phrase. I originally planned the series to be 18 books or more, and that was my intention right up to when I started work on volume 11. As I was planning this book, I realized that, if I wished, I could use the end which I had planned for the end of the series in book 12 and stop there, and that it would make perfect sense coming at that point of the story-line. At first I just smiled at the thought and went ahead and wrote the original draft of book 11, which was about 50% longer than the book that finally got published (it carried on after the scene in the theatre, to the final fight between Darren, Steve and Vancha which ended up being moved to #12). I then started planning the original book 12 (which was to have been called "The Cannibal King") and went ahead and wrote it.

But I couldn't get the notion of stopping the series early out of my head. It just wouldn't go away, while I working on the first drafts of book 11, then The Cannibal King. I tried to ignore the voice saying "Stop, Darren, stop!" for reasons that I will elaborate on in my book 12 notes. It was only when I finished the first draft of The Cannibal King that I realized that the voice was right -- the character of Darren didn't belong in the second half of the story line which I had planned. His story -- which was, more than anything else, a coming of age story -- had run its course and it was time to let the sweet prince lie.

Also, the series was becoming more and more adult in tone. This was to reflect the changes that Darren had undergone. Don't forget, in the timeline of the book, more than twenty years have passed between the events of book 1 and this book. Although Darren still looks young, he's a man, and so is Steve. The cliffhanger ending of book 11 (with Shancus in the theatre) could have smoothly fit into any adult horror series. This was no longer a story of two boys struggling with one another -- these were two men, prepared to go to any lengths to lay the other low. If I'd continued the series, I don't think I could have matched the tone with the tone of the first half. That would have been fine for readers who had matured with the books and who were now adults themselves, but it would have been a big problem for 10 and 11 year olds who were coming fresh to the series.

So I went back, took out a lot of the later chapters of book 11 and moved them forward to be used in the new version of volume 12 that I was now planning, and set to work on the re-writing and editing process for the now shorter book 11.

Once I'd decided to end at book 12, I was much happier than I had been while writing the original 11th draft and The Cannibal King -- the book felt more natural now, and although I was nervous about fan reaction to the news of the imminent end (and all the money I was going to miss out on by not continuing!), I knew I was doing the right thing, and that the Saga would now end on a logical high.

Oh, and book 11 was originally called Sons of Destiny, the name that I eventually gave to the 12th and final book!

One final thing. While the relationship between Darren and Debbie was an important part of the series, I had never planned for them to become a couple. Darren's physical situation was always a deterrent -- in the first half, he was too young to date a grown woman, and it wouldn't have been possible in the second half of the story either, for reasons I won't go into. But I didn't plan to leave Debbie pining for her childhood love. Oh no. I had Miss Hemlock's future all mapped out, and she was going to find love and a very productive partnership with... Alice Burgess!!

I actually wrote this into the first draft of Lord Of The Shadows. In the original draft, Darren was excited about completing the Purge and becoming a man, because he thought it would allow him to court Debbie. Then he found out that she and Alice were already an item, and though he was sad, he was glad that she was happy, and hoped they would have many long and enjoyable years together. I thought it was a nice, sweet touch, but my agent didn't agree and persuaded me to remove it, arguing that it served as a distraction during a crucial period in the story's arc, especially now that I had taken the decision to end things with book 12. He may well have been right, but part of me still wishes I'd left it in, and in my mind's eye Debbie and Alice have always been a couple since this point in the Saga.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 10 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. It's time for Harkat to learn the truth about who he used to be ...

To unlock the mysteries of his past, he and Darren must place themselves in the hands of Mr Tiny and leave the world of humanity behind. Can they survive in a place of savage killer animals, monstrous mutants, and fiery winged beasts of lore? And even if they do, will they unravel the riddle of Harkat's identity before they are destroyed?

Find out by taking a dip in The Lake Of Souls, the first book of the "Destiny Trilogy", the final, shocking story-arc of The Saga of Darren Shan!

Author Notes:

Book 10 of The Saga Of Darren Shan went on sale on the 6th of October 2003 in the UK and Ireland. Interest in the series had been growing strongly throughout 2003, and the book cracked the top 10 of the UK children's bestsellers chart, peaking at #6, which was very respectable given that it was contending with children's annuals that came out around the same time. In Ireland it again got to #1.

I knew this book would divide readers. It was a break into total fantasy, and I knew that people who don't like fantasy books might not like it. But this was where the story needed to go at that point. It does stand alone as an oddity, the only book in the series that isn't set in the modern world. That wouldn't have been the case if I had gone on past book 12 and taken the action of the main storyline into the future, as I intended to at the time when when I wrote the first draft of Lake Of Souls. It does stand alone as an oddity. If I ever go on to do a follow-up series set in the future, this issue will be resolved -- but as things currently stand, that's a shortcoming that I have to admit to.

That said, it's not quite as stand alone as it might appear. And it's not just about finding out who Harkat used to be. (And the VAST majority of readers didn't know who he was -- I was pleased that the twist worked, and remained a secret from most of my fans until they read this book.)

Primarily this was a book about showing Darren being able to survive on his own. I wanted an action-packed book to show how he'd developed and toughened. He couldn't have survived in this world if he'd gone there earlier in the series. Now he's almost a full vampire, he's strong and mentally tough, and able to take on just about anything. It also cemented the friendship between Darren and Harkat, which became more important now that they were alone.

The book shows us what the world of the future was destined to be like. Of course I could have done this in a few pages, just had Darren have a dream or vision, but I don't think that would have driven the point home, or given Darren a strong enough reason to fight against it. Because he personally experienced the wasteworld of the future in this book, it gave him more of a reason to fight to prevent it in books 11 and 12.

Speaking of destiny ... a point that some readers missed is that the book is DELIBERATELY game-like -- because it had all been set up by Mr Tiny! He was pulling the strings here more than ever before. Yes, the panther, giant toad and Grotesque were unbelievable, ridiculous foes -- but that's because Mr Tiny chose them. And a net had to be used to fish for the dead because that's something that would tickle the wellied one's fancy. This is Mr Tiny's world, so his warped sense of humour shines through. You shouldn't read this book too seriously -- you're supposed to have a bit of a chuckle at these creatures!

The same goes for Spits Abrams. Mr Tiny placed him in this world, which is why he's a drunk, foolish, piratical cannibal. He's not a REAL, developed character. He wasn't meant to be. Mr Tiny wouldn't have chosen him if he was. (Having said that, Spits is one of my personal favourite characters. I always chuckle when I read his lines. Yes, he's a ludicrous walking cliche, but he hits MY funny-bone just right!) (p.s. Make sure you look carefully for a young Master Abrams when you read the Saga Of Mr Crepsley books!)

I'd developed characters very carefully in all the other books of the series -- compare Murlough to Spits, for example. The reason I "went off the rails" in this one was because I wanted to have some over the top fun as seen through the eyes of Des Tiny. Yes, I had serious points to make, and I had to set up the very serious business of the next couple of books -- but this one was never meant to be taken too seriously (apart from the first few chapters). Killing Mr Crespley in book 9 took the series to a very dark place, and I knew it would get even darker in book 11 -- this was my chance to let readers catch their breath and have a bit of a giggle before the action heated up again and everything went to hell.

Originally book 10 was going to be 2 books. In the end I decided to streamline it and just make one book out of it.

A point some readers seemed to miss is that this is a post-nuclear world. The backdrop to it was that the War of the Scars would spin out of control, and nuclear and chemical warfare would result, almost wiping out mankind.

If I'd gone beyond 12 books, as I'd originally intended -- or if I write a follow-up series in the future -- the Kulashkas would have returned, along with the dragons. And we'd have seen that the world isn't entirely desolate -- there WERE survivors, and a semblance of society, ruled over by the Lord of the Shadows. Maybe I'll return to that world one day and tell the story about those survivors and their despotic Lord -- but don't hold your breath!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 9 of The Saga Of Darren Shan.

The hunters have become the hunted. Pursued by human forces, they are now wanted fugitives. Before they can hunt for the Lord of the Vampaneze again, they must first outwit and outpace the mob on the streets of the city. If they survive, they face their longest night and most testing challenge to date. Will any of them live to see the dawn?

Killers Of The Dawn is the third and final part of "the Hunters trilogy". The Saga Of Darren Shan continues in Book 10:The Lake Of Souls.

Author Notes:

I know the 9th book of The Saga Of Darren Shan is still a painful topic for some of you, so if any of you guys want to skip this entry, I'll fully understand. We will, of course, have to talk about THAT death, but first, let's touch on some lighter recollections.

It was released in February 2003, which meant I'd averaged almost 3 books each year since my first novel was released in February 1999 -- busy bunny! In fact, I would maintain that incredible level of output for the next 13 years, releasing 49 books (if you include Koyasan and Hagurosan) by the end of 2016.

KIllers got to #1 in Ireland and spent 5 weeks there, which was amazing. Even more amazing was the performance of book 7, Hunters of the Dawn, which went on sale in Japan around this time, and went to #1 on the overall bestseller chart (including adult books). While I was pretty popular among children's readers in the West by this stage, I was a bona fide literary phenomenon out in Japan (as well as Taiwan and some other countries in the Far East). It was a strange double life, but one that I enjoyed immensely -- I got to experience all the fun bits of huge sales and overnight fame, but without it impacting on my day to day life at home in the slightest. Sweet!! In the UK, I could sense the tide turning and more and more people were becoming aware of my work -- although it didn't trouble the top levels of the children's bestsellers chart in the UK, Killers spent five weeks in the top 20, which was a big step forward, and a sign that the masses in the west were slowly starting to wake up to what the hordes of Shansters in the east already knew -- that these books were GOOD!!

Some readers on my message board compared the structure of the Saga to Star Wars. This actually isn’t as crazy as it might sound. I was thinking about those movies when writing the books, and though I wouldn't say they were a huge influence, I definitely did pay homage to them with the "May the luck of the vampires be with you" line!!!

I actually had to write most of book 9 twice! I was doing the first draft not long before book 1 was released. (Yes, I was that far ahead of schedule! Though I would spend the next few years editing it.) I had most of it written, maybe 100 pages or so (the books normally came out at around the 130 page mark on my PC) -- when my computer crashed. Once I had it fixed, and checked my back-up copy, I realized I hadn't been as cautious as I should have been -- and only had something like the first 20 pages saved to disc!

Rather than get depressed about it, I just accepted that it was my fault and resigned myself to having to do an almost total rewrite. I was about to go on holiday (to Sinai -- my first trip abroad since I was a teenager), so I left the book until I returned, then sat down and wrote it all again. I have to say it was for the best -- since I'd already written most of it, I knew where the problem areas were, so I was able to do a very strong new first draft, probably the closest to the final version of any of my books. These days I backup at the end of every few writing sessions -- something I recommend ALL writers should do, since you never know when that fatal crash is going to happen!

I loved the idea of setting the action of this book within the space of 24 hours -- it allowed me to crank up the pace and have everything happen really quickly. (I used a similarly fast style in Lord Loss, the first draft of which I wrote not long after writing book 9, and then again in my Zom-B books many years later.)

And now for the heartbreaking stuff...

I knew far in advance that Mr Crepsley was going to bite the bullet in this one, so that actually wasn't a hard scene for me to write, though my stomach did clench a bit when I was doing his final speech (as it did every time I read through it when editing). Whereas it came as a shock to the vast majority of readers, I'd made my peace with his passing back around the time of the second or third book. Writers often experience their stories very differently to how their readers experience them.

The one bit of the book which troubled me was the scene just after his death -- the fake rescue. This was in the first draft, but every time I came to edit the book, I was intent on removing it. I felt it was too cruel, that I'd be hitting readers twice with his death -- giving them hope that he was going to survive, then killing him off again. But every time I came to that scene and re-read it, I saw that I had to leave it in -- it drives home the fact that he really is dead, that there isn't going to be some miraculous resurrection in a later book. It was painful for readers, and I still get angry letters and emails about it all these years later, but it really was for the best. Sorry, folks!

As for why he had to die at all... Well, it all goes back to the prologue of the very first book. In Cirque Du Freak I said "Bad things happen. Evil sometimes wins and good guys sometimes die." I'd made it clear right from the start that those were the stakes in this world of the night. I felt that I had to then play the game accordingly, and not "save" my favourite characters, as many writers do when writing this sort of a series. I'd loved the David Eddings books when I was a teenager, but he never killed off any of his main cast, and I felt that he was cheating his readers by not doing that. Yes, it's painful when a beloved character dies, but death is part of life, and if you're going to create a world of incredible danger, you shouldn't protect your characters too much. I don't kill off my main guys and gals lightly, for no good reason, but when the storyline calls for the axe to fall, I don't pull them back out of its way either. This book made that clear. It probably lost me a fair few fans -- readers who felt there was enough pain in the real world, without having to endure it in the world of fiction too -- but I think those who stuck with me appreciated the honesty of it.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 8 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. Having failed once to kill the Lord of the Vampaneze, Darren and his allies have wound up back in the town of Mr Crepsley's birth, where history seems to be repeating itself -- bodies have been discovered, drained of blood ...

But this time there's more than a single mad vampaneze to contend with, and when Darren is paid an unwelcome visit by a school inspector, it's only the beginning of a twisted series of events which will stretch the Hunters to their very limits. As faces from the past re-enter Darren's life, and the body toll mounts, he must forge new alliances and try to unravel the mystery behind the malevolent forces which have been set in motion against him.

Allies Of The Night is the second part of "the Hunters trilogy", in which the stakes are raised and the pace quickens. This one will really leave you hanging on to the edge of your seat!! The trilogy concludes in Book 9:Killers Of The Dawn.

Author Notes:

Book 8 of The Saga was released on November 4th 2002. Once again it topped the bestsellers children's chart in Ireland and stayed there for 3 weeks, but made no indent on the UK chart.

Allies was a blast to write! If I remember correctly, it was one of the smoothest first drafts I've ever done. Bringing back Debbie, RV, Steve ... great fun! The only real problem I had was in the scenes between Debbie and Darren. Originally Debbie was the one who wanted Darren to stay at her place, to "take the relationship further." But my editors are VERY wary of any sort of sexual reference in my books and argued against this. I thought it over, decided it would make more sense for Darren to be the one who wanted to get into heavy petting, and made the change, making Debbie the more mature and sensible one.

I think every reader of Cirque Du Freak knew that Steve was always going to return, and there was much rejoicing when he rejoined the storyline. I think they were also very happy that he turned out to be a proper villain -- how disappointed would you all have been if he'd matured and seen sense with age?!? I sometimes get asked if I would change anything about my books if I could go back back into the past. The only real change that I maybe would have implemented was with Steve. Originally I thought the Saga was going to be much longer (more than 20 books) so I deliberately kept Steve out of the action for several books, not wanting to overuse him and have readers grow bored of the characters, since I planned for him to feature heavily in the second half of the storyline. If I'd known I was going to end the Saga where I did, I probably would have found a way to work in another story arc between Tunnels Of Blood and Vampire Mountain, so that we could have seen a bit more of Steve's growth and development. At the same time, I really like the four trilogies structure of the Saga, so perhaps I would have left things the way they were. Unless time travel ever becomes a reality, I guess we'll never know..

I went on a stag do (bachelor party) to Las Vegas shortly before the book was released, and decided to "honour" the others who were there by naming them in this book. (I think they're all in this one, although maybe 1 or 2 are in book 9.) Michael Corbett, Kevin Beisty, Kevin O'Brien, Derek, Matt and William were six of the seven at the stag do with me. The other was my brother, Declan, who got a bigger role in book 11.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 7 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. After 6 years living inside Vampire Mountain, Darren has come to terms with himself and his new life as a leader of the clan. Outside, a war is raging, but Darren is not a part of this war, and it seems like he never will be.

Until Mr Tiny comes calling! After hundreds of years, the mysterious meddler returns to Vampire Mountain to warn the Princes and Generals of their impending doom. The Lord of the Vampaneze is destined to lead his forces to victory, wiping out the vampires in the process. But he CAN be stopped. Three hunters have the power to track him down and kill him. Guess who one of the hunters must be?!?

Hunters of the Dusk is the start of an action-packed 3-part Darren Shan adventure, a tale of quests, friendship, treachery, despair and bloodshed. The "Hunters trilogy" continues in Book 8 : Allies Of The Night.

Author Notes:

Book 7 of The Saga Of Darren Shan went on sale on July 1st 2002, the day before my 30th birthday, which was a nice treat for me! But although that was the official release date, it was actually on sale in many book shops from early June -- back in those days, since my books weren't impacting on the British bestseller charts, there was no attempt to officiate an embargo. If a book shipped from the warehouse early, booksellers were free to put it on the shelves as soon as it reached them. Simpler times! While it made no impression on the UK bestsellers chart, it did get to #1 in Ireland, the second of my books to achieve that feat. While I was very fortunate to build up strong fan bases in lots of other countries over the years to come, I'll never forget that my Irish fans were the ones to first take me to their hearts.

The Saga falls into two neat halves – the first 6 books explore Darren’s life before becoming a Vampire Prince, the next six his life as a Prince and the hunt for the Vampaneze Lord.It's a structure that I subconsciously mirrored in my Zom-B series many years later, where the first 6 books follow B Smith's formative experiences, and the next 6 focus on what happens when B sets off on a perilous mission.

Vancha was one of my favourite characters -- he was just lots of fun to write. He was actually based on a character in The Belgariad by David Eddings, called Beldin, who was a small, ugly, smelly, foul-mouthed magician. I loved those books when I was a teen, and this was my way of saluting them, just as I did with Lord of the Rings when I was working on Murlough and based him on Gollum.

The purge was originally called vampuberty, and was linked to teenage puberty instead of to vampire blood cells. But my UK editors were dead set against the use of the term vampuberty. They argued VERY strongly against it. It even looked like they might not publish the book unless I changed that name! Well, I had a long think about it, and decided not to give in to them, no matter what the cost. I'm not sure if they really would have dropped the series if I'd stuck by it, but they may well have -- as I said above, these books weren't bestsellers, so they were under no pressure to continue publishing them. Luckily, push didn't come to shove, because while I was listing all my reasons for not changing the term, I came up with the idea of the purge, which actually made more sense and was a stronger concept -- and so a possible major catastrophe was narrowly averted and the second half of the series went ahead and was published -- phew!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 6 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. A close friend butchered. A shocking secret revealed. The vampire clan under threat of extinction.

Only one ally of the clan knows the whole truth. Only one humble half-vampire can prevent an all-out catastrophe. But rather than surrendur to a two-faced would-be Prince, he has abandoned himself to the waters of Vampire Mountain, and faces an almost certain death. Even if he survives his terrifying trip to the heart of the savage mountain, how can he possibly avert the coming calamity -- for he has been declared unworthy of being a vampire, and has been sentenced to death by those he wishes to save ...

The Vampire Prince is the stunning final book of a gruelling, 3-part Darren Shan adventure -- but The Saga Of Darren Shan will continue in Book 7 : Hunters Of The Dusk

Author Notes:

The last book of the Vampire Mountain Trilogy was published on February 1st, 2002. This was a landmark book in my life, for reasons that had nothing to do with the story! I went on a tour to promote the book, and on Thursday 7th February, after a school event in Waterstones in Kingston, a young lady who introduced herself as Bas came up to me and asked if I'd give her a short story for a book she was putting together. I said no, as I don't write very many short stories, but promised to give her something that she could use, such as a fictitious recipe for vampire broth. She emailed me on Valentines Day to follow up, and added a fateful, funny p.s. to her email -- "I hope you're having a better Valentine's Day than me!" That made me smile, and I responded with my own amusing p.s. (which I can't for the life of me remember) and we ended up going on a date a week later, which led to a long-term relationship, and ultimately... marriage!! Oh, and she ended up getting a story from me as well -- check out mo author notes for "Hagurosan." :-)

I really enjoyed writing "The Vampire Prince." It was great to tie up all (well, most of) the plot lines of the Vampire Mountain storyline, to explain why Kurda did what he did, to bring the vampaneze fully into the plot, set up the rest of the Saga, etc. Although I always meant for Vampire Mountain to be a trilogy, I viewed it as a single big book, and what I find when I work on a long book is that the start is usually a lot of fun, introducing all the new characters, setting the plot in motion; the middle can sometimes be a bit of a drag (although that wasn't the case in this instance, as we had all the action of Trials Of Death sandwiched in the middle); and the final third often ends up being the most enjoyable of the lot to work on, as you get excited when you start to see the finishing line approaching!

The book starts with Darren being washed away down a stream through the heart of vampire mountain, and I went for a different style at the beginning of the book to convey the urgency and speed of the situation -- to make it seem more dangerous. I liked the choppy, immediate style, and used a variant of it some years later when I came to write "Lord Loss".

I thought there might be some negative reaction to Darren suckling the she-wolf -- angry parents saying their kids shouldn't be reading books where a child sucks a wolf's nipple! But so far there hasn't been.

I had to work hard on the scenes with the wolves. In the first draft they were too cuddly and human, and Darren was all but communicating telepathically with them. My editor urged me to make them more realistic, and she was absolutely right.

The "prince" on the cover of the UK edition (the first with the new look) was a guy who worked at HarperCollins -- the designer took a photo of him, played around with it, and turned him into a star! :-)

I love the final line of the book. It always brings a smile to my face whenever I glance at it. This is probably the happiest moment of the entire Saga, before the real darkness of the second half of the series and the return of some menacing figures. It's bittersweet, of course, because of the loss of some of our favourite characters, but still, in Darren Shan terms, this is about as sugar-coated as it gets.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 5 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. Five Trials -- five chances for Darren Shan to prove himself worthy of being a vampire -- five ways to die!

But while Darren struggles to complete and survive his perilous Trials, other forces are at work deep within Vampire Mountain. Their goal: to wipe the Princes and Generals from the face of the earth!! Darren is poised to uncover a shocking conspiracy -- but will he live long enough to spread the warning???

Trials Of Death is the middle book of a gruelling, 3-part Darren Shan adventure. The story concludes in Book 6:The Vampire Prince.

Author Notes:

The fifth book of The Saga Of Darren Shan went on sale on 1st October 2001 in Ireland and the UK. (It didn't go on sale in the USA until April 2003 -- the Americans were a bit late coming to the Freak Party!) While most of the books in the series were released at 6 months intervals in the UK, I didn't want fans to have to wait too long for the installments of the Vampire Mountain Trilogy, so I asked my publishers if they would consider releasing book 5 hot on the heels of book 4 -- and happily they obliged.

To help promote the book, my publishers, HarperCollins, gave away free bottles of fake blood which were sent out to book stores all across the British Isles, to be given away as freebies. Hands up anyone who still has one of these!

I sometimes get asked what the 5th trial would have been -- and the honest answer is, I don't know! When plotting the book, I knew I would only need to come up with 4 trials, so that's all I figured out!

It was my decision not to include any teaser chapter of book 6 at the end of the book, bucking the trend of the UK releases -- I thought it would be best to leave readers in total suspense, with no idea of what was going to come next.

Book 5 was the last book in the U.K. with the old-style covers. Though I thought the original book 1 cover was great, I felt that the others weren't as strong, and that the books weren't catching as many eyes on shelves as they should. Collins agreed and set to work on redesigning the look of book 6 -- a look which was to last until the end of the Saga.View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 4 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. Six years have passed since Tunnels Of Blood. Darren has settled into life as a vampire's assistant, and feels at home in the Cirque Du Freak. But now he must leave the freak show and his friends behind, to travel to the distant Vampire Mountain with Mr Crepsley, where he must be presented for approval to the Vampire Princes and Generals.

Travelling with Darren and Mr Crepsley are two Little People, and they're later joined by an old friend and some four-legged predators. The trek to Vampire Mountain is long and dangerous, and blood will be spilt along the way. The vampires also make a worrying discovery -- they are not the only creatures of the night on the path to the mountain ...

Inside Vampire Mountain, Darren learns much of vampires, their history and ways. He's introduced to many fierce, battle-scarred Generals. Some accept him instantly -- but he must earn the friendship of others! When he's taken to meet the legendary Princes, he learns the true price of what it takes to become a vampire ...

Vampire Mountain is the start of a gruelling, 3-part Darren Shan adventure. The story continues in Book 5:Trials Of Death, and concludes in Book 6:The Vampire Prince.

Author Notes:

The fourth book of The Saga Of Darren Shan was released in the UK and Ireland on June 4th 2001. This was the first time I'd broken a longer story arc up across a number of books (three, in this case) and we weren't sure how fans would react -- would they enjoy the cliffhanger and wait for the next installments with bated breath as I hoped, or would they feel cheated? While some fans certainly didn't like the fact that the Vampire Mountain story was split up into three books, most were happy with it as it was presented, and it's a tactic I've used many times since then. (I occasionally get accused of doing this to create more books and thus more revenue, but that honestly never crosses my mind -- all I'm ever interested in is delivering a story in the best possible format for absorption, and when it comes to a younger audience, I think that huge books can be a turn-off, hence the desire to break them up.)

I was a bit nervous about the lack of action in Vampire Mountain. This was an important book in the series, in that it gave us an insight into the society of vampires, and it had to answer lots of questions and explain the basic vampiric setup. At the same time, I didn't want it to be complete exposition -- I wanted fans to be able to enjoy it as well as learn from it. I wasn't sure if the book had achieved that, but it met with a warm response, and continues to be one of the fan favourites all these years later -- it's often the one that people pick or a message when they come to me to get their books signed.

Book 4 was originally titled Halls Of Vampire Mountain. Later I decided to shorten it for more effect. And Harkat in the first draft of this book (and 5 and 6) was originally called Harvey. My plan, back when I was planning this trilogy and looking ahead to the rest of the series, was for Harkat to have been EVRA in his previous life. (Take away the H and Y from Harvey and reverse the letters -- tah-dah!) At that stage I meant for Evra to travel to Vampire Mountain with Darren and Mr Crepsley, and to be with Darren and Harkat in every book right up until The Lake Of Souls, when he would have died (having realized at the very end that he was actually Harvey).

But when I sat down to write book 4, I realized there was no real reason for Evra to travel with Darren -- unlike Darren, Evra had grown up and had other, more normal things to occupy his thoughts (such as marriage!). In terms of the storyline, it made no sense for him to leave his home and go off to a mountain full of vampires. He would have simply been there because I wanted him to be. And so, regretfully, I had to relegate him down the list of important cast members. And then I had to go looking for another candidate to fill the shoes of the to-be-renamed Little Person... one who was friends with Darren... who died during the series... who had a genuine reason to come back to life as a Little Person and help Darren and the entire vampire clan...

Arra was an interesting character, who took on far more of an important role than I had imagined when I first came up with her. I wanted Darren to meet a female vampire, so that the question of why there are so few women vampires could be naturally raised. (Answer -- because the clan is packed with very old male chauvinists!) I had no plans to develop the character beyond that, but Miss Sails had other ideas, and when I began writing, she grew and grew, to become one of the key characters of the story arc.

Heh. Writing about the scarcity of female vampires reminds me of something else. I took a very anthropological approach to the vampire clan. I loosely based the clan on real warrior tribes of the past and present, like the Celts, the Samurai, the Masai Mara, and then tried to imagine how such a society would evolve if the members lived for hundreds of years. Because vampires don't mix much with humans, and since there were so few women among their ranks, it made sense to me that homosexuality would be quite common in the clan, as it was among many tight-knit groups of soldiers in the past (the ancient Romans, Greeks, Spartans, etc). I was going to mention this in Vampire Mountain -- I even had the idea that there would be little "love caves" where the guys could go to get away from the hustle and bustle for a while -- but I knew my publishers would hit the roof and demand it be written out, as they work themselves up into a state if I include any kind of sexual references, be they heterosexual or homosexual or anywhere between, so I reined in my anthropological observations and kept quiet.

Hmmm... "Vampire Love Caves." Maybe I'll pass that idea on to E L James for her next book!!! "Mister Grey... meet Master March!!!!!" :-)View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 3 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. Shortly after an old friend's visit, Mr Crepsley leaves the Cirque Du Freak and heads for a city, taking Darren and Evra with him. The boys enjoy their stay in the city. Evra soaks up a lot of TV shows, while Darren catches the eye of pretty young Debbie Hemlock! But Mr Crepsley's behaving strangely, patrolling the streets every night, saying nothing of his purpose to Darren or Evra.

Then, in the run-up to Christmas, police discover several human bodies hidden in an old building -- each of which has been drained of blood! Darren and Evra are horrified, and immediately set about shadowing Mr Crepsley, on the understanding that if he's the killer, they're going to stop him -- by any means necessary!

In a blood-soaked abattoir, Darren confronts his mentor, and aims for his throat with a rusty butcher's knife. But this attack is just the start of the true nightmare, and soon Darren finds himself fighting not just for his own life, but for the lives of his friends, Debbie and Evra, both of whom are threatened by a force of sinister, murderous evil ...

Author Notes:

My publishers had wanted to publish just one book a year, as they do with most other authors, but as the printing date for Cirque Du Freak came up, I knew I had a long and sprawling story to tell, so I pushed them to release them every six months, and luckily they agreed. (Otherwise we wouldn't have seen the last book until 2011!) Tunnels of Blood came out on November 6th, 2000, my fourth book to be released that year -- yowzahs! (Cirque Du Freak in January, Hell's Horizon in February, The Vampire's Assistant in the middle of the year.)

Although it's the third book in the series, I tend to view Tunnels Of Blood as the real start of the Saga Of Darren Shan, because this is when everything started to ramp up for me. As I said in an earlier post, my initial rough plan with the series had been to write one-off books in which Darren and Mr Crepsley found themselves in new locations and had to face off against supernatural antagonists each time. As I wrote book 2 and plotted book 3, that began to change. Originally the third book was going to feature an evil vampire, but I felt that wasn't very original. Since I'd made clear that my vampires were not evil killers, I began to think that maybe I should explain why they had such a bad reputation, and I came up with the idea of a breakway group of vampires called the vampaneze, the idea being that these guys killed every time they fed, and that humans had confused vampires for vampaneze over the centuries.

The vampaneze were the key to the series. Once I'd thought of them, storylines began falling into place like jigsaw pieces into a quickly forming puzzle. Suddenly I had the War of the Scars as my backdrop, and I saw the roles that Darren and Steve could play in it. Instead of working on a handful of loosely-linked spooky stories, I now saw that I was in fact working on something far more ambitious, a multi-book, purposeful story, in which every part added up to an over-arching whole. It was a tremendously exciting time for me, where the goalposts shifted and a whole new universe of storytelling presented itself to me.

Now for some fun background facts about certain characters and elements of the book...

Murlough was based on Gollum! Lord of the Rings was one of my faves as a teenager, and I wanted to evoke the spirit of Gollum in this book. I was VERY tempted to have Murlough say "My precious" at some stage, but eventually felt that would be a bit TOO obvious!

Debbie -- hold onto your hats, folks! -- was based on Scary Spice! The Spice Girls were huge back when I was writing the first draft of TOB, and while I wasn't that interested in their music, I did think the girls themselves were lots of fun!! I didn't deliberately base Debbie on Scary Spice, but when I sat down and thought about what I wanted her to be like, that's the image I got!

Hypnotism... As some of you occasionally note, in book 1 Darren hypnotises Annie -- but this power is never mentioned again. No, it's not a mistake on my part! One of the rules of vampirism is that when people are first blooded, their bodies and brains go hyperactive, and sometimes they develop temporary hypnotic powers, which soon fade. I was going to explain this in book 2, but there just wasn't a proper time for it. So I decided to push it back to book 3 -- but, again, when I came to write it, the moment just never seemed right. In the end I let it pass -- it's not important to the plot of the series, and although Darren does know about it, there's no real need for him to share the info with his readers. (Just like there's no need for him to go into specifics about his second set of Trials in book 7.)

The Vampaneze... their name evolved out of a story-telling session with a young cousin. I used to make up stories and tell them to my cousins (Ronan, Lorcan, Kealan, Tiernan, Meara) all the time. One day I'd finished telling Kealan a story and encouraged him to make up a story of his own. He invented some silly kind of monster which he called a Rampaneasy (at least that's what it sounded like). I liked the sound of that, and played around with it. I changed the R to a V, and the "easy" to an "eeze" sound, and the result was... VAMPANEZE!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Book 2 of The Saga Of Darren Shan. Having abandoned his old way of life to unwillingly serve as Mr Crepsley's assistant, Darren must accustom himself to the habits of vampires. But the change is difficult and the loneliness is crushing.

In an attempt to give Darren a sense of stability, Mr Crepsley takes him to live at the Cirque Du Freak, where he is to share a tent with Evra Von -- the Snake Boy introduced in Book 1. Darren soon fits into his new position -- even if he doesn't exactly enjoy hunting food for the ominous Little People! -- and he and Evra befriend a curious young boy called Sam Grest, whose one great wish is to join the travelling freak show.

But all is not well with Darren. He refuses to drink human blood, even though he'll die without it. While Mr Crepsley argues with him, and tries forcing him to drink, Darren grows weaker and weaker. Will he resist the temptation of blood and sacrifice himself for the benefit of his humanity -- or will some awful turn of events lead to his becoming a true, blood-sucking creature of the night???

Author Notes:

The Vampire's Assistant was published on May 30th, 2000. I didn't know when I wrote Cirque Du Freak that this was going to be such a long series. I knew that book 1 would be open-ended, leaving me with the possibility of writing another few books, but I didn’t have any clear series plans in mind. My vague thoughts were that Darren and Mr Crepsley would wander from one location to another, having run-ins with various types of monsters. With that in mind, I started plotting out the second book. (This was before the first one had been rejected by every publisher in town, a good example of the benefits of staying one step ahead of your readership -- if I'd waited for the reactions to book 1, I might not have bothered forging ahead with number 2, as nobody wanted to publish the first one and it looked like we'd hit a dead end.)

I realised early on that Darren needed to return to the Cirque Du Freak with his new mentor, so that he could come to terms with his life as a vampire's assistant among an understanding and friendly crowd. If I'd tossed him straight into a plot-heavy, fast-paced storyline, he wouldn't have the time he needed to adjust to his change of life and settle into his new role. It was fun fleshing out and getting up close to the freaks that we had only seen from a distance in the first book, and I enjoyed introducing Sam Grest and RV to proceedings. I don't think I had any specific long-term plans for RV when I wrote the first draft of the book, but I had a feeling we hadn't seen the last of him.

Evanna is mentioned for the first time in book 2 (though it's easy to miss, as it's only a fleeting mention, so don't be too hard on yourself if you can't remember it). This led readers to wander if I had planned things very carefully in advance, since she doesn't enter the overall storyline until book 7. The answer is... no! I spread the writing process for each book out over at least 2 years. I'll write a first draft in 3 or 4 weeks if it's a short book like The Vampire's Assistant, but then re-write and edit it over the course of the next 2 years or more -- whilst working on other books. So, while the first draft of Cirque Du Freak was written about 2 and a half years before it was published, I was still working on it as late as mid-1999. Similarly, I was still editing and fiddling with Book 2 up to late 1999, if not early 2000, by which time I'd written the first draft of book 8 and was starting in on book 9 -- so that;s how I was able to go back and include a little Evanna easter egg in book 2!View full covers gallery

Plot Outline:

Darren Shan's an ordinary schoolboy, until he and his best friend Steve get tickets to the Cirque Du Freak, a bizarre freak show featuring such arcane performers as Hans Hands, Gertha Teeth, the Wolf Man and Rhamus Twobellies. In the midst of the ghoulish excitement, true terror raises its head when Steve recognises that one of the performers -- Mr Crepsley -- is in fact a vampire!

Steve remains after the show finishes, to confront the vampire -- but his motives are anything but ordinary! In the shadows of a crumbling theatre, a horrified Darren eavesdrops on his friend and the vampire, and is witness to a monstrous, disturbing plea.

Later, in a moment of insane daring, Darren sets out to steal the vampire's magnificent performing tarantula, an act which will have severe, tragic consequences for both Darren and Steve. Their lives will never be the same again ...

Author Notes:

It was published in January 2000 -- the perfect way to mark the start of the new millennium! -- but I had the idea for “Cirque Du Freak” on May 8th, 1997. I was looking after one of my aunt’s children. She was shopping, the kid was asleep in the back seat of her car, and I was sitting up front with nothing to read, having forgotten to bring a book with me. Out of boredom I looked around the car and found one of the Goosebumps books. I’d never read Goosebumps, since they weren’t on sale when I was growing up. I flicked through the book, reading little bits here and there. My two observations were: (1) It wasn’t a very good book, very formulaic and easy to predict. (2) Regardless of that, I’d have probably liked the book when I was younger, since it was so full of cliffhangers and easy to read.

Then I started thinking that what the world really needed was a book that was as fun and easy to read as Goosebumps, but which had some of the darkness and depth of Stephen King. That led me to think about one of my favourite King books, Salem’s Lot, and how I used to try to scare myself when I was younger by imagining what would happen if a vampire attacked me and turned me into one of them. That set me thinking about writing a story about a boy who meets a vampire and reluctantly becomes his assistant – and a few days later I was writing the first book of The Saga of Darren Shan!

This was the book that changed my life, although I had no idea it would do so at the time. I'd always wanted to try writing a book for younger readers, but had no idea if I'd be any good at it, or if my agent would be interested in it. I enjoyed writing CDF, and my agent enjoyed reading it, but every children's publisher in the UK hated it -- we sent it to 20 different publishers, and every single one of them rejected it! I thought my "career" as a children's author had finished before it even started.

But then my agent arranged a few meetings with editors, to chat about the book and their reaction to it. One of those, a lady called Domenica DeRosa, read the manuscript again ahead of our meeting, and second time round it stirred something inside her. She suggested making some changes, so I went ahead and wrote another draft, and she signed me on. We still had trouble getting the book out there -- Domenica went off to have twins and never returned, and her replacement wasn't keen on the book at all -- and it sat in limbo for more than two years, but eventually it saw the light of day in January 2000.

You often hear writers talking about lucky breaks, and we all need them, regardless of how talented we might be. During the two years that CDF sat in limbo, one of my agent's other YA authors went stratospheric -- one or two of you might have heard of the Harry Potter books? I think the success of the HP series maybe made the people at Collins reassess CDF -- I imagine the thought going through their minds was, "Well, if Christopher Little was right about THAT series for children, maybe he's right about THIS series too."

And, of course, he was. :-)

Cirque Du Freak wasn't an immediate bestseller. It took the series a long time to really start selling in the UK -- I didn't make the bestseller charts until my follow-up series, The Demonata -- and although it made a more immediate impact in other countries when it was released worldwide, such as the USA, Japan and Taiwan, back in the early noughties I still wasn't sure if I'd be able to continue writing full-time or if I'd need to get another job. So far I've done OK with the writing and haven't needed to look for alternative employment, but hey, I never take anything for granted -- Cirque Du Freak is all the proof I need that you never know what's waiting around the corner.View full covers gallery

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