Can you tell us about your main character?
His name is Silas Stanley, as I wanted an old classical-sounding name that alliterated. Don’t ask me why, but it felt important at the time. His name was one of the first things I’d decided about the whole story. He is quite emotionally unstable, which at first is no bad thing as he’s quite childlike and impulsive. However as the pressures of life and having a family start to mount, this instability begins rocking him more violently in and out of some pretty dark places. He’s essentially a good and gentle person, whose almost naïve lack of pretence and self-control set him up for some nasty falls when things go wrong.
Who designed the cover?
Since I’ve had some positive feedback about it, I’ll admit to creating the cover myself. Somehow I’d always seen the colour of this story as a reddish-purple, odd as that sounds. I find myself randomly seeing things as a certain colour, so I wanted to reflect that with the cover. I also wanted it to be quite subtle – is that a sunset or a nuke on the horizon? I’ll let the readers decide that one.
Why did you choose to write this particular book?
Many impulses converged toward writing this one – although my first novel had a dramatic climax, I somehow felt it wasn’t dramatic enough. What could be more dramatic than a backdrop of the whole world ending? The possibilities that afforded me were endless, and as I walked back to a packed caravan site one evening with my dad and brother after a few pints of ale, my unsociable nature naturally led me to imagine the spectacular scene of the whole field lit up and burning like a pyre at night. That image was the first thing that prompted me to start thinking up an apocalyptic storyline, and five years later it was finally born.
Will you write others in this same genre?
I hope so. I’d always wanted to write something apocalyptic about the world ending, and now that I’ve done so, and read other stories in that ilk, I’m hooked. Watch this space for more cheery tales of civilisation crashing to a horrific end!
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Not intentionally, as I didn’t start out with one, but overall the theme is one of redemption. The idea is that true love often stays, no matter how clouded it gets with the darkness of the world. It usually takes a shock or a loss to unearth it, and in this case the world itself had to end before the protagonist could start to make sense of it all, but no matter how many loose ends he had left, they simply untied themselves. He didn’t have to go back and fix them all, he just had to remember who he was before he’d created them.
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