Read the first Chapter of the latest Shaman Mystery here!

The 4th Shaman Mystery by Nina Milton

THROUGH THE FLOODGATE 

Chapter One

Boiling Blood in his Brain

John Spicer was already waiting, when Larry drove down into Harper’s Coombe.

It was like a lover’s tryst – a lung-drying desire.

Larry pulled the old pickup to a halt behind John’s Audi and jumped out the cab. The ground was so soft he felt his wellingtons sink by inches.  Across the coombe there were patches of shining water, the start of little lakes.

Bloody rain. It was never-ending. Even down here in the coombe, the wind behind it was throwing water into his face.

He pulled the fur of his trapper hat down around his ears and went to the back of the pickup. Water pooled on the tarp, trickling down to the metal base as he shifted it, wetting the random items he carried. His fingers were slippy as he spun the combination lock. It was an old-fashioned document case, but it did the job. Empty, of course, because the previous money he’d carried home was now in a Second World War tin box, which had belonged to his father’s father and had previously held old documents and his sister’s first baby shoes. 

Soon, he would buy a soft leather case with a laptop inside, slender as a slate tile.

He left the briefcase ready and waiting to be filled, and splashed over the wet grass towards the Audi, obscenely large, less than a year old and glowing gold-brown with its metallic finish.

He’d told people he’d been getting migraines since the disaster, but it wasn’t actual pain. It felt more like boiling blood. Eighteen months of acid thoughts rolling in his brain, steam pushing at the lid.

At first, he had blamed God for his ruin. Then, with the promise of compensation, he had blamed the government. But one afternoon, standing in his own yard, a chance remark lit the gas beneath his stew pan of resentment, and the truth rose in the steam.

John Spicer was to blame.

Spicer had taken
everything away from Larry, taken more than his livelihood, taken the man he was. He could afford to pay for his mistake and Larry saw it as his duty to suck at the man until he was hollow inside.

The window of the Audi rolled down, but Spicer didn’t look at him. 'This is the last time I come here. You’re getting no more, Larry.' 

Spicer’s voice had a softness about it, as if he’d just eaten ice cream. Through that gentleness came the final trace of Somerset accent that going to posh schools couldn’t get rid of. Listening to John’s soft voice made his own speech sound unnaturally rough, hoarse, and littered with swear words, like his tongue was a lash.

'If you think this is the last time, you’re a stupider fuckhead than I thought you were.' 

'I only came here to say it to your face.'

Yet he was not saying it to his face; he was still staring though the windscreen as if there was a football match being played on the far side of the coombe, rather than the damp drip of willows, green with moss and pale with age, stubby things that rose almost vertically out of the steep sides.

From the start of this, Spicer had rarely done him the courtesy of glancing his way, and it made his brain boil harder, the knowledge that he couldn’t stand the sight of Larry.

It had been late July, the first time they’d met in Harpers Coombe. Midday, the sun warm on the balding crown of his head. The dell had been full of colour – meadowsweet and marsh marigolds and huge clumps of loosestrife, as if someone had thrown a quilt, ready for a picnic. He’d asked for a grand. He hadn’t expected Spicer to agree, but as the pack emerged from the half-open window, a flexible wodge wrapped in plastic, still warm from Spicer’s touch, he’d realised he should have asked for more.

Once the money was in Larry’s hand, the Audi shot forward by a couple of feet then reversed skilfully around the Land Rover pickup, whining as it sped up the track.

He’d had a flash of panic, ripping open the plastic there in Harper’s Coombe. Bank notes spilt into the briefcase, crisp from a bank clerk’s count. For the first time since the flood, his head felt cool, rested…atoned. He had scared John Spicer, a man not easily frightened.

In August, he’d put a zero on the end –  ten grand, you fucker, or I go to the police. 

It was chilly and damp when they met in September, with sedge growing at the soggy edges of the coombe. 

By October it felt like he was amassing a small fortune. 

End of November, John had not turned up.

He’d gone to his house, under cover of darkness. The windows glowed against the storm outside. The Christmas decorations were already up. They were playing music and their voices rose, fell, cheerful and relaxed. He heard John chuckle and Alison was chattering to her granddaughter in that baby voice people did.

He’d turned his collar up against the storm and slunk away.

He’d taken too long to think what to do, finally scribbling something down, sealing the envelope and stuffing it into the postbox at the end of the Spicer’s half-mile driveway.

The run-up to Christmas was in full swing when the brief reply, unsigned, had fallen through his letterbox. Capital letters exploded across the page;

WE SHOULD TALK.

TOMORROW.

Well, yeah, John. We should. You’re a month behind. That’s what we should talk about.

Rain dripped into his collar from the back of the trapper hat and he sensed that his right sock was getting damp; there was a small hole at the heel of his boot that only let in water when he was actually standing in it. He shifted, trying to find a dryer spot and saw how the Audi’s wheels were sinking into the boggy turf. John would probably be bleating for a tow, when they left.

'I’ve had enough,' Spicer was saying. 'It’s taken me this long to realise that I should never have started it.'

'You’d like to forget what you did,' Larry hollered back. 'Sabotage! You put people in clear danger!'

'I never meant to! But blackmail? That’s what you are doing, Larry Waish, damn you!'

He’d never heard the man let out an oath. 'Okay. You’ve had your little rant. Now it’s time to pay. You missed last month. I need the money. It’s fucking Christmas.'

John shifted in the seat, until, finally they were staring at each other. 'It’s over, mate. No more money. I’m going straight to Bridgwater to make a police statement. Tell them what I did; tell them what you are doing.'

The look on the man’s face. Pity. Larry stepped away from what was in those eyes, forgetting the boggy ground, and suddenly, his butt was in the mud.

John did not laugh. As if Larry Waish, and his pathetic life – never married, living with his weirdo sister, scraping a living from a barn full of poultry – was not a matter for mirth or taunts, but for compassion. The knowing chaffed the bottom of his stomach. All this time, John Spicer had felt sorry for him.

He sucked his boots free of the marshy ground and scraped himself up. He was mired. Shat upon. 'Fuckhead,' he hissed. 'Fuckhead, fuckhead.'

Spicer looked away, like he hadn’t seen the fool he’d become, and dropped the stick into drive. The fat, black tyres flew round with a high whining sound, splattering further mud over Larry’s jeans. The engine screamed. His foot must have been on the floor. He punched at the wheel and the horn burped out.

‘All right,' said Larry. His heart was pounding, he could hear the rhythm of it in his voice. 'All right. Make this the last time. Give me your payment and we’ll call it  a day.'

Perhaps John Spicer’s lips twitched, in and out of a smile. 'You’re too late. Because, Larry, blackmail is the bigger crime.'

'I call it fair payment. I lost two-thirds of my living.'

'You got compensation. I heard in the village.' Spicer tried to reverse, taking it steady, but the wheels dug deeper into the furrow he’d already made. The engine hollered for mercy. He stuck his head out of the window. 'Could you pull back up the lane?' As if they’d only stopped here to exchange pleasantries. 'Give me a bit of room, please?'

'You’ll need a tow,' Larry grunted. 'You’re in too deep.'

He mashed his way to the pickup, his jeans stuck to his backside. Somewhere in the back was a bit of good rope they could use to get the Audi out of its predicament. He shifted the briefcase to one side. It was still wide open, like a dog waiting for a treat.

The bastard owes. 

A double payment.

Fucking feels sorry. 

For me.

Fuckhead.

He’s in too deep.

Bloody fluid fizzed inside his brain until it felt like it was oozing out of his eye sockets. He wiped them and looked at his hands. Nothing but mud and rain and hot, invisible tears.

Blackmail is the bigger crime.

The back of the pickup was littered with his stuff. Bits from the farm, bits for the car, a spare sack of layer’s pellets. He spotted the fat coil of blue rope towards the bottom and reached down for it. His hand knocked against his shotgun. 

How did this happen? How did that sod turn his one bit of luck around like this?

He picked up his gun so he could pull the rope out. His shotgun. It felt good in his hand, like a friendship.

  As he walked along the side of the Audi, he drew his right hand behind him, the shotgun nestling against his back. The rope dangled from his left arm, almost tripping him.

'Look, Larry…I’m sorry, mate,' said John.

And he really was; sorry he couldn’t pay him any more money, as if the Waishes were a charity case.

Had he only agreed to pay him because he was a fucking charity case?

'You will be sorry.' 

He dropped the rope in the mud and poked the barrel of the shotgun through the window. It crashed against John’s teeth. The man veered away as best he could within the confines of the seat belt he’d never undone, his hands clutching at the barrel, struggling with the gun. The fucker had not been expecting this.

He couldn’t think. Couldn’t control his head anymore.

He fired. His eyes slapped shut with the recoil. When he cracked them open, he couldn’t make out where John’s face had gone. 

For a few further seconds, everything was motionless. 'Mate?' 

He went to wipe away the blood. His hand touched bone, and the slippery stickiness of innards. Like the entrails of a drawn chicken. He tried to help John up. The body moved. There was no sound as it gained momentum, just a single soft, squelch as Spicer collapsed towards the steering wheel.

He couldn’t take it in. He had no idea his shotgun could do this damage. It could kill a fox, from across a field, but he’d never used it on anything close up before.

He couldn’t recall what had gone through his mind before he pulled the trigger, or even if he had pulled it. All he remembered was the look of pity in John’s eyes, the mud on his jeans. The stew boiling bloody in his head. The friendly gun in his hands.

And then, a soul-saving moment of clarity as he realised no one knew they were here. No one knew they had ever met here.

He walked back to the car and threw in the tow rope. He pulled on a pair of chainsaw gloves and polished his gun with an old rag, burnishing it as if for a game show.

It was quiet in the glade. Even the crows had been scared away. Was Spicer dead? 

He had left Spicer’s brain splattered over the Audi. Of course the man was dead.

He stood in front of the car for a long time, thinking about positions. How a man might kill himself with a shotgun in a car. He rested the stock of the gun on the open window, so the trigger was just inside. Yes, that seemed to work. He let go of it and it fell into the driver’s well, where blood was pooling.

It wasn’t Spicer’s gun, but luckily, it wasn’t his, either. He’d picked it up somewhere, probably in some pub for a good price.

Sinking into the wet ground was the discharged cartridge. He nudged it towards the car with his foot. 

As he did so, the clarity left. As if the last of his luck had turned and walked away.

He was on his knees before he knew he’d fallen. A thin trail of bile ran from his mouth into the grass and was dissipated by the rain. He’d only had whisky for breakfast. His eyes stung. He ran his fingers over them and this time, yes, blood came away, smearing the bright colours of the chainsaw gloves. 

But it wasn’t his blood.

It was John Spicer’s.

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Symbolism in Literature – The Snake

Brittanica.com

Across the world of fiction and world literature you can find the snake. It has probably more symbolic references than almost any other creature, from representing an insidious threat (the "snake in the grass"), to the idea of fertility or a creative life force. As snakes shed their skin through sloughing, they have becomes symbols of rebirth and transformation, even immortality. They're associated with the underworld and the abode of the dead because they spend so much time in pits or hiding under rocks – or in the UK under corrugated iron laid down for that purpose.

Ouroborus 

Two of the most known. symbols ares the ouroboros and the caduceus. 

In ancient myth, a snake devouring its own tail, known as Ouroboros, was a symbol of eternity. The snake’s ability to slough or shed its own skin 

The Rod of Aclepious

The caduceus, the staff of the messenger Hermes in classical Greek myth has two intertwined serpents. This staff was carried by Hermes (or his Roman counterpart, Mercury): the messenger of the gods. The two staffs are often confused, but the herald’s staff borne by Hermes/Mercury had two serpents, rather than one, with their heads facing each other. This  has been wrongly used as a medical symbol for a little over one hundred years. It has often been mistaken for the Rod of Asclepius, a visually similar symbol belonging to the god of healing and medicine.

The Caduceus

The caduceus only has one winding snake. while the Asclepius has two.

In stories the world over, as well as in modern literature, the snake often raises its head.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 4,000-year-old story which also features a flood narrative, Gilgamesh attempts to seize a plant that might confer immortality, only for a snake to steal the plant away. This feels similar to the biblical  story although the creature who confronted Eve was only ever described as a serpent in Genesis – it is Milton, in Paradise Lost who first uses the term 'snake' to denote the evil of Satan. After he has tempted Eve  God punishes him by making him crawl in the dust.

 Fold above fold a surging Maze his Head            

 Crested aloft, and Carbuncle his Eyes;

With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect 

Amidst his circling Spires.

In Good Omens, by  Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, we meet  Crawley the satanic snake hilariously transformed into a burned-out rock star tasked with ushering in the apocalypse. Except Crawly—or Crowley, as he rechristens himself—isn't so keen on putting an end to his favorite earthly delights just yet. 

One of my favourite poems, D. H. Lawrence's ‘Snake’, was written while he was living on the island of Sicily, in the beautiful resort, Taormina, on the east side of the island:

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, if you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off...

Lawrence stages a masculine battle,  two males facing off against one another. He ruminates on killing  the snake so that he will be safe, while accepting its power and individuality. This creates an inner drama.You can read the entire poem here

One of the most famous snakes in fiction has to be Kaa, the Indian python from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. In he 1967 Disney film  Kaa is a villain, while in Kipling’s original book he defeats the Bandar-log monkeys and frees Mowgli, so showing that ambiguous symbolism, being both saviour and danger.

In The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, zealous Baptist Nathan Price takes his family to the Belgian Congo where he works as a missionary. Snakes appear, seemingly mysteriously, in gardens, and one morning the family find a curled-up green mamba and, as it slithers off, hear a shriek from Ruth May, the youngest of the four Price sisters. She has been bitten on the shoulder and dies as they watch. Read more of my thoughts on this fabulously rich novel here 

American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-86) wrote with passion about the snake; 

A narrow Fellow in the Grass                            

Occasionally rides –

You may have met him – did you not

His notice sudden is –

The Grass divides as with a Comb –

A spotted shaft is seen –

And then it closes at your feet

And opens further on –

I use snake symbology strongly in my second Shaman Mystery, On the Gallows. Sabbie first encounters an anaconda in a journey she takes for one client. But she meets this spiritual snake in an ice house, a long way from its home:

'Time and place can change. Home may change.'

I frowned. I didn’t want to forget a single word of what Anaconda was saying; I was sure it had meanings only Drea would understand. 

'Do homes change for the better?' I asked.

'Duty and purpose can change.'

'What is your duty and purpose?'

'First; do no harm. Next; protect your kin. Last; keep your secret.'

'What is your secret?'

Anaconda didn’t like this. He clearly felt I’d been presumptive to ask. For the first time I saw malevolence flicker in the small eyes. I heard the girl give a trembling sigh, as if even her breath shivered with cold. I tried to dodge past Anaconda, but he intercepted my move and I collided with him. His scales felt dry on my bare arms. My feet slid from under me and I fell on the ice, hard as concrete but much colder. It burned through my dress.

His tongue flicked. His head lunged at me. The razor-sharp points of his tongue plunged into my belly. I heard my throat scream in the world of my therapy room. My hands covered my stomach. There was no blood. This was a spirit wound from a serpent without a poisonous bite. Anacondas, I remembered, crushed their prey. I tried to slide away from him, wriggling like a snake does, struggling to gain a grip, but I was shivering so much my hands and feet refused to co-operate. I could hardly feel my body now. The bite wasn’t poisonous, but it had sent me spiralling into hypothermia.

The snake theme continues through the On the Gallows (Unraveled Visions in the US). Towards the climax, I make use of a reference to another fictional snake, the Mara, from Dr Who, when Sabbie interviews the woman who discovered a body on the cooling station at Hinkley Point Power Station;

The Mara, as it manifested itself in Kinda

...' I was cold, very cold and frightened and mad with myself for being so utterly stupid. I could hardly dial. I think I sort of lost it. Because behind me was a dead girl on the gallows and in front of me was the power station. I know I was screaming by then, on and on. Got myself right freaked out until I couldn’t move at all, like we did as kids, imagining Hinkley Point was the Dark Places of the Inside, where the Mara lived; we loved to scare each other with that Dr Who stuff, say the power station could transmit telepathically, and that the Mara was manifesting as one of us, we’d point to one of the gang and run screaming from them, the pure hatred and greed of Mara and that. It all came back to me. I was stuck there remembering that the Mara manifested into its snake form and could destroy me. Like her. I’d got it in my head that was what had happened to her.'     She stopped, and wiped her mouth. 'Madness. How your mind plays tricks.'

    'What did you say?'

    'That I went quite mad, really. Screamed so hard, I couldn’t use my voice for days, after–'

     'No – not that. The thing about Hinkley. What did you say about a snake?'

    'Oh, I was just frantic, totally back to when we were kids. We loved scaring each other. We knew about nuclear power, but we didn’t if you get me. We made things up. Even the signs are scary…DO NOT ENTER…to us, that mean, enter at your peril. It was Rick who started saying the power station was the Dark Places of the Inside. Said he could hear purring, but it wasn’t a cat, it was the Mara, who was, I dunno, this snake; a representation of all evil from another planet. It was what was on Dr Who at the time.'

    'The power station is…'

    'I’d half lost my mind, Sabbie, be fair.'

    'Yeah, I understand.'

     I did not understand at all.  Like I’d explained to Rey, the spirit world is full of twists and tangles...

Perhaps you have used snakes as symbols in your own writing. Or have been particularly affected by their reference in your reading. Do tell me about your experiences with snakes, by posting a comment below.

You can listen to Paradise Lost on BBC Radio 4 right now, with the great Ian McKellan as Milton, and Simon Russell Beale as the snake (Satan). It's live on Sunday afternoons and available on Sounds; click here to find out more

To read more blogposts about symbolism in literature, click here

A Catch-up of Fiction Today. 7 novels that novelist can learn from.

 

I was really lucky; my final proof reading of the new Shaman Mystery was last month. As this fourth book about the incorrigible Sabbie Dare is set in February, I was able to soak up all those drear February experiences – the perpetual rain, the sudden moments of sun, the deep frosts, the dark evenings. 

Through the Floodgate opens in early December 2014, when across the the Southwest, dramatic storms began. On the Somerset Levels, where Sabbie Dare lives, floods were threatening to yet again wreck farmland and villages. The first chapter shows the secret meeting between two feuding farmers, the torrential rain not able to dampen their anger and hate. 

When Sabbie picks up the story, at the end of January,  the floods are beginning to recede. A car is revealed beneath the floodwaters in a Somerset valley...Harper's Coombe.  Many vehicles were 'drowned' in the 2014 Somerset floods, but this one contained a dark secret. A man, dead before the floods overcame his car. And lying next to him, a shotgun.

    It seemed the saddest occurrence of the all the sadness of the devastation. According to bulletins, he was named as John Spicer. He had parked miles from his prosperous farm and big family, and shot himself in the head. 

    He must have chosen it as a quiet spot and driven there through the rain, too wrecked in his life to want to go on with it. He’d stuck a shotgun in his mouth. Not a cry for help – he knew he would die. Then, as the waters rose, he floated inside his car, like spacemen float around their cabin, alone, undiscovered, the murky waters covering him as if he was a burial at sea, the car a coffin. 

 Sabbie is thinking about John Spicer because she's at the funeral of a childhood friend. Kerry, who she knew as a child when she lived at the Willows Children's Home, had thrown herself from the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

 In this latest episode in Sabbie's life, I will explore the darkness that surrounds suicide, the darkness that pervades sexual abuse, and the way natural catastrophes can wreak havoc on the farming community.

But writing should never stop you reading, in fact, it is the most important and useful method of developing as a writer. I'm going to look at seven books I've read since the pandemic has locked us down at home. All of them are very different, but they have all helped me write and rewrite.  Because the shops are shut, they came into my possession in a variety of ways; I collected an armful from charity shops, and a pile from the library before it closed. I filched a couple from a 'free books' shelf outside my village hall, people have kindly given me books, and I ordered one from the net. This was a motley collection and the reading generated a diversity of reactions from me. Here are seven, in order from most disliked to most loved. 

Being Dead, by Jim Crace

Jim Crace  is known for slightly off-beam...okay, slightly weird stories. His Harvest is a favourite of mine, a gripping tale set in a quasi-medieval village. But Being Dead left me as cold as the two main characters, who are dead within a page or two of the opening. We watch them decompose, after an opportunist thief kills them to steal the little they have brought with them to make love in the dunes beside the beach they met on, thirty-odd years ago. They are not all that likeable, in life or death, and I might have given up   entirely, had it not be

The Lonely by Andrew Michael Hurley

Atmospheric and brilliantly described, the landscape of this book supports a slow-burning story that takes you into dark places. Two brothers, one almost fully responsible for the other, discover that the grown-up world they are both almost part of is bleaker and more disturbing than they could have imaginined. I do feel that the story would have told better if we'd moved between the present day (where they're older and wiser) and the past; the visit to The Lonely to heal Andrew, the older brother.

Akin,  by Emma Donaghue 

I’d been gifted the very beautiful hardback copy of this book, with its slightly Art Deco cover depicting Nice on the Cote D’Azure. I’ve already read two books by Donaghue; Room, and The Wonder. These two books are as different as a pea is to a pod, and I was not disappointed to discover that everything about Akin is different to those earlier novels.

I was drawn to the book because I know Nice well, I have family just along the coast, but it was the moment I read the blurb on the flyleaf that I knew I would not be able to put this book down. Who could resist this; A retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother’s wartime secrets.

As you leaf through the frontispieces, towards the first chapter, you come across the dictionary definition of ‘akin’, and also several very grainy black-and-white snapshot pictures. A grand Nice building, a strange symbol, a couple on a park bench, snapped from behind. What these mean is revealed steadily as you read into the book.

Noah Sevaggio is eighty next week. He’s never been back to the city where he was born, and in the past few years he’s lost his entire family; his brilliant wife, Joan, his sister and brother-in-law and even their son, Victor, who died of a drug overdose in his twenties. Eleven-year-old Michael is Victor’s son, and has been living with his granny since his mother, Amber, was thrown into jail for selling drugs. Now Granny has died and Michael has no-one.

Of course Noah is talked into taking on this child. Michael is savvy and streetwise and battered by a young life of hardcore experience, deprived of almost everything Noah would hold as needful for an upbringing. He’s full of suppressed anger and blatant cheek, with a mouth chocked with swearwords Noah didn’t know even existed. He’s had little education, but he’s smart. Noah trails him around Nice, so that we can also enjoy getting immersed in its seascape, its sounds and landmarks, its smells and tases. They are searching out the past of Noah’s mother’s final years in the city, after she’d packed Noah and his father off to the US.They use the grainy photos he’d found in her effects and Micheal becomes as keen on the quest as his great-uncle. 

‘All Noah was attempting to do was fill a gap, throw his ungainly self down so the kid could ross over this abyss. Weren’t all of us bridges for each other one way or another?…And then it struck him that it was really the other way around. This boy was saving Noah. Rescuing him from the trap of habit, the bleak tedium of counting sown the year of his retirement. Michael was the little ark, crazily bobbing, in which one lucky old man could go voyaging. 

A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better by Benjamin Wood  

The book starts off like any family drama, a steady rise in tension showing the aftermath of a family break-up. I imagined it would be about a twelve-year-old boy's assent into manhood, where he learns the facts of growing up by taking a trip with his estranged father. ‘I believed my father was a good man, somebody whose blood was fit to share.’ That might have been clue enough that things were going to take a dreadful turn. Wood  breaks a well-known rule…never tell the reader what is going to happen at the start of the story… with the words; As we drove off, [Mum] was smiling at herself, a limp hand spread across her heart. It was the last I ever saw of her. What’s the writer doing? I had to ask. This is a dangerous tactic, only to be used when you’re hugely confident it’s the right approach. By the time I was a third into the novel, I could see his rational. The gentle, steady incline up the tension stakes was tempered with vulnerability. They’re heading towards the Lake District, but as the story moves through this beautiful landscape, it becomes a place of blood and terror, it’s beauty is replaced by a ragged, tattered, chaotic, menace. The seedy pub, the rusty gates, the cluttered interior of the Volvo’s boot. No one is going to fully survive this story, and for a while I was sure Dan would be one of those who would perish at his father’s hands. 

The Beekeeper of Alepo by  Christy Lefteri 

Lefteri, herself a child of Cypriot refugees, volunteered in a Greek refugee centre during the Syrian crisis, then came home to London and wrote this book. Nuri, a Syrian beekeeper, and his wife Afra, an artist blinded when their small son is killed as a bomb lands in their back garden take a hazardous route across Turkey and Greece to find safety in the U.K. The novel moves betweenether this journey that starting in Aleppo in 2015 and the other from England the following year, where they are applying for asylum. Nuri and Afra manage to escape their shattered hometown, but they bring with them memories that haunt them. Nuri thinks, as they travel, wait and apply, that it's his wife who is the broken one of the two. He has no idea that he is suffering silently from PTS. 'You are lost in the darkness,' Afra says to Nuri. He still has his love of beekeeping and Afra still has a gift for art, and we get deep into their thoughts, indeed their souls, helping readers to understand experiences they will luckily never have. 

The Past by Tessa Hadley   

I love Hadley's writing, and so I should as she was one of my mentors on the MA in creative  writing at Bath Spa University. Each of her novels allows for a steady and subtle exploration of very ordinary people…albeit mostly middle class ordinary people…who hardly know, at the start of the stories, what hidden depths they actually possess. In The Past, a family of four siblings arrive at their dilapidated family home, to talk about selling it.  There’s a lot of them in this former rectory, but they squeeze in and proceed to do anything but talk about selling the house. The teenagers make love, the unwelcome new in-law makes a friend of one of the three sisters. Another sister tries to face up to what she thinks is her failed life and the third has no idea what her two children are up to…they have found a dead dog in a ruined cottage…and they know who it once belonged to. As we move towards the climax, there is attempted suicide by a deep river and a devastating fire. Nobody dies, but as the past is revived, everyone changes.                

The Little Red Books by Edna O'Brien.
This book has been feted by the literati and reviewers world wide, and rightly too. It has a mythical feel from the start, but is overlaid with comedy, tragedy, horror, history and realism. It has a wide panorama which starts in a tiny village in Ireland Cloonoila, , with its priest, its nuns, its housewives and its gossipy pub and posh hotel. But it spreads out, to Bosnia, London and finally to the Haig, where the Bosnian war criminal, Dr. Vladimir Dragan, based on Radovan Karadžić. It has wide-ranging themes, but the most clearly portrayed is that of exile; immigration and asylum, focusing first on the workers at the posh hotel, one of whom, soon recognise Dr Vlad and is terrified. Through the story walks Fidelma, the draper's wife, who falls badly for the sexy Vlad, and hopes he will give her the child she's failed to have with her weary husband. She get pregnant, Vlad gets arrested, she gets bloodily attacked by his Serbian followers. Some of this book is shockingly hard to read, and it's as though, at eight-five, O'Brien has decided to pull out all the stops, employing many styles of writing and many structures of plotting. The book is full of interiors, with a lot of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, as well as a lot of pulling-back from close narrative perspectives, so that we feel as if we are soaring over countries to see violence, disregard, and strong ethical actions in equal measure across Europe. This is a must-read for anyone who loves books that really want to tell you something about our world, and are not afraid to do so.   

Beneath the Tor out in Kindle!

At last! The three books in the Shaman Mystery Mystery series are out in both Kindle and paperback editions. The third in the series,  Beneath the Tor, is now available from Amazon. The Kindle edition is only 99p and if you're with Kindle Unlimited, it's free to download. 

Now I'll be able to concentrate on seeing the fourth in the series through production and into both Kindle and paperback editions. Through the Floodgate, should be released in the early spring of 2021. 

The original idea of the Shaman Mystery Series, came to me one day, in the guise of Sabbbie Dare. She arrived, fully-formed and said;  'I'm a young therapist, a shaman, and sometimes I do get very strange people walking into my therapy room. Honestly, I could write a book about some of them...'

And so the idea for the first in the series, In the Moors,

was born.

I'm not at all like Sabbie; I can't add up, I doubt I could solve a murder mystery, and I'm not quite the 'cock-eye' optimist that she is. I'm far, far, shyer than Sabbie, who says it just like it is, and is unafraid of catching people off-guard. Sabbie is a very curious person and as she says herself..."you know what that did to the cat."

But like Sabbie, I follow a pagan path which takes me close to the earth and into the deep recesses of my mind. Shamanic techniques help me in my life - in fact they changed my life - although, unlike Sabbie, I’ve never set up a therapeutic practice...I’m too busy writing!  

Beneath the Tor had its seeds in my visits, over the years, to the town of Glastonbury. I have become firm friends with many of the people who not only live there, but use it as a sacred and spiritual base for their work. But I also can't help but think that there is a dark side to the town. Naturally, one has to made a living if one offers spiritual therapies, but in the past, I have met those who are not all they're letting on, and some who have been making a profit without really knowing what damage they might do.

Nevertheless, there are good points to the town. The sacred and the pagan do exist side-by-side, with the beauty of the Abbey and the lovely church central to the community, and the mysteries of the Chalice Well and Tor deep in its psyche. I wanted to include both these sides to Glastonbury, and celebrate it, as well as set a thrilling crime mystery there.

To get this book right, I spoke to a lot of people and read a lot of books. I should thank the generosity of Nicholas Mann, whose wide breathe of knowledge on Glastonbury was my foundation stone, especially his book The Isle of Avalon:

Mara Freeman on Glastonbury Tor

Sacred Mysteries of Arthur and Glastonbury, published by Green Magic, and Glastonbury Tor: A Guide to the History and Legends. Also by my side as I wrote was Grail Alchemy, Initiation in the Celtic Mystery Tradition  by Mara Freeman, an authority on the mysteries surrounding the Isle of Avalon. She had just finished writing  at the time I was completing Beneath the Tor. It's an inspirational book I recommend here. Of the series, Mara says…"A real page-turner, In the Moors cost me several hours of sleep because it was so un-put-downable! An engaging heroine, a landscape at once so real and so menacing, and an intriguing mystery had me enthralled into the wee hours!” 

Some of you may remember the launch of Beneath the Tor at the The Avalon Room in Glastonbury. 50 people gathered and it was a blast; everyone had a great time, there was standing room only, and as one attendee said on facebook…Ronald Hutton...Arthur ‘ZZ Birmingham’ on guitar...and chocolates!

While Arthur wowed us with the blues, Ronald Hutton, professor of history at Bristol University and a world authority on paganism, gave a talk on the history of shamanism, concentrating on how it arrived in the West and was taken up and made obtainable by the great exponents in this country and the US especially. He then very cleverly (well, he is clever!) explained how my books tapped this seam, explaining how readers nowadays like two particular genres of novel; crime fiction and fantastic fiction. By entering Sabbie Dare’s two worlds…as a 30 year old woman faced with dilemmas, worries and, sometimes, danger in the 'apparent world' – and her amazing journeys into the spirit world as a shaman, I had successfully blended the two. Thank you, Ronald, and thank you, too, for your kind review of the book...." Milton 

has become a mistress of plot-weaving, and above all, she pulls off the trick of setting the totally fantastic amid the totally everyday and making the two fit together with pace and excitement."

So, I hear you cry, what is the third Shaman Mystery about? Well, let's have a taster; 

…A handful of dancers were still going strong. Alys was among them, turboed up like a child who’d had too much ice cream, hollering and whooping, I could hear her from the far side of the summit.

    I saw her dance.

    I saw her drop.

    She fell to the ground without a stumble or a cry.

    She fell awkwardly, one leg trapped under the other, her head thrown back.

    I stared for long seconds, waiting for her to rise.

    Alys didn’t get up. She didn’t move at all 

One Midsummer Eve on Glastonbury Tor, beautiful Alys Hollingberry dies suddenly after dancing through the night. After receiving sinister, anonymous emails about Alys, her grieving husband Brice approaches therapeutic shaman, Sabbie Dare. She turns to the spirit world for guidance but receives only conflicting and enigmatic answers. Meanwhile she follows the links from Alys to a killer who attacks in public yet seems to disappear at will. She must find the murderer before someone she knows becomes the next victim.

You can get a copy of Beneath the Tor HERE!