Eye. See. U.

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Over on Goodreads I was recently asked the following question (and as the response was a lengthy one, I've decided to post it here on this blog too):

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Some time ago, I had a spate of fairly vivid dreams, ones that go beyond the realms of being ‘interesting’, through the curtain into ‘disturbing.’ I would dream that I was walking down a city road, overshadowed by tall office blocks of no interest, but for a few streets down where there was this office tower crowned by a giant eye. 

We’re not talking an ‘eye of Sauron’ here - I think I could deal with an eye wreathed in flame - but a giant crow’s eye, yellow, black, blood-shot, and the size of an airship, blinking rapidly, and swiveling smoothly atop of a concrete and glass perch.

Swiveling smoothly to look at me, that is.

Imagine being followed by this giant eye, all the way down the street. You don’t know why it’s looking at you, as you are largely anonymous among all those other souls, but you know it is. 

You duck into a cafe, to peek through the window, only to find that gigantic yellow eye staring back at you, blinking, and fixed in your direction. You don’t know its intention, but you suspect it wishes to harm you. Not out devilment, not because it’s evil in any way, but because it is curious about you, and hungry for you. You are only a maggot to this all-seeing eye. Something to be swallowed and not thought of again.

You are just food…

Initially, I woke up in a sweat, a little overwhelmed by the experience. When it happened again, I wondered if this was a reoccurring nightmare. But after a while, despite several nights of disturbed sleep, I started looking for the eye-tower in my dreams, like a child would seek out the scariest ride in the theme-park.

I realised this wasn’t a healthy thing to do. I had to deal with it, and exorcise it from my dreams. So I dealt with it the only way I knew. I wrote about it. 

I took it out of the city and put it in a valley. I turned it from an office block to a mountainous tree, with a fleshy, root-twisted trunk. I allowed the eye-mountain to move. To hunt. 

I allowed it to hunt a particularly unpleasant person.

And I gave the eye-mountain a voice, and a name: The Unghar.

But The Unghar didn’t have a story.

What it did have was a companion piece of short fiction at that time, concerning the fate of an obnoxious city-trader who wakes up from having a bath, only to discover his bathroom has been torn from his apartment, sent spinning across the stars, and is spinning to oblivion to the center of a far-away sun. 

I thought the two ideas were connected in some way: two people, not particular nice, been thrown into unusual, and potentially catastrophic circumstances far from Earth. When I thought about this further, I wondered if these two people were neighbours, and if they were neighbours, how did they both get sent across the stars to fend for their lives? Was it who they were? Or where they lived? Or something they did?

In the end, I settled on the place. What happened to them was a consequence of where they lived, and I sent these two individuals to their doom, but not alone. No, they went with their apartments too. Their stranded rooms.

And so that’s what I’ve been writing: an epic dark fantasy/science fiction about a Victorian house that has separated from reality, has splintered its occupants across the universe, depositing them on alien worlds, and sometimes in the vacuum of space, while inside their apartments. 

Of course, there’s more to it than that, and as with a book of this size, it’s been heavily influenced by my own childhood, various artists, writers, music and films.

But that’s how it kicked off, the big bang as it were. All the other pieces are like dust and light, converging on the nucleus of the story, and one that is fully formed, even has a life of its own.

One that no longer resides in my dreams, or my nightmares.