Black Hours diary entry no.13: Knocked out

After the euphoria of baby announcements (and a pretty incredible scan where the baby appeared to be performing for mine and Sarah’s benefit), The Black Hours progress has continued unmolested. At the time of writing, I am but five chapters (less than a quarter) of the way from the end. It’s a conclusion that I’m quite nervous about. I always had an ending in mind, but as the book grows evermore darker, the original ending just seems too optimistic.

I’ve faced this demon before, feeling overprotective of my characters, like Zeus not wishing to sacrifice his Perseus, before finally bowing to godly pressure. In the new book, The Hoard of Mhorrer, several characters are put in perilous situations where I’ve had to bow to instinct and play the final card, not wanting to deal them out but having no alternative without cheating the reader. I suppose it’s my own bloody fault for putting the characters in impossible positions, and maybe the characters’ faults too (sometimes they can be so wilful).

And so to The Black Hours, where it’s now become “two weeks until disaster”; the chapter where everything comes to a head. I’ve become quickly attached to the characters in the book, perhaps sooner than I did to those in The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer. These are characters that wouldn’t look out of place in 21st century London, let alone Queen Victoria’s London. Characters that you can cheer for. Characters that are fighting for you and me, and here I am, spoiling the party.

And there’s another reason too. It might sound a bit pretentious, but perhaps by writing this I’m excising certain fears – or fuelling them. Let’s face it, in many respects things aren’t that great right now. Apart from a world recession, there’s the spectre of climate change (somewhat more insidious than the collapse of global markets, but potentially more disastrous); there’s still the threat that some fundamental nutcase will decide to blow up a football stadium or jumbo-jet in the name of Allah, and there’s that niggling fear that we haven’t had the long overdue pandemic, overdue since the beginning of the 20th century.
The Black Hours is a culmination of all of that. Biological, fanatical, financial and political. And drawing to the end of the book has made me realise that there is no happy ending, just one with a little bit of hope because several people decide to sacrifice themselves to at least give ‘the many’ a fighting chance.

Now I don’t want to bottle the ending because I’m worried about the future; and I am concerned, perhaps not to the degree that I have sleepless nights, but I have caught myself staring into space thinking “will things ever be this good again?”
So far The Black Hours has been uplifting, because in the tradition of the action thriller, the good guys get knocked down, but they soon get up again. But I’m not sure how long this can continue without me lying to the reader.

Sometimes, the good guys just stay down.