New articles and updates - plus the first chapter of Andromache in the Dark
It’s been a busy month, but mainly in terms of trying to keep on top of everything. I’ve been juggling a few things, and eventually had to knuckle down and focus on the most pressing – High-Rise edits. I’m glad I did, as going through that book again really reinvigorated how proud I am of it. I think it doubles as a great jumping on point for my thrillers and a real treat for anyone who’s followed them from the start. Hopefully it won’t be long before I have a cover I can share.
With Andromache in the Dark and Backstory also to come this year, I’ve got no shortage of stuff to be focusing on but I am starting to think towards what I want to do next. I have a few ideas. Some are sequels to things I’ve already written. Some conclude long running plotlines. Others are totally new. None I’m ready to talk about yet, but I’m writing a lot of frantic notes.
Apart from that, what else is there to report from this last month? Nothing huge. I’m told everything is on schedule regarding The Hunted movie, but I’m not really involved in the process so there are no salacious scoops to be handed out here. At the end of February I was also honoured to launch Laura McCluskey’s fantastic debut The Wolf Tree at Readings in Carlton, which made for a lively, fun night. Grab the book if you haven’t already, it’s already shaping up to be one of the big blockbusters of the year.
Apart from all that, I somehow ended up writing five blogs or articles this last month. None about surprising topics.
New articles for InSession film
I’ve been writing periodic articles for InSession Film for a while now, and this month I had two, both touching on stuff I’ve written about for them before. Never let it be said that I am not consistent.
The first was a response to the new Jurassic World Rebirth trailer. I’ve been looking forward to this film for a while, but I found the trailer pretty disappointing. I have time for every Jurassic Park film except Dominion, but how many times can they keep repeating the same stories?
The next one returns to a topic I have a few opinions about – the Hannibal Lecter franchise. There have been some rumblings recently of a new film in the works, which obviously I will not say no to, but the more you think about it the more you realise there are very few directions left for this franchise to go. Except one.
New Blogs
Over on my personal blog, I covered a few eclectic topics. The first was Windmills, the seemingly cursed book/play/TV script I can never get out in the world despite it being easily the story I’ve come back to the most throughout my life. I’ve written about Windmills before – a lot – but I haven’t touched on it in some time and I so thought I’d give an update for those who’ve followed me for a while and might have been wondering what happened to it.
The next went a bit broader but admittedly wasn’t new territory for me. I’ve been a little bit fascinated by how my once passionate fandom for many big franchises has faded over the years. Previously I’ve written about this from a more personal angle, but I wanted to take a macro view this time, to explore how it’s not just me getting sick of Marvel and Star Wars and Doctor Who.
The last one really is just for writing nerds, as I explore an accidental technique that helped me get back into the High-Rise headspace during edits.
Recommendations
I can’t be more original than to confess that the two things I’m most attentively watching at the moment are the same two things everyone seems to be watching – The White Lotus and Severance. But given how good they both are, I’m not complaining.
I’ve recommended both shows in the past. They’re brilliant for different reasons – confident, adult dramas with such a strong handle on their tone and themes that you know you’re in safe hands and are willing to just go along for the ride. Although that’s about all they have in common.
That said, I did see some pre-release coverage of both shows claiming that these new seasons (second for Severence, third for White Lotus) were marked steps down from the acclaimed previous ones. Which concerned me given the sad fate of other onetime favourites like Yellowjackets or Ted Lasso, but I needn’t have worried because so far I heavily disagree with those claims.
Severence has a reputation as a mystery box show but personally I don’t especially care what Lumon are up to or why they have rooms full of goats – I’m more concerned with the very knotty dramatic and ethical questions created by the show’s premise. If you could divide your work self and home self into two separate consciousnesses with no memories of each other, would you, given that one of you would essentially be a slave? What happens if your work self falls in love with a colleague but your home self is married? Or if your partner on the outside meets your work self and likes them more than your home self? Who has the right to your body, or your life? If you quit or are fired, is that tantamount to murder? How much of your personality crosses over between the different versions of you?
It's knotty, head spinning stuff but for all its unsettling strangeness Severance keeps focus on the characters and what all those big questions mean for them. It keeps the show remarkably human, which is what I think good science fiction should always strive for. Fridays cannot come fast enough at the moment.
The White Lotus, meanwhile, is earlier in its run (three episodes at the time of writing) but so far I’m pretty damn hooked. There are criticisms of it being too slow but I’m not sure the first two seasons were any different at this stage. And there are more than enough enticing questions and Chekov’s Guns to keep me involved.
It probably doesn’t feel quite as razor sharp as its second season just yet, which made an absolute feast out of the sexual politics between its twisted characters, but the ingredients for dynamite are all there. The White Lotus has always operated best as a keenly observed exploration of the most venal and entitled human behaviour, usually from characters with no comprehension that they are either of those things, and there’s plenty of that here.
What’s most interesting about these new episodes is the way in which they’re starting to build an overarching narrative between the three mostly disconnected seasons of the show so far. Only a couple of characters crossed over between the first two and the second season certainly didn’t rely on any knowledge of the first. This time, a huge amount of tension is derived from the unexpected reunion of two characters who barely knew each other in the first season but who are uniquely placed to be deadly threats to each other given what happened in the second. I guess if you like your White Lotus seasons to be entirely standalone this could be a problem, but for me it’s given a real charge to the undercurrent of impending doom that runs through every season of this show.
Andromache in the Dark – Chapter One
Since there wasn’t a lot to report this month, I thought I’d throw in a little bonus. The entire first chapter of Andromache in the Dark, out July 2. Enjoy!
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Florence was not supposed to be like this.
I don’t mean the city, by the way, which was exactly how I’d always dreamed it would be. I mean this trip was supposed to be sightseeing and learning about all the fascinating and frequently gory history that happened here, checking out some beautiful old art and wandering through stunning buildings full of secrets. It was not supposed to be me standing on a rooftop, watching the cobblestoned street below, holding a long, heavy grappling-hook launcher and waiting for screams.
‘It’s going to be really easy,’ Mum had told me as she started up her gyrocopter and Dad sped off down a laneway on his motorbike. ‘We’ll direct the chase your way. She won’t expect anyone will be waiting, not with both of us on her tail.’ Mum grinned at that and clapped me on the arm. ‘The moron doesn’t realise we’re a team of three now.’
A whir of rotor blades and the gyrocopter swept into the air and I was left standing alone to heave a sigh and drag this heavy launcher up the staircase that backed one of Florence’s many historical houses, something I’d far rather be paying attention to than a high-speed car chase.
It was late afternoon creeping towards evening, and the sky had taken on a golden gleam. It made the ornate and enormous sweep of the Duomo and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio look even more beautiful and otherworldly, just like the sloping roofs and tumbling chimneys and tilting houses that surrounded them.
Otherworldly. I smiled a bit, despite myself. I had been to actual other worlds and I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anything as beautiful as here.
But, I reminded myself, what I was supposed to be seeing was the approaching car on the street below. I refocused. Aimed the launcher. It felt weird and dangerous to be holding it. My heart was fluttering a little, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the time Mum, Dad and I had busted those snorkelling smugglers in Hawaii, or the mountaineering mobsters in Tibet. Or as bad as what had led to that: the journey that brought my dad back home in the first place and turned me almost overnight from ‘Andromache Peters: boring history nerd’ to ‘Andromache Peters: daring adventurer who’d really just like to go back to being a boring history nerd please and thank you’.
A shriek of car horns from several streets away. I checked behind me, making sure the cable was leading properly from the back of the launcher to the heavy metal ring secured into the roof. Mum had been very clear about her instructions: ‘That car will be going dangerously fast, so the moment the hook hits it you dive clear and throw the launcher, got it?’
My hands were sweaty. The horns were louder, followed by yells. I could hear the chop of gyrocopter rotors. The rev of Dad’s motorcycle.
A long low-slung black car swung hard around a nearby corner, entering the street below. It seemed far too big for it, but then any car in Florence seemed too big for streets designed for horses. I aimed the launcher at the boot, waited as I’d been told for the car to be nearly below me, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
The car was here.
I pulled again and again and suddenly there was a rushing sound, the whine of unravelling cable and then a thud below as the hook went through the metal of the boot and snapped open and then I was remembering Dive clear! but before I could dive anywhere a burst of stones came from behind me and the metal ring was pulled clear and I was pulled off the roof.
Somehow, as I was yanked through the air, flapping wildly after a speeding car, holding on to a grappling-hook launcher for dear life, the only thing I could think was, I told you, Mum!
‘I’ve done this plenty of times,’ she’d promised. ‘The ring will hold: I’m sure of it.’
‘Mum these buildings are hundreds of years old and —’
‘See? Built to last.’
What was not built to last was Andromache Peters. I imagined the gravestone: Died in Florence due to grappling-hook mishap after surviving dinosaurs, Pharaohs and big crabs. Completely embarrassing.
So, my situation: I’m flying through the air behind the car, hanging on to a grappling hook buried in the boot, and if we go around a corner I’m going to be absolutely pancaked.
Fumbling in the buffeting wind and dust of the car and trying to ignore my straining muscles and the ear-destroying scream that I think was coming from me, I hit the button on the side of the grappling launcher. The one I’d noticed before, the one that said Retract.
Suddenly I was racing with terrifying speed towards the car, as the cable was winched fast back into the launcher. I slammed into the boot with a grunt of pain, holding on desperately as the car swung hard around a corner.
Okay still not good. Still really not good. Buildings were racing too fast past me. There was no way for me to get off this car alive, and the plan – to capture it in the street due to clever use of a grappling hook that turned out to not be so clever after all – had failed terribly.
Which left me with … what?
The vibrating of the boot was rattling my entire body and sending painful waves through my already sweaty hands and I couldn’t catch my breath and everything hurt and sooner or later I was going to let go. I needed the car to stop. I needed —
Wait. Wait.
The grappling hook was still stuck in the boot of the car. But the cable was retracted. Which meant …
I pulled the trigger again.
The impact was immense. A tear of metal and a smell of smoke and I hit the rear window, the launcher wrenched from my grip by the force of our sudden stop.
The wheels tore at the cobblestones beneath us. The air smelled like burning. I slid off the boot and leaned against the car, shaking and gasping.
Surrounded by clouds of black smoke, the grappling launcher stuck upright from the boot. The bolt had shot again, this time through the chassis, burying in the road and stopping the fleeing car in an instant.
A roar of engines. Dad’s bike shot past me and a moment later a gust buffeted my hair as the gyrocopter landed in front of the car. I could hear sirens.
I looked around, for the first time taking in where we’d ended up: on one of the historical bridges that arced over the River Arno. Directly in front, beautiful old palazzi tiered up and across a hill towards the winding wall of the Belvedere fortress, somewhere else I hadn’t had the chance to visit yet.
I staggered back from the car. Mum and Dad had both dismounted, and now stood in front of it, arms crossed, looking every bit like the heroes of so many books and movies and paintings. Mum, all in black, goggles high on her head, blonde hair long and wavy in the wind. Dad, in his vest and oversized glasses, sleeves rolled up and an easy smile on his face. Even after six months, seeing him real and alive caused a pang in my stomach.
‘Well?’ Mum called. ‘You getting out, or what?’
The driver’s door of the car opened. For a second nobody emerged.
And then somebody did: the most glamorous-looking woman I had ever seen. Maybe around my parents’ age, tall and slim, wearing a long red evening gown, her black hair done up in something that had probably taken four hairdressers four hours to arrange. I glanced down at myself: checked red shirt over a black T, jeans ripped, boots scuffed, covered in dust. If there was a hairstyle called Dragged Behind Speeding Car, then I doubted anybody would go for it after seeing me.
‘You going to come quietly, Addison?’ Mum asked.
The woman looked for a long time at Dad. ‘You’re back from the dead,’ she said.
‘So are you,’ he replied. ‘How many times have you “died” now?’
Addison Cane, the second most famous villain my parents had ever faced, laughed as if this was all some pleasant day at the park. ‘If you’re going to be thrown from a great height always have a parachute in your dress. Words to live by. Or not to, depending on whether you listen.’
She turned and her cold blue gaze landed on me.
I didn’t blink. I’d faced bigger dangers than her.
‘Ah,’ she said softly. ‘The daughter.’
‘The one who caught you,’ Dad said, with a note of pride that made my heart swell a little.
‘Well, that’s neither here nor there,’ Addison replied. ‘What was your name again, girl? Andro-match?’
‘Andromache,’ I said, loudly. ‘An-drom-a-key.’
She sniffed. ‘Your parents couldn’t give you a normal name?’
‘Oh yeah, says you, Addison,’ my mother retorted.
‘Alright, Promethia,’ Addison replied.
‘Nothing wrong with a unique name.’
‘Unique or stupid?’
‘Come on,’ Dad pushed. ‘Let’s hand her over to the police, find out where she hid the Medici gold and go home.’
‘This is fun, isn’t it?’ Addison said. Behind us, the sirens were getting louder. ‘Like nothing ever changed. We could do it every weekend.’
‘We will not,’ my mother retorted. ‘We have a daughter to raise, thank you very much.’
‘Get a babysitter.’
‘Not on your account.’
‘Oh please.’ Addison winked at my father. ‘I’m the most fun you ever had.’
‘That is quite enough,’ my mother snapped.
Police cars screeched on to the bridge behind us. I leaned against the barrier as men and women in uniform, bathed red and blue by flashing lights, ran across to Addison Cane. There were loud voices and the click of handcuffs and I turned, elbows on the stonework, watching the river wind its way between all these ancient buildings so full of mysteries, and wondered why, with so much I’d always yearned for now real, I wasn’t happier.