The appeal of the Gothic mashup
behind The Book of Thunder and Lightning
Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash
When creating future heroes for literature, it’s sometimes useful to look to the past. If we dig deeper into history we can see our present realities reflected back to us and this can be furtive ground for writers.
This is what happened to me back in 2021, following the completion of my novella Headcase. With the worst of the pandemic behind us, a short walk to a local neighbourhood in Shoreditch, London took me to a street I had never come across before. Calvert Avenue, with its chic boutiques and quaint cafes lead to Arnold Circus, a small round park with a spired bandstand at its centre. Its elevated position gave you a view of the spider web of broad, orange-bricked avenues fanning out from it. Had I suddenly been transported to another city?, another country? Another time perhaps.
After doing a little research (which subsequently turned into a year-long obsession) I discovered that this attractive inner city neighbourhood had a history that was all its own. The site of The Boundary Estate, built in 1900 was where the Old Nichol once stood. ‘The Nichol’ as it was known was one of the most notorious slums in the 1800s and that raised park I had entered had been built on top of the torn down bricks from its old houses. The poetry of this struck me like a cosh round the head on a foggy night in Limehouse. This was the beginning of my next story, and it just wouldn’t leave me alone.
I descended into the research rabbit hole by first reading A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison, the sad story of a young boy from The Nichol getting caught up in crime and (spoiler alert) culminating in him being killed in a knife fight. Although the book was less famous than Dickens’ Oliver Twist, it caused a stir at the time it was published in 1896. It divided opinion, with some critics saying it glamorised inner city violence and others saying it exaggerated it. Hang on. This sounds a bit familiar, I thought, as I pressed pause on my remote halfway through an episode of Top Boy Summerhouse. As the cliché goes, the more things change the more they stay the same.
Later that year, I returned to the Boundary Estate one mild autumn afternoon. As I sat to have a coffee, I checked my phone and a tragic news story popped up about a boy having been struck by lightning while playing football. I looked back up to that bandstand and again noticed that metal spire poking up to the heavens and then thought of the poor boy in Morrison’s book. Any cynicism I had about fate and coincidence evaporated like white dandelion pods floating up to blue skies. The rest, as they say is history. Well actually that’s not strictly true, because although the first half of The Book of Thunder and Lightning does take place in the past, the second takes place in the 21st Century.
So the moral of this story is, if you want to find out where we are now, it often helps to look at where we came from and if you want some inspiration, it might well be right outside your door (or underneath your feet).
The Book of Thunder and Lightning by Seb Duncan will be available for pre-order from Roundfire Books in 2024.
https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/book-of-thunder-and-lightning-the/seb-duncan/9781803416779
https://www.waterstones.com/book/book-of-thunder-and-lightning-the/seb-duncan/9781803416779