Blog Tour: When Angels Fear - a Guest post from the author, Polly J. Mordant
Thanks to Rachel's Random Resources and Polly Mordant for inviting me onto the Blog Tour for When Angels Fear. I am delighted to host an author guest post . But first here's a little bit about When Angels Fear...
The Blurb
She runs from a
terrifying past, to a village with problems of its own
Exhausted, desperately seeking sanctuary, Emma arrives at the pretty English village of Flammark.
But she cannot rest. A strange
sleeping sickness stalks the village and a young woman has disappeared.
Why won't
the police investigate?
As events unfold, Emma becomes
embattled yet again, compelled to fight for her life against a deadly curse
linked to a past about which she had no knowledge.
She is the only one able to
vanquish the evil but doing so will entail confronting an horrific and
all-too-familiar enemy.
The question is, will she be
strong enough?
Purchase Link - http://getbook.at/WhenAngelsFear
Guest Post from the author
WHAT LIES
BENEATH THE CREATION OF WHEN ANGELS FEAR
By Polly
Mordant
I’d been nursing the idea for When Angels Fear for many years but wasn’t quite sure how to properly get the words down on the page. Essentially, the book’s starting point concerns a woman escaping from an abusive relationship, but I didn’t want it to feel exploitative or create a story that overly victimised the central female protagonist. Hard to do when, in fact, the whole set-up pointed to her having been at the mercy of her ex-partner.
Then,
(again, years ago) I saw a photograph of a church taken from across a village
green. It seemed to have come from the garden of the house opposite. I was
instantly struck by a seeming relationship between the two buildings. What if a force emanated from that church
that impacted, in some way, on the house? I can’t obviously pin down when the
lightbulb moment came but somewhere down the line, I made the connection: what
if that force was also mixed up in some way with the man who was determined at
any cost, to get his partner back?
Slowly the
bones of the story began to come together to what essentially is the premise of
Angels. In the throes of escaping
from her ex, my main character, Emma, runs to a village in what, she thought, had
been a random pin-in-a-map exercise. She knows nothing about the place or the
forces at work there. In a debilitated state, this heightens her vulnerability;
at first she can’t think clearly and doesn’t see where the danger really lies.
Nor,
incidentally, does the reader. The possibility of presenting a kind of noir
thriller, where no one really knows what’s going on, became irresistible.
However,
within that framework, I could begin Emma’s fightback. There are a lot of
reflective moments in the book, where we can see the seeds of her recovery and
the return of her considerable sensibilities and strength. She makes friends,
forms alliances and eventually is both able and enabled to confront her past.
In parallel
to her story are two others. The first concerns a detective inspector, Westen,
new to Sandmarsh’s Serious Crime Squad. He’s abrasive, sweary, insensitive and
ambitious. At first, I wrote him to give the story some texture. Emma’s early
chapters show her to be both nervy and numbed by her past and in danger of
becoming narratively flat. Westen’s arrival on the scene shook it all up and
also, as it turned out, created a lot of tension between them which carried right
through to the end. Their relationship becomes a real focus in the next book in
the series.
Interestingly
enough, I have a poll on my book’s Facebook page, Friends of Flammark.
From what started as a narrative device Westen seems to have gained quite a
following. He’s racing ahead!
I want to
end with a few comments about the antagonist – the abuser - who also has his
own story. Just as I did not want Emma to be a straightforward victim in their
relationship, likewise I didn’t want him to be stereotypically formulated
either. The supernatural element really helped in his depiction. I kept him as
a background threat quite deliberately, refused to give him a name and made him
a constant ‘elephant in the room.’ Except for at the end. All his
characterisation; all his backstory is packed into the final few
chapters. I hoped this piled on the tension even more as I manipulated
all the expectations built up about him throughout.
In short, I
wanted a novel that played with your head. I’d love to know if it plays with
yours.
Author Bio
Social Media Links
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https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/119522099-p-j-mordant
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