Lost Hearts

This post relates to the original 2020 version of Those Who Wait which I withdrew when I realised that it was crap. After knocking out a third Frank Sampson story, Mortal, I revised and republished Those Who Wait in June 2024.

Let’s be honest, my two Frank Sampson novels (Gifted and Pariah) didn’t exactly set the world on fire. The best that can be said is that Gifted earned out its advance. So the question arose… what next?

I wanted to do something different. OK, so the protagonist of Those Who Wait is another teenage boy, but he’s a very different kettle of fish: quiet and introspective where Frank was loud, chaotic and thoroughly pissed off with everybody and everything.

When I was a child, my parents gave me a copy of M.R.James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary for Christmas. One tale, Lost Hearts (1904), in which the ‘psychic portions’ of two murdered children, their hearts cut out, return to exact a bloody revenge, has always haunted me.

More recently, I read Uncle Silas (1864) by Sheridan Le Fanu, in which a teenage heiress is the near-victim of an elaborate plot to murder her.

Over a period of several years, I played around with screen adaptations of both tales and eventually realised that, structurally and thematically, they were essentially the same story: of an attempt, by a predatory adult, to turn a child into an exploitable resource. I don’t know why this theme so preoccupies me — I can find no reason, no trauma — but it does.

The projected screenplays turned into a single novel. It’s been slow work. In my very earliest, exploratory notes, the main character was a teenage girl. By the time I completed a first draft, around September 2016, she had turned into a boy. The most important secondary character was a boy, then a girl, then a boy again. Minor characters appeared and disappeared like tears in the rain. I went through six drafts in 2017, four in 2018, and another three in 2019. It was originally written in the third person past tense; it wound up first person present tense.

Along the way, my agent got pissed off with the whole business and, when I persisted in my folly, gently pointed out that there was a door behind me. I sent it round a couple of dozen agencies, to no effect. So I decided to whack it out into the big, bad world myself.

I know what you’re thinking: after all that, is it actually any good? How would I know?