Gifted, my first Frank Sampson novel, was published by Random House in 2015, with the tagline:
Just what the world needed: another teenage wizard.
Perhaps I should have taken my own hint and quit while I was ahead. But I was contracted (and only too willing) to knock out a sequel, Pariah, which came out a year later. Neither book set the world on fire: Gifted (published in the US as A Dangerous Magic, and inexplicably translated into German as SMI: Smart Magical Investigation ) seems to have sold out its UK print run of 3,000, while I believe Pariah sold a little over 1,000 copies. Not insignificant… but no worlds were shattered.
I had rather hoped to do a third book, which would have allowed me to wrap up various threads that I’d left hanging out of the story, but sadly the grownups weren’t keen. So I nailed Frank back in his box, and wrote a ghost story that turned out to be a complete pile of shit.1
By now we were in lockdown and people were dutifully masked up and following the little arrows around Waitrose. All in all, morale was low. I played around with various projects… and finally decided that, whether it knew it or not, the world really did need another teenage wizard story.
I write Frankenstein-style. Ideas get messily sewn together into a monstrous, misshapen narrative, then hacked bloodily to pieces again and stitched back in a different order. But my final, self-published version of Mortal does at least deal with the most important question left hanging over by its predecessors: how, at the tender age of five, Frank came to kill his father…
Funnily enough, I had no idea, when I kicked the series off with Gifted, that Frank would turn out to be a patricide. I was typing merrily away one day, and, out of nowhere, the idea popped into my head… and refused to pop out.
Here’s how, at the beginning of Mortal, Frank sums up what he remembers:
It’s a long, messy story, but I’ll try to keep it short. When I was a nipper, I was a fire-starter: things used to just burst into flames around me. Something would wind me up, and… whoomph!
I started small—cushions, curtains, pieces of furniture, next door’s cat—but soon worked my way up to entire buildings. I’m not sure what happened next, but I suppose Dad must’ve twigged that I was Gifted, and sold me off to the Society of Sorcerers for beer money.
Maybe that pissed me off enough to set light to him. Maybe he’d had a few drinks and was beating up on Mum or me. I really don’t know. All I remember is Dad going up in flames.
I always knew that there there would turn out to be more to it than Frank remembered. Early drafts of what eventually turned into Mortal focused on an outbreak of plague; but that sort of fell out the bottom of the story, leaving the ground clear for Frank finally to discover how he really came to do his old man in…
So here we are. A third Frank Sampson story: good. Self-published: not so good. I lack the entrepreneurial spirit that it apparently takes to push a book to global prominence. I think Mortal is… well, not at all bad, anyway. Even my old editor at Random House thought it was good: I sent it to her and she said—sincerely, I think—that she really liked it… but that, given the current climate in mainstream YA publishing, she simply couldn’t sell it.
So it’s out on Amazon, as a Kindle ebook and paperback. It’s funny and gory and, I think, takes risks. Despite the fact that the two main characters are teenagers, it’s no more ‘Young Adult’ than, say, The Catcher in the Rye. And—if anybody’s listening—it’d make a damn fine TV series.
Yes, I know: blowing my own trumpet. But somebody’s got to, even if I can only manage tuneless farting noises, somewhere off in the distance…
- In June 2024, after a staggering series of revisions, I finally published the ghost story as Those Who Wait ↩︎
Donald Hounam 