A story that makes you wonder in the dark

From the cover of The Feathered Man (cover illustration by Jim Kay)

Jeremy de Quidt's dark and suspenseful tale The Feathered Man is one of our favourite new books this month. Here, he tells us where the idea for the story came from.

Ideas are never a problem. Good, useable ideas, well, they are something else. It’s spotting the difference between the two that is the hard bit for me. Like a lot of writers, I have a small pocket book that goes everywhere with me, and when I think, or come across something that might one day be useful, into the book it goes. The thought or idea might seem so obvious at the time that of course I’ll remember it, but I don’t always, and it’s only when I go back through the book that I do. But some things I just don’t ever forget, I remember them with a photographic clarity even years later, and the exciting bit is that I didn’t know at the time they happened what the significance of them would one day be - in this case, the start of a book - The Feathered Man.

What I remembered was a sparrow. It was the first thing I ever recall being dead. It lay in a rose bed in Peter Smith's front garden. I must have been about four. It was summer and the roses were yellow, and I remember the thought quite clearly; realising that the sparrow had been alive and now wasn't, and wondering where the thing that had made it alive had gone? In my own simple way I had asked the question that no-one knows the answer to, though many have a faith and believe they do. But faith and proof are quite different things.

That conflict between faith and proof was central to a debate in the late 18th and early 19th centuries  - that time when a new age of medicine and anatomy had opened up and men asked again, what is life and where does it go? Can it be re-created? It was the inspiration for Mary Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein, and it was a very real moral and philosophical dilemma of the time; that collision between the new discoveries of science on the one hand, and religious faith on the other.

That memory of the sparrow, I stored away in my head. It didn’t need any pocket book. It lay quietly there until a friend cleared out her house and gave my daughter, Alice, a life-sized wire and feather sculpture of a kneeling man. Alice put it on her bedroom wall. Every time I went in to say 'goodnight' to her I would see its white outline in the dark, and think ‘there’s a story there.’ It set me thinking about feathered Aztec gods, about the conflicts between science and religion, between faith and proof, and I remembered that sparrow and the question as a child I’d first asked myself in Peter Smith’s front garden - where does life go?

If I look at the story of The Feathered Man as a whole, I can see those three things quite clearly as its inspiration; the wire sculpture, the sparrow, and those scientists and priests of the 18th and 19th centuries. Add to them a curse, murder and betrayal, heroes and villains, and the framework is complete. But the detail had to come from somewhere else. I think most writers are like sponges, we go around soaking stuff up - the sheen of old wax on a death mask in a museum, the way that blood hangs in a thin rope from someone’s chin when they’ve had a nose bleed. It’s all grist to the mill. And we look to see how other people write too - the mechanics of how they put their stories together, and then we weave our own.

Writers of scary stories tend to have had nightmares and terrors when they were young. I remember some of my nightmares even now: the cowboy pegged out to die in the blazing sun, the huge gothic wooden stable filled with tortured horses. They still make me feel uneasy. I never read frightening stories as a child, I had nightmares enough without them, but somewhere along the line the wonderfully scary tales of M.R. James have seeped into me, as have the covers of books in the library all too frightening to read, and the cold dust of Egyptology and Aztec legends. It’s all been quietly sorted away, and it’s that sympathetic remembering of what it was that frightened me as a child that finds its way into what I write now.

There is a theory that facing bad things in literature equips you for facing them in life, I don't know if it does. I just like leaning forward and telling a story, and if that story makes you wonder in the dark what that noise was, or what that shadow is by the door, then all the better.

Read our review of The Feathered Man