For some time now I’ve been hinting that I might have a new book in the offing. Well, I’m very happy to announce that I’ve recently signed a contract with Pete Crowther at PS Publishing for the publication of my book Stardust, which will appear in the autumn of 2012 as number 11 in the ‘PS Showcase’ series highlighting up and coming writers.
The question friends have asked me most frequently about Stardust is: is it a novel or a collection of short stories? The most honest answer I can give is that it is both. Although each of the ‘chapters’ in Stardust does work as a standalone story, they were written in sequence with continuing characters and references and were always meant to be published as a single unit. Two of the ‘chapters’ are substantial novellas. The work as a whole adds up to more than just the sum of its parts.
For these reasons and by virtue of my own gut instinct I prefer to call it simply a book.
For anyone curious to know what Stardust is about, I’ve written a ‘sort of’ synopsis, which appears below. I shall of course be posting updates on Stardust as and when, and would like to take this opportunity to thank Pete and the PS team for their support and appreciation of my work.
STARDUST – A SYNOPSIS
Michael Gomez is fifteen and he is a chess prodigy. He has never lost a game before, but he’s about to learn that troubles come in threes. As he leaves the sports hall where he has suffered his first serious defeat in a competitive tournament, he learns that his teacher and mentor is terminally ill with cancer. As he struggles to come to terms with what has happened, he finds himself drawn into a world he thought existed only in the movies.
The woman of his dreams is Ruby Castle, a charismatic beauty who became famous for her roles in horror films and then notorious for murdering her married lover in a jealous rage. Ruby’s glory days are long behind her, but for Michael her cinematic fantasy world is the only escape he knows from the world of chess. As Michael is forced to decide if he is willing to make the sacrifices involved in becoming a professional champion, his reality begins to take on the dangerous glamour of a Ruby Castle film. Walking home across Blackheath Common he is apprehended by the Puppeteer, the evil genius of the film that made Castle famous. The man should not exist – and yet somehow he does.
The novel then takes us back to the world Ruby Castle grew up in, the isolate and sinister domain of the travelling carnival, and the story is taken up by Marek Platonov, a knife thrower with troubles of his own. Marek was Ruby’s childhood sweetheart. As her astrological twin he knew her better than anyone, but as they enter adolescence the two become estranged and Ruby starts to cherish dreams of becoming an actress and a future that does not include Marek. Castle runs away to London, where hard work and natural talent make her a household name, but a part of her is unsatisfied even by this. The films that make Castle famous do not have happy endings, and Ruby seems destined to suffer the fate of one of her own doomed heroines.
Castle’s story unfolds in a series of snapshots, of overheard conversations and fleeting glimpses, the myths repeated and reinvented by the people who in one way or another fell under her spell: an antiquarian bookseller with a passion for magical artefacts, the mistress of the poet who was once Castle’s lover, a young girl in a future Russia who dreams of escape. As the novel reaches its climax these worlds collide and the boundaries between the fantastic and the quotidian appear to break down completely. Vernon Reade and Clarissa Goule, a middle-aged couple in the early stages of a new romance, go on holiday to the Canaries and narrowly escape being torn apart by a mythical spider god. Strangely enough this is exactly what happened to the couple played by Castle and her lover in the film they made together just before Castle committed her crime of passion. Charlie and Vernon have a happy ending, the way all good Hollywood couples should – but is the ending we have been shown the true end of the story?
Ruby Castle is as much the sum of other people’s fantasies as she is a real person. In the end the world she lived in and the world that she created through her films become dangerously indistinguishable.
Stardust is the lure of fame, the fallout from a burning rocket, the evanescent glister of a vanished dream.