I wrote "For the Love of the Devil" way back in 1998, when I was 28/29. The main characters are in their early twenties, so by definition it is a work of Young Adult fiction (and I bloody hate YA fiction - all those Kindle books about vampires and zombies falling in love, "written" by Indie "writers"). But let's not forget that although I do conform to conventionality with my alternative history novels, I am, at heart, a writer of transgressive fiction. And even back then, when this book was first published in 1999, those nascent transgressive emotions were evident. This was a book which features erotic scenes, and was sent for review, but ultimately rejected (the reviewer said that although they were enjoying it, one scene early on in the book turned their stomach). A little bit unfair, but as someone who read it said to me, "That scene with the imps chewing off a guy's cock was a bit much." So I guess the criticism was justified.
So why am I talking about a book that I wrote ages ago, and which was first published ages ago as well? Well, it's been republished with a new cover - the one you see above. I might be biased (the cover was created by my talented stepdaughter) but I think it looks fantastic. Just great for a re-release of an old novel. Obviously, the book has been (slightly) updated - I mention smartphones rather than ugly old cell-phones - and some of the less palatable paragraphs have been removed. The book was originally around 150,000 words long - now it's been pruned by about 6,000 words (I've never been through so many red pens).
But what is FtLotD about? Well, basically it's a love story about a young woman and a young demon (see, Christ, I was ahead of my time, what with all of these YA books written by 50-year-old, sexually-frustrated cat-ladies about young women falling in love with vampires and zombies). But that makes it sound a bit shit. What I love about this book (and it's not because I wrote it - there are some scenes that, when I read it recently, I thought were very twee, but I didn't want to rewrite the entire book) is that I created this vision of Hell (and eventually Heaven) that hopefully captures the reader's imagination. Here is a demon who is just "doing his job" in a hellish factory of torture. But the demon desires nothing more than to be human again. This book, I actually played it out in my mind, listening to music (and in particular, "Sympathy For The Devil") and imagining how it would look if it was turned into a film. There are some very dark characters, and some very troubled characters, but hopefully it sucks the reader into its world. Style-wise, I was still finding my feet, my writer's voice. Actually, it's difficult for a writer to have a noticeable voice when writing in the third person (that's why I generally write in the first person now), but in a book like this, the writer's voice is less important than the story, the tale, the thing that keeps the reader reading. But I planned this novel before I committed pen to paper (actually, it was fingers to the keyboard of an ancient IBM-compatible 486 PC). Nowadays, I let my characters lead the story from beginning to the middle to the end. If nothing else, if you've read anything I've written recently, FtLotD is an interesting insight into how I wrote "back in the day" (really, back in the day, I wrote "die Stunde X" on a Commodore Amiga, using a word processor called Wordworth - they couldn't call it Wordsworth, because apparently that was the name of a famous wordsmith. Somewhere, I still have the first manuscript of that novel printed using a dot matrix printer).
I guess I'm rambling. That's what writers do. Sometimes, we hope that we write something profound, but I don't think this is going to be the post when that happens. Let me just conclude this one by saying that I'm proud (and embarrassed occasionally by the stylistic naivety) of this novel. It's a cheap "buy" for the Kindle (hey, if old cat-ladies can flog their vampire love stories on the Kindle, then I can sell this), and hopefully you'll be entertained for a few hours. Maybe you'll instantly forget it (I can't recall the plots of any John Grisham books I've read, so meh ...) but hopefully you'll be briefly touched.
The Kindle version is here.
The paperback version (for proper readers) is here.
(Disclaimer - apologies for any typos in this post. My proof-reader went to bed ages ago!)
