RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2025
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| click all images for a closer look |
What a massive departure this book turned out to be from my original plan of a boarding school story. The plot also echoed that of a planned book (The Bells of St. Mark's Eve), which I ended up pulling from my calendar as I don't want copycats.
There are so many things about the fairy tale that deeply fascinated me, and I think what really brought it all home was the fact that the story could very well have been a true event even though no one could agree on the actual mystery of the vanishing children.
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| The front view of Athelhampton House, which I used as a model for the Shriver home |
My intention wasn't to rewrite "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" with a gay twist. What I decided to do was to take significant elements in the fairy tale and put my own spin on them: the piper, the rats, the children, the mayor, and the role of music as a means of summoning people to a mysterious and, in this case, tragic end. In some variations of the story, three children get left behind and live to be witnesses to the other children's fate: a deaf child, a blind child, and a crippled child. The crippled child is also represented in this book in the form of Herrick's uncle.
And just like the ongoing mystery of the children's fate in present-day Hamelin, I chose to embrace the lack of a clear resolution. The book is a ghost story, after all, and in my world, ghosts don't have intelligent and complete (not to mention complex) conversations with live people. They're usually mute presences that communicate through touch, sound, appearance, and even perhaps eye contact, and it's up to the main character to interpret what they've just experienced. In those stories where ghosts actually leave written messages, those are one-word communications or barely coherent strings of words. Or, in this book's case, fragmented messages projected into the main character's mind.
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| art by Chris Rawlins (my favorite Pied Piper art so far) |
To help them find rest ultimately depends on the ghost itself and whether or not it wishes it or if it doesn't want to sort out its unfinished business. There are a couple of exceptions in my Grotesqueries collection, but by and large, my characters are at the mercy of the dead, not the other way around. In Compline, I wholeheartedly embraced that idea for a good reason, which is this:
The thing that got me about "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is the way the mayor and other people in power reneging on a promise and double-crossing someone who'd just done them a great favor. People in power who abuse their position and don't give a second thought to their behavior and how much their decisions and actions affect those who are at a disadvantage really get on my last nerve. In my books, they become my favorite villains to write about, and they get their just desserts (some worse so than others). In brief, the tragedy was avoidable.
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| art by Margaret W. Tarrant |
And so that also figured largely in how I wove my own take on the fairy tale. There are reversals as far as the children and the adults' roles in reference to the piper, and people in power in this case run the gamut from politicians to parents or adult family members.
The story takes place in a very bucolic place in rural Germany with two towns taking center stage. Both towns are fictional, and as is my wont, I happily included elements of Roman Catholicism in the form of the old churches (the events in the past predating the rise of Protestantism), hence the role of late night prayers or Compline in the mystery of the tolling church bell. The severely limited geography and locales are purposeful as I wanted to give the story its own brand of claustrophobia despite the picturesque descriptions of rustic towns far from the bustle of busier urban centers.
Compline is a 50K word long novella that's available for 99 cents in e-book and $9 USD in print.
