About the Book:

The Horrors gain strength when things in our world are broken. A bone. A promise. A heart.

Ever since she first encountered ‘The Horrors’, Alice has hidden herself safely behind the walls of her family’s Whitby guest house. Only her beloved sister, Lucille, knows that Alice can see things – gruesome, terrible things – in the darkest corners of our world. Shadow-monsters which will do anything to satisfy their violent cravings – and seemingly nothing can stop them. Of course, no one would believe them if they told them – and so the girls stay silent.

That is, until Lucille goes missing, and the boy she was in love with turns up dead. All of which coincides with the arrival of Austin – a dashing young actor from London, who claims a demon has stolen his voice, and only Alice can help him.

Faced with a world and powers she never even knew existed, Alice must race against time to save her sister, herself, and perhaps the only other person who’s ever cared about her. As well as send a demon or two back to where they came from . . .

Find this book on Goodreads. Find on Bookshop.org UK (affiliate link).

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About the Author:

H.F. Askwith is the author of three YA gothic fantasy thrillers – A Dark Inheritance, A Cruel Twist of Fate and Half A Dark Heart. She is a Northern Writers’ Award winner and has an MA in Creative Writing. When she’s not writing, she loves solving puzzles, playing board games with her family and running.

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On writing a hor-roman-tasy, almost by accident

One of the questions authors often get asked is how much they plan their novels in advance. Over time (and three published books), my answer to that question has evolved. My first novel, A DARK INHERITANCE*, did not have anything resembling a plan when I began, and ultimately this led to a lengthy editing process and lots of rewrites as I searched for the story. With my second, A CRUEL TWIST OF FATE*, I undertook more planning right from the outset – in part to streamline my process and implement what I’d learned from A DARK INHERITANCE, but also because I couldn’t write a who-dunnit without knowing who did it!

For my latest novel, HALF A DARK HEART, I landed somewhere in between. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to set the story in Whitby, the atmospheric seaside town best known for its scenic cliffs and abbey ruins (and of course, the fact it appears in the classic horror novel Dracula). I also knew that it was going to be a blend of horror and fantasy, and that the story was going to be about sisterhood, and hauntings, and clues hidden in a playscript. 

The novel begins in a guest house, where the reclusive Alice, who sees horrifying creatures nobody else seems to be able to see, hides away from the world. I wrote an opening scene where she’s sitting at the entrance desk… And in walked an actor without a voice. 

Sometimes as a writer, I know I need to purposefully create a character to fulfil a specific purpose. When this happens, I’ll think about exactly who that character is going to be, what traits they need to have, and how they can best fulfil their function in the story. To give an example, Alice’s sister Lucille can be quite fiery, and if she’s feeling something, everyone is going to know about it. I wrote her that way on purpose, to be a foil to the more reserved and considered Alice, who tends to hide or push down her emotions. Lucille was consciously crafted as a character.

Sometimes though, I’ve found that a character just walks into a scene, already themselves. That’s what happened in that opening scene, where the playscript with the clues is brought by an actor without a voice, Austin. Because Austin had lost his voice, he communicated with non-verbal gestures, facial expressions, and through little messages written in a notebook. He was engaging and exuberant and wore a fancy coat. I wrote him into my overarching synopsis, planning out how he would connect to the mystery and the horror elements and how his connection with Alice would grow.

As the idea evolved, Austin became more central to the story than I had anticipated. At points during the drafting, his written messages turned into longer-form letters too, a sort of exercise in improvisation… And through this, I found out more about the character, including details about his past that ended up being central to how everything unfolds at the end of the novel.

Because Alice and Austin fall in love, nothing is the same again. Their connection had a much bigger impact on the story than I’d anticipated, turning my strange little horror/fantasy novel into a love story. So Half A Dark Heart is a hor-roman-tasy, almost by accident, and it combines ingredients from all the kinds of stories that I enjoy as a reader.

Part of the joy of writing, for me, is in the surprises, where creativity and imagination take the lead. So while I want to hold on to everything I’ve learned about how planning can be useful, I hope I also never let go of the discovery.

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