Once upon a time, in a dark, dark wood…hold on…strike that….

Once upon a time, in a dark, dark district, deep in the rotten and impoverished core of a human-ruled locale…

I often get asked what inspired Blackthorn – how the idea first came to me, or which author in the genre made me want to dip into PNR. By now most of my readers who visit this site or have read any of my interviews will know it was one night of getting lost that inspired my first thoughts about the series. And I have confessed that I hadn’t actually read any PNR at that time, not least because it didn’t exist long, long ago, in the distant land of Wales, in the year of 1996.

But…

I had watched The Little Vampire TV series as a child. I did watch The Lost Boys in my late teens. I’ve always held that those two were the inspiration to my urban approach to vampire tales. Then, of course, I read Anne Rice. My fascination with all things mythological stems back years even before all of that though – probably as far back as having read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Amidst all that, I developed a fascination for the Gothic genre.

Yet I cannot deny, though I’ve never gone into any depth about it until now, that fairy tales have most definitely played a part in forging the fabric of what Blackthorn has become. For a long time, I didn’t even realise it. After all, what is the essence of Blood Roses if not Beauty and the Beast? Except this beast really bites – and Beauty has a sting all of her own, of course!

There’s been some fabulous and fun fiction, TV shows and films out these last few years during a wave of fairy tale revival. This time it’s been with new spins on old favourites or, more specifically, intended for an adult audience.

It appears that fairy tales are as enduring as the legends surrounding our most beloved supernatural characters – vampires, werewolves and witches, amongst others. Witches, in particular, are reoccurring “favourites” in both fairy tales and paranormal romance. Unlike so many representations of witches today though, I remember when they were damn scary. I think the film, The Blair Witch Project did an incredible job of bringing the legend right back to how it used to be. I remember it took me months to build up to watch it. I knew, even before it started, it was going to terrify me. I knew I was going to be transported right back to when I was a child, when the witches of fairy tales truly were the thing of nightmares. The serryn-kind of witches that terrify vampires in Blackthorn.

Whether we like it or not, we’re born with an inherent fascination with the macabre. It’s in our basic survival instincts to be aware of the threats out there – we want to learn, we want to understand and we want to be able to protect ourselves. As children, fairy tales feed that part of us. They’re exciting, dangerous, scary, anxiety-provoking and utterly compelling as a result.

Forget Disney’s interpretations, fairy tales, real fairytales, aren’t nice. In fact, they’re downright disturbing – not least when you peel the layers away. It’s probably why they’ve held a captive audience for so many centuries and why they’re still bought today. Dark, violent, cruel, sexist, full of selfishness and greed, kidnappings, blackmail, loneliness, where only the beautiful survive or whereby unless you’ve got feet unnaturally small for your height to the point you wouldn’t be able to stand up, you don’t deserve to find your prince. (I’ve got small feet for my height, by the way, so that’s not a personally-motivated dig. ;-))

Fairy tales don’t shy away from things. There’s childhood abuse, predatory adults, a beast threatening to slaughter a young girl’s father unless she’s delivered to him against her will (of course, she still fell in love with him – the shock, the shame, the slight against woman-kind!!), attempted murder, a brave prince losing his eyes trying to cut through a Blackthorn hedge (allegedly) to save his one true love, children shoving an old woman in an oven to burn her alive after thieving from her house – but only after being willfully abandoned by their parents to starve to death. And, of course, let’s not forget what terrible press stepparents get in these stories. Yes, fairy tales are just magical and highly-appropriate reading material for young and delicate minds.

Only maybe they are. Maybe that’s why they’ve endured like they have. Fairy tales are not there to soft-pedal reality. They are there, in some cases, to push readers to the edge of their fears, to give a sense of right and wrong, to show both light and dark in parallel, to explore the consequences of behaviour but, most of all, fairy tales show that all can be okay in the end.

Very few fairy tales end without some kind of justice, of good overthrowing evil (however debatable and sometimes stereotypical that evil is), of characters changing and developing as happens in all great stories. Most of all, they’re brilliant because they don’t hold back on character flaws. They don’t hold back on the bad stuff. They say sometimes life is bad, that bad things happen, that it can be struggle and that, sometimes, things happen for no reason at all. Anger, fear, hatred, cruelty, prejudice, oppression, injustice – they’re part of the fabric of society. BUT people survive, friendships are formed, families are reunited, characters see the errors of their ways and those that don’t are punished whilst the good go on to live happy lives. Good can triumph over evil. Monsters can be defeated. Love, ultimately, finds a way.

Some of us are still big kids at heart, aren’t we? Isn’t that why we love the escapism that stories give us? To go places we’ll never experience or might be too scared to venture alone? Don’t some of us, as adults, want to revisit the witch’s kitchen, to walk through that dark wood, to feel the wolf snapping at our heels, to believe that heroes and heroines still exist and, most importantly, that there’s always hope? Don’t some of us, basically, still like a little bit of magic in our lives? And not least when things, when reality, gets dark?

Hence Blackthorn – not for the faint-hearted, but then it was never meant to be.

So here’s a very special thank you for all the wonderful messages and emails I’ve received that inspired this post. To the readers who have brought me smiles and to the edge of tears letting me know how valuable the escapism of Blackthorn has been to you. Knowing it’s a little sprinkle of fairy dust in your own lives is the biggest payback of this series ever. You make sharing Blackthorn with you so worthwhile. So, in turn, thank you for sharing your stories with me.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

xxx

P.S. If you’re intrigued by my reference to the “Blackthorn” hedge – there will be a post on that before too long!