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Blog Archive
Friday, January 27, 2017
GUEST BLOG: At Night the City Streets Became a Forest by M.A. Griffin (Author of Lifers)
Fantasy Book Critic is excited to take part in the blog tour (thaks to RockStar Book Tours)
for the soon-to-be released book Lifers by M.A. Griffin. Lifers is scheduled to
be released January 31, 2017 by Chicken House (Scholastic). Find it available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Audible, Goodreads
About Lifers:
Captured and condemned to a cavernous dimension, Preston is determined to escape. But this is no ordinary jail. Friendships will be forged and lives will be lost in a reckless battle for freedom, revenge--and revolution.
Set in a world all too similar to our own, Lifers is thrilling, pulse-pounding storytelling of the highest degree.
Today as part of the blog tour, M.A. Griffin stops by to
talk about how he took the familiar setting of Manchester and turned it into an
unfamiliar setting that readers found to be different and alternative.
Before welcoming M.A. Griffin, I'd like to supply you with
an overview of the book. If you would like to read other guest blog posts by
this author or read some reviews, feel free to visit the other blogs on this
blog tour. And of course, you can enter the blog tour giveaway for your chance
to win a copy of Lifers!
Blog Tour Schedule -
Week One:
Week Two:
Without further ado, I welcome M.A. Griffin.
*******************************************************************
At Night the City Streets Became a Forest by M.A. Griffin
I called the setting of Lifers ‘Dark
Manchester’ because I wanted to make this distinction between the knowable
reality of the city during the day, and the unfamiliar, frightening city of the
night. There’s this moment near the start of the book where Preston, my
protagonist, is being interviewed by the cops about his missing friend. He’s
exhausted and sleepless. As he crosses the boundary between day and night his
surroundings change; “The room seemed to dip into darkness, as if a shadow had
shouldered the moon out for a moment.” That’s my feeble attempt at distilling
what I’m trying to get at I s’pose.
Tell you
what though – there’s no chance of ‘accidentally’ bumping into Morrissey in
either city. Having spent a quarter-century trying, I can declare that feat, at least, to be officially
impossible.
Website | Twitter | Goodreads
At Night the City Streets Became a Forest by M.A. Griffin
Lifers, my YA thriller, is set in Manchester, a UK
city that’s often familiar to non-Brits because of its connection with football
and music. It’s been my home now for over twenty-five years since the day I
arrived, bright-eyed and terrified, as an eighteen-year-old student.
(Manchester University is considered a pretty good place to study but I’d
chosen it based on one factor: I figured I’d got a decent chance of
‘accidentally’ bumping into Morrissey.)
Anyway. One day a few
years back I was hanging out in The Whitworth, an art gallery in the heart of Manchester’s
student-land, and I saw this awesome video installation. It was by Willie Doherty,
and it was called The Visitor. There were long slow shots
of Belfast towerblocks cut with dark woodland sequences, the camera passing low
through roots and fallen leaves; this striking contrast of the urban and the
wild with a voiceover that finished by saying, “…at night, the city streets
became a forest.” Terrific, eh? I was blown away by the idea that a city might
change at night – after we’ve all gone to sleep – into something feral.
That’s one of the places Lifers started;
with this idea that a kid might wake at night to find his or her world utterly
changed.
I called the setting of Lifers ‘Dark
Manchester’ because I wanted to make this distinction between the knowable
reality of the city during the day, and the unfamiliar, frightening city of the
night. There’s this moment near the start of the book where Preston, my
protagonist, is being interviewed by the cops about his missing friend. He’s
exhausted and sleepless. As he crosses the boundary between day and night his
surroundings change; “The room seemed to dip into darkness, as if a shadow had
shouldered the moon out for a moment.” That’s my feeble attempt at distilling
what I’m trying to get at I s’pose.
Here’s the thing, though – this head-stretching
defamiliarisation happens more often (and more powerfully) when you’re a kid.
We’re scared of monsters under the bed because our cosy familiar room actually
becomes a distinct, parallel place in the dark. There’s this poem by British
poet Simon Armitage that covers similar territory.
Here’s the deal: imagine finding a huge abandoned tractor tyre up on the moors and,
along with a gang of mates, lifting it upright and rolling it onto the road.
Once on tarmac this vast tyre accelerates, breaks free of your grip and rolls
over the lip of the hill down towards a nearby village. Terrified, you chase
it, imagining a trail of devastation. Instead?
…down in the village the tyre was gone…
Not there or anywhere. No trace. Thin air.
Not there or anywhere. No trace. Thin air.
What I love most about the
poem is how the young poet justifies the tyre’s mysterious disappearance:
Being more in tune with the feel of things
than science and facts, we knew that the tyre
had travelled too fast for its size and mass…
and at that moment gone beyond itself
towards some other sphere, and disappeared.
than science and facts, we knew that the tyre
had travelled too fast for its size and mass…
and at that moment gone beyond itself
towards some other sphere, and disappeared.
I guess
the possibility for a kind of dislocating magic – ‘some other sphere’ – is much
higher in childhood. The Dark Manchester of Lifers is my other sphere. I get to
move landmarks, adjust roads and buildings and generally meddle with things to
make weirdness happen. And I had an absolute blast doing it!
Tell you
what though – there’s no chance of ‘accidentally’ bumping into Morrissey in
either city. Having spent a quarter-century trying, I can declare that feat, at least, to be officially
impossible.
About M.A:
I'm a writer of children's fiction, represented by Ben Illis at the B.I.A., available for workshops and school visits when I'm not chained to a laptop cursing my lack of progress and/or poverty of imagination.
My debut novel, The Poison Boy, was written as Fletcher Moss. My second novel, Lifers, is my first for teen readers. It arrives April 2016.
2:52 AM | 
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