Anniversary: Silma Hill

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of my second novel, Silma Hill. It’s out of print, though there are second hand copies available online (or from me if you live nearby), and the ebook is available on Amazon. As a result, I will be sharing extracts, memories, reviews and the like over the next few weeks. Below is something I posted a few years ago, when I was first getting this Substack underway, so apologies to people who have read it, but most of my Subscribers have joined since then.

Silma Hill is an odd book for me (in a good way) because it’s not the kind of thing I’d ever written before or have ever really returned to since. Gothic horror, mystery, historical fantasy fiction, whatever genre it sits most comfortably, I’d never have predicted this as my second novel.

I’d got book deal for First Time Solo and gone through the torturous edits with Rodge Glass (torturous because of how much had to be done, not because of working with Rodge) and I was burnt out. I also knew I needed a follow up. But what?

In the meantime I’d visited the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and been taken by the Ballachulish figure, a statue found in a peat bog in Aberdeenshire. I wrote a couple of small things about it, including a piece of Twitter fiction that caught the attention of Jeff Sanders, an archeologist connected to the museum who sent me a PDF of the original find report. That sparked something in my imagination and pieces fell into place. The statue, the idea of a minister whose interest lay outside religion, the uncovering of a pagan icon that unleashes forces on a village. Burns, Stevenson, James Robertson, James Hogg, all these writers who dealt with supernatural Scotland had seeped into my imagination and it all came out here in a fever of writing.

I had a draft in a few weeks and set about editing it, but it was never going to be my next book. I was thinking of a sequel to First Time Solo, and what was becoming Silma Hill was a holiday, writing something fun, something that didn’t matter, something that was never going to get published. That lack of pressure, it allowed me to write more freely than ever before.

I showed what I had to a couple of friends. They loved it. Told me to stop messing about and finish it properly, that it was good enough to be something other than a holiday. It went from one act, to two, then three. I showed it to my agent, then my publisher and got a two book deal off the back of it.

Some people love it. Some hate it. It’s still my most popular fiction book on Goodreads, but it also gets the most vitriolic reviews. It’s not a proper horror book. It doesn’t have a proper ending (I don’t do closure, never have, never will). I never explain myself and this infuriates people. I don’t care, I have a lot of fondness for this. I was in the thrall of Stevenson growing up and this is the closest I’ll ever get to something like Kidnapped or Treasure Island. It’s an outlier, my weird kid, and I love it for that.

There’s a prequel in my mind, the story of Trent, how he goes from Edinburgh street rat to gentleman scientist, a sea voyage where he makes his fortune. I have it all plotted out. Silma Hill wasn’t a big seller, the chances of that prequel ever seeing the light of day is slim. Too many stories, too little time.