The Lovely Dark - blog tour

I was thrilled to be invited to take part in the blog tour for The Lovely Dark by Matthew Fox. His debut middle grade novel, The Sky Over Rebecca, is fantastic and I was excited to see how he would follow it up. My excitement was justified! The Lovely Dark is a superb story, the first book set in a post-pandemic world that I've read, and has definitely staked a strong claim to being one of my favourite reads of the year. I can't recommend it highly enough for Years Five and Six.

Matthew was also generous enough to write a piece for this blog about how he actually came to write The Lovely Dark. I hope you enjoy reading it.

A Pandemic Fiction by Matthew Fox

The Lovely Dark had a long gestation period. It’s out in paperback in the UK this week, but I’ve been thinking about it – and trying to forget about it – for more than a decade.

This was the starting point:

A girl, Ellie, dies in London; Charon picks her up in a flooded underground station and ferries her across the Styx to Hades; there, she meets a boy called Justin, who will be her guide to the Underworld…

And for a long time, that’s as far as I got. I worked through numerous permutations and combinations, but nothing felt right. I couldn’t figure out the why of the story: why did I want to tell this story and what did I want to say?

Then along came a pandemic…

Now a story I had tried to forget about seemed to have some relevance. It could be a way to look at the pandemic, I saw, a way to think about the impact of lockdowns on young people. I wrote the first draft of a new middle-grade novel set partly in post-pandemic London and partly in Hades. Ellie’s grandmother has died in the first wave of the virus: her grief is part of a bigger societal event; her love for her grandmother helps to structure the story from start to finish.

I didn’t have a title for the book yet, but I found myself thinking about lockdown, and about how people reacted differently to it. Introverts and readers seemed better able to work through the weeks of solitude. I thought perhaps some people – myself included – might find it a little too comfortable. And one winter’s night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I began to think how lovely it was to be safe and warm, in a dark room on a dark night: it felt womb-like; it felt like hibernation.

I’m here in the lovely dark.

So I had a title, and with it came a better feel for the Ellie’s character. She’s someone whose world has been turned inside out by the pandemic: her grandmother has died; her friendships have been disrupted; she has retreated into her books. Her bedroom is a safe, warm space where her overactive imagination rules. ‘It’s what happened to me in the pandemic,’ she tells us. ‘The world outside shrank. The world inside grew to fill the space that remained.’

Lockdown for most people was a kind of half-life. Even introverts eventually found themselves longing for an in-person author talk at their local independent bookshop; we all have to get back to the business and business of living sometime. As Ellie’s grandmother says towards the end of the book, ‘I have been in Erebus – a place of darkness between Earth and Hades. I have lingered there . . . Sometimes I think we’ve all been in Erebus these past few years and are only now returning to the light . . .’

It’s my hope that The Lovely Dark can help younger readers talk about and reflect upon their experiences during the years of lockdown – and perhaps help us begin to say good-bye to the pandemic.