🕷️ The Spider Dance by Nick Setchfield 🕷️
A genre-defying page turner that fuses thriller and speculative fiction with dark fantasy in a hidden world in the heart of Cold War Europe.
THE TRUE COLD WAR IS FOUGHT ON THE BORDERS OF THIS WORLD, AT THE EDGES OF THE LIGHT.
It’s 1965 and Christopher Winter is trying to carve a new life, a new identity, beyond his days in British Intelligence. Recruited by London’s gangland he now finds himself on the wrong side of the law – and about to discover that the secret service has a way of claiming back its own. Who is the fatally alluring succubus working honeytraps for foreign paymasters? What is the true secret of the Shadowless, a fabled criminal cabal deadlier than the Mafia? And why do both parties covet long- buried caskets said to hold the hearts of kings? Winter must confront the buried knowledge of his own past to survive – but is he ready to embrace the magic that created the darkness waiting there?
🕷️ Q&A with Nick Setchfield 🕷️
Nick Setchfield is a writer and features editor for SFX, Britain’s best-selling magazine of genre entertainment in film, TV and books. A regular contributing writer to Total Film, he’s also been a movie reviewer for the BBC and a scriptwriter for ITV’s Spitting Image. The War in the Dark is his first novel. He lives in Bath.
Where did the inspiration come from for your new release?
A mix of inspirations: everything from The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth to the Hammer movie The Satanic Rites of Dracula. There’s an element of the plot that’s essentially The Day of the Jackal with vampires – just how do you assassinate the undead? – and it was huge fun slamming those genres together. I wanted the pace and tension of a classic thriller with the dark, elegant horror of a vampire story, all set in a glamorous but deadly 1960s.
How does it feel to know your characters are out and about in reader’s imaginations?
It’s ridiculously thrilling to know they’re independent entities now. They’ve escaped me, in a way. I wonder what faces they’re wearing in other people’s heads. And I do hope they’re behaving themselves when I’m not looking. Especially the demons.
Do you miss writing about them?
Not just yet. I think we all need a breather from each other. I really put them through the wringer in The Spider Dance – some of them barely make it out alive, and others are even less fortunate – and they’ve deserved some time away from me. But I can feel the itch already.
What was your publishing journey highlight?
With the second book? So far it’s been the moment I placed it on the shelf next to the first. Suddenly it looked like a career.
What was the last book that made you laugh out loud?
I’m currently reading Hellraisers by Robert Sellers, a history of the lives and times of Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris. It’s giving me vicarious alcohol poisoning as I turn the pages but it’s very amusing. I laughed out loud at O’Toole’s titanically louche justification for never having house keys on his person: “I just hope some bastard’s in.”
What was the last book that made you cry?
Probably The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. That last paragraph: the perfection of the prose, the devastating humanity of the moment, and that final, inscrutable smile.
If you were on an island for a year what two books would you bring?
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, which is so rich and green and evocative it would fill my senses whenever I’d get bored staring at the coconuts. Plus the Atlas Obscura book, just to remind myself there’s a brilliant, breathtaking and frequently bizarre world out there.
Lastly, what is your favourite book quote?
“This is what happened.” – Stephen King’s audacious opening line to The Mist. So empowering in its simplicity and a Southern Cross in the sky for any writer struggling to put the words on the page.
Thank you to Nick Setchfield for stopping by today. The Spider Dance is published on the 16th of July.
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