There was a demon in my dreams last night.
I know where he comes from, this demon. He walks straight out of the past. He’s the distilled embodiment of it, a figure in black glass.
There’s a curse, you see: ‘May you live in interesting times’. But there’s also another: ‘May you live with a long and vivid memory’.
First, the dream started as I was drifting off to sleep. I was alone in the apartment and it was raining outside. A cold, shiny night by the sea for the perfectly envisioned spider to come creeping across the wall above my head, along the line of the dado rail. Rendered with cinematic, lifelike detail, the spider, a hairy brown thing, half shadow, half scratch, was roughly the size of a boxing glove. Long, bristly, zigzag legs, silently padding along the wall. Real as the night.
On sight of it, I jolted awake. Or rather, I jolted to the awareness that I wasn’t awake. These dreams, when they come, tend to follow a pattern, as I’ve come to learn. One, that I’ve experienced an episode, usually in the wee hours, not always alone, and worse if drunk. I don’t drink often, but when I do, I can err on the side of drinking too much, a throwback of youth, as all of this is. A well of grief and anger can rise up in me so black, so foul, and beat around my brain like bats and indeed spill frothing into my life. Tears, shaking, a bitter twist of the mouth and a coldness that allows no compassion, not for a while. A ferocious sense of injustice. A storm. A need to lash out – never physically, thankfully, I’m not a violent man – but with words. Words, after all, are how I’ve made sense of my life and, on the rare, unfortunate occasion, how I find myself bound, helpless, to move to unmake it.
These are memories of childhood. And of youth.
I can’t describe these events, but I can describe their effects. The echoes. The scars. Sometimes, I’ve been fortunate enough to jolt awake next to someone who would hold me, who would even jolt awake at my jolt, my occasional cry. Sometimes shout at me in shock, and then comfort me until the shaking and the tears subsided.
‘You’re safe. You’re with me. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.’
But mostly, when the demon comes – when he really comes – I’m alone.
There are some, I know, who may suppose that my haunting stems from waywardness in my early twenties, but the truth is stranger than that, as it often is. When I was a child, my late father took me to see a famous doctor in London because of these night terrors. I was a bedwetter, you see, up to the age of 8 and, with diminishing frequency, for a handful of years after that. They were different times, but eventually, a solution was sought.
I sat in the doctor’s study aged 8 or so and he performed tests. Breathing on a mirror. Listening to a series of bells, if I recall correctly. And I described my repetitive dream, I think, horrifically vivid, of being chased through the woods (sometimes a jungle) by an old grinning man with false teeth and mechanical legs.
You could never outrun this terror. You could try. I’d often find my dream self at the edge of some windswept cliff or other, facing an inevitable fall. And I would wake up crying, shaking, on slick and acrid smelling sheets.
It feels so strange to write that, but its feels like time and fears are rarely pretty.
There remain mysteries in these dreams too. Turbaned men and adorned women who sat, apparently in meditation, inside the sheltering leaves of huge, cactus like plants. I think of them as guardians. The clarity of the memory, decades later, should speak of the realness of the dream at the time. When they come – when the demon comes – the dreams are often as real as life itself. It was only much later, in my late twenties, that I developed the art of recognising that I was dreaming and thus mounting some kind of defence.
More on this later.
Last night, I was alone. I hadn’t wanted to go out. The spider had vanished and the demon was coming. I suspected it. I read till 5am, but sleep can be a cruel mistress and damn it, her chains dragged me down.
I was in a house. A large, somewhat rickety loft apartment with 70s décor and peeling wallpaper. It was night and I was instantly aware that I was a prisoner, the same old running theme. Along with the fact that I’d have to think my way out of the dream in order to survive it, stir my slumbering self and wade through the mud of sleep paralysis to emerge – sometimes with a cry, sometimes not – shaking and quietly crying on the other side, back in the waking world.
There were three men in the unkempt lounge under the eaves. Two, masculine, muscled and vague of face. Perhaps a bearded one, his image fades even now as I write this down half an hour since I awoke, forcing myself to pour it all out. The third man was much clearer. A punk in appearance, slender, bare-chested, dark haired with studs through his nose and lips. There were tattoos (ravens, I think. Or bats.) on his chest behind his braces, and his face was angular, pale and not unattractive. Think of a cross between Brian Molko of Placebo fame and someone more sinewy and vulturine.
Something, perhaps. I don’t know.
Oh no. My heart sank. For all his shiftiness, I’d recognise the demon anywhere.
Over the years, he’s taken different forms, the demon, bizarrely growing younger as I’ve grown older, and taking on a pleasing form. The grinning man with the false teeth and mechanical legs became a tall middle aged one for a while. A shadow that would stand in the corner of my bedroom in my twenties and radiate anger. He was less the carnival freak, now earthier and more brutal, full of some unspoken vengeance. And he’d simply fly at me, howling and flailing at my head in a barrage of shadows. Plucking at my arms, my legs, my flesh. I’d lie, teeth gritted, eyes squeezed shut, mentally begging him to go away, to leave me be. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move, during these rare assaults. And on two occasions that I remember, I’d find myself on the bedroom floor when I awoke and came to my senses. Breathing hard, shaking, before the inevitable tears came.
Was he a ghost? What did he want? I even asked him this once, fumbling for the light switch and managing to break a lamp. I hadn’t hurt anyone. I’d lived the best I could, given the circumstances. And, yes, I would help if I could. But then I’m not entirely sure that I believe in ghosts.
Not external ones, anyway.
Only as memories. Or the dross that comes from memories. The shadow plasm, if you will.
But I digress. Last night, the demon appeared handsome and young. He even bore shades of a younger me, vain as that sounds, but it was the first time I’d noticed such a correlation in the dreams, and that was perhaps telling in itself.
Initially, in the dream, in the dream house, I was an unwelcome guest. Or a sort of acquaintance that the other men liked to ridicule and tease. But, as I said, I was aware that I couldn’t leave the place, as I vaguely recall enduring a torrent of sarcastic and sniggering abuse. Being called fat. Weird. A fag. Useless. A loser etc.
I tried to appeal, as I often would. Why didn’t they like me? What had I done? I couldn’t help being who I am. As usual, it was pretty pathetic, the weakness of a child, and somewhere, I was aware that the sleeping adult me was seething.
Fuck these ghosts. Fuck the demon. I was so over their bullshit now.
This was the seed that had grown into my defence, you see. The sword I’d forged and with which I learnt to fight back, though I was far from in the clear yet.
This part is difficult to write, but I promised myself, when embarking on this piece, that I’d be honest about it. Maybe it’s the whole point. How to describe the mixture of dread and attraction without sounding utterly debauched? But this was certainly a bullying dream, an ordeal of degradation, and I immediately recognised the experience from my early teens, showering after phys ed with my high school aggressors and finding myself desiring them.
I haven’t written about this before, that bizarre curdling of fear and desire. The paranoia that there’s a light flashing above your naked self in the changing rooms, alerting all the other boys to the fact that you’re different, that you’re not one of the pack. Trying not to look. And then trying not to look too long. Trying to control yourself, your body. Thinking of dead things, animals and maggots and bones. Of unhappy moments. Flat, grey days. Of nothingness. Succeeding – always in this case, thank God – with an effort of will that distorted the mind and pummelled the heart.
Mind over matter. Over raging hormones. Adolescent torture.
And the chilling suspicion that some of the other boys could smell it too, on some fundamental level, and react to your thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old self with a mixture of loathing or worse, curiosity. The collected images that one would later furiously masturbate over, arching to pleasure and then hating oneself. Feeling that you’d betrayed yourself. The sirens of guilt and disgust, because everyone knew that it was wrong. Everyone said so, all of the time.
Yes, there was pain, back then. But worst of all was the fear that you enjoyed some of it. Or you told yourself you did in order to survive.
It’s a sickening truth, even to this day.
That kind of stuff can tear a boy apart. The man who endures will be strong.
The demon, last night, was speaking to this truth. As before, there was a mocking, sneering tone to things. Even the posters on the wall – Slayer, The Sub-humans, Crass – curled their tattered lips at me. And I knew what was coming.
I’ll keep it brief, for taste’s sake. I was both trapped and degraded.
The demon stripped and bound me. He put a bottle in me, a plastic bottle, until I bled. All three men did things in the dream, barking commands at me, making me move this way, that way, put this or that in my mouth. All three entered me, roughly, and all three flogged me with words while doing so, hissing, spitting, deriding my body. Laughing at my submission.
I told you it wasn’t pretty. You were warned.
None of the above reflects real life, you understand. None of it was forced, in the truest sense, even as a dream. And to be frank, I don’t care what people think. This was the dream and it was a dream of debasement, an inversion of my romantic self. A parody of innocent wants and a need for security and love. It was a reminder of those days of loving the monster. And hating the self. Days I’ve long since got free of, lucky rainbow that I am, although I guess the stain of them remains, deep down.
Later, I was in a small toilet and the demon, all sparkling eyes and cruel, sensuous lips, was demanding that he watch me in this exposed and vulnerable state. And here, I managed to gather some sense of myself, drawing on a thread I’d summoned somewhere in my late twenties. Forging dream steel and determining to fight back.
There are places I will not go.
You can probably breathe now.
The dream changed. Grew foggier. Less real. I was shaping events. Pushing at the walls. I remember engaging the demon in a discussion about bands, which delighted him as he crawled across me – a kind of spider again – while smarmily testing my knowledge.
Demons do love games. But I was on the road home, I knew, and my mind caught fire, slowly spearing through the horror.
It’s fading, fading, elusive to write… We were outside, all of a sudden, in the garden under the stars. Just an ordinary English garden behind an ordinary house. We were still naked. I was clothed in rope. Bear with me here, because I feel moved to excuse the form of my imagination, vivid, wild as it is, but there was a space rocket in the garden. A tall, silver thing, probably one of the beloved phallic machines culled from the old black and white Flash Gordon episodes I’d run home from school to watch as a boy (because yes, there were joys in childhood too, as there must be to throw shadows).
The demon found this highly amusing, I think, and, apparently challenged by this oddity from my dreaming mind (and eager to subvert it), he pulled me to the flank of the rocket and somehow, launched it.
In a plume of fire and smoke, we roared up into the night, both the demon and I clinging to the side of the rocket. Me, frozen by fear, if not ice. In no time at all, space was drawing near (another iteration of the windswept cliff edge, no doubt), the firmament dark and cold, the earth dwindling below. An inevitable, terrible, asphyxiated end.
How the demon laughed! Gleeful, triumphant, he’d turned my escape pod against me.
Or so he thought. You see, I found myself letting go of the rocket and simply falling backwards through the air. And in the strange logic of dreams, I’d pictured myself as having dreamt up the only available parachute. The only one. And impossibly, through the screaming air, I was able to convey this message to the demon’s drawn and panicked face.
I fell. And I fell, a relieved Icarus. And then, I woke up.
Moments before I hit the ground, of course.
Dreams love a good cliché.
I sat up in the dawn, shaking a little. Another battle won, I thought. It had been some time, but I didn’t believe myself entirely free of him. The demon.
The shaking is gentler these days. The jolts not as sharp, as I recognise the dreams for what they are and I relax and let myself cry for a minute. To breathe slowly until I can dismiss the fucker. To let reality filter in and remind me that I got clear of these shadows and built myself a sword. To recognise I made choices to ensure that I was in a safe place with good company, with those few who understand me and will fight to protect me, as I do them.
These ghosts aren’t uncommon among artists, I find. I know I’m not alone.
As I face these shadows and try to unravel them, they become easier to talk about. The episodes, the bats, strike less regularly, with less force, although they can still do damage. To my regret.
I will master the demon one day.
There is a curse, but there’s also a blessing: ‘May you learn to forget.’ I’m doing my best. For the shadows are shrinking, I believe, outweighed by a great deal of light. Hard won. Precious.
More light. More light, please.
It’s been put to me, recently, that perhaps the demon has always been the one standing in the mirror. In the black glass of memory. And that glass, in itself, can easily break.
Only one of us can win this battle. After all, only one of us is real.
And it was put to me that writing it down might help.
And someone else had asked me to write a piece for Childhood Fears.
So I woke up this morning and did.
© James Bennett
I know where he comes from, this demon. He walks straight out of the past. He’s the distilled embodiment of it, a figure in black glass.
There’s a curse, you see: ‘May you live in interesting times’. But there’s also another: ‘May you live with a long and vivid memory’.
First, the dream started as I was drifting off to sleep. I was alone in the apartment and it was raining outside. A cold, shiny night by the sea for the perfectly envisioned spider to come creeping across the wall above my head, along the line of the dado rail. Rendered with cinematic, lifelike detail, the spider, a hairy brown thing, half shadow, half scratch, was roughly the size of a boxing glove. Long, bristly, zigzag legs, silently padding along the wall. Real as the night.
On sight of it, I jolted awake. Or rather, I jolted to the awareness that I wasn’t awake. These dreams, when they come, tend to follow a pattern, as I’ve come to learn. One, that I’ve experienced an episode, usually in the wee hours, not always alone, and worse if drunk. I don’t drink often, but when I do, I can err on the side of drinking too much, a throwback of youth, as all of this is. A well of grief and anger can rise up in me so black, so foul, and beat around my brain like bats and indeed spill frothing into my life. Tears, shaking, a bitter twist of the mouth and a coldness that allows no compassion, not for a while. A ferocious sense of injustice. A storm. A need to lash out – never physically, thankfully, I’m not a violent man – but with words. Words, after all, are how I’ve made sense of my life and, on the rare, unfortunate occasion, how I find myself bound, helpless, to move to unmake it.
These are memories of childhood. And of youth.
I can’t describe these events, but I can describe their effects. The echoes. The scars. Sometimes, I’ve been fortunate enough to jolt awake next to someone who would hold me, who would even jolt awake at my jolt, my occasional cry. Sometimes shout at me in shock, and then comfort me until the shaking and the tears subsided.
‘You’re safe. You’re with me. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.’
But mostly, when the demon comes – when he really comes – I’m alone.
There are some, I know, who may suppose that my haunting stems from waywardness in my early twenties, but the truth is stranger than that, as it often is. When I was a child, my late father took me to see a famous doctor in London because of these night terrors. I was a bedwetter, you see, up to the age of 8 and, with diminishing frequency, for a handful of years after that. They were different times, but eventually, a solution was sought.
I sat in the doctor’s study aged 8 or so and he performed tests. Breathing on a mirror. Listening to a series of bells, if I recall correctly. And I described my repetitive dream, I think, horrifically vivid, of being chased through the woods (sometimes a jungle) by an old grinning man with false teeth and mechanical legs.
You could never outrun this terror. You could try. I’d often find my dream self at the edge of some windswept cliff or other, facing an inevitable fall. And I would wake up crying, shaking, on slick and acrid smelling sheets.
It feels so strange to write that, but its feels like time and fears are rarely pretty.
There remain mysteries in these dreams too. Turbaned men and adorned women who sat, apparently in meditation, inside the sheltering leaves of huge, cactus like plants. I think of them as guardians. The clarity of the memory, decades later, should speak of the realness of the dream at the time. When they come – when the demon comes – the dreams are often as real as life itself. It was only much later, in my late twenties, that I developed the art of recognising that I was dreaming and thus mounting some kind of defence.
Last night, I was alone. I hadn’t wanted to go out. The spider had vanished and the demon was coming. I suspected it. I read till 5am, but sleep can be a cruel mistress and damn it, her chains dragged me down.
I was in a house. A large, somewhat rickety loft apartment with 70s décor and peeling wallpaper. It was night and I was instantly aware that I was a prisoner, the same old running theme. Along with the fact that I’d have to think my way out of the dream in order to survive it, stir my slumbering self and wade through the mud of sleep paralysis to emerge – sometimes with a cry, sometimes not – shaking and quietly crying on the other side, back in the waking world.
There were three men in the unkempt lounge under the eaves. Two, masculine, muscled and vague of face. Perhaps a bearded one, his image fades even now as I write this down half an hour since I awoke, forcing myself to pour it all out. The third man was much clearer. A punk in appearance, slender, bare-chested, dark haired with studs through his nose and lips. There were tattoos (ravens, I think. Or bats.) on his chest behind his braces, and his face was angular, pale and not unattractive. Think of a cross between Brian Molko of Placebo fame and someone more sinewy and vulturine.
Something, perhaps. I don’t know.
Oh no. My heart sank. For all his shiftiness, I’d recognise the demon anywhere.
Over the years, he’s taken different forms, the demon, bizarrely growing younger as I’ve grown older, and taking on a pleasing form. The grinning man with the false teeth and mechanical legs became a tall middle aged one for a while. A shadow that would stand in the corner of my bedroom in my twenties and radiate anger. He was less the carnival freak, now earthier and more brutal, full of some unspoken vengeance. And he’d simply fly at me, howling and flailing at my head in a barrage of shadows. Plucking at my arms, my legs, my flesh. I’d lie, teeth gritted, eyes squeezed shut, mentally begging him to go away, to leave me be. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move, during these rare assaults. And on two occasions that I remember, I’d find myself on the bedroom floor when I awoke and came to my senses. Breathing hard, shaking, before the inevitable tears came.
Was he a ghost? What did he want? I even asked him this once, fumbling for the light switch and managing to break a lamp. I hadn’t hurt anyone. I’d lived the best I could, given the circumstances. And, yes, I would help if I could. But then I’m not entirely sure that I believe in ghosts.
Not external ones, anyway.
Only as memories. Or the dross that comes from memories. The shadow plasm, if you will.
But I digress. Last night, the demon appeared handsome and young. He even bore shades of a younger me, vain as that sounds, but it was the first time I’d noticed such a correlation in the dreams, and that was perhaps telling in itself.
Initially, in the dream, in the dream house, I was an unwelcome guest. Or a sort of acquaintance that the other men liked to ridicule and tease. But, as I said, I was aware that I couldn’t leave the place, as I vaguely recall enduring a torrent of sarcastic and sniggering abuse. Being called fat. Weird. A fag. Useless. A loser etc.
I tried to appeal, as I often would. Why didn’t they like me? What had I done? I couldn’t help being who I am. As usual, it was pretty pathetic, the weakness of a child, and somewhere, I was aware that the sleeping adult me was seething.
Fuck these ghosts. Fuck the demon. I was so over their bullshit now.
This was the seed that had grown into my defence, you see. The sword I’d forged and with which I learnt to fight back, though I was far from in the clear yet.
This part is difficult to write, but I promised myself, when embarking on this piece, that I’d be honest about it. Maybe it’s the whole point. How to describe the mixture of dread and attraction without sounding utterly debauched? But this was certainly a bullying dream, an ordeal of degradation, and I immediately recognised the experience from my early teens, showering after phys ed with my high school aggressors and finding myself desiring them.
I haven’t written about this before, that bizarre curdling of fear and desire. The paranoia that there’s a light flashing above your naked self in the changing rooms, alerting all the other boys to the fact that you’re different, that you’re not one of the pack. Trying not to look. And then trying not to look too long. Trying to control yourself, your body. Thinking of dead things, animals and maggots and bones. Of unhappy moments. Flat, grey days. Of nothingness. Succeeding – always in this case, thank God – with an effort of will that distorted the mind and pummelled the heart.
Mind over matter. Over raging hormones. Adolescent torture.
And the chilling suspicion that some of the other boys could smell it too, on some fundamental level, and react to your thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old self with a mixture of loathing or worse, curiosity. The collected images that one would later furiously masturbate over, arching to pleasure and then hating oneself. Feeling that you’d betrayed yourself. The sirens of guilt and disgust, because everyone knew that it was wrong. Everyone said so, all of the time.
Yes, there was pain, back then. But worst of all was the fear that you enjoyed some of it. Or you told yourself you did in order to survive.
It’s a sickening truth, even to this day.
That kind of stuff can tear a boy apart. The man who endures will be strong.
The demon, last night, was speaking to this truth. As before, there was a mocking, sneering tone to things. Even the posters on the wall – Slayer, The Sub-humans, Crass – curled their tattered lips at me. And I knew what was coming.
I’ll keep it brief, for taste’s sake. I was both trapped and degraded.
The demon stripped and bound me. He put a bottle in me, a plastic bottle, until I bled. All three men did things in the dream, barking commands at me, making me move this way, that way, put this or that in my mouth. All three entered me, roughly, and all three flogged me with words while doing so, hissing, spitting, deriding my body. Laughing at my submission.
I told you it wasn’t pretty. You were warned.
None of the above reflects real life, you understand. None of it was forced, in the truest sense, even as a dream. And to be frank, I don’t care what people think. This was the dream and it was a dream of debasement, an inversion of my romantic self. A parody of innocent wants and a need for security and love. It was a reminder of those days of loving the monster. And hating the self. Days I’ve long since got free of, lucky rainbow that I am, although I guess the stain of them remains, deep down.
Later, I was in a small toilet and the demon, all sparkling eyes and cruel, sensuous lips, was demanding that he watch me in this exposed and vulnerable state. And here, I managed to gather some sense of myself, drawing on a thread I’d summoned somewhere in my late twenties. Forging dream steel and determining to fight back.
There are places I will not go.
You can probably breathe now.
The dream changed. Grew foggier. Less real. I was shaping events. Pushing at the walls. I remember engaging the demon in a discussion about bands, which delighted him as he crawled across me – a kind of spider again – while smarmily testing my knowledge.
Demons do love games. But I was on the road home, I knew, and my mind caught fire, slowly spearing through the horror.
It’s fading, fading, elusive to write… We were outside, all of a sudden, in the garden under the stars. Just an ordinary English garden behind an ordinary house. We were still naked. I was clothed in rope. Bear with me here, because I feel moved to excuse the form of my imagination, vivid, wild as it is, but there was a space rocket in the garden. A tall, silver thing, probably one of the beloved phallic machines culled from the old black and white Flash Gordon episodes I’d run home from school to watch as a boy (because yes, there were joys in childhood too, as there must be to throw shadows).
The demon found this highly amusing, I think, and, apparently challenged by this oddity from my dreaming mind (and eager to subvert it), he pulled me to the flank of the rocket and somehow, launched it.
In a plume of fire and smoke, we roared up into the night, both the demon and I clinging to the side of the rocket. Me, frozen by fear, if not ice. In no time at all, space was drawing near (another iteration of the windswept cliff edge, no doubt), the firmament dark and cold, the earth dwindling below. An inevitable, terrible, asphyxiated end.
How the demon laughed! Gleeful, triumphant, he’d turned my escape pod against me.
Or so he thought. You see, I found myself letting go of the rocket and simply falling backwards through the air. And in the strange logic of dreams, I’d pictured myself as having dreamt up the only available parachute. The only one. And impossibly, through the screaming air, I was able to convey this message to the demon’s drawn and panicked face.
I fell. And I fell, a relieved Icarus. And then, I woke up.
Moments before I hit the ground, of course.
Dreams love a good cliché.
I sat up in the dawn, shaking a little. Another battle won, I thought. It had been some time, but I didn’t believe myself entirely free of him. The demon.
The shaking is gentler these days. The jolts not as sharp, as I recognise the dreams for what they are and I relax and let myself cry for a minute. To breathe slowly until I can dismiss the fucker. To let reality filter in and remind me that I got clear of these shadows and built myself a sword. To recognise I made choices to ensure that I was in a safe place with good company, with those few who understand me and will fight to protect me, as I do them.
These ghosts aren’t uncommon among artists, I find. I know I’m not alone.
As I face these shadows and try to unravel them, they become easier to talk about. The episodes, the bats, strike less regularly, with less force, although they can still do damage. To my regret.
I will master the demon one day.
There is a curse, but there’s also a blessing: ‘May you learn to forget.’ I’m doing my best. For the shadows are shrinking, I believe, outweighed by a great deal of light. Hard won. Precious.
More light. More light, please.
It’s been put to me, recently, that perhaps the demon has always been the one standing in the mirror. In the black glass of memory. And that glass, in itself, can easily break.
Only one of us can win this battle. After all, only one of us is real.
And it was put to me that writing it down might help.
And someone else had asked me to write a piece for Childhood Fears.
So I woke up this morning and did.
© James Bennett
ABOUT JAMES BENNETT
James Bennett is a British writer raised in Sussex and South Africa. His travels have furnished him with an abiding love of different cultures, history and mythology. His short fiction has appeared internationally and the acclaimed 'Chasing Embers' is his debut fantasy novel. James lives and works in Barcelona, Spain, and is quite aware that these bios can't keep up with him.
'Chasing Embers' and 'Raising Fire' are available now. The concluding volume 'Burning Ashes' is out now from Orbit Books. www.orbitbooks.net
Further information available at: http://curia-draconis.blogspot.co.uk/
Or feel free to follow him on Twitter: @Benjurigan
Or join on Facebook: fb.me/Benjurigan
'Chasing Embers' and 'Raising Fire' are available now. The concluding volume 'Burning Ashes' is out now from Orbit Books. www.orbitbooks.net
Further information available at: http://curia-draconis.blogspot.co.uk/
Or feel free to follow him on Twitter: @Benjurigan
Or join on Facebook: fb.me/Benjurigan
ABOUT CHASING EMBERS
'A thrilling fusion of myth and modernity' Kevin Hearne, author of the Iron Druid Chronicles
'Blending together the best of action, adventure and urban fantasy . . . Chasing Embers is one of my highlights!' The Eloquent Page
Fans of Ben Aaronovitch and Jim Butcher will revel in this fiery tale of magic, mayhem and modern-day mythology.
BEHIND EVERY MYTH THERE IS A SPARK OF TRUTH . . .
There's nothing special about Ben Garston.
Or so he'd have you believe. He won't tell you, for instance, that he's also known as Red Ben. Or that the world of myth and legend is more real than you think.
Because it's his job to keep all that a secret.
But now a centuries-old rivalry has resurfaced, and the delicate balance between his world and ours is about to be shattered.
Something is hiding in the heart of the city - and it's about to be unleashed.
'Absolutely loving it. Gorgeous use of language, great humour, characterisation and storyline. New fan!' Elizabeth Chadwick
'Blending together the best of action, adventure and urban fantasy . . . Chasing Embers is one of my highlights!' The Eloquent Page
Fans of Ben Aaronovitch and Jim Butcher will revel in this fiery tale of magic, mayhem and modern-day mythology.
BEHIND EVERY MYTH THERE IS A SPARK OF TRUTH . . .
There's nothing special about Ben Garston.
Or so he'd have you believe. He won't tell you, for instance, that he's also known as Red Ben. Or that the world of myth and legend is more real than you think.
Because it's his job to keep all that a secret.
But now a centuries-old rivalry has resurfaced, and the delicate balance between his world and ours is about to be shattered.
Something is hiding in the heart of the city - and it's about to be unleashed.
'Absolutely loving it. Gorgeous use of language, great humour, characterisation and storyline. New fan!' Elizabeth Chadwick
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