Volume Three of The Damocles Files, The Key of the Abyss has now been released. It’s been three years since Volume Two, Seeds of Destruction, came out and I hope that the wait will have been worth it. This is possibly the darkest of the three books, certainly in tone and subject matter. It’s set against the rising tide of fascism that was a feature of the second world war and the years leading up to it so has a horrible relevance to the current state of world politics.
The format of all three novels – telling a story which spans
the duration of the war – allows to start from scratch as it were with regards
to the characters and many familiar faces from the first two books feature in volume
three. Indeed, it was nice to be able to expand on those characters, add a bit
more colour to them. There are new characters too, of course; a new villain in
the shape of Ormanno Bianchi, but also new additions to the DAMOCLES team - Tom
Armitage, scholar and priest-in-training and Napoleon Gibson, a horn player in
a jazz band who is drawn into the world of DAMOCLES, albeit against his will.
As in the first two books, an array of locations feature in
The Key of the Abyss, among them Paris on the brink of German occupation, Albania
and the deserts of southern Iraq. The book’s novella-length finale takes place
in a mountaintop monastery in Northern Italy.
It was a joy to go back to the world of DAMOCLES. Writing
these novels is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done, an opportunity to
give free rein to my imagination and tell tales of action, and supernatural
horror, in exotic locations, something the format of the novels – short stories
linked by an overarching narrative – fully allows for.
This could well be the last DAMOCLES novel to use this
format though. Much of the time taken to write volume three was taken ensuring
that there was no overlap of timelines from the first two books and that the
characters we wanted to use were actually available when we needed them and to
fit in with the real events which happened and which we reference. The spreadsheet
we set up to keep track of where everyone was at any given time allowed us to
do this (and allowed some nice cross-references too). That said, it would be
difficult to write another war-spanning epic in the same vein as the availability
of the characters after three books’ worth of adventures is now strictly
limited.
Which isn’t to say that more short stories or novellas won’t
be possible. Or even a post-war DAMOCLES novel… I don’t think I’m ready to say
goodbye to the world we’ve created yet and so DAMOCLES will return, in one form
or another.
Oh, and The Key of the Abyss finally reveals what the acronym
DAMOCLES actually stands for.
