Publication Day: Strangeness and Charm

The 29th May is the official US publication day for Strangeness and Charm, the third in the series The Courts of the Feyre, and it’s cause for celebration here at Shevdon Manor. For your delectation, the kind folk at Angry Robot Books have posted a sample for you to whet your appetite upon, which I hope will encourage you to go out and acquire a copy.

To celebrate, I thought I would share with you a little of the research that  inspired the book. This is the church of St Mary and St David at Kilpeck in Herefordshire, a little south and west from Hereford itself. This is a remarkable building in many ways, not least for its age – it was built around 1140, replacing the saxon church that preceded it.

I’m not a geologist, but the archway appears to be carved from pink sandstone and is remarkably well preserved. Around the door are the most fantastic carvings – mythical creatures, angels, animals and looping vines, carved all around the doorway. You can see for yourself that it is a portal of significance.

The tops of the walls around the church are decorated with corbels – an architectural term for a bit sticking out to provide additional support – which are again carved into strange creatures, knights, animals and faces. The most rare of these is a sheila-na-gig – a female figure displaying exaggerated vulva. There are very few of these left in Europe and Kilpeck has one of the best examples still in existence.

That’s not the only significant thing about this particular church, though. The church stands next to what remains of a castle which was slighted (demolished to prevent further use) by the parliamentarian forces during the English Civil War, at around 1645. The castle is a grassy mound with a few remnants of a wall. The church, however, is untouched.

You might not think that was remarkable, given that it is a church, but these were puritans and were against the decoration and ornamentation of churches. There are any number of churches throughout England where statuary was pulled down, murals obliterated and stone carvings chiselled off.

Many of my stories begin with the questions: why and what-if, and in this case the obvious question – why was a church bearing pagan imagery and the naked and blatantly sexual image of a woman left completely untouched by a puritan army, while the castle right next door was utterly demolished?

What if the reason the church wasn’t touched was that it was protected? And what if the reason it was protected was that it held something that needed to be kept safe and hidden away?

What’s in the church then becomes interesting, but that will be the subject of my post for the UK launch on June 7th, when we will discover even more mysteries in this fine building.