Q: What gave you the inspiration to write SCRAVIR?
A: (C M Vassie) I have visited Whitby since childhood. Our sense of place is strange. It is the collection of all our memories, of time passing, of the way we literally grow into our world. I still remember walking beneath the table in my grandmother’s house and of reaching up to turn a door handle. So Whitby has shifted in scale as I have grown up. But behind the solid surfaces is the reality of thousands of lives spent on the edge of the sea, of storms and anxious waiting, of boats shattering between the harbour jaws, the slow Morse of the lighthouses, footsteps clattering narrow streets.
In recent times Whitby has welcomed an army of eccentricity to its weekend festivals. Most of us spend the better part of our waking lives as buttoned up adults, role playing as grown ups, being ‘sensible’, wearing our jobs and ties and sensible shoes in service to the collective view of what life is all about. And then, like the Mardi Gras festivals in Rio, the streets swell with glorious Goths and Steam Punks of all ages. The Pavillion becomes a ferment of costumed music and raucous laughter. We paint the city into a different world, an imagined world. The town doesn’t change, we do. It’s weird and wonderful to witness.
The home of Dracula becomes a living expression of our inner landscapes. I simply found myself wondering one day, what would happen if evil really came to Whitby during the Goth Weekend? Would anyone notice or would everyone assume it was simply part of the show? How bad would things have to be for people to wake up?
Q: You’re not really suggesting that people don’t know the difference between fiction and reality?
A: How many people a day stand in Arguments Yard in Whitby and pretend to be daggers drawn or shouting in each other’s faces? Ten, thirty, a hundred? How many of us passing by assume it is just a bit of fun, even if we cannot see anyone taking a photo? What if weren’t make believe? Would we see that?
In our ordinary lives many bad things around us are hiding in plain sight. In a town packed with merry ghouls, who is left to spot the mayhem?
Q: Whitby’s Goth festival is obviously based around Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which he wrote in 1890. Is SCRAVIR While Whitby Sleeps a continuation of that story?
A: Stoker stayed in the posh part of town, a guesthouse on Royal Crescent. My story shelters among the small cottages on Henrietta Street, close to Fortune’s Kippers. The side of town that remembers people with callused hands, people who set out to sea and hauled the nets.
SCRAVIR is set in November 2016 but the nemesis has an unusual relationship with the tides of human history and understands absolutely that evil has to be invited in. And his enablers are not vampires, though they do visit death and destruction.
Q: To many fans Gothic means castles, caves, and plenty of darkness.
A: They will not be disappointed. The lacklight world of SCRAVIR is a humble student of velvet violence, dank dark, and winter logs crackling in a huge fireplace. But I must implore those with faint hearts not to purchase these pages as no good can come of it.
Q: Are you serious?
A: A decade ago, I visited Brasov in the heart of Transylvania. It was my good fortune to have avoided entering Bran Castle though I came perilously close to another castle then derelict, since restored and one of the settings in this journal. It is incumbent upon us all to know our limitations and sometimes when the air is chill the very worst impulse is the urge to get warm.
Only those with a strong constitution should venture close to the flame. I hope that many of those who stride the sea-swept harbour walls of Whitby, and those who dream of doing so, will find inspiration and solace in the pages of my journal but I would hate to unsettle those of a gentler disposition. For them and their loved ones, it is best they do not drink from this cup.
Q: Lastly, we have been in lockdown for what feels like eternity. Have you visited your beloved Whitby recently?
A: It has been my pleasure to add to the echoing of footsteps in Henrietta Street and to climb the 199 steps to the Abbey not once but twice over the past month. On the first occasion I watched the shadows emerge from their sorry ginnels as darkness fell and the horizon sank into the sea. I witnessed waves throwing themselves at the harbour jaws like a pack of wolves, over and over, as if one day the stones must yield and the whole town vanish from the earth. I breathed the clear salt air and felt blessed to be alive.
Intriguing having visited Whitby many times over the years and sat on a seat by the Abbey watch hing the sunset turn blood red…..how appropriate is that?
Indeed! And a key scene happens by the Church of St Mary, overlooking the harbour at the beginning of SCRAVIR, though in the story it is pouring with rain. You can find out more by reading the first two chapters …
https://injinipress.co.uk/scravir-sea-inside/
When is the follow up of scravir due out, absolutely loved it
Thank you for your kind comment 😉 This has to be the longest wait for a reply in history. Humble apologies. We can tell you that C.M.Vassie has completed a different book, a time travelling adventure set in Whitby (provisional title: the Whitby Trap). We are hoping to launch this book by the beginning of November. The author is now fully focused on finishing the sequel of Scravir. Thank you for your patience, it will be worth the wait.
Picked up Scravir from mr Vassie at the royal hotel during Goth weekend. What a great read. I’ve got my local bookshop down here in London to order the Whitby Trap so hopefully will generate interest down here in the south. Looking forward to reading it and of course the sequel when it’s out