NEW TITLE – the Whale Bone Archers

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We are delighted that C.M.Vassie, author of our best-selling contemporary gothic thriller SCRAVIR, has written this collection of short, but decidedly tall, stories all set in one of their favourite places, the historic town of Whitby. 

How often have you visited a place and wanted to know a bit about its history without being force-fed a massive university thesis with 40 footnotes on every page? 

How often have you said to yourself it would be great to have a fictional guidebook that takes me round this town, shows me stuff I didn’t know, gives me a sense of what it’s all about while feeding me nonsense that makes me laugh or shiver? 

 

Well here it is! A magical mystery tour of Whitby. 

 

If Dracula is fiction what is his boot print doing on Tate Hill Pier? 

James Cook was an intrepid explorer but doesn’t that statue on the West Cliff show that his real passion was preparing Asian food for his crew? 

 

See the heroic town of Whitby in a whole new way with The Whale Bone Archers by C.M.Vassie

Limited stock – Signed copies of SCRAVIR

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As November slides into December sea mist haunts the lacklit streets. The new contemporary gothic phenomenon SCRAVIR flies into Whitby old town on silent wings. The first reprint is running low, a second reprint arrives in the new year. 

We still have limited stock of signed copies of SCRAVIR but you’ll have to hurry. The perfect gift for anyone who prefers dark tales  to the saccharine sweet sludge of crackers, pies, paper hats and tinsel!

Lastly, here is our favourite December review of Scravir. “Well the plan was to read this on holiday this week but silly me started it and finished it before we’d set off. Great read, loved that it was set in Whitby. Probably one of my favourite books I’ve read.” Rick Martin. 

Thanks Rick, really glad you love SCRAVIR ! 

Thank you to all our Scravir readers!!

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Thank you for all the great comments for Scravir on social media. The Injini Press team and author C M Vassie are thrilled and excited at the journey we are taking together with you fuelled by our common love of Gothic tales and of the magical town of Whitby. We have even seen a quiz that takes people round Whitby through the eyes of Scravir!  

Look out for the great review of Scravir- while Whitby Sleeps in the Whitby Advertiser in September and another review coming in the Esk Valley News in October. 

SCRAVIR available at 88 Church Street, Whitby

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If you prefer to buy your books in a physical shop, you can now buy SCRAVIR -while Whitby Sleeps in two of Whitby’s independent book shops! The Whitby Bookshop is at 88 Church Street, just a stone’s throw from Henrietta Street where much of our story takes place.  Holman’s Bookshop is across the harbour at 19-21 Skinner Street.

Or you can buy a signed copy here on our website. And if you buy 2 or more copies we pay the postage! (all calculated at the checkout)


SCRAVIR sells out in Whitby!

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SCRAVIR – while Whitby sleeps has sold out at Holman’s bookshop in Whitby.  Back in stock soon … First edition going quickly now. If you collect signed first editions and love gothic fiction don’t let this opportunity slip through your fingers. Dark things are happening on Henrietta Street!

(7 Jul update: back in stock)

Old texts that inspired Gothic fiction

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For those interested in the old texts that inspired gothic tales of vampires, an interesting place to start is to read The Travels of three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, being the Grand Tour of Germany, in the year 1734. 

First published in volume IV of The Harleian Miscellany: A Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Entertaining Pamphlets and Tracts, this work is anonymous but very interesting and entertaining. You can find the original text here and read it for yourself.

C. M. Vassie read it as part of his research for SCRAVIR. 

“What I loved most about Travels of Three English Gentlemen was the language and style,” says Vassie. “The details of observation and the descriptions are wonderful.”

While the Scravir are not vampires, understanding how people hundreds of years ago might have reacted to those menacing beings was important to Vassie.  

Travelling around Europe was a very different undertaking three and four hundred years ago. The poor would have had little opportunity to venture far but in the 17th and 18th centuries young English elites would go on Grand Tours (designed to broaden their horizons) that could last between two and four years.  They would study art, languages, culture and geography.  

Because of the risk of highway robberies, the young gadabouts carried little money. Instead they took letters of credit from reputable London banks.  

The authors of Travels of Three English Gentlemen may well have been such gadabouts.  They provide us with an early description of Vampires.  

It is worth noting that this travelogue is not all about vampires. It also gives many fascinating insights into the flora and fauna the travellers saw on their journey, with descriptions of vampires being interspersed with notes on dormice, glow-worms, bears and river crabs.  A paragraph about witches is as easily followed by a description of wines and pies, peaches and apples as by the history of a local war.

Vassie borrowed the writing style of the journal for a key moment of discovery in SCRAVIR. 

You can learn more about the Grand Tour here. 

SCRAVIR – Author Q & A

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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.

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