Writing With Passion
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 – 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)
The Whitby Guide couldn’t wait to get their hands on a copy of SCRAVIR – while Whitby sleeps. You can read their fantastic review here on their website!
A big thank you to them and to everyone who is snapping up a signed copy of this first edition – while stocks last …
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.
You may be hundreds or even thousands of miles from Whitby, reading Scravir and wondering what Whitby really is like at night. Is it evil? Would Dracula recognise it?
Certainly Market Square (above) had been in existence for decades by the time Bram Stocker arrived to document the night a ship carrying a resident from central Europe sank so unfortunately.
Many would avow the old town harbours an aura, a physical weight of history.
Loiter quietly at midnight at the foot of Abbey Steps and stare up a rain swept Henrietta Street. A violent storm is smacking boats against the jetty. The comforting veneer of tourism is washed away. All those messages, fathoms deep at every window – ‘holiday cottage available’, ‘five sticks of rock £3’, ‘pirate boat trip £4’, ‘strictly no parking’ – gone. All gone.
Until all that remains is a blunt nosed cliff beneath which small cottages nestle sng like trembling chicks; their occupants minded to sit out the storm but knowing that sooner or later they must venture out and pass through the harbour jaws to cast their nets. Or die hungry.
It’s in a cottage on this same narrow cobbled Henrietta Street, on a drenched lacklit night, that chaos arrives, and the howling anguish of Scravir takes place.
What does Daniel see making shadows in the back of Fortune’s smokehouse on Henrietta Street?
Of course on a peaceful night all is well. The narrow streets wind and hug the contours of the earth. Beneath a night thick with stars, Whitby is a slumbering bear, though shadows rife as rogues still cling to every corner and passageway.
The final stretch from proofread text to printed book always feels like an eternity! But there are so many things to be finalised from cover art to fonts, from inners papers to ISBN numbers. And the closer to the end you get the further away it seems.
The montage above shows how the cover image changed over time; the warmer colour on the left giving way to a cool look on the right.
A particular challenge for SCRAVIR was the issue of the different voices in the narrative. The story mixes standard narrative with text messages, emails, autopsy reports, and a fragment of a journal from several centuries ago. How should the layout and typography represent this? For several hundred years, since the 12th century, there was a long “s” and a short “s” that was the lowercase version of the letter and looked similar to an “f”. It is part of the experience and the fun of looking at old manuscripts. Text messages use emojis. At what point does adding all this textual colour impede reading rather than enhance it? We decided to dive in with both feet!
We hope that in the end we got everything right, but as the French writer Jean Paul Sartre discovered when Les Main Sales was first performed in 1948, neither the author nor the publisher ultimately decide what a work means or how it is received; that is down to the reader 😉
Some people think that sunset and sunrise look the same, but we know that just isn’t so.
In the quiet hours before the fruit machines begin to chirp, before the rustling of fish and chips, before pavements ring with passing feet, clouds coalesce and meander inland ahead of the sun. And the horizon fills with stories to be.
At sunrise everything spray fresh poised, about to become. While sunset is final flourish, grand gesture, a noise of colour.
Waves scythe the sands, blade across a guillotine, rushing white noise, trimming back and forth to count the centuries.
Small birds shrug shrimps in a pebble dash staccato while the harbour slow breathes the last of sleep. All too quickly eager dogs and ice-creams, for now unseen, will own the beaches.
But not now. For now only the rocks stare out to sea. And all is well.
And what of Whitby’s amazing Goth festival, which provides the background for the dark entertainment that is SCRAVIR – while Whitby Sleeps?
Striding across Market Square, a bright late autumn swagger of Goths and Steam Punks deck the dour dark streets like baubles on a Christmas tree. Not even feeling the air is chill.
In a town heaving with three thousand people in costume, where locals push their Saturday shopping home in small coffins; where men strap glass cloches containing a pink pulsating brain to their heads … who will pause to wonder whether the costumed body slumped in the ginnel is festive prop, drunken celebrant, or butchered corpse?
While Whitby dances, drinks, and drums its wild weekend; while lurching streets lark and laugh; while winter batters the harbour jaws, while Whitby sleeps … who is left to shout for help? Who will fight the mingling menace of the Scravir?
