Warning! Some slight spoilers ahead.
Sorrowmouth was born during the first lockdown. Months of empty streets and queuing outside Asda for groceries, making sure my parents had supplies, face masks and plastic gloves and washing your hands to the tune of Happy Birthday. It wasn’t a fun time but being a natural recluse, there was some comfort for me in that emptiness. As my anxieties diminished, everyone else’s seemed to escalate. None of that madness found its way into the four stories I created during those quiet months in 2020, but I found myself feeling far more creative than I’d felt in some time. The stories seemed to pour out of me.
The three other original tales appeared in last year’s A Box Full of Darkness (also from Black Shuck Books), and, as fond as I am of those other stories, Sorrowmouth quickly announced itself as ‘something else’. Indeed, when I submitted them to Steve Shaw, he felt that Sorrowmouth was strong enough to stand on its own as separate novella release (which necessitated the inclusion of an earlier story of mine, Lost and Found, finding its way into the mini-collection).
I’d had the idea of a man being followed around by a giant creature that only he can see some years ago. The initial idea included him travelling between roadside shrines, and fragments of characters that ultimately made it into the story, but at the time I ran out of steam with it, and filed it away. As any writer will tell you, very little is wasted — eventually you stumble upon another idea that just perfectly slots into that old idea and unlocks the whole thing, and that’s exactly what happened with Sorrowmouth.
That other piece of the puzzle was reading an article by Alan Moore to accompany a Tate exhibition of William Blake’s art. Moore details the events surrounding the creation of Blake’s A Ghost of a Flea in a typically evocative fashion, suggesting ghosts rushing down the stairs, seances and the soul of a murderer with a bowl of blood and the thorn. I was aware of Blake’s painting but something within the article seemed to unlock the necessary creative impulse in my mind, connecting the giant from my idea to the Flea. Further research into Blake and his life (which was no hardship as he’s endlessly fascinating) flicked on lightbulbs in the various darkened rooms of the story as I found ways to reflect aspects of Blake across the various characters in Sorrowmouth. There are Easter eggs galore in there for the committed reader.
A note on the title: the name appeared, as they so often do, from nowhere some time before, and I filed it away for future use. I have a huge file of titles for stories which I refer to as I’m breaking a story in my mind, looking for something that fits the bill. For a long time I assumed Sorrowmouth would be a place, perhaps some lost village for one of my folk horror stories, but it never seemed to find an appropriate home. But as the story I was constructing came into sharper focus, it felt right that Underhill’s constant shadow had a name, and Sorrowmouth, although more or less nonsensical, felt right. It’s always a gut instinct with titles, and once I’ve committed to it, it’s all but impossible to change my mind about it. Of course, later on we are introduced to Kate’s shadow, Prurience, and the naming of her opened up a whole world of possibility about similar shadows and the naming of them.
The initial idea was set in my home town of Birmingham, but once Sorrowmouth came fully into view I decided to place the story in the coastal town of Hastings. I’d set another story, Sunflower Junction, there. We’ve visited it a couple of times over the years and, as much as I like it, there’s an undeniable sense of faded glory to the place – Art Deco buildings going to seed on the front, a town that’s a bit past its best. Despite that the town beyond the front is varied and multi-faceted and frequently pretty.
This feels like a very working class story. I was brought up in a family where we didn’t have a lot, but enough to get by. I know what’s it’s like to properly run out of money, struggle with education, lack of prospects, felling locked into a life that isn’t everything you might really want for yourself or your loved ones. I’ve also known a lot of people in similar circumstances and worse; I’ve known good people struggling with substance and alcohol addictions, and I wanted to make them part of my story; I wanted each of them to have a clear voice, to make no judgements, to see things from every angle. There’s a lot of cruelty in Sorrowmouth, but in every case I’ve tried to find the human and social cause and effect that brought events to that moment, and not flinch away from what happens next.
‘“What happened?” Underhill asked. “To your boy?”
Mary took a long drag on her cigarette. She sat forward with her elbows on her knees as if to brace herself. “Daniel was killed,” she said, with a far-off look on her face, “by a joy rider. They cruise up and down that strip all night, they do, racing each other. It’s like a sport to them.” She paused, her voice brittle with emotion. “You know what lads are like these days. Nothing else better to do with their time. Goading the police, robbing people.” Mary exhaled a plume of smoke and glanced out at the bright flowers on her balcony. “The terrible fucking thing is I know half of them, and their parents. I see them every bastard day and I can’t prove which of them it was, but they know, they do, and they just walk right past me, and I want to fucking scream at them, at all of them.”
Underhill saw Sorrowmouth stooped in the doorway with his bowl and thorn, mottled skin burnished gold in the lamp glow, beady eyes beseeching him. Underhill nodded and he dipped his head under the doorframe and into the room, towering over both Underhill and Mary. Mary continued, her words beginning to slur.
“I think, no, I know that if I didn’t have my beliefs, you know my absolute belief in, well, in angels, guardian angels, all around us, around me, well, I wouldn’t have gotten through these last few weeks.”
She glanced up, beyond where Sorrowmouth’s face hung like a stiff mask in the cloud of cigarette smoke and saw something else entirely. She closed her eyes and smiled an entirely benign smile at the very notion of her personal angels. There were some crude and disappointingly prosaic paintings on the wall around the fire of them floating in the air, their wings outstretched, lit up with a golden glow that Underhill remembered like the tattered fragments of an ancient dream. Angels looking over babies in cradles. Angels hovering above the Earth, showering it with their benevolent light.
Sorrowmouth finally pricked at the woman’s grief with his thorn until it seemed to bleed furious moonlight. Chaotic swirls of black and silver and red convulsing in the air around them. He gathered it all into his upturned bowl and began to sup at it like an eager dog.’
Grief is the thread that unites all of the characters in Sorrowmouth; grief is something that I write about a lot, probably as a means of mental preparation and a way to address my own personal demons. Finding a way through grief is different for everyone, but I wanted Sorrowmouth to have an uplifting note. I’d like to think now that I’ve amassed almost quarter of a century of fiction, the clear message in my stories is that of hope, of there being a way through whatever your problems are, and that you can find the most unexpected of escapes if you widen your horizons, if you move the goalposts even just a little bit.
I’m inordinately proud of Sorrowmouth. Some of the sections were written in a fevered, almost altered state. I’ve never fully experienced anything quite like it before. The sequence where Underhill is taken away from the familiar by his father and left to make his way home and subsequently has visions, was written in some strange haze that was quite peculiar. I’d been reading a volume of R.S. Thomas’s poetry, which I found deeply evocative and ultimately uplifting. When I sat down to write that passage I was also listening to Max Richter’s extremely stirring soundtrack to the brilliant HBO show, The Leftovers. At some point I didn’t feel I was writing at all, simply allowing the story to appear from beneath my fingers. It was a lovely feeling; it happened again during Underhill’s conversation with Varley in chapter 8 and again during the climatic chapters. When that happens, it’s best just to hold on and get it down and hope it’s as good as you think it is. But I felt happily possessed by Sorrowmouth and by the end, absolutely purged of something that I can’t quite put a name to.
‘Underhill had to fight with himself to remain in place. But something was already changing inside him. Something that had become familiar in the last year or so. He could feel the world subtly reordering itself as his father walked away; that dreamy feeling that he sometimes had and couldn’t explain, not even to himself, so certainly not to his mother or anyone else. But he couldn’t acknowledge it right now; he was afraid that if he didn’t know his way home, he might wander lost in unfamiliar neighbourhoods until the end of time; he might end up in a different country altogether. Soon Underhill couldn’t even hear his father’s footsteps but the panic subsided, and the world gradually began to settle around him, changing little by little, soft and gentle and pliant, like his mother’s embrace. He could hear the insect drone of a languid summer day and the silence of a Christmas Eve wrapped in snow. It tranquillised him. He looked up to find the buildings were all changed and very distant from him, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. They were lit up from within with an incandescent golden light. They were like cathedrals floating in a changed sky; all the dreamy colours of a place where words ran out and art took over. Underhill had felt this strange abstracted feeling before, sitting in his bedroom window. The world settling around him, quelling all of his fears and anxieties, then transforming itself into something beyond the immaculate. Underhill drifted through the endless avenues, suspended on washes of impasto and evanescent spirals of ecstasy, transported away from the fraught little island he’d found himself born on. The vaulted sky arched like a vast cathedral. Buildings dissolved and then knitted themselves back together in ever more complex variations. He floated, lost and alternating between rapture and fear. He saw giants made out of shimmering lights, kaleidoscopes and cascading sounds, striding through the vast endless avenues. Trees wove intricate lattices of branches around him and angels came to settle there, their wings folded stiffly behind them. The air buckled around them. They gave off a fierce ravaged beauty; they glowed from within. The sound they made was like an orchestra tuning up, rising in intensity, becoming eerie quavering falsettos. The universe opened its arms up to Underhill then and he was seized with a feeling of intense benevolence and belonging. There was a truth beyond his understanding at that moment, a mystery hiding at the heart of all things. Everything narrowed and intensified until it felt as if this rapture would fill him to the absolute brim and unmake the body he was born into.’
Grief visited my family not long after completing Sorrowmouth, when we found out that my dad had cancer. He passed away a short time after. Although we were unprepared for how quickly it all happened, I was glad that he didn’t suffer for too long. Since then I’ve written exactly one story, and that was a struggle. I don’t know if I have many more stories in me, to be honest. It seems to get harder and harder for me to work these ideas into something I’m happy with. Playing with the dog or making music that only I will hear seems more pleasurable these days. I have one other completed short novel that I’d like to have published, as it means a great deal to me, but after that I’m not sure.
I’d like to thank Steve Shaw for publishing my last two books. I’ve never met him but he seems like someone I’d get on with very well. The same goes for Priya Sharma, who provided some very kind words about Sorrowmouth. Thanks are also due to Gary McMahon, who’s always been supportive of my work. A message from him about how much he liked Sorrowmouth a couple of weeks ago really lifted my spirits.
I hope if you’ve read this, then you’ve probably read Sorrowmouth. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you.
Simon Avery 