The McAllister Journals: Entry Three: Bringing Back the Eighties

Behind the scenes on the writing of the second Holly Trinity novel

“Is this what the 1980s are gonna be like? With nobody listening to me?”

In the first of my sequel journals, I talked about how I had a list of things I wanted to include, and contrived a story that would bring them all together. One of the items on this list was how I wanted to use flashbacks. The interludes exploring earlier periods of Holly’s long life was an element of the first book I wanted to carry over into the second, but from the start, I knew I wanted to use them in a very different way this time around.

In Ghosts of York, the flashbacks are mainly an exercise in world-building and character development, giving little snippets of the key moments that moved Holly, and others, to where we find them at the start of the story. But with the second book, I wanted the flashbacks to tell a story.

This time around, instead of bouncing around across the span of Holly’s life, I decided to zero in on one specific incident that marked an important turning point for her. To present a Holly who is very different from the one we know, and explore why she was like that then and why she changed.

The idea gave me many centuries to play with, but I also had a strong desire to position this subplot in relatively recent history, so the scars left could still be fresh.

As I mentioned in the first journal entry, I wanted to work ghost hunting into the narrative. This led me inevitably to the 1970s and 1980s, the time of The Stone Tape and Poltergeist. The time of analogue technology, so advanced at the time and so primitive now, probing haunted spaces in the hope of capturing something otherworldly in a VHS web.

I eventually pinned down my flashbacks to 1980, and began developing the idea of a team of parapsychologists investigating one of the city’s many haunted sites, only to uncover far more than they expected. The things they saw that long night would echo all the way into the present day, to the time when Holly and Mira are forced to return to that terrible place. Because the dark forces awoken back then are rising once more…