Now that The Lodger has been out in the world for a while, I thought I’d take some time to unpack the whys behind a lot of what happens in the book, including some choices that I suspect seem a little counterintuitive. If you haven’t listened to it yet, stop now, because from here on in I’ll be spoiling everything about this book that brings to a bloody end the story started in ​The Hitchhiker.
 
So, to kick off, let’s chat one of the biggest risks I took in the novel.

 
Ryan and Sophie
 
To delve into this aspect of The Lodger means touching a little bit on its background. Originally The Hitchhiker was only ever intended as a standalone book, but I enjoyed writing the murderous character of the Driver so much that I used him again in The Caretaker, also intended as a standalone. Given one of these books was (at that stage) only out on Audible while the other was a print novel, I couldn’t link them too directly but I also couldn’t help but think towards a third book that might bring the two together and create an unofficial ‘Driver Trilogy’.
 
Originally I toyed with the idea of having Maggie and Charlotte join forces to hunt down The Driver after their respective run ins with him, but that felt too obvious and cute. Plus I always knew that Charlotte was a one-and-done protagonist, that her story concluded in The Caretaker. Conversely Maggie was left in a place of unfinished business regarding the Driver. So I decided to focus predominantly on her desperate hunt for the monster that understands her all too well. I would touch on The Caretaker by having Maggie learn about the events of that book as part of her investigation, but otherwise this would be a direct sequel to The Hitchhiker.
 
But the more I developed the more I found the ‘hunt’ story increasingly thin. As compelling as the dynamic between Maggie and the Driver was to me, could it really sustain an entire book? Maggie might have been conflicted about what the Driver represents to her, but when push came to shove she wasn’t really going to hesitate to kill him. Which would mean contriving all sorts of ways to keep them apart, a problem I did not have with the far more cautious Charlotte in The Caretaker.
 
Around this time I was working on a prologue that would see The Driver play twisted marriage counsellor to a bitterly unhappy couple, as a way to establish who he is to new readers and give a ghoulish little ‘pre-credits’ scene to old ones. But the more I planned it out, the more I started to wonder if this ‘mini story’ was, in fact, the story.
 
I knew from the start that this would be contentious. Would readers really want to spend so much time with new characters, especially such unlikeable new characters, when this was supposed to be the grand finale to a bigger story?
 
My reasoning was this; both The Hitchhiker and The Caretaker got to have their own plots, characters and concerns distinct from each other. To me, The Lodger would have been lesser if it was only a culmination rather than a complete story in its own right. So I decided to split the difference. Alternating chapters focusing on alternating characters would allow me to parallel Maggie’s hunt with the Driver’s manipulation of Ryan and Sophie’s miserable marriage. Throw in a Jack Carlin return and the continuation of some older plot elements, and this felt to me like the way to give readers the best of all worlds. It allowed the book a kind of internal integrity but also meant that you do get a full fledged major Maggieverse instalment at the same time.
 
This also let me have some real fun with Ryan and Sophie. Because I knew the book would be regularly returning to well liked familiar characters, it meant I didn’t have to worry about making these new players at all sympathetic. Instead I could have some real fun doing the exact opposite.
 
Much of Ryan and Sophie’s story was shaped by what I found funny. I loved the idea that during their city courtship both of them played up a dream of settling in the country without ever seriously imagining it might happen – until Ryan’s Dad dies and leaves them the farm, and neither is able to call the other’s bluff. This felt like rich storytelling ground, especially once you drop the Driver and his games into the mix.
 
There’s something a bit satirical to both these characters, but I find them very sad at their cores. Sophie is inspired by people I knew at uni who borderline fetishised the idea of a provincial country existence without knowing the first thing about it. But at the same time she reflects one of my least favourite attitudes and one I’ve seen all too often; the belief that ‘my big problem is that I’m too good at too many things so I don’t try enough at any of them’. Arrogance as an excuse for apathy doesn’t go a long way to endearing people to your plight.  
 
Then there’s Ryan. This character isn’t as directly reflective of people I’ve actually known, but there are several things at play here. The whole notion of a country kid who hated the country and couldn’t wait to leave but starts leaning into where he came from the moment he realises it gives him social capital was a lot of fun. And furthermore somebody who doesn’t actually want to go into the family business but does in order to prove themselves to a disapproving father felt true to a lot of what I saw growing up. I’ve never known a Ryan exactly, but in totality his arc always felt emotionally honest and interesting.
 
If Ryan is someone who has never felt ‘man enough’ and Sophie someone who believes her brilliance has always been overlooked, then the Driver murdering people around town and making each believe the other could be the killer was a thrilling way to capitalise on their particular brands of toxicity. As Ryan dithers over what would be the most masculine way to respond, Sophie is alarmingly turned on by the idea that her hitherto disappointing husband might actually kill for her, tacitly reinforcing her belief in how special she must be. Granted it’s a lot, but I was laughing the whole time.
 
Of course it all had to end badly for them. I knew these were one-and-done characters so I didn’t hold anything back, and in the end Ryan accidently killing Sophie then, in an attempt to really demonstrate his manhood, killing the one person who could prove it wasn’t murder felt appropriate in that it was both deeply sad and darkly funny. And a way to comment on the key themes encapsulated by both of these characters; that refusing to accept or understand who you really are can never end well. Yes, it’s extreme, but come on, were you expecting anything else?

 
The Driver
 
Yeah, the Driver is dead, and yeah I still have doubts about the choice. But one of the reasons I had to kill him so definitively was to take off the table any temptation to bring him back for another round. He’s gone and this time it’s not a fake-out. Considering his head exploded, it really couldn’t be.
 
I knew, coming into this book, that I couldn’t pull the same trick as Hitchhiker or Caretaker. There was never going to be another “he’s dead… OR IS HE?” ending because there was no way I’d get away with it a third time.
 
But in the early stages I had no intention of killing the Driver off. He’s such a fun character and so easy to write that I figured I’d keep him around for future nightmares. In fact, my original intended ending for The Lodger was that Maggie decides to hand him over to the police, setting the stage for a book called The Prisoner where our beleaguered hero from The Hitchhiker, Jesse, is serving out a sentence only to find his tormentor locked up with him.
 
But as I wrote a few things became clear to me. The first was that as fun as the Driver is, he’s not a particularly layered character and the more he comes back the more diminishing the returns. At his heart he’s a happy go lucky middle-aged dag who happens to really enjoy serial murder. The one complicating factor is his hunt for a partner of sorts, and once Maggie, the most perfect partner he could find, rejects him that quest is basically over. There might have been a bit more I could have done with him, but not enough to justify contriving new stories that would be less interesting each time. The more I considered it the more certain I became that this would be it for the Driver. A trilogy of books I could be really proud of felt, to me, the better choice than some perpetually open-ended series that would start to repeat itself sooner than anyone would like.
 
So if this was to be it for my smiling psychopath, what was the most satisfying way to dispatch him?
 
Well, probably not the one I ultimately went with. If you’re disappointed that it was miserable pathetic Ryan who finally did him in rather than Maggie, then I get where you’re coming from. But Maggie’s ongoing journey is grappling with her own violent nature and the Driver represented the most thorough acceptance she’s ever likely to find. I’ll delve more into this below, but the entire reason Maggie is so drawn to him is because he sees the parts of herself she’s ashamed or scared of and he celebrates them. But Maggie’s final victory in this book is the moment she tells the Driver ‘I think I am like you, but I think I don’t want to be’. For her to then kill him would undermine that. And let’s be fair here – she tries to, its just that he gets the upper hand.
 
Remember that the Driver started out as an unfulfilled man in a depressing marriage. There was something fitting about his end coming at the hands of another unfulfilled man in another depressing marriage. I liked the idea that the Driver doesn’t get a big glorious final showdown. I liked the idea that Ryan’s final act of decisive ‘revenge’ is what damns him. I liked the idea that Maggie actually tries to save the Driver at the end but his death means she has to stay on the run. When it came to unifying the various threads of plot and theme that run throughout The Lodger, this was the way to do it.
 
Of course I question it. I question whether I killed him too soon or whether there was a better death for him. But we’re over a year out from me actually settling on this ending, and so far I have no regrets. You don’t have to like it. But it’s the right ending.
​
 
Maggie and Jack
 
All of which brings me to our two old friends.
 
Maggie, of course, was always going to be in this book. I might have hidden her role in The Hitchhiker (more or less), but this time around she would have to play a major part after the way that book ended.
 
Maggie has grappled with her affinity for violence before. In The Inheritance we saw her settle on trying to use it for good. But when somebody as psychotic as the Driver comes along and offers acceptance and understanding, I could see how much that would unbalance the already lonely and unstable Maggie.
 
This was where Jack Carlin came in. I’ve made no secret of how much I like Carlin. Apart from his supporting role in The Inheritance he’s also the lead of my first Audible Original The Consequence, appears in my lockdown web series The Pact and my short film The Retirement Plan, and will be on protagonist duties again in next year’s High-Rise. Clearly I’ll take any excuse to involve him in a story and I had a good one here – that Carlin would be Maggie’s most obvious source of information when it came to tracking the whereabouts of the Driver.
 
But what started out as maybe a little indulgent soon became a crucial part of the story as Maggie is forced to consider how much she can trust Carlin. I think after The Inheritance I’d assumed a loyal partnership between them would be the status quo going forward, but as I wrote The Lodger I realised that we hadn’t quite earned that yet. So Maggie, with the Driver’s voice in her ear, does what she always does and assumes the worst, becoming convinced that Carlin is going to betray her, to the point where she turns on him.
 
But Carlin doesn’t betray her. He comes through at the end and saves her from the Driver. And in that moment Maggie realises that not only is he her friend, but that somebody doesn’t have to understand or like every part of you to accept you.
 
The final scene between Maggie and Jack in the car is one of my favourite moments I’ve ever written. It’s the most vulnerable we’ve seen Maggie and the way that Jack handles it, by telling her without bullshit exactly what she needs to hear, made me love these two so much more than I already did.
 
I finished The Lodger thinking that this wasn’t the end for Maggie, but that this moment of warmth and love could be a good place to leave her for a few years. As it turns out, we’ll be seeing a lot of her in the next few years. But the thing I like most about The Lodger was that this character for whom happiness is always out of reach got to have a moment of real peace before I throw her right back into the fray again. 

Lately my creativity has been a bit off. There are a few reasons for this – it’s a been a uniquely busy year and in some cases I bit off more than I could chew. But also I’ve found the vast majority of new films and TV shows so uninspiring, shining a harsh light on just how much I rely on exciting new stuff to energise my own process.
 
A few months back I went to Mt Buller for a few days by myself, largely to clear my head and refocus after the insanity that was planning and writing Andromache in the Dark in two months. While there I really tried to hone in on what it was that had slipped away from me, and in doing so I ended up tracing some of this disillusionment back to my fading interest in screenwriting.
 
This, I believe, was due to the many frustrations on The Hunted movie and the struggles on Gremoryland, neither of which I am currently involved with (although good things are happening on The Hunted front that I can hopefully talk about very soon). These twin disappointments left me gun shy about pursuing any film work and so I opted to focus on the books, which gave me plenty to be getting on with. But while up on the mountain, I tried to work out whether I had enough renewed focus to try and write a film again.
 
There has been one movie this year that I found fresh and exciting and fun and thought provoking in all the ways I love, and that was Challengers. It’s the first time in years I’ve felt like I’ve seen something really new, something that isn’t aspiring for popular disposability or arthouse significance but rather is just a good fucking movie. While on that trip I read the Challengers screenplay and began to wonder if I could write something with that same energy. If that was the kind of spark I needed to reinvigorate this long dormant corner of my writing life.
 
In doing so, I thought back to an idea I had years ago, during the writing process for The True Colour of a Little White Lie. True Colour is about a teenage love triangle at a ski resort. It’s maybe the most overlooked of my books and maybe also my favourite. But while writing it I began to entertain the idea of a quasi sequel/companion story that gave protagonist Nelson and his (first) love interest Juliet their own Before Sunset, a chance encounter well into adulthood where they reflect on where the years since their last meeting have left them and on the lingering pain and lessons from their teenage entanglement. I pictured it as a two-hander play, a long conversation in a ski-lodge bar that maybe one day I could produce as a small theatre show.
 
But revisiting that idea through the prism of Challengers made me consider it differently. What if, I thought, the swooning Before Sunset stuff was just the first act? What if their fifteen-years-late reconnection ended with the discovery that they have both been lying quite egregiously about their lives? What if this discovery reopened old wounds and threw them into a charged game of one-upmanship that would force them to confront all the ways in which they haven’t changed and all the things they still need to work through?
 
Returning from the mountain, I was too busy to think about it much further. But the idea continued to percolate. Then, in Sydney a couple of weeks back, I ended up with a few spare hours in which I walked around Circular Quay and idly let the story unfold in my head.
 
By the next day I had an outline.
 
It wasn’t perfect. The third act was pretty loose and the central themes of the story were alluding me. But most importantly of all, I felt it. I felt the weird mix of hurt and fury and yearning that would draw Nelson and Juliet into increasingly bad choices that would start off farcical and funny until the point where peoplestart getting hurt.
 
The tone was a challenge. It wasn’t quite a comedy, not quite a romance or a drama either. But it was a story I wanted to tell and what was more, the first major thing I’d worked on since 2019 that didn’t have a contractual obligation looming over it.
 
I told myself not to write it. I was woefully behind on edits for both High Rise and Andromache in the Dark. I told myself I could start writing when both were done, maybe in November.
 
I finished it yesterday.
 
Is it any good? Parts, maybe. I think the first half absolutely crackles. The second more or less works, but it needs development and fleshing out to reach the place I think it could and should. But it was just so much fun. Nelson and Juliet’s spiky banter spilled on to the page, as natural and barbed and electric as it was in True Colour, only now shot through with a sadness and desperation that their fourteen year old selves couldn’t have because, well, they were fourteen. Writing now the characters felt as alive as ever, like they’d just been waiting in my head to re-emerge, older and jaded but not a whole lot wiser.
 
Does it have a future? I don’t know. I suspect any version of it that goes out into the world will likely have to be edited to be about totally new characters, to avoid the tangled rights situation that has tripped up attempts to sell Maggie’s various misadventures to different parties. Furthermore, I’m not sure it’s high concept enough to really seize the imagination of producers, although it’s enough like Beef that there’s at least another recent successful comparison.
 
But even if it doesn’t go any further, even if I leave it here, writing it was exactly what I needed. I got to spend some time with old friends in a new context with the freedom of knowing there was no pressure on if or when I ever finished it. If all it ends up being is a warmup exercise to a more commercially appealing script then that’s okay.
 
It’s called White Lies. I hope you get to see it one day. But if you don’t, you can at least credit it with a renewed excitement for whatever I write next. 

In my twenties, I prided myself on being a geek. I reacted with overblown excitement to new Star Wars or Lord of the Rings announcements. I saw every Marvel film opening weekend. I obsessed over Game of Thrones theories and went to see Doctor Who episodes in cinemas. I collected random merchandise pertaining to whatever properties I liked, from action figures to posters and mugs and whatever else could clutter my room. In one share house I lived in, we had maps of Westeros on the walls, which a visiting girlfriend proclaimed was ‘a bit sad’.
 
I didn’t feel that way, but my attitudes to these things did slowly change. Around 2015 I remember beginning to feel a kind of self-consciousness about being excited for the new Marvel film, largely due to a suspicion that I was getting all worked up over a homogenised corporate led franchise that was suffocating the film industry with its ubiquity. Around the same time I remember watching episodes of Star Wars: Rebels with a housemate and starting to wonder if our giddy anticipation for an animated children’s show was just a bit performative.
 
In the 2010s, geek culture had become popular culture. It was no longer embarrassing to like Doctor Who or  or Star Wars or Game of Thrones or superheroes because everyone liked at least one of those things. The biggest TV shows and movies were all brands that, once upon a time, had been nerd stuff. And maybe, partly bolstered by a snooty ‘I liked this stuff before it was cool’ mentality, I played up how into it all I was.
 
For all my ‘geekiness’ I don’t know if I was ever a true obsessive of any of these things. I never went back and watched classic Doctor Who or delved into the Star Wars books or Marvel comics. The Lord of the Rings movies were seminal for me, but I only read the books once as a kid and I couldn’t get my head around The Silmarillion or any of the expanded lore stuff. I think I liked the idea of myself as a ‘real fan’, whatever the hell that means, and acted in accordance with that conception despite more realistically being someone who liked the more accessible mainline versions of these franchises but didn’t have much time or inclination for the serious deep dive. And while I’ve certainly gone about as far as it’s possible to go down the Hannibal or Animorphs or A Series of Unfortunate Events rabbit holes, all of those offer a comparatively manageable range of materials to consume.
 
The turning point for my understanding of fandom was the release of The Last Jedi. Seeing the starkly divided and outraged reaction to that film made me wonder if intense passion for anything in pop culture is really a good thing. As the arguments intensified and culture wars sprung up around the film and involved creatives were sent death threats I found I was no longer comfortable referring to myself as a Star Wars fan because in that moment, who the hell wanted to be a Star Wars fan?
 
Maybe I got wary about overt passion after that. Bit by bit, the intensity of my feelings towards the things I’d once loved started to wane. I stopped watching Star Wars shows and Doctor Who. I washed my hands of Marvel after Endgame. I gave up on The Rings of Power halfway through the first season.
 
Understand, my love for the original works that initially drew me in has never gone anywhere. I still adore the Eccleston/Tennant years of Doctor Who and I’ll love The Lord of the Rings until the day I die. But I think I’ve come to realise that liking something, even loving it, doesn’t mean you have to define yourself by it or keep up with every new development or even have any opinion at all on its current state. I don’t need The Acolyte to be for me because it’s not and that’s fine. I’m happy to leave my Star Wars fandom where it started; with the six movies I loved as a kid.
 
None of this is to suggest that I’ve entirely sworn off obsessive love for certain books or movies or TV shows. I’ll be first in line for new Saw movies. I buy every Animorphs graphic novel on release day. I wrote a whole fucking book about Hannibal Lecter. And yeah, I have a display of my Hannibal collection in my room and entire shelves devoted to Animorphs and A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I’m not trawling through forums or getting aggressive online about what minutiae from a fictional story has offended me today.  
 
My first love will always be stories and so in some ways a loss of passion is a bit of a sad thing. But passion is a double-edged sword. I think the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to realise that I’d rather love something at arms’ length than to let that love turn me into an objectionable jerk. 

It might surprise people how old many of my story ideas are. This isn’t always the case – next year's High-Rise, for example, was conceived literally days before I pitched it to my publisher, while The Hitchhiker came about because Audible were looking for a contained Wolf Creek type story and I’m a working writer who will say yes to almost anything that secures me a contract, then make the story work after the fact.
 
But other stories have had a much longer genesis. Anyone who halfway knows about my writing life will be aware of the tortured saga that is my dream project Windmills (still yet to be published with no sign of that changing soon). The Hunted, published in 2020, started out as a horror movie concept in 2011. Andromache Between Worlds, published this year, was originally conceived when I was writing the Boone Shepard books in 2013. And Boone himself originated during my high school days, well before those books were published and before he reappeared in Andromache.
 
I don’t think I’ve ever wholesale thrown out one of my older ideas. The truth is, there aren’t that many concepts I’ve seriously considered that I haven’t at least attempted to write at some point, and even if the writing doesn’t go the way I want it to, I’ll usually file it away as something to revisit down the line. As recently as last year I was playing with reviving a concept I came up with in primary school. This isn’t to indicate that any or all of these nascent childhood/adolescent attempts have inherent value, but rather than once I’ve lived in a story for any amount of time it's extremely hard for me to entirely let go. This isn’t to imply that every idea that has ever mattered to me is something I’ll one day pursue (except for Windmills, which it’s fair to assume I’ll be trying to get published until I go into the crematorium), but more that its not uncommon for me to periodically consider whether that half-baked concept I tried to write as a teenager might have something worth exploring today. To be fair, it worked for Boone Shepard. 
 
Part of this is, weirdly, pragmatism. Being an author fundamentally is being a freelancer, and even when you’re in the midst of one contract you’ll tend to find yourself thinking ahead to the next one, to what you might have in your head that could be worth pitching if the need arises. 
 
One concept I’ve come back to a few times over the years is Phoenix. I’ve discussed this one before but to recap; Phoenix was a web series I made with some friends in 2010. It was about five teenagers surviving in a house after a nuclear war. It was shot in black and white and edited on Windows Movie Maker. It was exactly as terrible as you think it was.
 
When I first developed Phoenix, teenage me had planned for an extensive, epic mythology and long-game twists and reveals. I envisioned something enormous and never once considered the limitations of how I’d tried to realise it. So when the series proved to be a bit of a joke among our friends and everyone involved decided they had better things to do than make something that existed to be laughed at, we let the series peter off after just sixteen of a planned thirty episodes.
 
Already the next year I was trying to convince friends to make a kind of ‘rebooted’ version, starting the story again with reimagined episodes. The year after that, I wrote much of my story arc into the first of a planned five book Phoenix novel series. I figured that free from the limits of a no budget web series made by a team with no film experience, all those awesome ideas I’d had would shine.
 
They… did not. I mean I think that book was probably as fine as anything I was writing in 2012 could have been, but I knew I hadn't written anything earth shattering and didn’t feel much inclination to forge on. Until, a couple of years later, I did, making a crack at a second book despite nobody having shown much interest in the first. That too, went nowhere. 
 
The weird thing here is that Phoenix was never one of those ideas like Windmills or Boone Shepard that I loved so dearly I would do everything in my power to see it realised. I don’t think I was ever all that passionate about it. But that’s kind of my point – even Phoenix, I struggled to let go of.
 
The other night I was thinking ahead to what I might move on to once my next Audible is finished. I spun again through the mental rolodex of old ideas and again Phoenix came up.
 
But it struck me that I no longer had that untrustworthy little voice saying “you know, maybe now it could work…” I just didn’t have that feeling of unfinished business or unrealised potential that characterises so much of what I’ve repeatedly returned to over the years. When I open the mental folder branded Phoenix, there’s just nothing in there I want to pull out to re-use.
 
Has time finally taught me to let go of weaker ideas? No. See, the difference with Phoenix is that unlike so many of those other old concepts, I did eventually finish it, just not in the way I would have expected or thought much of at the time.
 
I covered this fairly extensively in a contemporaneous blog post, but in 2021 the cast of Phoenix got together and shot a final episode. There was never any intention for this to see the light of day and it never will, but we did it for ourselves, as a fun exercise in nostalgia. We spent a weekend together, filmed the episode, edited it in Movie Maker (it was important to be faithful to the old style), and then got drunk and watched the whole series from its 2010 beginning to 2021 ending. It was a beautiful little tribute to our formative years that we did purely for us. No, the new episode wasn’t good, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to do it how we used to and put this silly thing that once united us to bed.
 
So the other day, when Phoenix popped up as a concept to potentially revisit, I was pretty quickly able to say “probably not though”. And the reason wasn’t because I felt like there was nothing worthwhile there or that it wouldn’t make for a potentially good YA series with the right tinkering, it was because whatever itch I had to scratch with that story was gone. I’d finished it.
 
In general the stories you tell as a working writer will on some level be dictated by the market. If you release a book that’s part of an intended series only for said book to flop, then there likely won't be a lot of publisher enthusiasm for another. But that doesn’t mean you as the author can just let go. When you put time and effort and care into the development of a story and the characters who populate it, that doesn’t just go away because the story wasn’t as well received as you’d hoped. And that can leave you in a weird position where you are left with a need for catharsis that very few others are demanding and very few options to achieve it. Can you really put time and effort into writing a story that you know will likely never see a public release, at the expense of something that might?
 
The Phoenix finale was obviously a unique case where it wasn’t going to take a huge amount of time out of anyone’s life to make and to boot it would be a fun exercise in nostalgia for old friends who never see each other anymore. Other examples are a bit trickier. When The True Colour of a Little White Lie underperformed, it meant that the sequel I’d already written, A Different Type of Ordinary, had no real path to release, let alone the third book I’d been planning. I’m still vaguely toying with the idea of releasing it online or something, just to let the rest of the story be told, but then I wonder if doing so would distract from the work I should be promoting, and so that book remains in the drawer.

Then there’s Boone. The first Boone Shepard novel did better than it should have. The second was a step down. The third got a stunted print-on-demand release that marked an obvious decrease in quality but meant I got to finish the story and say goodbye. And that’s a prime example of what I’m talking about here – I always knew that Boone himself would reappear in the Andromache novels but he’s effectively a minor character.  Since the release of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice in 2018, I’ve had no desire to try and tell another Boone Shepard story, even as a play or a short story or something. I’m not convinced I could find his voice anymore. When I open the mental Boone Shepard folder, like with Phoenix, there’s nothing there for me anymore. His story has been told.
 
Boone and Phoenix are outliers. As I said before I don’t think I’ll ever let go of trying to get a version of Windmills into the world. Maggie and Jack Carlin, ideally, have a lot of mileage left to go and indeed you’ll get plenty of the two of them in The Lodger and High-Rise. Andromache Peters is just getting started. But I’m also under no illusions here – the moment you’re not just writing for yourself anymore, you don’t have that much say over what comes next no matter how much you might want to write something. 
 
But this is also true; once you’ve started a story, you're compelled to finish it, for yourself as much as for anyone else. If you don’t, it will just keep on bugging you until you find a way to put it to bed. 

It’s no secret that the majority of my fiction takes place in a loosely connected shared universe, and as said connections come more into focus with each new book I get more questions about what counts as part of the mythology, what the reading order is, and exactly how they all connect.
 
So I thought I’d write a bit of an explanation.
 
Firstly, while I do catch myself referring to this as the ‘Maggieverse’, including in the title of this blog, there’s nothing really meaningful or significant in that. My books (and other work, we’ll get to that), don’t form some kind of Marvel-esque interconnected story where each instalment is to some degree needed to understand the inevitable Avengers style team up at the end. There’s no grand plan or intended culmination here. I started linking my stories and crossing over characters because I thought it was fun and I kept doing it because I liked the storytelling opportunities it afforded. For all intents and purposes we’re talking about a bunch of standalone stories that have a few recurring characters and plot threads running through them. You don’t need to have read The Hunted to read The Hitchhiker, or The Caretaker to read next year’s High-Rise. But if you are familiar with several of them you’ll have a different experience when it comes to the crossovers or easter eggs. It’s up to you how much that kind of thing matters to you.
 
But for the curious, here is what you might want to know about those connections.
 
The Maggieverse essentially encompasses any work I’ve done in the crime/thriller sphere since 2020. It currently includes three novels, two audio dramas and a web series. In the next year it will add another novel, another audio drama and a short film. Effectively, it’s everything I’ve written except the Boone Shepard and Andromache Peters books, which take place in their own shared universe that has nothing to do with this one.
 
There are, to date, four main plot threads that run through the Maggieverse. The first is the ongoing hunt of fugitive drafter Maggie for her long-lost mother, which takes centre stage in The Hunted and The Inheritance. The second involves the complicated relationship between rogue ex-cop Jack Carlin and his estranged daughter Morgan – this kicked off in my in 2020 lockdown web-series The Pact, was built out more in audio drama The Consequence, and will wrap up in next year’s action/thriller novel High-Rise.
 
The third involves the ongoing rampage of an avuncular serial killer whose M.O is finding vulnerable, desperate people and subjecting them to his warped version of a self-help programme. This story plays out across audio drama (and soon to be novel) The Hitchhiker, last year’s The Caretaker, and will conclude in audio drama The Lodger later this year. Maggie and Jack Carlin also feature prominently in some of these stories.
 
The final thread is the least explored but the biggest. It runs through the background of The Consequence and The Caretaker, and involves a Machiavellian power struggle over the Melbourne criminal underworld centred around ruthless but charismatic drug dealer Dominic Ford and his various rivals and allies. But so far I’ve only scratched the surface of that one.  
 
As you can see, there aren’t exactly clear delineations between all of these plotlines. Yes, you can loosely characterise certain stories as belonging mostly to one corner of the universe, but in truth plot points and characters cross over so much that it’s a bit murkier than that. As I’ve said before, my philosophy has long been that every one of these stories needs to work as both the first and last time you might see these characters, as a standalone work rather than part of a greater whole. This is partly for artistic reasons, partly for pragmatic ones. I hate the idea of anything I write being a piece of a puzzle rather than a complete work in its own right, but also I need to ensure that if story X flops terribly then I haven’t left a heap of unsatisfying loose ends that might never be resolved.
 
There are a bunch of Maggie and Jack Carlin short stories I’ve written that fall into this continuity but don’t have any huge impact on overall plotlines. The same goes for The Retirement Plan, a short film I wrote which releases later this year and features Jack. It’s 100% part of the universe and if you like the character you’ll probably enjoy it, but it’s not his story, isn’t crucial to his journey and is in no way intended solely for those already familiar with him. Then there’s The True Colour of a Little White Lie, which technically takes place in the same universe but given it’s a teen coming of age dramedy, it includes no major cameos from or references to my various psychopaths and antiheroes.
 
I do maintain a pretty detailed timeline of what takes place when. Chronologically, the order of the most pertinent stories written so far goes: The Pact, The Consequence, The Hunted, The Inheritance, The Hitchhiker, The Caretaker, The Lodger, High-Rise.
 
I don’t want to create the perception that everything I write for adults will further this continuity. For example, I’m currently working on a new crime novel idea that will, like True Colour, take place in the Maggieverse but have no bearing on ongoing storylines and feature no familiar characters. But keeping everything under the same narrative umbrella means I have an increasingly rich arsenal of characters and storylines to draw on when it comes to anything new I begin to develop. That’s not to say I always will, but it’s good to know I can.
 
Again, and I can’t stress this enough, there is no grand plan. It doesn’t really matter what order you consume the stories in, if you read one or three or skip a couple that aren’t for you. There’s no homework required here. Just some links that, if you like my stuff, might be fun. 

WARNING: Contains giant spoilers for Andromache Between Worlds

When it came to writing this blog (similar to one I did for Caretaker last year), I realised that despite being ostensibly a kid’s book, Andromache Between Worlds packs in a lot to discuss. In writing about The Caretaker’s spoilers, it was fairly easy to just move through the main points, but Andromache’s secrets are a little more layered, not least in how they connect strongly to a previous work of mine.
 
So to tackle the big moments, reveals and themes of Andromache Between Worlds, I’m going to break this down into several sections. Starting with the spoiler that, depending on how far back you read my work, will be either the book’s biggest talking point or totally irrelevant. And that, of course, is:
 
The Boone Shepard Connection
 
I’ve never exactly hidden this, but here I can properly delve into the fact that Andromache Between Worlds is, to a not insignificant degree, a sequel to the Boone Shepard Trilogy. By which I mean the main character, Andromache Peters, is the daughter of Boone Shepard, who is of course the long-lost father she spends the book trying to track down.
 
If you don’t know the Boone books then you might be reading this thinking ‘hang on, when the hell was that mentioned?’ Which was kind of the point. Early in the writing process, Boone Shepard and Promethia Peters being the famous parents Andromache has grown up in the shadow of was explicit, but it was decided that linking this book so directly to the old ones could be dangerous, in that it might create the impression that you have to have read the Boone series to read this one.
 
While much of what happened in the Boone books is either directly referenced or has a huge bearing on what happens in Andromache, her parents are never once named, only ever referred to as Mum and Dad. This was to ensure that anyone unfamiliar with the other books wouldn’t be tripped up thinking they’d accidently come in halfway through an ongoing story, while those who do know the Boone books will pick up on the ample references.
 
But even though I used the term before, I don’t think of Andromache as a sequel. Technically it is; the events of this book can’t happen without those of the previous ones, but it’s not a Boone Shepard novel – it’s an Andromache Peters one. It had to be its own thing, never reliant on the tone or events or minutiae of the Boone series.
 
If I’m being honest, early on a lot of the appeal in this book was a chance to return to the Booniverse. I’ve written before about how much those characters and stories meant to me and how sad it was to say goodbye at the end of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice. Revisiting Boone and Promethia and Oscar and Vincent (we’ll get to him) but through the eyes of other characters felt like a great way to see old friends again without undoing the way I concluded their story.
 
Andromache’s earliest genesis was back when I was writing the Boone books. The concept, that years later Boone would be trapped in a parallel universe and his daughter would have to find him, was fully formed as early as 2014. There was never a version of this book that wasn’t connected to Boone, but there were versions that were far more reliant on him.
 
But as I got to know the new characters, they became increasingly dominant, giving this book a style and voice and intention all its own. I wouldn’t call Andromache a ‘torch-passing’ story because I don’t think that’s what happens here. If there is a torch, then Andromache did not need to be given it – she picked it up and ran with it all by herself.
 
Which feels like a good place to talk about:
 
The Central Trio
 
Early on I knew that Andromache would need sidekicks, but didn’t have a clear picture of who they would be. That picture only really emerged as I started to write, and once I found my central trio I fell as in love with them as I have any character I’ve written.
 
I’ll start with Andromache herself. At times, I’ve worried that she might be a somewhat boring protagonist. Her closest comparison among my ‘heroes’, fittingly enough, is Boone Shepard but while they’re both relatively straightforward good guys, Boone has a haplessness and exasperation and depth of pain that Andromache doesn’t. By contrast, I worried that she was a little too good, a little too much of a hero without enough moral ambiguity or quirks.
 
It wasn’t until I listened to the audiobook, read by Ayesha Gibson, that I fully understood how much I like Andromache. And it’s precisely because of the things I worried might be weaknesses in how she was written. Andromache starts the book as a lonely, isolated, unintentional trouble-magnet. She can get nothing right. She can’t make friends. She resents and idolises her parents at the same time. She starts her adventures more or less by mistake and in the first half of the book spends more time running away and fretting than doing much of any worth.
 
But just past the halfway point, when she’s confronted with a seemingly perfect alternate version of herself who is in truth anything but, Andromache comes into her own. Meeting Lady Black terrifies Andromache because it seems to indicate that had things gone differently, she could easily have become a villain. But it’s also this meeting that forces her to step up and decide exactly who she wants to be. Andromache overturns Lady Black’s tyranny through her own ingenuity and it’s this quick-thinking cleverness that propels her through the rest of the book and ultimately saves her father.
 
Andromache is insecure and a little self-involved. She’s also an unambiguous hero who struggles and fails and screws up but wins because of her own brilliance. And while in some ways that might make her seem a little vanilla and traditional, in further books there’ll be plenty of time to muddy those waters.
 
I lucked out with Rylee. I started writing her with very little idea of who she was, but she proved to be one of those characters who just writes themselves and from her first snappy lines to Andromache I was immediately clear on who this person is. Irreverent, dismissive, very intelligent, lacking any kind of filter but wise in an easy, unassuming way that the other characters need.
 
Tobias is a slightly more complex proposition. He starts the brooding and judgemental, but gradually reveals someone more lost and sad, someone who doesn’t so much provide a counterpoint to Andromache’s pain as a reflection of it. I’ve wondered occasionally if he’s not distinct enough from the other two, if he combines Andromache’s inner turmoil with Rylee’s science abilities, but I think that’s a fairly surface level reading. As Tobias points out, the demons he grapples with are very different to Andromache’s and his knowledge of science comes from a place not of passion, but almost desperation. Probably more than the other two, Tobias offers the most potential to explore further in books to come but I liked the contrast he provided; the way he argues incessantly with Rylee but relates to Andromache on a deeper level of mutual understanding.
 
Maybe the most important thing for me is that the three of them together feels right. The bond is there and the way they bounce off each other is fun and warm and provides a strong foundation to further adventures.
 
And speaking of adventures…
 
The Worlds
 
A book called Andromache Between Worlds doesn’t get very far without cool worlds. Outside of the deeper themes about facing your own darkness and grappling with the flaws of your parents and the lies you’ve been told, the big selling point of this novel is ‘dangerous adventures in other universes’.
 
But delivering on this was a bit trickier than just saying ‘what totally mad alternate realities can I come up with?’ The worlds have to be different from each other while also tonally suiting what the characters, particularly Andromache, are dealing with. But more than anything else, they have to be interesting.
 
Apart from Andromache’s own world, which is already a bit more heightened than our own, there are four parallel universes that appear in the book. The first, a world of sea monsters and pirates and a land rendered uninhabitable by natural disasters, is more of a table setter than anything else. Still, I had to have at least a vague idea in my head of its mythology; how it came about, what the key conflicts are and so on. But really, the strangeness of castle-sized warships attacked by giant crabs just felt like a visually distinct and exciting way to introduce the parallel universe concept.
 
The second world, predictably, is my favourite; a version of the Wild West that happens to be overrun by dinosaurs. But apart from allowing me the chance to have pistol duels between cowboys interrupted by rampaging T-rexes, this is also the world where Andromache encounters a beyond impressive version of her mother who seems to be a lot happier without a child. The ‘coolness’ of the world and its parallel Promethia becomes the worst thing Andromache can see; a subtextual suggestion that her deepest fear, that her mother never wanted her, might be true. Of course it isn’t, but there was something fun about wrapping such a grim suggestion up in maybe the craziest of all these other realities.
 
The third world was maybe the trickiest balancing act. Unlike the others, this doesn’t offer an alternate history or flight of fantasy, but rather a status quo that pertains directly to Andromache’s family history and the shared mythology of the Boone novels. Namely, what if at the end of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice, arch villain Vincent Black had won?
 
To work on its own terms the world still had to be drastically different from the one our heroes know. So we have cities built upwards rather than outwards, spiralling into the sky and traversed by orbs dangling from a network of wires. A seeming utopia that, in reality, is anything but.
 
Given how dark and ambiguous the middle section of the book is, I wanted the final world to be a contrast but not to lose the gravity of the situation. A version of reality where Ancient Egypt never fell but instead took over the planet, split the difference perfectly for me. It provided a chance for fun visuals and concepts, but the figure of an antagonistic Pharoah desperate to prove himself as worthy of his ancestors also spoke to the themes of the book and provided a clear ‘villain’ for Andromache to defeat at the end via her own cleverness and, of course, the help of her friends.
 
But the Pharoah was never going to be the real big bad. Nor was Lady Black or the pack of marauding raptors. No, for a story that dealt so heavily with the legacy Andromache carries, I needed a threat who, in many ways, encapsulates the very worst of that legacy.
 
Vincent Black
 
Okay, so here’s a confession. I think the final twist in Andromache Between Worlds might be my best yet. And that twist, of course, is the reveal that kindly scientist Cavanaugh Rogers, seemingly determined to help Andromache bring her father home, is none other than Vincent Black, her father’s greatest enemy. The entire plot of the book has been a ruse for Vincent to find and destroy his nemesis.
 
In the context of this novel, Vincent Black is mainly presented as a shadowy bogeyman, spoken about in tones of hushed fear as the megalomaniac that Andromache’s parents became famous for defeating. Vincent hangs over the book but never actually appears – until he does.
 
But of course Andromache belongs to a larger continuity and so does Vincent. It’s no secret or surprise that The Silhouette and the Sacrifice, published print on demand with a limited budget, was the least read of the three Boone Shepard novels, but those who did check it out have met Vincent before. Vincent was always intended to be the man bad guy of the Boone books (check out the first one again if you don’t believe me; he’s very explicitly set up) but what I always liked about him was that he isn’t some genius who has been pulling the strings all along, but rather the result of Boone’s actions throughout the series. He is not the architect of all Boone’s pain – Boone is, inadvertently, the architect of Vincent’s.
 
If the Boone books were about learning from the mistakes of the past, then Vincent Black was the consequence of those mistakes, the catalyst for the final lesson. And unlike the other, more overtly evil villains in those books, Vincent was wounded and human; ruthless and dangerous and unstable but convinced that he, in fact, is the hero of the story.
 
I think this conviction carries over to Andromache. Vincent appears disguised throughout the book, but it’s only in the final scenes that he is fully revealed and where we properly see just how broken and obsessed he is, how deeply tragic despite everything he’s done. Andromache defeats him by using his own schemes against him, and when she very almost consigns him to the same fate he had planned for her father, it’s Tobias, a longtime victim of Vincent’s deceptions and manipulations, who stops her, keeping him on the board for future books.
 
In some ways, Andromache Between Worlds is the story of a girl learning the full scope of who her parents were, the good and the bad, and having to ultimately decide what she believes about them. And for a lot of the book she is led towards bleak revelations, often by Vincent or those loyal to him. In the end, it was only appropriate that she face her parents’ ultimate foe and in doing so come to understand that her mother and father might be imperfect, but there are far worse things to be.
 
What happens next?
 
When I originally developed the idea for Andromache Between Worlds it was supposed to be a trilogy. Each main world was going to be the setting for one book, with Andromache’s ultimate rescue of her father the ending. Condensing it all to one book was not only a practical decision (better to tell the whole story than risk setting up sequels that might never happen), but a storytelling one – by packing so much into one relatively slim volume, there was no way this book could ever drag or linger in one place too long.
 
The problem, however, is that it hasn’t left many obvious places to take another book, unlike other novels of mine. The first Boone ended on a gigantic cliffhanger. The Hunted left obvious loose ends to be picked up in future books. Even an ostensible standalone like The Caretaker has enough ambiguity at the conclusion to continue the story if I’m ever inclined to.
 
But Andromache is somewhat final, to the point where some reviews have commented on it. The villain is defeated. Andromache saves her father, reconnects with her mother, comes to terms with her parents’ past, and finds real friends. The story is done.
 
But.
 
A lack of an obvious next step doesn’t mean there’s no next step. Infinite parallel universes mean infinite new directions Andromache’s story can take. And while the first book ends with Andromache choosing not to keep adventuring, it would not take much to change that.
 
I have a vaguely outlined theory that among the different types of follow ups a story can have, a ‘true’ sequel is one that finds a surprising angle for continuation in a seemingly complete previous instalment. For example, Before Sunrise ends with our two lovers promising to connect again at the same place in six months. The sequel, Before Sunset, reveals that they did not, but when they meet again nine years later their mutual attraction has gone nowhere. The problem is that now they both have adult lives and responsibilities they didn’t have at 23. Further to this, Psycho ends with Norman Bates seemingly consumed by insanity and locked away in an asylum. Psycho II takes the unexpected route of having a genuinely cured Norman released into society twenty years later, only for that society to refuse to believe in his rehabilitation – a bitter and tragic irony that drives him right back to insanity.
 
By not taking the most apparent path forward, these sequels avoid both repetition and episodic, Marvel-esque storytelling where everything is just a blatant set up for the next instalment, resolution be damned.
 
As such, we will quickly learn that there have been hitherto unseen complications to Andromache Peters rescuing her father, complications that will force our central trio into a whole new adventure. I’ve got a fairly clear outline for the second book and a somewhat vaguer one for the third.
 
Beyond that, who knows? But I hope to find out.
 
 

When I was a kid, there was almost nothing as exciting as getting a new DVD. Living in a country town meant there wasn’t a huge amount of access but every trip to nearby rural cities like Wangaratta or further away to Melbourne came with this tang of excitement because, usually, Mum and Dad would let us buy a movie.
 
At the risk of shocking everyone with the revelation of my being a somewhat weird kid, I would sit in the car on the way back, turning the prize over in my hands, reading again and again what the special features were, analysing the cover art and evaluating how it would look next to other films in the same series (if, of course, it was a franchise instalment). The first thing I’d do upon getting home was ignore all bedtime directives to at least check out what the menu art looked like, to get a tantalising glimpse of the features, maybe of the movie itself. Then it would be telling everyone at school and inviting friends around for a watch party.
 
It's hard now to fully comprehend how exciting a new DVD release in the early 2000s was. It was one thing to be a film fan, but a 2-disc special edition offered so much more than just the movie you loved. Making-of documentaries, deleted scenes, commentaries and so on. One of the reasons the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions are so revered by a generation was the lovingly assembled appendices and how they gave such a complete insight into the making of the films that we ended up feeling like we’d been there alongside the cast and crew.
 
But the truth is, all that stuff was just a bonus. In the end if you wanted to watch something after it left cinemas then DVD was your only way to do it. Whether you wanted to build a library or own a few favourites or just rent something to fill a quiet night, DVD was a necessity.
 
I think the first time I suspected things were changing was around 2006. I would have been 14 or 15, and I still bought DVDs regularly (only now with my own money from after-school jobs and with less hopeful begging of my exasperated parents). I also had some new friends who were fairly internet savvy, and they reacted with faint bemusement at me spending money on movies. Didn’t I know I could just download them?
 
I did not know. Turns out, there was a free and easy (and illegal) way to get any movie or show you wanted. And what was more, it was not reliant on when Australian providers deigned to allow us access. In 2008 everyone my age loved Skins but to watch we either had to wait for a heavily belated DVD release with all the good music changed, scour TV guides for the weird hours it would play on SBS, or illegally download it.
 
Three guesses what we did.
 
In the late 2000s and early 2010s there was a weird tension in how TV shows were consumed, a tension that came to a head with Game of Thrones. In Australia we didn’t have reliable streaming services yet and VOD wasn’t releasing episodes in much more a timely a fashion than DVD or blu-ray. Meanwhile, most of the best shows were only airing on pay TV and even then with a delay from the US release. Which meant that if you wanted to watch Walking Dead or Game of Thrones or Mad Men or Breaking Bad without being spoiled, chances are you were pirating. Providers like Foxtel made a lot of aggressive noise about cracking down on this, but singularly failed to provide a better alternative.
 
Meanwhile, I kept buying DVDs – or, by this stage, blu-rays. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pirating everything I wanted to watch and buying only what I wanted to keep. I was a student and it was impractical to spill every tiny bit of money I had into physical media releases. But I also was a film lover who liked having his favourites on his shelf.
 
I was already being mocked for this. What’s the point, people would ask. I didn’t have much of an answer. At first I would say that it was about quality, that owning something on blu-ray meant better sound or visuals. It did, for a while, but soon download quality caught up. So I would say special features, but that wasn’t entirely true. By this point in my life I was too busy to just sit and watch deleted scenes or making-of stuff.
 
By the time Netflix and Stan and every other streaming service hit our shores, my continued buying of blu-rays was starting to look a bit ridiculous even to me. It was like how I kept buying Empire Magazine years after it stopped having much value to me as a news or behind-the-scenes resource. An exercise in stubborn nostalgia that was, in all likelihood, a big waste of money. But still, if I really liked something I would buy it. Even if it sat on my shelf and was never taken out of its plastic wrapping.
 
It wasn’t until quite recently that I began to understand the value of what I’d kept on doing. I was talking to a friend about the intensely underrated Exorcist III. Convinced, he told me he’d watch it, only to report back that it wasn’t available on any streaming service. Or iTunes or Google Play. Or at a JB Hi-Fi if he wanted to go down the DVD route.
 
Lucky that about a month beforehand I’d spent $70 on a limited-edition blu-ray.
 
I’m being a little facetious, so let’s actually unpack this. The Exorcist III isn’t some universally beloved classic, but it is a cult favourite sequel to one of the most iconic films of all time. And now you can’t see it unless you shell out for a release clearly intended only for hardcore fans or collectors?
 
The blu-ray market for serious collectors continues to flourish, thanks to imprints like Criterion, Kino Lorber, Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome, Shout Factory and more. These companies produce beautifully remastered editions laden with new special effects. Often they’ll release cult obscurities – like my beloved Tammy and the T-Rex, which I also spent a ridiculous amount of money on.
 
But the thing is, these releases aren’t for the average punter just out to watch a movie. They’re like the Folio Society equivalent for movie lovers. The problem is that they’re increasingly becoming the only way that certain films are actually available to the public.
 
Disney recently announced that they would no longer release physical media in Australia. Understandable, given most big retail outlets won’t stock them. Blu-rays or DVDs are now relegated either to niche stores like the wonderful Play Music & DVDs in the city, or else JB Hi-Fi. And look, this has been coming for about twenty years and there’s little point in bemoaning it. Times and technology move on. To most people, physical media is unnecessary and redundant clutter.
 
But the problem with not buying the movies and TV shows you love is that you are now entirely beholden to the whims of whoever owns the rights. There has been a not-insignificant wave of TV shows being edited to remove ‘offensive content’, which would seem noble if it wasn’t a clear and cowardly case of big companies erasing their own less than stellar histories to try and look better. In some cases this spills into pearl clutching and patronising overreach, like one of the best episodes of Community being pulled from streamers over what was reported as but absolutely not blackface. Now, unless you own certain episodes on DVD or are willing to pirate, you might never get to see them again.
 
Even if you’re disgusted by the censored content, it’s hard to see any upside to a corporation deciding what you can and can’t watch.
 
Then there’s the troubling and increasing practice of streamers dropping their own TV shows for a tax write off. Willow, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, Star Trek Prodigy and more have been removed after only months of release because they weren’t seen as big enough hits. These streaming exclusives never got physical releases. So if you ever wanted to watch them again, or even watch them for the first time, your options are less than limited.
 
My point is this; if you love film and TV, then you shouldn’t stop buying physical media. I’m not saying return to the early 2000s way of buying anything you might one day have a vague inkling to check out, but rather grab your favourites whenever and wherever they’re available. Because streamers are fickle and things fall through the cracks. There have been plenty of cases where a movie I want to watch with friends isn’t available on streaming and I’ve (somewhat smugly) been able to pull out the DVD. And that disc you own can’t be edited or changed or removed or slapped with disclaimers about outdated attitudes. It’s just yours, as it is, forever.
 
Physical media won’t entirely die out. Considering the resurgence of vinyl in the past decade I’d be stunned if blu-ray didn’t endure in a similar way. But it’s important that it does endure, because without it there’s a decent chance you’re going to lose a lot of the stories you love to corporate mergers and tax write offs. 

It probably seems strange to anyone on the outside how real an author’s characters become to them but if you think about it, it’s kind of a necessity. You spend hours upon hours with them, learning their backstory, flaws, foibles and qualities. You discover new things and, if you’re lucky enough to revisit them, build upon those discoveries until you know and love them more than you do plenty of real people.
 
But just because a character matters intensely to you doesn’t mean they they will to readers and sometimes this can be a hard thing to reconcile. Usually you’ll get at least some people who respond the way you intended, but often there’ll be voices who either outright dislike your favourites, or else fall in love with the characters you didn’t think were all that special. This, by the way, is no bad thing. If all readers react exactly the way you want them to then chances are you have a pretty dull book.
 
But in thinking about this the other day, I started thinking about which of my characters are my favourites. And while my top five characters are probably somewhat predictable, I think there’s still value to exploring why these fictional people matter so much to me.
 
So, to kick things off:
 
5. Boone Shepard
 
I don’t know that Boone is an enormously interesting character. He’s somewhere between Tintin, Doctor Who and Indiana Jones – an adventuring journalist always dressed in a vest and tie and slightly askew glasses. He’s not that capable or clever or funny. In the crazy world of the Boone books, he’s essentially the straight man surrounded by much more colourful personalities. He has a troubled past and is haunted by deep regrets, but he never really did anything bad.
 
But I think everything I loved and still love about Boone can be summarised by a single scene in the second book, American Adventure. After her defeat, main villain Addison Cane escapes on horseback into the desert. Boone gives chase and Addison gets the drop on him, holding him at gunpoint and demanding to know what Boone is going to do to stop her.
 
Boone’s reply, to me, is why the character has value.
 
“I’ve got nothing, Addison. If you kill me now, that’s it. But at least I know I’ll die trying to stop you.”
 
Boone Shepard is, one some level, a bumbling idiot who fails more than he succeeds. But he tries, always, to do the right thing, even when he can’t or shouldn’t or it makes no sense. Of all my characters I think he’s the one I most wish I was like, because his north star is always his bravery and decency and determination to stand up to evil even if he’s killed in the process. Is that, as a defining trait, somewhat simplistic? Maybe. But I think after years of writing more morally ambiguous antiheroes, Boone’s good heart feels more unique than ever.
 
4. Promethia Peters
 
If Boone is the straight man, then his partner/rival/best friend/love interest is the opposite. Promethia Peters is a brash, loud mouthed, insecure agent of chaos. She’s also one of the first characters I ever encountered who just wrote themselves. Promethia’s absurd approach to life just seemed to spring from nowhere – I never once had to think about what she would say next because she was already saying it.
 
But Promethia, for all that she can be annoying and adversarial, hides a far more tender, sensitive, emotionally intelligent side. At times she would shock me with her insight and ability to, between insults, intuit exactly what Boone was going through and do whatever she could, in her own way, to be there for him. And this led to one of the biggest surprises of my writing life – the love between them that only revealed itself halfway through the writing of the second book and became key to the trilogy’s finale. These two, on every level, were meant to be together and I had no idea until years into telling their story.
 
It's a very mild spoiler, but Promethia reappears in Andromache Between Worlds as an older, more world-weary character. I always knew she would turn up and I was so excited to see her again, but was shocked to find that she didn’t much resemble the character I so adored in the older books. Her humour and irreverence and bull-in-a-china-shop mentality had all been worn away by time and loss. But as the story goes on and the circumstances that so changed her are confronted, flashes of the old Promethia started to emerge and I came to find that her new persona was less a change and more another layer to a woman who is far smarter and more thoughtful than the world she inhabits ever gave her credit for. Promethia’s arc in Andromache, relatively minor though it is, is one of my favourite things about that book and while I believe it will land for new readers, I think the ones familiar with the Boone series will most appreciate the journey she’s been on and the difficult path she takes to come back to herself, albeit a more rounded, complete self than she ever was in the older stories.
 
3. Rylee
 
A slight cheat here. At the time of writing Rylee is yet to make her debut, but she will very soon – as the scene stealing best friend in Andromache Between Worlds. Rylee is a fourteen-year-old Irish science prodigy who is deeply bored by everything around her and has a total inability to be anything other than exactly herself. She’s blunt and no-nonsense and will be as likely to tell her friends that they’re being idiots as she is to deliver exactly the wisdom they need at key moments. She has no insecurities, no demons to vanquish, and absolutely no filter. She will torment rivals with borderline Hannibal Lecter-esque insight and squeal with delight at getting to see dinosaurs, even when they’re trying to eat her.
 
I bloody love her.
 
In some ways she feels like a successor to Promethia, filling a similar role with a somewhat similar personality. But in so many other ways they’re not very alike at all; Rylee’s unapologetically tactless energy gave Andromache a spiky sense of humour that allowed an occasionally heavy book a streak of subversiveness. The novel never would have worked without her and I can’t wait for you to meet her.
 
2. Jack Carlin
 
Some characters just appear on the page fully formed. I spoke before about how strong a personality Promethia Peters had, but that wasn’t true of the first couple of attempts I made at those novels.
 
But Jack Carlin, from his first two-scene appearance in an unpublished crime manuscript I wrote in 2014, was just there. Not long ago I dug up that old document to re-read the prototype Jack and I was shocked at how not a prototype he was. Everything that defines him in my more recent work was already there – the wolfish grin, the cigarette behind the ear, the oversized coat, the unique, gutter-poet way of speaking, the enigmatic moral code. In retrospect, it’s no wonder he made such an impression that I included him in The Inheritance years after his bit-part in a mostly forgotten attempt at a novel. You don’t come across characters like him very often, so when you do you hold on to them, even if the stories they initially appear in go nowhere.
 
Upon his return, Jack more than made up for lost time. In the space of a year he took on an antagonistic role in my lockdown web-series The Pact, gave Maggie some much needed assistance in The Inheritance, and took centre stage in my first Audible Original The Consequence. Across those three stories I learned so much more about him; his fractured relationship with his daughter, his sketchy past as a corrupt cop, his deep-seated guilt and need to atone, his lack of patience or mercy towards what he sees as the scumbags of the world. It was like the most extensive character building exercise possible for High-Rise, which will be his biggest and most important story, a story that I started writing with ease because by this point I know this guy and his rich history so well.
 
Before we reach our very obvious #1, some honourable mentions:
 
Anders, in The Caretaker, was a fun way to puncture the tension but also revealed unexpected depths for a character initially conceived as a slightly quirky, Coen-esque Swedish hitman. Vincent Black, the “final boss” of the Boone Shepard Trilogy, might be my best villain because of how tortured and human and broken he is while still being thoroughly dangerous. Dominic Ford, the charming and Machiavellian drug lord from The Caretaker and The Consequence is a case of a menacing villain whose complex backstory I haven’t yet had the chance to fully reveal – something also true of his fellow Caretaker stablemate Leo Grey, the troubled young author who plays a small but pivotal role in that book but, if I have my way, will play a starring role in a yet-to-be-written one. Julie, the gruff vet who helps Jack Carlin in The Inheritance and The Consequence (and High-Rise) will probably always be a bit-part but I love her every time she turns up. And of course, how could I write a piece like this without mentioning The Driver? In my whole writing life I doubt I’ve ever had a better pitch for a character than “Ned Flanders but a serial killer” and he’s such an irresistible good time that he’s been front-and-centre across The Hitchhiker, The Caretaker and soon, The Lodger.
 
Which brings us to…
 
1. Maggie
 
It couldn’t really have been anyone else, could it? The troubled, taciturn berserker drifter who does her best to do good despite her deep held fear that she is anything but. You don’t write Maggie so much as you unleash her.
 
But it wasn’t really supposed to be like this. In the early versions of The Hunted she was vague and hard to pin down until the moment I started writing her perspective, and immediately she was just there, so clear despite how little I knew about her. Which would seem like a contradiction, except Maggie’s force of personality mattered far more than her undefined backstory.
 
Which did not for a second mean I wasn’t interested in learning more. But Maggie has never given up her secrets easily. The Hunted allowed a glimpse into her brutal childhood. The Inheritance delved a little deeper, in more detail, while also providing tentative access to the more bruised, vulnerable parts of her: the desperate need for someone she can trust, her addiction to violence and disgust at that addiction – or maybe the fact that she’s not more disgusted. And her fragile hope that she can be more than what her horrible childhood turned her into.
 
I think what makes Maggie so special is that I feel simultaneously in awe of and deeply sorry for her. She’s part savage animal, part broken child and the tension between the two sides has, so far, given me no shortage of fascinating territory to explore. After her central role in four books, plus several short stories and plans for future appearances, Maggie is the dominant force in all of my fiction, the backbone of this neo noir wild-west Australia that I write about. Several times I’ve wondered if I’m nearing the end of her story. Every time I’ve been left understanding that there’s so much more I want to do with her.
 
And readers, for the most part, seem to feel the same way. I get asked constantly when she’ll be back. My blatant teases of her next appearances on social media are met with day-making excitement. Not everyone loves her and that’s okay, but I do, intensely, and for that reason I think she’ll be around for a long time yet. 

I’ve spoken before about the early-career mistake that was Boone Shepard’s cliffhanger conclusion. At the time, naïve about the realities of publishing, I assumed an ongoing series was a guarantee so I had no qualms ending that book with my protagonists in an impossible situation with several mysteries still dangling and various set ups that would not pay off until the then theoretical grand finale. It never occurred to me that the book might not sell enough to justify a sequel, and that I very possibly could have ended up with one unfinished, unsatisfying chunk of a story. And very nearly did.
 
Since then, my approach to telling ongoing stories across multiple instalments has changed. My philosophy is to make every book I write as standalone as possible, while trying to split the difference so that character arcs and plot threads continue but each book is a complete story unto itself. Characters like Maggie and Jack Carlin might grow and change and develop across several stories, but each appearance has to function as comfortably the first or last time you might encounter them.
 
Those ongoing threads become trickier to manage the longer they go on. You have to somehow maintain continuity while ensuring that every new story doesn’t require an awkward and clunky info dump to catch up new audiences. And while you might assume that most of my readers will follow most of my stories, that’s not always the case – my Audible Originals, for example, are as crucial to the recurring characters and their arcs as my print novels, but plenty of people who love my books don’t listen to audiobooks. So I can never assume that somebody will, for example, have listened to The Hitchhiker before reading The Caretaker – even if I think doing so makes the latter better.
 
The truth is that the vast majority of authors cannot expect reader familiarity with everything they’ve written. The other truth is that it’s hard to predict which books will be successful and which ones won’t. The Hunted hit far bigger than The Inheritance. High-Rise, the novel I’m working on at the moment, is very much informed by what happened in The Inheritance, but I have to bear in mind that less people read it than read The Hunted or The Caretaker – which also inform High-Rise’s narrative.
 
Is your head starting to hurt just thinking about all this juggling? More to the point, are you starting to wonder whether I’m causing myself more trouble than its worth by interlinking all these stories?
 
If so, you’d probably be right. But the truth is I interlink my stories because I like interlinking stories. I like that Jack Carlin can be a supporting character in one story, the lead in the next, and referenced in the background of the one after that. I like that Hunted/Inheritance protagonist Maggie can walk into a country pub halfway through the seemingly standalone events of The Hitchhiker and hijack the story. I like that The Hitchhiker’s nameless serial killer can turn up a year later in The Caretaker and make the experience of reading that book vastly different depending on whether or not you know Hitchhiker.
 
Connections and crossovers are a lot of fun and can absolutely enrich a story and infuse it with a sense of history. But they can never come at the detriment of the primary story being told.
 
It’s not a line I’ve always straddled well. In preparation for High-Rise, I recently went back and re-listened to The Consequence, my first Audible Original and Jack Carlin’s first big starring role. I like The Consequence a lot, but it never made much impact and I think, in retrospect, that its relationship with other texts is a big part of that. The Consequence is a 30,000 word novella that, while trying to tell its own story, serves as a sequel to my lockdown web series The Pact, a prequel to The Inheritance, and in one subplot a set up for The Caretaker. That is a LOT of pressure for a story that is less than half the length of the already-short Hunted. Probably too much, especially with me tripping over myself to explain elaborate backstories that are more fully depicted in other stories.
 
I think I’ve learned from that. Andromache Between Worlds, for example, takes place in the same universe as the Boone Shepard books and ties into several plot points from them, but in writing it I made the choice to only refer to or use what I absolutely had to from the earlier books, rather than extensively recap them or pack it with characters or storylines that its audience will almost certainly be unfamiliar with. More pertinently, High-Rise is in many ways a direct sequel to both The Pact and The Consequence, but is very limited in what it uses from the former and barely references the latter. I’ll never retcon or contradict anything, but nor will I do an Ahsoka and write something that requires extensive homework to be fully enjoyable to the casual audience.  
 
Do I think the experience of reading my work benefits from being across all of it? Totally. But I have to be realistic. For example; The Pact was in every way a product of the pandemic and suffered from some clunky early episodes that I suspect put off potential viewers. I’m immensely proud of that series, but not many people watched it and I’m keenly aware that resolving its character arcs and cliffhanger ending is not something a huge swathe of people are crying out for. But I want to finish that story and I want to do so in a way that will be entirely satisfying regardless of whether or not you know The Pact exists. If you do, High-Rise is a sequel and a conclusion. If you don’t, it should still be a barnstorming action packed thriller that will leave you breathless and blown away and never once feeling like you’re missing anything. 

2023 saw two of horror’s most iconic properties return to the big screen, both largely sold on now-elderly original stars reprising their most famous roles. And that is roughly where the similarities between Saw X and The Exorcist: Believer end. One is the tenth instalment in a franchise commonly dismissed as cheap torture porn, which dominated the 2000s and has had trouble regaining a foothold ever since. The other is a legacy sequel to the genre’s most respected classic. One is steeped in the convoluted mythology of the many films preceding it. The other entirely ignores all but the first. One is directed by the guy most famous for directing the sixth and seventh instalments in the same franchise. The other, by a former indie darling now best known for successfully resurrecting another faded horror property. One was embraced by critics, sitting comfortably in the eighties on Rotten Tomatoes. The other has been roundly dismissed and only just managed to crack the twenties.
 
And it’s in that last key difference that everything gets a little weird. Because somehow Saw X has become an unexpected critical hit while The Exorcist: Believer is facing the most sneering contempt any Exorcist film has been met with since the largely derided Exorcist II: The Heretic.
 
Clearly it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Blumhouse, Universal and Morgan Creek bet big on David Gordon Green’s return to The Exorcist. Really big – Universal put down $400 million for the rights. And while this is obviously excessive, it’s hard not to see what they thought the potential could be. After all, 2018’s Halloween effectively established Green as the J.J. Abrams of horror – at least, J.J. Abrams circa 2015. A safe pair of hands to revive any dormant franchise thrown at him. Following his two less celebrated Halloween sequels you’d be forgiven for thinking the gamble was maybe a bit misguided, but by then Green’s theoretical Exorcist sequel trilogy was underway, and with the coup that was Ellen Burstyn’s first return to the role of Chris McNeil in fifty years there was no real reason to think the film would not be at least generally well liked. Legacy sequels are easy, right? Follow the beats of the original with new characters and one or two returning veterans, and you have box office gold.
 
Meanwhile the announcement of Saw X was met mainly with eye rolls. In stark contrast to The Exorcist franchise, which has somewhat retained the prestige of the revolutionary original and has at least a couple of cult classics among its relatively conservative output, Saw never got much critical respect. The first film, despite being a Sundance hit, was a nasty if clever low budget thriller that was supposed to go straight to DVD. After becoming wildly profitable, sequels were pumped out yearly, with the contained, restrained charms of the first film giving way to labyrinthine, soap opera plotting that saw every successive film starting right where the previous one left off before regularly jumping back in time to fill in narrative gaps, while the largely implied gore of the first two films was replaced by explicit and extensive dismemberment. Saw ran out of steam with 2010’s gimmicky Saw 3D, then suffered two failed attempts at reboots: 2017’s convoluted and contrived Jigsaw, and 2021’s awful Spiral, which sidestepped established plots and characters in favour of a new and far less entertaining narrative centring a perpetually squinting Chris Rock.
 
It’s worth noting that there is something of a false equivalency when it comes to making any comparison of the two franchises. The expected standards are vastly different. But at the same time, to dismiss Saw X as a comparatively low bar to clear ignores the fact that not even hardcore Saw devotees liked the last three films in the franchise, let alone mainstream critics. That, clearly, has not been the case with Saw X, the success of which looks even more unlikely when you consider that its setting between the first two films necessitates an 80-something Tobin Bell playing a 50-something John Kramer and a 50-something Shawnee Smith playing a 20-something Amanda Young. Another similarity then; like Believer, Saw X is also a direct sequel to the first film, but it still embraces the minutiae and mythology of the entire series. It is a surprisingly savvy move, one which makes the film accessible to new audiences while ensuring there are plenty of nods to the old.
 
Ironically, Believer might have fared better if it had taken more cues from the previous franchise extensions it was so quick to dismiss. Say what you will about the Exorcist sequels, but each one of them tried very hard to do their own thing, building on William Friedkin’s original without emulating it. None achieved the same impact as the first, but The Exorcist III is increasingly recognised as a horror classic in its own right while Paul Schrader’s Dominion (one of two attempts at an Exorcist prequel based on the same script) tends towards the evaluation of being an interesting failure, a backhanded compliment Believer couldn’t even earn.
 
It doesn’t help that The Exorcist already had a pretty great legacy sequel doing just about everything Believer does only better, in the form of the tragically short lived 2016 TV series. Both versions even feature an older Chris McNeil estranged from Regan due to the ways in which she capitalised on their traumatic experiences (arguably neither version is true to the established character). But the TV series, despite having neither Burstyn nor Linda Blair involved, was far superior, coming up with compelling new frights and new characters who, given time to develop, could have become icons in their own rights.
 
Look, nobody would have expected David Gordon Green to adhere to the continuity of a cancelled television series, and to be fair it’s not like he erases The Heretic or The Exorcist III so much as just doesn’t reference them. But the involvement of Burstyn plus his track record of culling the whole Halloween canon after the original film comes with an inescapable subtext – that this was supposed to be the true sequel to Friedkin’s classic. But as too many Terminator films have learned to their detriment, if you’re going to overwrite or implicitly position yourself as superior to other properties in the same franchise, especially ones with passionate defenders, then you’d better be offering something pretty excellent in their stead.
 
Believer does nothing new. Having two possessed girls rather than one only serves to involve more extraneous characters in the story. And the attempt to make the act of exorcism more one of ‘community’ than of Catholic doctrine, allowing the involvement of multiple faiths, is not only weirdly misty-eyed for an Exorcist film, but comes off as a cheap attempt to pander to 2020s sensibilities rather than honour the intention of the original. After all, author of both the original novel and screenplay William Peter Blatty was a devoted Catholic and while it’s testament to the power of his work that it is still powerful and gripping to non-believers, producing a ‘true sequel’ in which the Catholic priest cries in the car while the other religious representatives bravely take on the demon does not help alleviate the vague sense that Green had no real understanding of the film he was making a sequel to.
 
Then there are the characters, none of whom compel or move like Damian Karras, a priest losing his faith and belief in his own decency, or Chris McNeil, a staunch non-believer forced to confront the impossible in order to save her daughter. In Believer, our protagonist essentially repeats Chris’ arc. The parents of the other possessed girl are rendered so one-dimensional and unlikable it’s hard to care at all about their plight, and none of the various exorcists come close to the compromised, complex heroism of Fathers Karras or Merrin.
 
Ellen Burstyn remains, at ninety, a transfixing screen presence, but whatever the trailers led us to believe she is barely in the film. She turns up for about five minutes before being sidelined in a way that aims for shocking but just feels distasteful, then is forced to deliver a truly awful monologue outlining the film’s half-baked themes, apparently written with the assumption that if Burstyn delivers it audiences will take it seriously. The actress, and the character, deserve better.
 
Contrast this with Saw X’s treatment of Tobin Bell. True, the return of the Jigsaw Killer is nowhere near as big of a deal as Burstyn’s – we last saw him in 2017’s Jigsaw and he had been prominent in all seven films preceding that – but Saw X does something quietly innovative and makes him the protagonist. This time around we’re in Kramer’s shoes from the start. A lengthy first act shows him grappling with his cancer, the hope and desperation of being offered a miracle cure, the devastated rage when he realises it was all a scam. By letting us follow Kramer, a neat trick is played on the audience – to paraphrase the largely execrable Saw IV, we’ve been invited to ‘see as he sees’. And so when he starts raining down twisted justice on the scammers, it’s hard not to cheer him on.
 
There have been some critiques of Saw X positioning Kramer as a hero, but that’s not quite what the movie is doing. Consider Amanda’s conflicted feelings about their treatment of drug addict Gabriela, clearly damaged and in over her head with the con, and how Kramer coldly dismisses them. Gabriela makes Amanda – and us – question just how far we’re willing to support Kramer here, as does the third act involvement of a completely innocent party in the game. Yes, it’s true that next to those who masterminded the fraud Kramer is the more sympathetic party, but Saw X regularly plays notes of discomfort that stop us from siding with him completely.
 
But maybe the most striking thing about Saw X is how, despite being a direct follow up to the first film, it refuses to fall into the trap of eschewing the less loved parts of the franchise. No, it doesn’t pay much tribute to Jigsaw or Spiral, but fan-favourite Kramer successor Mark Hoffman not only makes a post-credits scene appearance but is an off-camera player throughout the film, and the entire premise, of Kramer seeking an experimental therapy from a Norwegian doctor, has its origins in a Saw VI flashback where he attempts to get coverage for that exact treatment from his unscrupulous insurance company. In that film, when denied, Kramer retorts that he has money and can pay for it himself, inviting audience questions about why he didn’t. But by revealing the treatment to be a fraud, Saw X offers an explanation, not only tying itself closer to the history of the franchise at large, but doing so in a way that never once alienates casual viewers.
 
There has been an admirable reticence on the part of Saw’s producers to hit the reboot or retcon button. Even Jigsaw and Spiral, which positioned themselves as new starts for the series, still take place in the continuity of the first seven films. Saw, then, is the only horror franchise to reach ten films without ever once walking back or ignoring its less loved chapters. It’s one of the reasons why, despite the low critical ratings each new film might earn, fans remain passionate and invested.
 
As such it must be noted that Saw X’s unprecedented high critics score was almost certainly informed by a new generation of critics with fond memories of the older films. There’s no way this instalment is an improvement over the original, Saw II or Saw VI. It's not even an especially good movie, but it is a good Saw movie and a lot of this is due to the fact that, unlike Spiral, it’s not embarrassed to be a Saw movie.
 
Which should not suggest that dogmatic adherence to canon is inherently a virtue. In fact, The Exorcist franchise in all forms has always ignored everything but the original – Blatty’s III made no reference to John Boorman’s II, and while those movies could coexist without contradiction by merit of focusing on different characters, the plots of both Paul Schrader’s Dominion and Renny Harlin’s alternate version The Beginning directly undermined what Boorman did.
 
Nobody is claiming that Believer would have been better had Green embraced the entirety of The Exorcist’s messy cinematic history. But the bitter irony is that his true failing was not embracing their shared mandate; to use the story Blatty started as a foundation for something new.  
 
It’s almost counterintuitive – that the less prestigious film franchise flourishes by leaning into its history while the ‘classier’ one arguably needs more radical, divergent takes to impress. But then, the first Exorcist was special precisely because nobody had ever seen anything like it before. That high standard leaves only one certainty – that following it by trying to do the same thing without a comparable level of originality is doomed to failure.
 
No, David Gordon Green should not have packed his film with callbacks to The Heretic. But he could have taken a lesson from that film’s willingness to swing for the fences. The interesting failure will always be preferable to the boring success, but Green’s film achieves neither.