Revisiting The Hunted

With each book you write the process changes, but for me it always tends to follow the same rough trajectory, one it’s all too easy to compare to a relationship. The initial idea is like a flirtation. You need to know that there’s enough there to actually commit to writing the thing, so you think about it and get carried away with daydreams and imagine what it could be. Then you decide to get involved and this is where it can be anything from smooth and exhilarating to tough and uncooperative to, most likely, something in the middle – but it will still consume your world. It will still be the majority of what you think about and talk about, whether you’re celebrating the process or complaining about it.
 
By the time of the edit, when you’re re-writing and re-reading and scouring for mistakes, you’re probably going to resent it just a bit. Even a story you’re entirely proud of you’ll end up reading so many times that it loses all excitement. You’ll second guess yourself. You’ll think it was all a terrible mistake. Then the book comes out and people either like it or don’t and your perspective will shift just enough to make peace with the whole thing, and then you’ll move on. Down the line, when enough time has passed, you might be able to revisit it with a new point of view and walk away either proud or at least knowing you learned a lot. In my experience, you’ll ultimately have some fondness for even the ones that didn’t land as you’d hoped.
 
The above metaphor holds true in the case of every one of my novels except The Hunted, because my relationship with that story remained intense and all-consuming long after the logical end of my journey with it. And not, in all honesty, because I particularly wanted it to be.
 
When The Hunted was acquired for publication in 2019 it kicked off a whirlwind that upended my life. At the time I was also asked to adapt the screenplay version for the company that initially acquired the film option. This meant that I was still writing and rewriting versions of The Hunted for more than a year after it was released. And even after the film changed hands and I stepped back from the script, I ended up reading multiple other people’s adaptations. All of which is to say that I’ve never really had any space from The Hunted because I seem to step back into it every few months, even if I’m not actively writing it myself.
 
But as I started on Maggie’s finale The Reckoning, there were key details I needed to remember and so, whether I wanted to or not, I had to re-read the original novel.
 
This, to be blunt, was a slog.
 
When I re-read the Boone Shepard books a couple of years back there were subplots and characters and lines and ideas I’d forgotten, which came as pleasant little surprises (or less pleasant ones in some cases). That wasn’t really true of The Hunted because I’ve gone through this story so many times that every beat of it is effectively chiselled into my memory. There were little touches I didn’t remember and certainly some lines and details that are helpful for The Reckoning, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed reading it again. It didn’t feel like a chance to reappraise the book with time and distance, it just felt like the millionth time I’ve gone through it.
 
Which probably makes it sound like I hate the book. I don’t, at all. How could I? Without The Hunted I don’t have the life or career I love. I owe that book so much. And honestly, in the times I was able to get swept up in the re-read, all I felt was pride. The Hunted absolutely rips. There’s a reason it’s my signature novel, the reason nothing else I’ve written quite hit the way this one did, a reason filmmakers have wanted it since before it was released. The pace is savage, the characters strong, the style vivid. On release it was called relentless a lot and I think that is so true of it. I wrote The Hunted at a time when I had nothing to lose, when every other idea I’d tried to break through with had hit a dead end. I think my state of mind at the time of writing gives the book a raw savagery and desperation and ‘I-don’t-give-a-fuck’ recklessness. I didn’t expect The Hunted to be a success and that’s the reason it was. It shatters rules and pushes limits and falls apart if you dig too deep, but sees itself out with a defiant blood soaked scream and a raised middle finger.
 
This created a conundrum that still needles me. If The Hunted was a product of the kind of lawless abandon you only get when you have nowhere else to turn, then by the time I wrote The Inheritance I was working on steadier ground, reasonably sure of myself and of my career. That book, as I’ve discussed before (and will discuss more when I shortly re-read it) did not do as well as its predecessor. But in almost every regard, I like The Inheritance more. I think its characters are deeper and its writing richer. The Hunted arguably gives more dimension to its cast than it strictly needed to, given the kind of book it is, but the characters are still ultimately sketches, reacting to terrifying circumstances without much time for introspection. Even Maggie, who is easily the most interesting character in the book, feels more arms-length here than she does in any of her other appearances. Yet I still suspect that had The Hunted gone deeper or more vulnerable with any of them it wouldn’t have worked and it wouldn’t have got a sequel.
 
Likewise from a structural standpoint – it breaks just about every rule of storytelling I was ever taught. It jumps back and forth between two timelines despite there being no real mystery about where the ‘then’ story ends up. It has at least three characters who could be called the protagonist depending on where we are in the story – one of whom is taken off the board before the halfway point, another of whom is a borderline psychopath, the third of whom becomes roundly ineffectual in the final act. The antagonists are about as surface level as it’s possible to be. A lot of this is down to how it was written; it was essentially two different novellas written months apart and intertwined with each other to make something that vaguely resembled a book. Nothing about it should work. But somehow it does and while I can’t quantify exactly why that is, I think it’s to do with the pulsating spiky darkly funny rock-and-roll energy of the thing. There are several lines where on re-read I actually gasped out loud wondering how the hell I got away with them. One thing that is often overlooked about The Hunted is that there is a gigantic vein of black comedy in the thing, and I suspect that’s why so much of its excess and refusal to play by the rules is forgiven.
 
The scrappy savagery of The Hunted is what made it special yet it can’t be replicated; paradoxically because the success of the book has left me in a place where I don’t think I can write quite the same way again.
 
That’s not a bad thing. I’ve never felt compelled to try and re-create whatever it was that made The Hunted hit so hard. High-Rise, with its one-night-one-location punch, probably comes the closest but it’s a different, more disciplined, more considered book. Of course it is. I’m a different, more disciplined, more considered writer to the broke struggling desperate playwright of 2017, when I first wrote about a berserker girl called Maggie and a town of human hunting hicks because all my attempts at being a serious literary author had fallen flat. To return to a possibly strained metaphor, you can’t start a new relationship trying to retrace the steps of an old one. Down that road madness and resentment lies.
 
Maybe what is so unique about The Hunted is that it’s the literary relationship of mine that has lasted the longest and yet it’s never been my favourite. I’ll always prefer the introspection of The Inheritance, the heart of Andromache or the personal nature of The True Colour of a Little White Lie. But The Hunted has something wild and hard to define that none of those ever did. The place I had to be in to write it isn’t somewhere I have any interest in revisiting, but in retrospect it’s hard not to be grateful. Without it, I wouldn’t be here. 

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