My mystery thriller novel Death Nest has recently been published. With all the will-readers-like-it anxiety that comes with a new release, this one particularly has my stomach in knots, as it is one of my most “personal” novels. Written in early 2020, I experienced an unusually intense time getting it on the page, in a way that hasn’t happened with any other novel. This one felt painful to write, and by the end, I was exhausted, emotionally drained, and didn’t even care if the manuscript was any good.

In the aftermath, for the first time ever, I found myself unable to write fiction. The voices in my head, normally yelling over each other to be heard, fell silent. It was frightening. I was worried I’d done a Truman Capote and wouldn’t be able to write anything of significance ever again. This lasted for the rest of 2020, and when I finally got back on the horse the following year, I was terrified. Could I write another novel?

Thankfully, I could. In retrospect, certain other factors besides those I’m about to discuss doubtless contributed to my inability to write in 2020. A global pandemic and redundancy from a day job in television I’d held for over twenty years will do that for you. Nonetheless, Death Nest (or The White Nest as it was tentatively titled in those days) carried a lot of personal baggage. When I finally reread the manuscript, it was much better than I remembered, and whilst I could see a fair bit of raw nerve jabbing in the story, for anyone else reading, I suspected they wouldn’t detect the same anguish. Instead, I hoped they’d think of it purely as a nail-biting mystery with hints of the supernatural, akin to previous novels I’d published, like Spectre of Springwell Forest and The Irresistible Summons.

Of course, describing a novel as “personal” is a little silly, as I consider all my fiction writing personal in some way. At the same time, I would be foolish not to acknowledge when a story is more directly rooted in personal experience. Children of the Folded Valley, my most successful book to date by far, was previously the most “personal” of my novels, as it is directly informed by some of my own experiences. In contrast, Death Nest is every bit as personal, if not more so, but not on a literal level. It is personal on a metaphorical, emotional level.

What’s it about?

The narrative concerns a widower who fears his young son is cursed when he shows disturbing behaviour akin to that of the widower’s younger brother, before he vanished without a trace in a supposedly haunted forest, twenty years previously. In fact, the protagonist, Nick, thinks there’s been a curse on his entire family ever since his late entrepreneur father developed land considered sacred in pagan folklore into a theme park.

The novel flashes back to coming-of-age incidents in Nick’s early teenage years, including his first love. Several mysterious incidents feed into the subsequent narrative, including the baffling disappearance of Nick’s younger brother. Nick has felt a weight of guilt and responsibility for years, as he was in the forest with his brother when he vanished, but has no memory of what took place, beyond a vivid recollection of fleeing the forest in terror, covered in blood and bruises.

Why is this one so personal?

Fears that Nick’s young son will end up likewise being lost are at the core of why this novel is personal to me. Time to grit my teeth and tell you the personal stuff: My youngest brother, ten years my junior, went on a deep dive into drugs during his mid-teens. He got worse and worse, and wound up being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. My parents had to have him sectioned in late 2005. They had no choice, as he’d come to believe they were trying to kill him, and he was living in their coal shed with a plastic bin bag of items that weren’t “contaminated”.

Seeing this happen to my beloved younger brother, with whom I had once been so close, was distressing beyond my ability to put into words. His “disappearance” in this respect has often felt worse than death. I have grieved him many times, and also felt a sense of guilt over it for complicated reasons. For instance, I wonder if my partying days as a teenager (which didn’t involve drugs) were something to which he aspired. In my darkest moments, I ask painful questions: Was my love for drug-addled bands like The Prodigy a bad influence? Was I wrong to show him Trainspotting, a film I thought condemned drug use, but that he later claimed turned him on to drugs?

Flash-forward several years, to 2019. In my youngest son, I see eerie parallels to my youngest brother. He is sharp, quick-witted, and shares the dark sense of humour my brother had at the same age. He is incredibly clever, just like my brother was before his brain was destroyed by drugs. Complicating matters, my youngest son has an autism diagnosis, and is struggling in many respects, in school (with school culture rather than academically), in self-esteem, and socially. I sense the walls of a world hostile to the neuro-diverse moving in to crush him, and I am powerless to help.

An upsetting dream proved a catalyst for the novel

Whilst on holiday that summer, I had a vivid and profoundly upsetting dream. This dream appears, in a slightly modified form, in the novel. I saw my youngest son as an old man, holding the toy dinosaur we’d bought him that holiday, which he loved. In the dream, I know that my wife and I, and his older brother, are all long since dead. I saw him alone, with no wife, children, relatives, or friends. He sat in a room filled with packed boxes, and an orderly from an old person’s home arrived to take him away. My son put down the toy dinosaur on his chair as he stood. The orderly asked if he wanted to bring it, but my son shook his head, saying he didn’t need it anymore. The last connection with the halcyon days where he shared in the love and laughter of our family had been severed.

I awoke from this dream. It was early, and everyone else was still asleep. I took a shower, then curled up in the corner as the water ran, overwhelmed with grief. Everything collided in my head; the grief of what had happened to my younger brother, and the anguish I felt at this vision of a possible future for my youngest son. I didn’t necessarily expect my son to get into drugs, but I feared he would wind up in a future where he was completely alone. It was unbearable. I daresay anyone who loves their child would feel the same.

The upshot

When I wrote Death Nest, it was an exorcism of sorts; a cathartic exercise in turning these complicated emotions — grief over my brother, fear for my son — into a page-turning mystery. As I indicated earlier, I hoped that the anguish in which this story was conceived would not register with those who read the novel. So far, that appears to be the case, as not only was the beta-reader feedback for Death Nest overwhelmingly positive, but it was taken exactly how I had hoped, as a gripping and sinister thriller.

I hope you’ll forgive me for being so personal in this article. I wanted to provide a glimpse into what was ultimately a positive experience that helped me come to terms with some of these complicated feelings concerning my brother and my son. I don’t pretend to be a psychiatrist, and I know everyone will approach such personal matters differently based on personality, temperament, upbringing, culture, and so on. However, writing fiction is a powerful tool that has helped me process a lot of difficult feelings and events. I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing this.

I hope this has been insightful. My novel Death Nest is out now in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon (click here for the UK, and here for the US). It’s also available from Smashwords and their various outlets.

NOTE: This article originally appeared in The Writing Cooperative on Medium.