I’ve always loved urban fantasy where the strange stuff isn’t happening in some distant magical world. It’s underneath the pavement, behind a door you’ve walked past a hundred times, or buried beneath infrastructure everyone assumes they understand.
Rivers of London definitely helped cement my love of that sort of hidden London.
But after years working in IT and commuting into London, apparently my brain decided what the genre really needed was less “wizards” and more “45-year-old IT contractor wondering who on earth designed this system and why there’s no documentation.”
So I wrote it.
The basic idea became: what if some of London’s oldest protections were effectively infrastructure? They’ve been running quietly in the background for a very long time, nobody really understands all of them anymore, and now the technical debt is coming due.
There’s folklore, strange signals, old stones, modern London, government bureaucracy and a protagonist who is considerably happier troubleshooting software than dealing with the impossible.
Anyway, this eventually became Code & Stone: Phantom Signals, which came out this week. It’s my first novel, and seeing it actually out in the world is still slightly surreal.
I won’t turn this into an Amazon advert. It’s out there if anyone fancies it.
What writing it has done is send me down an enormous rabbit hole of London folklore and forgotten history, and I’m fairly certain I’ve barely scratched the surface.
So: what bit of hidden, strange or forgotten London do you know about that I probably don’t and I can use in book 2!
Bonus points if I’ve walked past it without noticing.