Gerda and the Darkness Published in Death +70

My story Gerda and the Darkness was recently published in Death +70, the rather curiously titled anthology from the equally curiously titled imprint Harvey Duckman Presents. This is a collection of eighteen stories by a variety of authors, whose theme is described as “Tantalising Tales from Beyond the Apocalypse”.

The publisher describes it as “a disturbingly dark collection of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, rich in zombies and plague, wasteland raiders and alien invaders, lost tech and ancient lore, nuclear Armageddon, the end of the world and beyond…”

Needless to say, I’m delighted to be in the anthology, especially as this is a story I’ve been trying to get published for some time. I wrote it ten years ago and was delighted and proud of it — but it was only after racking up nineteen rejections that Harvey Duckman finally accepted it.

Realistically, I have a good idea why markets may not have been falling over themselves to publish this story. Rather than being written in the immersive style popular today (and my more common approach to fiction), Gerda and the Darkness is more like a folk tale with a more traditional storytelling approach.

I’m realistic enough to understand this wasn’t my most saleable story —though more so than my still-unsold second person, future-tense piece (another one I still believe in). So It’s wonderful that Harvey Duckman seem to have seen in it what I always saw.

Nevertheless, it’s a little surprising that they saw it as fitting into this particular anthology. Although there is a hint of the dystopian, it’s definitely an outlier in the collection.

I don’t remember clearly what motivated me to write it, but one inspiration was probably the opening lines of Paul Simon’s song The Sound of Silence¹: “Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.” Allegedly (although I’ve no idea if this is true) it was a regular saying of a blind friend of Simon’s musical partner Art Garfunkel.

The story concerns Gerda, a young woman who lives in a traditional-style Scandinavian village on the hills above a fjord. No specific location is ever given, and I tend to think of it as a parallel version, rather than a real-world Scandinavia.

As a child who’s a bit of a loner, Gerda meets and befriends an entity called Darkness. Far from being scary or menacing, the Darkness becomes a good friend, telling Gerda endless stories, including some about the ultimate dark beyond any stars, which she loves.

When Gerda is a young woman, the community is threatened by raiders — but raiders like none they’ve heard of before. These come from a highly industrialised and urbanised society, with hints that it’s an expansionist dictatorship, who intend to exploit the land for its mineral wealth. And the people are simply in the way.

Without giving away any spoilers, it’s Gerda and the Darkness who save the day, and Gerda is rewarded with a somewhat twisted (but genuine) heart’s desire.

Gerda and the Darkness, along with the other seventeen stories, is available from Amazon as a Kindle, a paperback or a hardback. You can find it on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com — or just tweak the URL to fit your country’s version of Amazon.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it

¹ The title has been variously given as The Sound of Silence and The Sounds of Silence. I believe the singular version was Simon’s title of choice.