Normal: Some Influences

Some of you may have already read Normal, some of you have bought it, some of you may not have even heard of it, but I thought it would be interesting to share where some of the ideas within come from.

Normal was one of the novels where I had a premise, but little else for a long time. Both Dead Branches and Is She Dead in Your Dreams? feature missing kids. I wasn’t done with that idea, as there was something else I wanted to explore: what happens afterwards? What would life be like for someone who came back?

In part, this may have come from the end of Stranger Things Season 1. After Will returns, there is a hint that there is something residual there. I didn’t want the same kind of attachment or residue in Normal. In fact, for a long time while I was plotting the story, what had happened to Ted before the beginning of the story was unknown to me. Without picking titles deliberately, I started to notice that there were some stories out there that dealt with the aftermath.

I had some quite significant reservations about another adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House after the 1990s film, but the TV series was brilliant. One of the reasons why it was successful was because what happened at Hill House was merely a starting point for future traumas. Their lives are irrevocably changed by the events in the house. The way each member of the household is affected is explored in detail, and it’s fascinating.  

When you look at many horror movies, if there is a ‘next’ it is because there is another wave of the same experience for the protagonist, so this wasn’t really what I was looking at. It is quite fascinating to see how survivors of horror movies are treated in further parts of the series when they’re not part of the main narrative of a sequel. Some are experts helping the new bunch of potential victims, others are talked about as if legends, some are crazy, and others are simply bumped off in the first few minutes of the sequel.

One novel which tackles the next step particularly well is Kealan Patrick Burke’s Kin. It starts where something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ends. The survivor, Claire, is picked up on the side of the road, and the early chapters are spent wondering whether she will survive her horrific injuries and the trauma of the terrible experience. We find out how someone escaping affects the perpetrators and we discover what happens next. It’s gruesome in places and a hard read due to some of the terrible things Claire has suffered, but for me it showed me that you could very much write a novel about an aftermath, and do it well.

In Normal, I wanted all of the members of the family to have very different feelings. With Simon, the father, I had this idea that he would not feel 100% sure that the boy that had been returned was really his son. For seven months, having Ted back is everything he has wanted, but Simon’s not a man who is used to getting what he wants. When he finally does, his brain cannot accept this, and he starts to seek evidence to say that he hasn’t got the thing he wanted at all.

This allowed me to explore an idea that had been in my head for a long time. I don’t know how much of this is true, but before they made that very safe remake of The Omen in 2006 there was a concept going around that I thought would be quite brilliant. One way of trying to put a twist on a story can be to throw the word ‘not’ into the concept.

So instead of the following concept: A father decides he must kill his son who is the Antichrist.

We have the following: A father decides he must kill his son who is NOT the Antichrist.

We have a very different story here – a man who loves his son very much is corrupted by outside influences, and as a result starts to think about doing the truly unthinkable.

Finally, Lola’s story. Ted’s little sister ended being my favourite character while I was writing the story. I had the early part of her journey plotted out in my head before any of the others. When Ted returns, she becomes a target for a bully. I wasn’t expected that to be quite so harsh, or for Ted to be pulled into it in the way that he was. I can’t help but think the novella I read pretty much before I started the major writing of Normal inspired me here. I’d read James Newman’s Odd Man Out about a year or so earlier, and when I saw all of the buzz around Silver Shamrock Publishing’s In the Scrape by James Newman and Mark Steensland, I knew I had to read it.

I just so happened to have several hours on a coach from Normandy, France back to Cambridgeshire, UK with a group of remarkable well behaved students, and I was able to read the novella in pretty much one sitting (we had one rest stop while I was reading). The presentation of Jake and Matthew in that novella is superb, and the two are them are put through one hell of a rough ride during the novella. Without a doubt, some of that definitely rubbed off on me when I was exploring how things would work out for Ted and Lola.

There are a ton of other influences in the novel, some of which I’m fully aware of, others have no doubt slipped in there subconsciously.   If you’re interested, check out some of the titles above and let me know what you think of them.