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In writing my first book 'Necromantra' I wanted to combine a love of fantasy fiction with a love of the area – a little like Tolkien meets Arthur Berry.

When it first came out, in a rush of artistic blood, I described the feel of the novel as "Arnold Bennett meets Edgar Allen Poe, but they meet in Kafka's terrace in Burslem!"Ìý But some people took that to be the plot of the book!

Gothic

Actually 'Necromantra' is kind of a gothic adventure where the dead are brought back to life, ghosts haunt gravediggers in the form of rats, and nameless forces lie in wait deep beneath the cobbled streets in a murky nineteenth century world of pot-banks, pits, and canals.

And yes, there are oatcakes…

So the book is intimately connected with North Staffs, to the extent that one of Hanley Library's two copies is housed in the local history section.

And how do I know North Staffs so well? Born (in the Fanny Deakin Hospital in Chesterton) and raised in North Staffs, I now teach creative writing for what used to be the Department of Adult Education and is now the Centre for Continuing and Professional Education at Keele University.

Local

Equally fitting is the fact that, after doing the rounds of publishers across the globe, it found a home with a Stafford-based publisher, Immanion Press.

Mind you, this still left a difficulty. Although there's only a light smattering of Potteries dialect in the book, Immanion had no native speakers to proof-read my manuscript.

It was left to me to approach an old tutor and valued friend, Geoff Sutton, once a lecturer in creative writing at Crewe & Alsager College.

An expert eye

Geoff cast an expert eye over the manuscript - and didn't mark down the odd 'tha' as a spelling error.

I said that 'Necromantra' is my first novel, but in a sense it's my second. My first novel, 'The Shadow Cycles' is far more complex, with many more characters and a much more convoluted structure.

However, as a teacher of creative writing, I advised myself that it was no place to start writing novels.

Thus, although 'Necromantra' was written first, in some ways it's my second novel. Hum... Perhaps that should've been Arnold Bennett meets Lewis Carroll?

Phil Emery

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For more details about the book, visit the Immanion Press website by clicking on the link below: