My new YA novel, The Last Thing You’ll Hear is a contemporary thriller, crammed with sibling rivalry, obsessive fandom, toxic cults, and an enigmatic music guru who exploits two musical sisters in an attempt to lure teens to mysterious festival, Enrapture. It’s loosely based on the tale of the Pied Piper, but at its heart, it's a story about the power of music, and the things that influence us when our identities are still forming.
I’m a huge music fan, an obsession that started in my teens. Around the age of sixteen, I discovered live music, and there was no looking back. I just missed the rave scene (too young) but I was a committed ‘indie kid’ throughout the nineties, and not a week went by when I didn’t go to a gig of some sort, whether at a local pub, a dingy venue, or a big Birmingham club (blagging my way in with dodgy fake ID). If I wasn’t watching bands play live, I was in my bedroom, playing (badly) on my guitar or making carefully curated mixtapes for my friends, hoping to tweak their tastes until they were as obsessed with my latest find as me.
My dream was to go to a festival. What could be better than hundreds of bands, days of live music, all in one place? Festivals of all sizes are everywhere now, but back then there were none near the small corner of Shropshire where I grew up. Glastonbury was the holy grail, but tickets were ridiculously expensive (no change there…). It seemed like my festival dream was out of reach.
It's a similar story for Wren, the main character in The Last Thing You’ll Hear. Wren lives in Hamlington, a fictional place based on my home town and a nod to Hamelin, from the Pied Piper story. Nothing ever happens in Hamlington, so when Wren and her friends learn about new, upcoming festival Enrapture, they’re desperate to go.
There’s something special about a festival, and the Hamlington teens know it. As Wren muses to her best friend Danny, going to Enrapture could ‘change her life’ – and not just because, as a young singer-songwriter, there’s a chance she might get to play on the emerging artists’ stage. Festivals are magical spaces. They exist in their own distinct reality, separate from dreary daily life. When Wren first sets foot inside Enrapture, she likens it to Narnia or Wonderland, overwhelmed by the brand-new world around her:
‘My brain is buzzing and my senses are stirring. I want to absorb every tiny detail, lie down in the parched grass and soak up every sound and smell and sensation. We’re in a cut-off world of no rules and no adults where anything could happen, where our worries could dissolve and our problems disappear…”
That’s why festivals are so seductive: Anything can happen. For a short while, you can do anything, be anyone, behave as you please. You’re surrounded by young, like-minded people, free from stress, responsibility and judgement.
Normal rules do not apply.
That freedom is incredibly attractive for a teen, and it’s also why a festival makes the perfect setting for a YA thriller. Festivals are places of extremes. Any situation where teens come together, free from adult interference (for good or for bad) is going to produce fireworks. Things will be amazing, or terrible. There’s no in between.
In The Last Thing You’ll Hear, tickets for Enrapture sell out in minutes. The teens of Hamlington are bored, drifting, insecure – and festival promoter ‘Adam Webb’ takes full advantage with the messaging around the festival:
The world is broken.
You’re lost and alone,
Searching for something to believe.
Open your mind.
Return to simpler times.
At ENRAPTURE, we will heal.
The promise that Enrapture will ‘fix’ them is impossible for Wren and her friends to resist – and while readers may quickly realise that there’s a darker side to Enrapture – that something… supernatural might be at work – the teens’ obsession makes them oblivious.
I loved writing the festival scenes; creating the atmosphere and building the threat, the sense that something is very wrong at Enrapture – that there’s a damn sight more to worry about than the long queue for the portaloos. I tried to give Enrapture the immersive vibe of a Punchdrunk theatre production (check them out!) and a Night Circus otherworldliness, combined with the unsettling intensity that comes with any fanatical fandom. I wanted the darkness that lurks beneath a seemingly happy community, like in the films Midsommar and The Wicker Man.
For me, the best thrillers have high stakes and locked sets, and a festival setting has those things in spades. Once inside Enrapture, the teens are cut off geographically, physically and psychologically. They’re in a remote valley. Phone signals are non-existent. It’s easy to lose your friends. A high security fence encircles the site. On top of that, the main arena is enclosed too, and the domed main stage is made of twisted thorny briar, backlit by the sun, like a sinister Eden Project.
Even so, the teens funnel willingly like rats into the arena…
And then the music starts.
But I won’t tell you how the story ends. Maybe you know the tale of the Pied Piper, maybe you don’t. All I’ll say is that, by the end of the story, Wren and every teen in the arena must decide what they believe.
As for my festival dream, it did come true eventually. In 1995, I finally got the chance to go to Glastonbury. And just like Wren at Enrapture, ‘it was everything I dreamed…’
Life-changing, even.
But that’s another story…*
*See my debut, Mirror Me
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