The Chime Seekers by Ross Montgomery

November 11th 2021

My latest book, The Chime Seekers, is about a boy called Yanni. When the story begins, Yanni’s family has relocated to the creepy village of Fallow Hall, thanks to a new baby sister who won’t stop screaming. Having been the unrivalled focus of his parents’ love for years, Yanni now feels overlooked, forgotten and left behind. One night – Halloween night, to be precise – his anger and frustration and sense of abandonment boil over, and he tells his sleeping baby sister that he hates her. Little does he know that he’s been overheard by an evil faerie named Lorde Renwin, who cruelly tricks Yanni into handing his baby sister over. Left with a magical changeling instead, Yanni’s only hope of getting his sister back is to travel into the evil faerie realm – a sinister double of the village called Hallow Fall – and complete a series of fiendish challenges before it’s too late.

This book was written entirely in lockdowns. I started writing the first draft in the week we were ordered to stay at home in March 2020; the second draft coincided almost exactly with the second lockdown; and it was finished in the final lockdown over Christmas. I count myself incredibly lucky that before I started, my editors and I had worked on detailed chapter plans explaining exactly what was going to happen and when – this meant that every day, I had a bullet point list telling me what to write. If I hadn’t had those – if I was doing structural changes for example, or detailed line-editing, or even just writing by the seat of my pants – then frankly I’d have been in serious trouble.

Writers rely on new experiences – when I’m stuck, going for a walk is usually the only thing that helps me get unstuck again. With that option gone, replaced by a very unhelpful sense of anxiety, most writers I knew simply couldn’t find the headspace they needed. I was so lucky that the timing worked out the way it did – when the writing was going well, I could be transported into another fantasy world, rather than the flat I was sitting in, all day every day. It was pure escapism, and it was a blessing.

Not only that – the lockdown meant that something very strange happened to my writing during that time. The Chime Seekers is all about strange, arcane, fiendish, hidden magic; it’s about finding a whole other magical world that sits right alongside the one we see every day, closer than we realized. It is about the strange becoming familiar, and the familiar becoming strange; about being trapped inside things that have changed for ever, and not knowing how to find a way home again. I have no doubt whatsoever that the strangeness of that time found its way into the book I was writing. I’ll never forget the moment, one night, when I realized that I could hear a bell ringing on the wind: it was from Lambeth Town Hall, beside what was normally the busiest road in London. I’d been living a mile away in Brixton for seven years, and had never once heard it from my flat – I didn’t know it was possible. And there it was, ringing away. The city was so silent, it was unrecognizable.

Nowadays, humans are everywhere, all the time. The world has been completely explored: and with it, the sense that there could be something out there has gone. That wasn’t how the world used to feel: the world used to feel like we shared it with other beings, beings who had their own rules and ways, and sometimes the world belonged to them. At night, and at certain times of the year, outside was theirs – and you didn’t walk outside unless you knew what you might come across, and knew how to defend yourself and respect their ways.

For me, that was what lockdown felt like. For brief moments in those 18 months, it suddenly felt as if the world wasn’t ours any more: the outside suddenly belonged to them again.

The Chime Seekers is out now.