ASCENSION - TV SERIES. INSPIRED BY LAST DAYS, GREEN-LIT AT APPLE TV
"Old friends" reappear in places you least expect, or could only dream of.
Last Days: written in 2011 (in circumstances often so trying that I'm amazed I didn't ask for an extension on the deadline).
Published by Pan on a midlist in 2012, a little later by St Martins in the states.
Among hundreds of thousands, if not millions of novels published since then, I wonder how this series could come into being in 2026, involving filmmakers of this calibre?
And what were the odds against the production? Astronomical.
But this novel about two friends making a guerilla documentary about a seventies cult, and the group's antecedents in medieval Europe, has followed a strange path over time, and almost exclusively among actual readers.
Year after year, they/you recommend the book to each other, particularly in America.
The very book has become a cultish artefact. It was never a vast bestseller, translated into a zillion languages, but has pursued a slow steady creep, like a bony thing in rags approaching bedroom windows at night. Reader curiosity leading to unease, even fear, has seen the old manuscript change hands repeatedly.
I may be deluding myself, but the book seems to carry a peculiar charge. I've heard the hushed tones and read the warnings about readers' nightmares. I even had two uncanny experiences while actually writing one scene.
And what was once a manuscript, feverishly written by me in an old building in London (the site appears in Arthur Machen's 'The Hill of Dreams'), intends on spreading its core ideas through TV screens.
What have I done?
What might I have started?
Will I be responsible for bringing the Unholy Swine and the Saints of Filth into existence?
I may watch this in a brightly lit room.