The Damnation of Peter Pan by Simon Petherick. Fiction. Published 2019.
A dark and unsettling story of one family’s blighted relationship with JM Barrie’s most famous creation.
Peter Mannering, the 75-year-old son of Maimie, one of the characters featured in Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird, reflects on a life of wealth, misfortune and violence. Demons summoned from the past combine to present an horrific foretaste of the future, yet down in the basement of his Kensington mansion, a new generation of the family surely offers the possibility of redemption?
Ranging from the sweet green hills of Laugharne, the Welsh town made famous by Dylan Thomas, to the frenetic life of Soho and the new pop culture of the 1960s, The Damnation Of Peter Pan tells the story of the twentieth century through a prism of love, literature and the lexicon of the occult.
From the opening page:
‘In 1990, when my mother was four years’ old, she was foully cursed by Peter Pan in The Kensington Gardens. You will need to know more of that, of course, and you will. But that curse, laid as a single, terrible seed amongst the raised borders of The Gardens, is at last about to flower. Almost one hundred and twenty years later, as I sit here now, a febrile monster of seventy-five, quivering with age and sin in this echoing mansion in Ennismore Gardens. I tell you, that curse is finally rent open upon the world. It is a savagery, and I can barely bring myself to tell you. But I must.’
Read the opening pages of the novel here.
Download an Advance Information Sheet here.
The novel is available from Amazon here. If you’d rather use another retailer, just give them the ISBN code 9780957629479 and publisher name The Word Machine and they can get hold of it for you. Or contact me.