Village of The Damned doesn’t quite work out as I really wanted it to. Some elements of the story really need reworking and rethinking. But at present I don’t have time to edit it further. It will have to be a future job. The idea of a ‘brigadoon’ style village, caught up in a time loop, though, was one I have been thinking of for a while. Originally I thought of it as a Torchwood story, but it didn’t quite fit in my mind. Then the idea of David, Susan and family having a holiday came to me. In the end, it becomes rather more about Christopher and the two girls, and I almost wrote David and Susan out of it and made it Christopher with Jackie and the children, but Christopher’s thoughts about his daughter, Susan, are important in the plot.

The Priest, Father Ó Cuinn, (Quinn in English) is a key figure, of course. He hides Christopher and the children and later, it is very much his decision above all the rest of the villagers, to make an end of it. The idea came to me after I had made him central to the plot that the Transubstantiated wine represented the ‘innocent blood’ that was talked about by Ó Cinnéide (Kennedy in English). Of course, as Christopher points out, the sacrifice was all nonsense from the start and the children were murdered for nothing but one man’s madness.

I did plan to have Ó Cinnéide die in a fight with Christopher, then changed my mind. I’m not sure if it ought to go back in again, because otherwise there is no reason why his hold on the village should stop.

This, unfortunately, is one of the plot holes in the story. There are a few others. Like, even granted they are in a time loop, how come the magazines are still new in the shop, why haven’t they run out of ice cream? I probably need to add in a few paragraphs to address those issues.

Of course, they almost all die. It’s a sad kind of ending. And I still am not entirely satisfied with the story. Perhaps I’ll come back to it another time and work on it.

Cill Chiaráin where they were headed is a real place in Connemara. So is Bantrach Ard. Trá Crón, the mysterious village they landed in, isn’t. I thought it only fair to make a place up for something that dreadful to happen to. But the reason I chose that area is a curious one. I was looking at the map of Connemara, re-familiarising myself with the place names I once used to know well, when somebody in the office where I am working over the summer said they were going to ‘kill Kieran’ because Kieran, s much shouted at office junior, had done something wrong AGAIN. I remembered that there IS a place called Kilkieran – or the proper Gaelic spelling, Cill Chiaráin, and decided to put it in.

Lughnasadh, or Lughnasa, is the old Celtic harvest festival, celebrated with bonfires and the sacrifice of sheaves of corn. It has nothing to do with blood sacrifices. That was a rather unfair misuse of the old mythology. It is important that I should point out right here that Ó Cinnéide’s actions have no real basis in history.

Flying around the village to create a time loop, is slightly stolen from my favourite fantasy writer, Terry Pratchett. His witches did something similar in a broomstick relay in Wyrd Sisters. But a hover car is just as good for undoing something like that.

And, of course, the title is taken from the movie version of John Wyndham’s Midwych Cuckoos. Wyndham is another source of regular inspiration along with Pratchett. His Chrysalids was one of my favourite books in high school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lughnasadh
http://www.connemara.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd_sisters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_the_Damned_%281960_film%29