Intro

The adventure began seven years ago, when I published the first Kingdom of Clockwork novel. I don’t know where the world of that first story came from, but it must have been fertile ground, because after that the stories kept coming. They more or less wrote themselves, under the inspiration of the history and architecture of the city of Copenhagen, the strange visions of the Danish artist Otto Frello, and the Nordic landscape, particularly the Arctic regions.

I live in two cities – one which is real and one which is a shadow, an echo of the real one, but only visible at odd moments, out of the corner of your eye, in a forgotten alleyway, or on the verge of sleep. It is the second city that I write about.

It is said that a famous sculptor was once asked whether it was difficult to make a sculpture that looked, for example, like a lion. He replied that it wasn’t difficult at all – you just had to remove all the bits that didn’t look like a lion. Writing is like that for me. There is something hidden in the rock, and I want to find out what it is. Eventually, it reveals itself – and what is there can often be as much of a surprise to me as to anyone else.

So I hope you will join me on a voyage of discovery into this mysterious world, to find out what’s hidden there, in the Irrational Layer, just beneath the surface of what we like to call reality. Welcome to the Kingdom of Kantarborg.

Billy O’Shea