‘I was channelled into writing by forces that took me hostage as a receptacle’
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Preface: The Horror! The Horror!
“The horror! The horror!” Joseph Conrad’s novella The Heart of Darkness ends with the protagonist Kurtz uttering these last words on his deathbed. The element of the “Vibhatsa”, the grotesque and the terrible, is a part of the Navrasa, the nine core emotive markers of Indian aesthetics. The genre of the dreadful, the gruesome and the ghastly, which has gone through a massive literary and box office revival, somewhere reflects the terrors and anxieties of our times.
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I began work on the first draft of The Book of Shadows sometime in the year 1994. The complex and convoluted story escaped me in many voices, very few of them recognisable as my own. I was a ventriloquist’s toy, driven by forces and powers I still have not understood. It is like none other of my books, rendered in alien voices and strange subconscious impulses, with violent visions and unexpected epiphanies.
The Book of Shadows has been a vehicle of healing, of acceptance and surrender. In Wiccan practice and older traditions of witchcraft, a Book of Shadows is a personal testament, a record of esoteric practices and knowledge gained.
This novel stood as a testimony to a time of intense grief and hurt, as the horrors of life swirled around...