Guest Post: Rosemary Fryth, author of Dark Confluence

First up for the “Unusual Creatures” guest post series this month is Rosemary Fryth!   She is the author of Dark Confluence, as well as it’s sequel Dark Destination (soon to be published). Dark Fairies are her specialty.

I have always read fairy stories.

As a young child I grew up with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, of Hans Christian Anderson, and the Australian author May Gibbs, who wrote original Australian children’s fairy stories about the Gumnut Babies, and the big, bad, Banksia Man. As a teenager I read onto Tolkien, Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, and Alan Garner.

I was especially influenced by Cooper and Garner, and their stories of creatures and beings from legend and myth interacting with children of a modern Britain.

As an adult I read more of the same: Charles de Lint, Robert Holdstock and Raymond E. Feist were in my opinion, standout authors, who deftly combined myth with the mortal, often mundane world.

The one constant in all the books I read (except for Gibbs), was that they were all set in far-away places like Great Britain, the USA, and Canada.

Very few children’s fairy stories (and almost no adult ones) were set here in Australia, and I keenly felt the need to right that wrong, and to bring creatures of Celtic and European myth, DownUnder.

Although I loved all these books, I yearned to write my own stories, and earlier this year I did, starting a new trilogy called ‘The Darkening’. The first book, ‘Dark Confluence’ is all about the faeries (The Fae) besieging the small Australian town of Emerald Hills.

 I set my stories locally here in Queensland, in a cool and green location on the beautiful Sunshine Coast Hinterland, a region that I knew well from camping and day trips, and attending folk festivals.

My stories weren’t just about fairies, my stories also had a thread of darkness, a hint of horror – because I believed that fairies weren’t always the cute and winged variety perched on flower or under mushrooms.

My fairies were cold, conniving, political, and calculating. They used humans and humanity as pawns to further their own ends and agendas. If someone or something crossed them, they were cruelly vengeful. On the other hand, they handsomely rewarded self-sacrifice, and oft loved the mortals they manipulated.

My first book, which has an unusual heroine, is also an adult fable about Australian society, and politics in this country. It was written as my own ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ with a hidden second story.

I have left little hints and clues throughout ‘Dark Confluence’, a story that can be read simply as a contemporary dark fantasy, or delved deeper for an underlying commentary on modern day Australia.

My choice of a late-middle aged spinster as my heroine for the first book of ‘The Darkening’ trilogy was deliberate too. So many stories feature teenage heroines, and although I enjoyed reading those stories, as an adult and mature woman I could not identify nor relate to a heroine thirty years my junior.

So I thought I’d break the mould, create a heroine who was small, neat, in her early fifties, unmarried and a spinster – a heroine who was overlooked by life, men and society.

Readers have commented to me on how much they loved Jen McDonald, they see her as ‘brave’, ‘compassionate’, ‘selfless’, ‘vulnerable’ and how they ‘felt immediately drawn to her’. I wanted Jen to be a real woman, the sort of woman we could all relate to if our own lives had gone on a slightly different, and lonelier path.

The second book ‘Dark Destination’ will soon be published, and deals with the ongoing story of the town of Emerald Hills, of Jen, and my new heroine, Fiona Delany – a moral, yet interesting and unusual young woman of twenty-two.

Into the story of ‘Dark Destination’ I have woven romance, as well as horror and darkness, although in this book the darkness comes courtesy of a rather nasty international cult called the ‘Artificers’ – a cult that I touched on briefly in the first book ‘Dark Confluence’. Paranormal elements are present in ‘Dark Destination’ although the main story is about Fiona and her dealings with the cult.

‘Dark Confluence’ is available for Kindle through Amazon, and is also available for Barnes and Noble Nook. ‘Dark Confluence’ will be soon available on other eBook platforms via Smashwords.

Monday September 17 

Monday September 24