Dear fans, readers and friends,
I wanted to apologise for the rather fantastical delay to the publication Scream of The White Bear. I don’t want to replay an old story, about fights with publishers, or the seismic shift in the whole publishing culture and industry. In real life it was a difficult true story, but all I hope is that you enjoy a fictional tale.
Scream of the White Bear is also, I think, much a story for our very challenged times. It is inevitable that my books, so much about animals and nature, should have always carried the implicit themes of conservation, but no more so than in this novel. A problem with that is I think over didactic books rarely make for great storytelling, which I certainly hope is not true in this case. Yet in the more than ten years of Scream’s delay, the genre of environmental fantasy, in the US at least, has even spawned University courses and degrees and many are waking up to the need to act, worldwide, especially those extinction rebels of our times. While of course all writers, especially of fiction, attempt to speak to the whole world and anyone that can read or listen. I do not pretend to know the solutions, but where I am in tune with that environmental genre, I think anything that helps us explore the issues, deepen our thoughts and understanding and find a voice too, some depth of response at least, the very essence of the search for meaning and value, a good thing.
But a writer’s first job is to enertain their readers and in that vein Scream also contains many of the terms and some of the characters from my three favourie books Fire Bringer, The Sight and Fell. I hope it expresses that love of animals I have always felt. It has been a long road, but the greatest recompense for that is that you the reader take pleasure in it. I hope you do.
Warmest wishes,
David Clement Davies
Phoenix Ark's Blog 