Once Was Willem

"This book is just incredible. I’m fascinated by history. The further you go back, and the fewer answers we have, the more magic appears real, and the more the darkness of the forest becomes something genuinely frightening. Mike absolutely captures that. This is the story of a boy who dies, and people make a deal with a sorcerer to raise him, which everyone knows you never do; but they don’t know that, because it’s the Middle Ages , and they’ve not got stories warning them of that yet. So they bring Willem back to life, but he’s been rotting for weeks, and he’s no longer human. He’s something else, a monster. And there are other monsters out there in the darkness, but they’re not really monsters, they’re just things doing their thing… and the plot all melds into this sorcerer who’s gradually taking over, and trying to do very bad things. The plot was really good and enjoyable, but that is not what I was interested in at all. I was interested in how absolutely brilliantly he captures the idea of this being another time, and people thinking differently. Things that we would not think are possible seem very real to them. And when the supernatural is fed in – and this is going to come across in the next choice as well – it does not seem either strange or supernatural, it just seems to be part of that world. I had to email Mike when I’d finished it and say, ‘That was astounding. How did you do that? I hate you. I’m gonna sulk for weeks about this.’"