Alpacalypse and the long history of Mr Clovenhoof.

Published: Fri, 02/24/23

Iain: Hello, friend. It’s less than a week until our latest book comes out —

Heide: Alpacalypse! Clovenhoof book 8!

Iain: Correct. You’re a bit shouty today.

Heide: Too many coffees!

Iain: Okay. Anyway, it did occur to me that we actually have plenty of readers who might have read our books and even signed up to our newsletter without having ever read a Clovenhoof book. We have a lot of readers who have enjoyed our Sam Applewhite crime books and the Oddjobs books and lots of other one-off books in between but may not be familiar with Jeremy Clovenhoof.

Heide: I suppose. He’s been a part of our life for so long — Twelve years? Blimey, twelve years! — that we forget that some people have yet to discover him.

Iain: Clovenhoof stories were the first things we wrote together. Do you remember why?

Heide: I do. After we decided we’d like to work together we sort of did a Venn diagram of all the kinds of things we liked reading and liked writing and two things were in the middle, fantasy and comedy.

Iain: I think we also recognised that we both had a deep shared love of Terry Pratchett’s work.

Heide: It’s funny that we have been criticised by some in the past for trying to “be” Terry Pratchett. Especially in trying to rewrite “Good Omens.”

Iain: You can see why some might think that. Devils, angels, comedy… I hope we are collectively a very different type of writer to Sir Terry.

Heide: We’re more stupid.

Iain: Ruder too.

Heide: His books were often fueled by anger and a sense of injustice.

Iain: And a very human warmth.

Heide: I hope we manage to achieve that one too.

Iain: You mean ours all have cheesy and sentimental endings.

Heide: There is, I admit, a certain amount of cheese…

Iain: But, yes, we decided to write a book about what would happen if Satan lost his job as Lord of Hell and was put into semi-retirement in the suburbs of Birmingham. I remember that we picked Sutton Coldfield, principally because it was halfway between our two houses.

Heide: But it works well. Sutton Coldfield has a perhaps unjustified reputation for pretending it’s better than the rest of Birmingham, sort of aloof from it. And I think we love nothing more than poking at that ‘Little England’ mindset, of people who think their petty concerns are of huge importance.

Iain: With the characters of Clovenhoof (Satan), the Archangel Michael, the nerdy neighbour Ben and the stridently bossy Nerys, we’ve been lucky to have characters we can have fun with.

Heide: So that’s eight official novels in the series, if we include the latest one. But there’s some short stories and — what? “side” novels?

Iain: I guess. I don’t know what you’d call them. Books that don’t fall into the sequence or are quite different. We wrote Trump of Doom as a response to the election of Donald Trump. We wrote the gargantuan Clovenhoof’s Diary as a sort of response to the turmoil of Brexit we were experiencing four-ish years ago. And then we wrote the Isolation Chronicles as a charity fundraising project during the COVID pandemic.

Heide: And then there’s the short stories. There are several Clovenhoof stories in Mythfits. And is the Satan’s Shorts short story collection still free on Kindle? Let me check. Yes! Yes, it is.

Iain: Might be a decent place for any new reader to start.

Heide: Do you think we’ll ever write book 9?

Iain: Well, since book 8 is about the end of the world that could be tricky.

Heide: A devil, an angel, the end of the world… That does sound a bit like Good Omens.

Iain: Sssshhhh!

Alpacalypse is published on 1st March.

From Heide and Iain

Unit 116378
PO Box 15113
Birmingham West Midlands B2 2NJ
UNITED KINGDOM

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