Stone Testament
Author’s Note

The question I am asked most often is, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’. It is also the most difficult question to answer because ideas can come from anywhere and while some books appear just like that, others take years to develop. The Stone Testament was that kind of book.
I could point to my then editor at Scholastic, who suggested I write a dark fantasy, but that was not the starting point. When I began to gather ideas, it seemed that the themes and subject matter had always been there, somewhere in my consciousness, going back to my childhood and adolescence.

My brother, Roy, had always been a fantasy fan and he had an enormous influence on my writing because he had a huge influence on my reading as a teenager. He introduced me to ‘weird fiction’, writers like Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Dennis Wheately, as well as lesser known writers like Arthur Machen. He was also interested in the strange, the unexplained; the gap between what we think we know and what could be true. He was fascinated by the possibilities of lost worlds, lost civilizations, and was an avid reader of writers like Graham Hancock who seek to prove their existence. I shared his interest and so when I began to think about writing a fantasy, I did not want to write about an alternative world. Instead, I began to think about a lost world, traces of which could be found in our world, in myth, language, anomalous artefacts, things that defy explanation.

While I was gathering ideas, I went to New Zealand, where Owain, the son of old friends, introduced me to the unique flora and fauna and the extraordinary geography of his country. A land which became separated from the super continent Gondwanaland around 100 million years ago and has remained, essentially the same, isolated in the southern ocean, along with Antarctica. Owain also loved fantasy and shared with my brother a desire for impossible things to be true.
I fixed on a lost world that is changing, as our world is; mythologies that reach from the deep past into present; strange artefacts for which we have no adequate explanation. These things, with a dash of ‘weird fiction’, became the raw material of this book.

It is finished now, but neither Roy nor Owain are here to read it. Both were taken far too soon, Owain, cruelly so. I’ve dedicated the book to them and hope that I have done them justice.