Devara?

Where on Earth is this Devara place?

That might be a question you ask yourself as you read Murkland, especially if you live in the UK, since you'll not have heard of anywhere in Scotland with such a name.

Devara is, unsurprisingly, a fictional city, but it is definitely a Scottish city and with good reason.  The name 'Devara' is an accidental distortion of Devana, the old Roman name for a particular part of the land which is now Scotland.  That part is where the city of Aberdeen, my adopted hometown, now rests.

So why Devara?  Why Aberdeen?  You might justly ask...

Devara is based on Aberdeen because it was that city which first inspired me to write this story.  Aberdeen has a particular atmosphere, brought about by its famous granite buildings and its usually dry but frequently windy and cloudy weather.  It's a certain quality of light, a blend of greys, of light and dark, which creates this atmosphere and it was this, combined with a particularly foggy day several years ago, whilst walking to a meeting of the Aberdeen University Creative Writing Society, that the setting for Murkland first came to me.

I'd been wanting to write this kind of a horror story for some time.  A supernatural horror, styled after some of my favourites in the genre (books, films and videogames), but which treated its subject matter with a little more philosophical and theological consideration.  And it's true that I'd been wanting to set a story in Aberdeen's dark granite streets for some time as well.  With Devara, these two ideas merged into one.

Is it just the same city with a different name, then, or what?

If you know Aberdeen at all, you'll recognise echoes of it in Devara, from the high street spanning the length of a granite bridge, much in the manner of Aberdeen's Union Street, to the eerie Devara Hill Royal Infirmary, loosely based on Woolmanhill Hospital.  There are plenty more besides, but Devara gave me the freedom to place things where I wanted them, to tweak the history of the city so it better fit the story I wanted to tell and, most of all, to distance things just enough so that the horrors you read about in the installments of Murkland are never too close to home, but are maybe just close enough.

Thank you for reading Murkland.  I hope you enjoy it and if you're interested in visiting Aberdeen, I think you'll find it well worth the trip!