One of the few pieces of creative writing I managed to get done this summer was a sci-fi short called How We Fall, published now by Redstone Science Fiction. It’s a story of soldiers put in a difficult situation, and the clash between their personalities. It’s also about how the same thing, or in this case the same person, can have very different meanings for different people.
For me, there’s something particularly powerful about the image of angels. I don’t know where this comes from. The religious part of my up-bringing didn’t feature a lot of traditional iconography. I’ve never had a grand vision or vivid dream in which the heavenly choirs descended on me in blinding light and close harmony singing. And yet the lure is there. A large part of what I love about Ennis and Dillon’s Preacher is the use, mostly subversively and occasionally reverentially, of that sort of Christian iconography. So when an ad campaign involving angels appeared across bus shelters around Manchester, it caught my eye. What for the ad-men was a gimmicky tagline, for me became the heart of my story. I’ve not delved deep into the spiritual implications of a winged messenger, but I like to think I’ve at least got more depth out of this than the guys selling deodorant.