In THE HALLOWED ONES, I wanted to explore the ideas of chaos and order. Most of the time, we tend to frown upon chaos and elevate order as a virtue. Chaos feels dangerous, opening up unknown possibilities. Order seems predicable, a way to keep us warm and safe. And it certainly feels that way to Katie, my Amish heroine. Katie is on the verge of her Rumspringa, the time when she can experiment a bit with the outside world. She wants to explore controlled chaos, the kind of exhilaration that we all want with pushing limits. She wants to venture to the nearby city, to meet people beyond her own small world, to wear jeans and read comic books. She’s read every book in the public library she can get her hands on. She yearns to know what’s beyond the confines of her fence. It’s the bright side of chaos that makes us feel alive, and Katie is no exception to those feelings. Before Katie can experiment with Rumspringa, the outside world is overtaken by chaos. Katie’s community is a safe haven, seemingly spared by the darkness. But she knows that evil and silence are waiting beyond her fence. There…

Imagine for just a moment that you’ve been snatched off an African highway by armed men and thrown into a hastily cleared out storeroom while they do God knows what to the rare wild dogs that you were transporting to the north of the country. The dogs that are your job, and your responsibility, and the thing that gives you purpose and represent two years of work now facing the bad end of a poacher’s weapon. And you’re locked in a room, sore and sweaty and gummy-mouthed with thirst, with your wrists bound with cable-tie, totally and utterly powerless. Imagine vacillating between blood-boiling rage and skin-chilling fear, and knowing that you need to escape to save your own life and also your dogs’. How long do you think it would take you to find your feet, clear your head and start thinking? Planning. I like to imagine, much like my heroine Clare, that I’d be useless for about an hour or so but that, as the post-adrenaline crash started to wear off, my mind would kick into gear and my brain would start focussing—really focussing with a kind of acuity we don’t get to use much in day-to-day life—and ideas…