My grandparents' HEA happened in a fictional queer couple

Welcome to The Close: where goodbyes are never permanent and love haunts the narrative.

NB: this has been crossposted from my Substack, which you can find here. It's the inaugural post!

I accidentally made my grandparents into a fictional queer power couple. Let’s call them A and P for brevity’s sake, and to stay consistent with their fictional avatars. I don’t want to speak for either of them, but I suspect they’d be thrilled to be the origin of this specific couple. Particularly my grandfather, A, who called Jeremy Brett (not straight!) “a beautiful man” and pronounced Eric Porter (also not straight!)—the Moriarty to Brett’s Holmes—“actually a good-looking man.” 

He’s right about both of them. Let’s be real. Any appreciation is merited.

The couple my grandparents became impacts my series’ whole plot. It’s funny; I didn’t do that on purpose. Threads of Wyrd has been with me a long time, yet never once did I think, Yes, I will cast my grandfather and grandmother as a Victorian ex-criminal and public house landlord who sees the future, respectively, then stick them in Cromer.

I did have some notion of Alastair Gow being influenced by A himself. Prone to storytelling, good with people, rough childhood, ADHD-coded, a Leo sun. Ultimately, however, both A and P seeped into my characters’ personalities and vibes. This was seemingly a byproduct of my grieving process; we lost A in 2022 while I was putting the finishing touches on Like Silk Breathing and moving house. I’m still reeling four years later, so I can’t imagine it didn’t percolate then.

Paul Apollyon, the enigmatic landlord whom readers first meet in Like Silk Breathing, is not hugely likeable then. (It’s now Book 4, though it was Book 1 upon publication, and I was tickled when some early reviewers were confused about why I started LSB’s prologue with a character who wasn’t Tom. Just wait and you’ll see!) Personally, I loved him, but he’s aloof and brooding. He’s brusque with his nephew, Tom Apollyon, and Tom only knows Paul hasn’t been right in the head since his lover disappeared without warning.

Only, as Tom finds out in the latter part of Like Silk Breathing, and comes to understand better within The Only Story and Unfair Winds, Alastair didn’t leave.

He died. 

It changed Paul, and Alastair haunts the narrative figuratively. 

Until he haunts the narrative literally by the end of The Only Story.

There’s more to things than that, but the way my grandmother careened into a dark state of being after her person died made me understand how I’d definitely transformed her and her husband into a queer power couple. Like Paul did, she lost certain parts of herself. They died with him.

It’s beautiful that love can be so devastating, but a lot of people don’t want to examine that closely, if at all. This dichotomy between love and loss, my friends, is where so many of the horror and uppercase G-gothic elements come out to play in my work. Unlike reality, though, I was able to play with events in TOW until Alastair and Paul got a happily ever after. There’s yearning, and separation, and hardship—then some necromancy, because Alastair is a ghost for two books out of the six. 

Their love story is an underlying hum in the initially published trilogy, which features two other main romances. Their HEA finally happens in Unfair Winds. One of them is dead by then, but I didn’t let that stop me. I’ve been told people cried and everything, especially if they also read what I call the prequel trilogy (The Kraken and The Canary, Of Flint and Fortune, and Of Valentines and Visions), which expands on Paul and Alastair’s backstory.

And a gothic romance series influenced by bereavement and family dynamics—family curses—can’t be too on the nose. I mean, look at these two and tell me it wouldn’t be horrific for one to be gone without the other:

What in the holy Lana Del Rey music video is this immaculate selfie?! Or, alternative caption: Paul Apollyon and Alastair Gow and they’re completely different but also still Paul and Alastair.

Here are fantastic portraits of the actual characters, which I commissioned earlier this year:

Anyway, all that’s a little bit on how I managed to give A and P a happily-ever-after situation through Alastair and Paul… sort of without meaning to. Welcome to The Close, where I guess we’re all gonna see how thin the veil is between inspiration and creation, and romance isn’t ever stopped by a little thing like death.