Keeping Mum

They say you should walk towards the light. Well I didn't. I fled. I ran away from it. I pushed the light back and it splintered in my hands like glass. I thought I might be dead because there was no blood. I raged, I wept. I shouted. There was no pain. I screamed. There was no noise. It wasn't time. It wasn't right. But still, I did not know that I was dead. Still, I hoped that I was not. I wasn't ready...

Has it been done before? We don't think so. Dual authorship is one thing, but fifteen authors? That's more like a writing team for a soap opera or a big TV series than a single novel.

And who are the Dark Angels? Well, they're not bikers or Goths or heavy metal rockers, but an eclectic bunch of writers who have come together through the Dark Angels creative writing programme. Challenging themselves to come up with ideas for a collective novel, they chose the model of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a novel told from the viewpoint of many characters with each chapter in a different voice.

Gathered together in a Scottish country house in the coldest March on record, the Dark Angels started to create the characters to tell a story about a woman who dies in a Scottish country house - and whose family decides to transport her body back to London via a few special, possibly secret-laden locations.

What they came up with is a stonking good story. By turns poetic, comic, psychological, philosophical, and moving. Full of secrets and lies, it's an adventure in writing.