Changes

Stefan Bachmann: Ooh, I try not to do that. It’s too scary. But seriously, I don’t know who they’d be. I don’t even know what age they’d be. I know the publishers are marketing it for ages 9 and up, but my little brother, who is now thirteen, stopped reading after five pages because he was terrified of the people in the trees. I was like, ''Uh, that’s not even a scary bit.'' And then there was the ten-year-old who thought the book was just a funny adventure and not scary at all. Basically I hope it’ll be picked up by a few of the right people, no matter what their age, and that they’ll enjoy it.

SB: Thank you! With ''The Peculiar'' I really wanted to combine all my favourite things – folklore, steampunk, 19th century England, magic – and make a story out of them. I wanted to write the sort of book I wanted to read, and I couldn’t find it in bookstores, so I tried writing it myself. As for the research, most of it was into Victorian customs and city maps and train time tables and the amount of time it would take to walk (or run frantically) from this street to that building. It got quite complicated.