Filmmaker Bill Bennett – who put Mudgee on the big screen in the films The Nugget and Spider & Rose – has delved into the world of modern white and black witchcraft in the first installment of a trilogy of novels.
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Bennett began his career as a journalist at the ABC, before segueing into independent production as a writer/director, making documentaries and feature films.
For previous book, The Way, My Way, a Camino memoir, he set off on an 800 kilometre walk across Spain to Santiago de Compostela.
So branching out is nothing new.
‘Initiate’ is the beginning of the Palace of Fires thriller series from Penguin Random House Australia.
Three hundred years ago, Lily’s ancestor broke a solemn promise signed in blood. Now she has been thrust into a shadow world where Satan is real, witches exist and evil is an ancient living thing that seeks to wreak havoc and rule. The dark is coming, and only she can stop it.
- 'Initiate' by Bill Bennett
Deciding to write a novel – and yes it was originally going to be ‘a’ novel, but more on that later – provided Bennett with an opportunity to tell a story free of the constraints of production budgets.
“I just love writing and screenwriting doesn’t allow you the opportunity to really use language and it’s incredibly limiting – you’ve got to write for cast, budget, locations, and things like that,” he said.
“And I just want to tell a story where I can let my imagination run free, you can’t really do that with a movie. So nine years ago I just started writing and the result was Palace of Fires.
“I’m just enjoying working on the trilogy principally because it allows me to use words and tell a really good story without any boundaries.
“And it’s much harder, with a screenplay you can just say ‘Lily walked into a room and saw her mother’, but in a novel you’ve got to describe the room and how her mother looks and all of that.”
Storytelling is storytelling, whether its a blog, a screenplay, or a novel, it’s the same thing. And what I try and do is try and choose whatever form best suits the nature of that story.
- Bill Bennett
Entering the world of dark fantasy came from a fragment of an idea from Bennett’s unconscious over a decade ago. And building upon it allowed him to follow the lead of authors whose work he’s enjoyed.
“I can remember having a dream of someone being chased down a stone corridor - something like a castle because there were torches in brackets on the walls – being chased by some kind of beast,” he said.
“That’s all I can think about where it might come from and that’s going back 12 years ago.
“And I’ve always been interested in well-told, dark reading material. I grew up reading Ray Bradbury and always had a leaning towards that kind of material.
“A lot of people decry Stephen King as being a not very good writer, but I think he’s incredible … and I think there’s a lot of similarities between him and Dickens.
“It was initially planned as one big book, which became two in my writing of it at about 150/160-thousand word. Then the publishers asked if I’ve got another one, I said ‘it’s partly written’, so they asked ‘how about three?’
“But it was good because it rounds off the story, at the end of book two it’s still incomplete but book three will tie off any loose ends.”
Bennett only recently returned to Australia following the successful US debut of his documentary PGS – Intuition is your Personal Guidance System. In which he explores intuition and how it saved his life years earlier.
These days his time is split between Mudgee and where ever work takes him. The local area – which he immortalised in 2002’s The Nugget and 1994’s Spider & Rose – is also where his wife, actress Jennifer Cluff, hails from.
“I love Mudgee, we’ve had a house here for something like 20 years and used to come and go from Sydney all the time – but I prefer to live in Mudgee now,” he said. “I can be more productive here.”