Rudden discusses matters of life and death

Damian McCarney

It’s the final book in a fantasy adventure trilogy. There’s one burning question in the reader’s mind – does the hero die at the end? It surely must be the most deeply frustrating question posed to an author; to parse all that beautiful penmanship and creative plotting down to that one simple, brutal dichotomy: life or death.

“It’s not frustrating because I like that people are invested, and care,” Dave says as he potters about his Dublin home, tidying up while the Celt throws countless disjointed questions at him from the other end of the phone, “but I don’t know what answer they think I’m going to give them. Like I’m going to go – ‘Oh yeah, here’s the last five pages’. No, I can’t tell you. Read the book!”
The book it’s imperative you read is Endless King, the final instalment of the Knights of the Borrowed Dark trilogy – featuring Dave’s unlikely teenage hero Denizen Hardwick., It’s about to hit the shelves of bookshops nationwide next week.
At the heart of that persisting life or death question, the Celt supposes, is the reader’s disbelief that an author could kill off the central character they have created; if the character survives the inevitable climatic showdown, it leaves scope for a further instalment, and the sense of being cheated. The reader seeks a blood oath.
“I think you’re right they wonder what kind of a definitive ending you are going to give it, and it’s easier to ask: do you kill the main character, than it is to ask, does this particular problem get solved.
“I think also we live in an age of reboots and live in an age of reimaginings and different takes – so people want to know, are you going to milk it for all of its worth – and that’s just not something that I wanted to do.
“So I just wave my arms at them and run away.”
“‘Goodbye!’ and I flee. And they’re very confused.”
(Somewhat surprisingly Dave confided in the Celt whether Denizen makes it; see spoiler alert below.)
With the old life or death quandary nicely fudged we caught up with Denizen, his fellow apprentice knight Abigail and orphanage pal, Simon. As the press promo outlines The Endless Knight sees at ‘Daybreak’, the ancestral home of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, to continue their training as knights, but lessons have barely begun before an unexpected arrival appears with news that throws the fortress into uproar. The Endless King has fallen, his dark realm rising in a brutal civil war. When the conflict strikes closer to home, Denizen and his friends face their greatest challenge yet. For if Daybreak falls, so does the world...
So okay, back to life and death again.
“Always when I’m writing the next book, my obsession and concern is upping the stakes and making it more exciting,” says Dave.

He adds: “If Book One is a little like my Harry Potter book, Book Two is like my Philip Pullman, because it’s a bit darker and weirder - then Book Three is my Lord of the Rings. I threw everything I had into Book Three.
It is all out, guns blazing, blockbuster. The biggest Tenebrous so far in the series – I’ve got a 60ft long dragon made out of screaming corpses, I’ve got cities being destroyed, it’s all out war,” he says with relish.
Some of the media hype around Dave’s trilogy was amplified early on when it emerged that film companies were bidding for the film rights. Considering that, when he was writing the Endless King, did he find that he was conscious of making it more cinematic?
“I always try to write in a cinematic way. I always play the scenes as movies in my head before I write them down so I can figure out: where the characters are standing, what they look like, how they move. And then I try to translate that for the written word.”
He concedes, the silver screen did inform one aspect of the Endless King:
“You know the way they tend to split the third book into two, and it’s very hard to find a really good mid-book moment for that end of the third film – I did find a particular moment and really worked on it and polished it and made it bombastic, just in case they split the book, so the third film will have a really strong finale, as will the fourth one.”
While the bombast is ratcheted up, it’s not at the expense of character development. The rationale behind the antagonists, the Tenebrous, is further explored.
“In the first book you think they are unrepentant villains. The second book and the third book just make it more complicated. It’s too easy to be like, those people, or those creatures over there are bad – that’s an unhealthy mindset to have. There are villains, there are antagonists there. But no more than your normal teenage years, the book’s about finding out the world’s a lot more complicated and bigger than he previously thought.”
Dave began writing the first chapter of the first book on November 1, 2012, and has committed much of his professional life to Denizen et al. Is it hard to say farewell?
“Do you know, it is. For a few weeks after it I was really sort of down. I know the world of the Knights back to front, and I know the characters – and the three books is all there is for Denizen – his story is three books, that’s it, and I made that decision very early on, because if you are going to write an ending you commit to the ending, but it is hard to let them go. I probably could have found more stories to tell, or tacked more on because Denizen is the kind of kid who gets into scrapes, and I could have found more scrapes for him to get into, but I think stories have a natural length and Denizen’s story was three books.”

SPOILER ALERT: So does Denizen survive? No, I can’t tell you. Read the book! Goodbye!

The Endless King is available in bookshops nationwide.