Hello guys, today I am sharing with you a guest post by Joe Hakim, the author of the book “The Community”. The blog tour is organised by Love Book Group. Keep reading!
BLURB
A northern coastal city. A sinister, extra-dimensional intelligence is taking hold…
Joe Hakim draws the reader into the heart of a disenfranchised community impacted by strange forces beyond its control. A group of friends: separated by time, choices, and circumstance are reunited by their shared encounters with an uncanny presence that looms over their lives. The seeds were sown in their childhoods, now they must try and understand what is happening before it is too late.
Raw and uncompromising, The Community fuses social commentary with a dose of sci-fi horror, to cast a light on an existence spent in the Void.
AUTHOR’S GUEST POST
Childhood, Wyndham, And All That
I attended a very small primary school in Hull, a fantastically ornate pre-war building that somehow managed to avoid being destroyed in the blitz. It was the same school my Gran and Mam attended, St George’s, just on the corner on the street where I lived.
Because it was such a small school, they had to put a portacabin in the playground so they had enough class-space for the pupils.
When I was about 8 or 9 years old and ensconced in a said portacabin, our teacher was taken ill, and so a supply teacher had to fill in. He was a lot younger than our regular teacher, hadn’t yet succumbed to the rigours of routine and results, and was clearly desperate to make a good first impression. His bid to establish instant rapport was to get us to play Blindman’s Buff, but a group version, where a team of blindfolded kids tried to find the voice.
After we finished the game, he said: ‘Now imagine if that happened to nearly everyone, everywhere, overnight,’ and he read the opening sequence of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. My young mind truly was blown, on my next trip to the library with Grandma Topsy, I immediately sought out the book so I could find out what happened next. It was the first ‘adult’ book that I had engaged with, and it left a big impression.
Brain Aldiss once famously described Wyndham as ‘the master of the middle-class catastrophe’ focusing on ‘cosy disasters’, and looking back on his work now, it’s impossible to not wince slightly at the quaint tweeness of his writing. But Wyndham did something that forever changed my view on not only science-fiction but writing in general: he put it in my backyard. Up until that point, for me, science-fiction was something that happened in outer space, in galaxies far, far away. And if the story wasn’t set in space, it was usually set in America.
With The Community, I wanted to take a classic sci-fi plot, the alien invasion, and firmly root it in Hull. I wanted to populate it with characters I know, with situations that I find familiar. And discovering Wyndham’s work at an impressionable young age facilitated the thought process that led to the creation of not only The Community but a lot of my work.
It’s to my eternal shame that I can’t remember the name of that supply teacher. He was only with us for a couple of days, I couldn’t have possibly comprehended how that encounter would go on to reverberate throughout my life. But I’d like to thank him, where ever he is, along with John Wyndham, for opening a little door in my head, one that has never swung shut since.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Hakim lives and works in Hull.
He’s performed spoken word at venues and festivals around the UK, including Latitude, Big Chill and Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He was co-host and organiser of Write to Speak, (Hull Truck Theatre 2009 to 2013). He is currently working with schools in Hull as part of First Story. In January 2017, Joe travelled to Trinidad with The Roundhouse and Wrecking Ball Press, as part of the Talking Doorsteps project. This culminated in a performance at the BBC’s Contains Strong Language festival in September 2017, which featured young people from Trinidad’s 2 Cents Movement working alongside young people from Hull’s Warren Youth Project and Goodwin Community Centre.
Theatre work includes co-writing and developing Omni-Science with Brick by Brick, performed at Assemble Fest 2017, and Come to Where I’m From, developed in association with Paines Plough and performed at Hull Truck in May 2017.
The album ‘The Science of Disconent’, his second with musician Ashley Reaks, was released in 2018. Joe toured and performed with LIFE, a Hull-based punk band, performing on the UK leg of the Slaves European tour.
