"Fade to Black"

Francis Knight was born and lives in Sussex, England. She has held a variety of jobs from being a groom in the Balearics, where she punched a policeman and got away with it, to an IT administrator.

When not living in her own head, she enjoys SF&F geekery, WWE geekery, teaching her children Monty Python quotes, and boldly going and seeking out new civilizations.

Knight applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Fade to Black, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Fade to Black gets you right where things start making sense to the MC, Rojan. Or at least he thinks so – he’ll learn. In painful detail.

Rojan is a pain mage – illegal, wanted, hiding. More, he’s disparaging of his own magic. As he says, dislocating his own thumb to power a spell is pretty damned stupid, putting it mildly. His particular form of magic involves knowing where people are. Still, even in his life as a bounty hunter he tries not to use it unless he’s desperate. That is, until his niece is kidnapped and the only way he has of finding out where she is, is to use his magic. Having reluctantly done so, his next problem involves getting to a place that, officially at least, doesn’t exist, or if it does is supposedly an environmental disaster, and full of poisonous runoff and dead people, not to mention he doesn’t know how to get to it. To solve that problem, his mentor advises him to go and see ‘The Man Who Knows Everything’–

Tam laughed, looking like a wrinkled gnome who’s found he can make any wish come true with a wink of his eye. ‘That’s what the Ministry say, but when do they ever tell the truth? They sealed a lot of them down there, the dregs they wanted to do without. They thought the synth would kill them soon enough, and they’d be rid of all those too undesirable, too feckless and faithless to live in their brave new clean pious city. Only it’s not brave or clean, is it? They left them there to die, Mr Dizon. And when they didn’t die, or not all of them, the Archdeacon found a use for them.’

Left them there to die of the synth. I shook my head in shock, but it was likely true. In the ’Pit, who knew? It was sealed, but the tainted run-off from Upside was likely still filtering through – the water had to go somewhere. Now here was Tam, saying that people lived in that horror? The thought made me squirm. Not least because it looked like that was where I was headed.

And head to it he does, not without some serious misgivings. Once he’s there, he soon finds out that Ministry have been lying even worse than this jaded cynic thought…

Learn more about the book and author at Francis Knight's website.

My Book, The Movie: Fade to Black.

--Marshal Zeringue