Guest Post: Why I Wrote Raising Hell by Bryony Pearce

I am absolutely delighted to share a guest post from the amazing Bryony Pearce. I loved the author's debut and I was excited to see them delve into dark themes again. They're honestly amazing at it.

Raising Hell by Bryony Pearce is out tomorrow and trust me, you need it in your life. It's dark and complicated and such a fun read. My release day review is coming tomorrow, but today I'm sharing a guest post from Bryony on why they wrote Raising Hell.

Why I Wrote Raising Hell by Bryony Pearce

When I wrote Raising Hell the world seemed to literally be going to hell. Donald Trump was in power and it was looking like he might win another election. BLM protests were on the increase. Brexit seemed to have spear-headed a rise in Fascism in our own country and the global pandemic had put us on lockdown. My children were having to wear masks to school, friends were getting covid, it seemed almost apocalyptic.

I had just finished writing ‘a very serious novel’. A historical YA fiction that has not in fact sold to publishers. This novel took me six months of solid research and a year to write. It was ‘very important’. I wanted, no I needed, a break. To write something that would not require much in the way of research and that was pure solid fun.

Ivy’s voice came to me one day; she had her talking cat and her machete, and I knew that it would be nothing but fun to write about her.

Obviously, I did have to do research, but it wasn’t about how they cleaned chimneys in 1634, it was about occult symbols for protection and magic spells that I could rearrange and make into my own. See – fun!

It being me, there is a serious side to Raising Hell. Inevitably the political situation impacted on the story, enter the British Republican Party (BRP) who seek to use the chaos caused by Ivy’s mistake to take power in the UK and ‘Make Britain Great Again!’.

Raising Hell is also about grief and how we deal with loss. The way that the BRP and their stooges manipulate the teen witches is to use their own personal losses to encourage them to cast spells that they think will reanimate their dead (obviously this does not end well).

Ivy too is dealing with loss – the death of her boyfriend, the loss of her childhood, her family and her friends. This has made her the person she is in the story; hard and untrusting.

As the story circles back to the correction of Ivy’s original mistake, it helps her journey back to trust and love and a better way of dealing with her losses.

Ivy’s story was cathartic for me to write. It is honestly fun. There is a lot of humour. Ivy has a smart mouth and a talking cat. But it is also serious. It helped me deal with a very hard year and I hope that it provides some escapism and fun for you too!

Much love

Bryony

About the Book

Meet Ivy Elizabeth Mann:

"I know what you're thinking, but I'm not half faery, or demon, or angel or anything like that. Mum's a Body Shop consultant living in a bungalow in Birmingham and Dad enters crossword competitions."

Once upon a time, Ivy and her friends did a very stupid thing and now there's a rift letting dark matter into the world. Dark matter that manifests as black magic which actually works. Now every teenager with access to the Internet is raising hell. Literally.

Ivy's doing her best to stem the tide, but her new job working school security barely pays the bills and there's only so much one girl with a machete (and a cat possessed by her own dead grandmother) can do against the forces of evil.

Now she's facing a teenaged goth with an attitude, a dark cabal with a terrifying agenda and a potential zombie apocalypse.

Ivy losing her job might be the best thing to happen to the world!

Will you be reading Raising Hell?