The Difficult Second Album

Potential spoilers for The Dark Vicar ahead....

There is a reason people talk about the “difficult second album.”

The first time around, you have the freedom of the unknown. Nobody is waiting for the story, nobody has expectations, and there is no established world you can accidentally contradict. You can discover the characters as you write them and change almost anything without worrying about what has gone before.

Writing a sequel is different.

With Dark Vicar, I was introducing everything for the first time: Òran Black, Sam Cartwright, their version of New York and the technology that drives the story. By the end of the novel, those characters had developed histories, relationships and ways of speaking that now have to remain consistent. They are no longer simply ideas that can be altered whenever the plot demands it. They have become people, or at least they feel that way to me.

That has made writing The Dark King both more difficult and more rewarding.

The challenge is to continue the story without simply repeating it. I didn’t want another killer exploiting VICAR in a slightly different way. Dark Vicar told that story. The new novel needed its own identity, its own atmosphere and a threat that presented Black and Cartwright with a very different kind of problem.

At the same time, I didn’t want to discard everything that made the first book what it was. The Dark King still explores the point where belief, power and obsession meet. It still has an intricate police investigation at its centre, and it continues some of the questions left behind by the Dark Vicar case. Readers will see familiar characters again, but they will also meet new ones whose lives initially appear to have little connection to Black or the police.

One of the biggest decisions has been when to bring those familiar characters into the central investigation. It would have been easy to place Black at the first crime scene and let the machinery of a conventional sequel begin immediately. Instead, the new story is being allowed to develop away from him. Strange events take place across different parts of New York, separated by time and police jurisdiction. At first, there is no obvious reason for anyone to see them as pieces of the same puzzle.

This means The Dark King has a broader opening than Dark Vicar. The reader spends more time with the person at the centre of the new story and begins to understand the history behind what is happening, although, I hope, never quite enough to feel safe in that understanding. Black, Cartwright and Professor DeMarko will become increasingly important as the pattern emerges, but the investigation has to earn its way towards them.

The book also needs to work for someone who has never read Dark Vicar. That creates another balancing act. Returning readers need to feel that the events of the first novel mattered, while new readers should not be confronted with pages of explanation about a story they missed. The necessary history has to emerge naturally: through conversations, consequences and the subtle ways the previous case changed the relationships between the characters.

Those relationships are particularly important this time. Black and Cartwright are no longer simply two people forced together by an investigation. Their connection has deepened, and the quieter moments between them matter just as much as the crimes. At the same time, I want Cartwright to retain her own professional world and her own story rather than existing merely as an extension of Black’s investigation.

The scale has grown as well. Dark Vicar was approximately 70,000 words. The Dark King will be considerably longer, partly because it carries several threads: a new sequence of crimes, the consequences of the first novel, an apparently hopeless murder investigation and questions surrounding Mandrake that have not entirely gone away. The difficulty lies in allowing those threads room to breathe without letting the novel become overwhelmed by them.

Perhaps that is the real problem with the difficult second album. You want it to feel larger and more confident than the first, but it still has to sound as though it came from the same artist.

The Dark King is still being written, and there is a long road ahead. I know where the story is going, but the most interesting part of writing is often discovering how the characters choose to get there.

For now, I can say that the novel begins with seemingly unrelated deaths, an overlooked detail and a pattern that nobody is yet looking for. By the time Òran Black understands what is unfolding across New York, the story will already be well underway.

The Dark King, the second novel in the Òran Black series, is coming in 2027.