Today I welcome fellow Crooked Cat author Cy Forrest, whose novel, The Punished is published on Wednesday!  (Why not drop in on the Facebook Launch event at 9pm on 13 Sept?)

The Punished is set in the Dorset village of Tyneham, which was taken over completely by the Army during World War II and remains deserted to this day.  Tell us more, Cy!

the surviving school room in Tyneham

Tyneham in World War Two – What Was It Like To Actually Be There?

Bringing extraordinary events to life in fiction is not a particularly English thing to do. Great English writers Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy did not make readers sweat in the way Scots, Irish, Welsh, American and mainland European writers did.

For example, Scots writer James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) makes you feel dread when the editor’s narrative ends and the confession begins. Space…