A couple of weeks ago I told you about a bestselling airport thriller novel (set on an aeroplane, no less) called Falling.
The story behind it was charming. American Virgin Atlantic flight attendant TJ Newman wrote it longhand during her work on long haul flights, a publisher picked it up, it was a fast-moving hit, a movie deal was announced and a new literary superstar was minted. Good on her, I wish her nothing but success.
A long while before that, I'd talked about a book by one of my then-favourite authors, Neal Stephenson, called Fall or, Dodge in Hell (sorry Neal, but your last book Termination Shock left me cold).
This week sees the release of a thriller movie called Fall, about two daredevil free climber girlfriends who decide to scale a 2000 foot radio mast and get stranded at the top.
At first I said to myself 'why won't all these other authors and filmmakers stop copying my awesome title?' (and yes, I started writing Falling in 1991, so in the words of the The People's Front of Judea, I thought of it ages ago).
But this week I started to think about it a little deeper, and it's kind of expected. Along with 'reckoning' 'rising' and 'legacy', 'fall' is a quite lyrical word, one that means a lot but which we don't use a lot in English for all the meanings it can convey but which you see a lot in movie and book titles because of a slightly profound air.
Usually in everyday conversation the word just refers to something or someone toppling over, maybe to something decreasing like the stock market.
But it also has a whole slew of connotations around a catastrophe, failure or tragedy. In wars, countries or armies fall. On Armistice, Anzac or Memorial Days we celebrate and remember the fallen, a much more respectful and poetic word than 'soldiers who've got killed in wars'.
The decline of a society like the Roman or Mayan empires or the fate of the Easter Islanders, is referred to as a fall. Not for nothing was the first sequel to Jurassic World called Fallen Kingdom because it depicted the destruction of the dinosaurs' island home by a volcano.
Even in something like sports or some other kind of competition, the winner can be referred to as having 'risen', which commensurately means the other player(s) have 'fallen'.
In religion, the tendency of sneaky, selfish, pleasure-hungry and greedy human beings to give in to temptation has long been referred to as the descent or fall of man. In 1998 Denzel Washington starred in a supernatural thriller where the executed soul of a serial killer could move from one body to another. The religious connotation of giving in to evil was articulated in the title; Fallen.
All of which makes 'fall' and its derivatives manna from heaven for the creative writers behind novels or scripts. It's a beautifully simple word, it contains mysterious depths of dark emotional resonance and the promise of darkness, danger or fear, and it's even slightly onomatopoeic; somebody falling off a cliff will make a sound not dissimilar to what he/she's doing.
Most of all, it's an negative word. Unless it's your mortgage balance or an elevated heart rate, a fall is usually a bad thing. Fiction is predicated on drama, which is by its nature the generating of obstacles for the hero to overcome, and in plenty (some would say most) genres and stories, those obstacles are by their nature bad things. They're all some sort of descent or fall.
So it was kind of natural that I'd use it to name the magnum opus this site is marketing – that you've no doubt paid full price for and have read voraciously in just a few sittings.
Firstly, it's what Dale does when we first meet his younger self. It's the occurrence that sets off his personal involvement in the story if not the premise overall. But secondly, I used it for the emotional weight the same way so many other writers have done so.
It teases/threatens a darker fate for everyone. If you're talking about it as a metaphor for the descent into danger and terror then Dale, and not just him, has only just started to fall...
So while I can't exactly say you're welcome Neal Stephenson, TJ Newman, Nicholas Kazan, Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank, I can at least claim to be in your good company.