HOLD BACK THE TIDE BY MELINDA SALISBURY

5/3/2020

To mark the release of her latest novel, Hold Back The Tide, we are honoured to welcome Melinda Salisbury to the Young Blood Library with her fascinating article article on how we need to look the monster of climate change right in the eye.

Be sure to check out the excellent review of Melinda's novel from our resident Librarian Tony Jones, by clicking here

Melinda Salisbury lives by the sea, somewhere in the south of England. As a child she genuinely thought Roald Dahl's Matilda was her biography, in part helped by her grandfather often mistakenly calling her Matilda, and the local library having a pretty cavalier attitude to the books she borrowed. Sadly she never manifested telekinetic powers.

She likes to travel, and have adventures. She also likes medieval castles, non-medieval aquariums, Richard III, and all things Scandinavian. The Sin Eater's Daughter is her first novel, and will be published by Scholastic in 2015. She is represented by the amazing Claire Wilson at Rogers, Coleridge and White.

It’s commonly acknowledged that fictional horror is usually created (and consumed) in response to real-world fears or occurrences. As well as terrorizing us with fantastical or imagined horrors like zombies, crazed murderers, ghosts, aliens, or the rise of sentient technology, fictional horror reflects back at us the things we collectively and often instinctively fear; death, disease, intruders, invasion, losing our position at the top of the food chain. Horror acts as an avatar that allows us to confront those fears by placing them in a fantasy context and, more often than not, watching as others escape or overcome them. It’s this eventual triumph and mastery that allows us to leave a horror film, turn off our TVs, or put down our books and sleep soundly that night. After all, it’s fun to be scared.
Or at least it was.

Until we were forced to recognise that the thing that is actually bringing us closest to our own annihilation is ourselves.

Not through war, or the rise of a single dictator, or even the awakening of an ancient, slumbering evil. But through collective consumption, greed, our lack of understanding or concern about the effects of the things we’ve innovated. Every single one of us alive today has – knowingly or unknowingly – added a nail to the coffin of our species, simply by existing during these times, the biggest threat to the human race is, and has always been, the human race.

Before the innovation of the last two hundred or so years, there was little on earth that existed needlessly. Everything had a function and a place, everything held and was in turn held in balance by nature. And once something was finished with, it was redistributed and reused; usually returning to the earth to breakdown and nourish the next thing; the oft-mentioned Circle of Life. Nature is usually quite forgiving of mistakes. After all, the planet has over 4.5 billion years under its belt; it can afford to wait out most aspects that threaten the grand eco-system. But not us. We have moved so far, and so fast that nature is going to have to take extreme measures to right the wrongs we’ve inflicted upon it. If we’re lucky it might not mean the annihilation of the human race, but it will mean the end of living as we do. There is going to have to be a change, and the race now is whether we are the ones who make it, or we wait for Nature to step up.

It was this realisation that sparked the idea for my latest book, HOLD BACK THE TIDE. The acknowledgement that of all the things we’ve overcome, and all the amazing things we’ve achieved, the one thing we won’t be able to do is fully halt the tide that we’ve unleashed with our endless march for innovation and convenience. That at some point the chickens will come home to roost, the horror we’ve unleashed will become manifest and we’ll have to face up to it when it does.

A lot of climate change fiction focuses on a dystopian future, where the remnants of the human race are dealing with the fallout from previous generations’ lack of care towards the planet, but I wanted to write something a little more reflective of the state of things right now, for the youths and teenagers who are campaigning for change.

In 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg stopped going to school on Fridays, instead spending the day outside the Swedish Parliament, campaigning for stronger action on the climate disaster. She was joined by others, across the world, an entire generation of young people willing to face censure and ridicule begging for the people in charge to do something about the catastrophic damage we’re doing to the planet. Since then the world’s children and youths have led the marches calling for change, Greta herself has travelled the globe (and used the methods of travel as a platform for demonstration), addressing world leaders and summits, begging them to use their positions and power to take action against the climate disaster.

In HOLD BACK THE TIDE a teenaged girl is the first to notice the damage to a local loch being caused by the rapidly-expanding paper mill in her town. She duly reports it to an adult, who – for their own reasons – sidelines her concerns. This willful ignorance continues, until disaster strikes and a very real and terrifying horror is unleashed. It renders the small community forever changed, damned by their refusal to listen to the concerns of the young, who are the main ones to suffer because of it, and their assumption that natural resources are there for the taking and there will be no repercussions. In the book the horror is very literal, and something that can be fought. In real life, we won’t be so lucky.

This was supposed to be a piece about horror, and it is. But it’s not about the monster in the closet, or under the bed. It’s about the monster in the mirror, and how if we want to avoid a real, true nightmare we need to look the monster in the eye. We need to acknowledge that it’s there.