What is the Stone Dance of the Chameleon?

By the time that it is completed, THE STONE DANCE OF THE CHAMELEON will have consumed more than ten years of my life. It is almost easier to say what it is not, than what it is. It is not, for example, strictly, a trilogy, but rather a single novel in three parts. The first is called The Chosen, the second The Standing Dead and the title of the third I am keeping to myself for the moment.

Many people will not consider the Stone Dance to be a fantasy at all - at least in the genre sense in which it is currently classified. It is a work which I conceived in my early twenties but which I only began to execute in my late thirties. As such, its architecture exhibits the boundless ambition of youth. It has been my fate, many years later, to labour on its perhaps over-grand construction.

With the Stone Dance I am trying to produce an effect on the adult mind which certain fairytales had on me as a child. As were many of the tales of the brothers Grimm in their original form, my story is necessarily dark and violent.

It is perhaps too vast. But if it is so, it is less than might appear at first reading. The Stone Dance is an iceberg: however much may rise above the surface, many times more moves darkly beneath.

If it is presumptuous to expect a reader to tackle a book of perhaps 2000 pages, how much more so is it that I hope that they will read it all a second time? My only excuse is that I believe that those brave souls who do so will discover that they are reading a wholly different book.