The Scotsman Abroad | The Deleted Testament of Hal Duncan

Sorry it's been so long! I'll explain The Situation in a few days, I swear.

For the time being, as I'm sure some of you know by now, it was my pleasure yesterday to help tease Testament—the first novel to come from my fellow Scotsman Hal Duncan in damn near a decade—over on Tor.com.

Testament itself is a properly exciting prospect, but to tell the truth, anything that has to do with Hal has a special place in my heart. You must be wondering why. Well, I spent a wee while explaining exactly that in my first pass at the aforementioned article—though I realised the error of my ways before hitting submit on the thing, given that said section would surely be rather more relevant here on The Speculative Scotsman than on Tor.com. 

Without further ado, then—a deleted scene from The Testament of Hal Duncan:

It’s been damn near a decade since The Book of All Hours blew my tiny mind. 

I was still a student in 2005—of English literature, largely, alongside a spot of philosophy. As I recall, I was within sniffing distance of my degree, and well pleased to be, but by then I’d become so sick of my subjects that the prospect of never having to read anything else ever again had real appeal. 

Clearly, it wasn’t to be, because come the conclusion of my course, a couple of books broke through. These books—books like The Scar by China Mieville and City of Saints & Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer alongside Hal Duncan’s tremendous two-volume debut—opened my eyes to a whole new world of words. In short, it’s fair to say that Ink and Vellum helped made a speculative fiction devotee of me. 

Duncan has been pretty prolific as an author and as an editor in the short story scene since—see Fabbles the first, Scruffians! and Caledonia Dreamin’—and as my two year tenure as co-curator of the Short Fiction Spotlight shows, I hope, I’m a huge fan of the form.

But sometimes a novel is needful. Sometimes an author requires the room long-form fiction allows to thoroughly explore a theme or an idea. To wit, I’ve been watching Notes from New Sodom like a hawk, and in April, the aforementioned author teased something called Testament. I reached out to find out more about the project post-haste, and today, it’s my pleasure to tease you about Testament in turn.

Read the remainder of the reveal right here.

Rest assured, in the interim, that you and I will talk again shortly.