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Hi, thanks for visiting my blog. Please feel free to post comments. Don't take anything I have written too seriously, these are all off the cuff impressions of things I have randomly read rather than carefully considered judgments. With some obvious exceptions.
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Tuesday, 3 September 2013

The Daylight Gate (2) - An afterthought

"When shall we three meet again" - daylight of course, it's such a nice witchy time of day isn't it?

What am I talking about? Something that has really bugged me about this novel, apart from everything else I wrote about earlier, namely the title of the novel. It tells you nothing about the subject matter, which is mildly irritating, but nothing out of the ordinary. But why daylight? In the novel there are a couple of relatively brief references to the time of day when witches' occult power is at its highest, and there is no mistaking the fact that this is intended to be a reference to twilight, the point at which day turns to night, and the creatures and spirits of the night begin to emerge. The "gate" in question is a bridge to this other world. "The Twilight Gate" as a title would have made some kind of sense, if only in the context of the novel itself.

But of course the "twilight" word has been thoroughly over-used in recent years, and pretty much franchised out to the werewolf/vampire community. So the editors of this novel must have thought to themselves, "how do we get a slice of that market without directly misleading people into thinking this is a book about teenage vampires with some kind of gate device? I know, let's use a time of day that sounds a bit like twilight but in fact is nothing to do with it!"

Now I know that doesn't make sense - if the wanted to just steal some of the teen vampire market they would have just called the novel "The Twilight Gate" and been done with it. This way they have the worst of both worlds - no direct reference to twilight and all the references that come with it, and a title that makes no sense, because daylight is the least witchy, occult, generally creepy time of day imaginable.

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