Of his narrative's plot twists, Priest told an interviewer in 1995, 'my shocks are based on a sudden devastating reversal of what the reader knows or believes.' Tie-in work His most recent novels are The Islanders (2011), set in the Dream Archipelago, and The Adjacent (2013), a multi-strand narrative with recurring characters. Priest also dealt with delusional alternate realities in A Dream of Wessex, in which a group of experimenters for a British government project are brain-wired to a hypnosis machine and jointly participate in an imaginary but as-real-as-real future in a vacation island off the coast of a Sovietized Britain. The state of mind depicted in this novel is similar to that of the delusional fantasy-prone psychoanalytic patient ('Kirk Allen') in Robert Lindner's The Fifty-Minute Hour, or Jack London's tortured prisoner in The Star Rover. This setting featured in many of Priest's short stories, which raises the question of whether the Dream Archipelago is actually a fantasy. One of his early novels, The Affirmation, concerns a traumatized man who apparently flips into a delusional world in which he experiences a lengthy voyage to an archipelago of exotic islands. Formerly an accountant and audit clerk, he became a full-time writer in 1968. Priest's first story, 'The Run', was published in 1966. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. Here he explored the ancient hillfort of Maiden Castle, near Dorchester, which he would later use as the location for the novel A Dream of Wessex. Īs a child, Priest spent some time holidaying in the English county of Dorset. Priest was born in Cheadle, Cheshire, England in 1943.

Christopher priest the inverted world