Coming Home

I spent forty years of my life in Sterling, Illinois, which became the protoype for Hopewell, where Demon takes place. If you spend forty years anywhere, it tends to have some sort of effect. In my case, I think the effect was a good one. In my childhood, kids were still given the run of the neighborhood; they were, in fact, encouraged to go play somewhere else. I spent most of my early years being dispatched to the houses of other kids or to the nearest park. There wasn't much money and very few toys. Personal enjoyment usually depended on individual ingenuity and imagination. You want to have fun? Fine. Think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

We believe in magic, my friends and I. Not all of them believed, because a few were cretins, the way it always is with some kids. But most of us believed. There was magic in the games we played and magic in the world. Things happened, and you couldn't always explain them away, even if you wanted to. Sometime we would see things that no one else saw, things that didn't have a name. Sometimes we would feel their presence, when we were walking along late in the day, in the shadows, in the cooling of twilight, and we would mark those moments. Sometimes the feeling was exhilarating and sometimes it was scary. but you always felt something.

I wanted my story to capture the size and space of childhood in a small town. I wanted to use all those memories I had stored up about Sinnissippi Park and the Bayou, about the Rock River and Riverside Cemetery, and about the Indians that were dead long before I was born. I had questions, all sorts of questions. There was that name - Sinnissippi. It was everywhere you looked - the park, a street, a set of townhomes, and so forth. What did it mean? No one knew. There were the Indian mounds that occupied the west bluff of the park overlooking the rock River. Who was buried there and what had become of them? There were the deep woods in the east end of the park, filled with massive trees and winding trails. What lived there, that no one had ever seen?

When I wrote the early Shannara books, I sat in a room with a window that looked out over Sinnissippi Park, which is the settting for much of the story in Running With The Demon. Whole worlds had suggested themselves to me from that window. When I walked the park, I would find places that I was certain had excaped everyone's notice but my own. It was not so different from my childhood. I was still playing games of make believe. I was still looking for what was magic.

Now I live in Seattle, and my hometown is a long ways away in both time and place. But I guess I'm still a kid looking for magic. After awhile, it's hard to stop.

--Terry Brooks, February 1997