Dorothy's Dog

The Book

The Horse Buried Under the Earth

The title is something I’ve wrestled with this as I’m aware it sounds obscure but that’s never been intentional. The inspiration for the story came from a dream and so it feels like the title was given to me somehow. Also, I believe the title makes sense the further into the novel you get and as it conveys the heart of my story, I can’t think of anything more perfect.

I can’t recall the exact date I began to write this story. I have a notes file dated February 2021 where I’d begun to outline the basics but that must’ve been a little while before I began writing in earnest as my first draft was completed on 22 August 2023. My fifth and final draft was completed on 20 October 2025.

Suffice to say, it took a while.

The one-liner and the elevator pitch

Ben finally found heaven at the end of the world only to discover they’d let the devil in.

Ben has drifted through life since losing his father and best friend as a child. Now thirty-six and struggling to find his place in the world, a chance encounter takes him far from home to a queer haven at the tip of Cape Cod in pursuit of his dreams. There, he finds inspiration, friendship and love, but a hidden past, a troubled soul and a malevolent force threaten his future happiness, and life.

The motivation

Over the two years that it took to write this book and while many of the major plot points changed quite drastically, the core of the story remained the same. I wanted to write a story representing a demographic of the queer community that’s often overlooked; someone approaching their middle ages who doesn’t have the perfect career or the perfect look, isn’t outgoing, and who’s spent much of their life alone. I wanted to show the positive changes that can occur when such a person is given the opportunity to thrive.

The settings

My novel is largely set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA (with diversions to Boston and Cambridge) and London, UK.

I lived in London from 1995 to 2016 and in many ways, they were some of the best years for being there if you were a gay man. Many of the places I used to frequent and have now gone, and part of what I wanted to do with my book is to ensure those places of community aren’t forgotten.

Provincetown came to be one of those places I’ve found myself returning to time and again after my first visit in August 2007. Invited there by a friend, my mother had died just three months before and it came at just the right time. To say that Provincetown is unique is to undersell it. For LGBTQ+ folks there are few places we’re in the majority be they bars, maybe even streets like Canal Street or Old Compton Street, but there, it’s the entire town and it’s something that can only be felt through experience.

This following passage is from late in chapter 3 and gives an indication of what one might find there. It’s early one morning and my protagonist Ben is alone, sat looking out to sea. He’s been in Provincetown for a few weeks and having settled into his new surroundings and begun to explore new friendships, he considers where he is physically and emotionally:

These past few weeks had been a revelation to Ben. Embraced by three shores; the harbour, the bay and the ocean, he found a unique beauty in this two-street town with houses built from shipwrecks and the long sandy beaches that rolled high into mountainous dunes. Nowhere before had he ever felt quite so at peace. He found himself in the majority for the first time and it had settled him. The knot in his stomach that he didn’t know existed had now begun to untie and he figured that the sense of normalcy he felt here must be what straight people felt all the time in the real world. In this place where being queer was the norm, it ceased to define you. For the first time in his life, Ben had discovered what it felt like to be the same as everyone else.

The photographs of Provincetown in this slideshow are ones I’ve taken between 2007 and 2019.

What’s next?

In between searching for a talented literary agent to pick up my book, I’m continuing to write pieces for Queerguru.

I’ve also begun work on my second novel, a spin-off from Horse set in the 90s (I have a title, but it might be a spoiler so I’ll keep it to myself for now) centred on a minor character from it plus a few other familiar faces. I also have a third novel in mind that I might call A Strange Character, a second spin-off in a similar vein set in the 80s and 90s.