Blood, Steel, And Belonging: ‘The Darke Secrets Of A Steel Town’
In his debut novel, Welsh author AJ Coonan explores the darkness that dwells within the heart of every man in a thrilling and disturbing love letter to his hometown of Port Talbot.
‘The Darke Secrets of a Steel Town’ follows the story of protagonist Sean Darke, who began life as a sinister alter ego for AJ. Beaten and belittled by a local bully, Sean reaches his breaking point and embarks on a terrible journey of revenge.
“Sean Darke has been in my head for seven or eight years,” AJ explains.
“He started out as: ‘what would I do and what would I be if I was crazy, if there were no laws?’ I’m as straight as any guy, if I get a parking ticket it’s paid that day, I’m straight as an arrow. But what if I wasn’t?
“So, I got into this story of what would a bad guy look like? Someone with my sort of upbringing, what would a really bad version of me look like? I started rolling with that story as the opening of the book.”
What started as exploring a dark fantasy quickly evolved into a full-fledged work of fiction that takes readers deep into the psyche of a man pushed too far, living in a town with a dark and gritty past of its own.
“When you get into the book, you’ll see it’s two halves of a whole,” AJ says.
“There’s this almost semi-autobiographical part because a lot of what happens to Sean in the first half of the book happened to me. Port Talbot, growing up in the 1970s and early ‘80s, was a tough place. I always felt like I was artistic and I won’t use the terminology of back in the day, but you were considered maybe a bit of a sissy.
“That came with its challenges. You were called so many things for being that and I’ve tried to get that across in the book. The book is semi-autobiographical in the first half and then it turns into a complete work of fiction as this alter ego takes over and runs off into ‘what if he becomes the worst version of me?’”
Taking inspiration from the ‘Dexter’ novels and TV series, AJ developed Sean as a sort of antihero character the audience can relate to despite his grievous and bloody misdeeds.
“What I also wanted to do in the book was I wanted the character to be liked, I wanted him to be the hero of the book as well, even though he’s really doing bad shit. That’s what I was trying to achieve with Sean Darke: this lovable character [that is] Dexter-esque,” he says.
“Some of the challenges of the early part of the book are real, and I think that’s what helped me develop the storyline of Sean Darke, and it’s why hopefully some people might identify with him and even pull for him a little bit, because he was under the cosh.
“He was struggling and he was fighting the system. I developed the character that he was bit of antihero as well because Port Talbot was a very working-class town. It has never elected anything other than a Labor MP, so I thought Sean might be quite good if he liked Margaret Thatcher and the conservatives. I thought that might build this character as someone out on the edge.”
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Now living in Swansea, AJ has never forgotten his roots in Port Talbot or the formative experiences that shaped his adolescence. Chief among them is the Steeltown murders, a series of grisly killings that led to the biggest manhunt in Wales history.
At the insistence of his trusty editor, AJ says it was essential for him to differentiate his gritty tale from the titular TV programme and numerous documentaries produced about the Steeltown murders.
He also recalls the claustrophobic sense of dread that gripped the people of Port Talbot at the time, knowing there was a killer among them.
“I was a kid then,” he says.
“The whole town [went] into shock and semi-shut down, kids were afraid and people stopped walking about after dark. It was a real thing, and I would have been eight when that happened. I remember the fear of sometimes having to get somewhere and being a little bit wary because shit was going down in the town.”
Set against the backdrop of Port Talbot’s looming steelworks, ‘The Darke Secrets Of A Steel Town’ straddles the line between fact and fiction, blending history with homage.
But a lot has changed about Port Talbot in the past decades. It’s no longer a steel town and is better known these days for producing a vast wealth of creative talent. AJ is among a burgeoning cohort of writers, actors, artists, and musicians hailing from the Margam end of town that are part of Port Talbot’s cultural renaissance.
“Over the years the steelworks have turned from this ugly, polluting behemoth into some kind of iconic landscape,” AJ says.
“People of my generation, we grew up in the town the spawned Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, and that spawned a generation of people like Michael Sheen and Rob Brydon and many more people.
“What it has done is give my generation, the middle-aged generation, an identity and something to live up to. We all feel a little bit responsible for carrying the torch on. There’s that feeling of identity, it’s almost nationalistic. If you’re from Port Talbot, you’ve got the brand on you – you belong. That feeling of belonging never leaves you.”
