Moving away from Amsterdam we venture north into the flat and watery landscape of Waterland, a place of beauty and calm during the summer, but a bitterly cold and frozen world of ice in the winter.
The huge Houtribdijk Dam is one of the most spectacular feats of human engineering, a 30km long dijk connecting the western and eastern shores of the Ijsselmeer and constructed to hold back the North Sea from flooding Amsterdam and huge swathes of northern Holland. At the centre are the tiny docks of Trintelhaven, Tobias Vinke’s lair and the place where he holds Nina captive. His bungalow is there, as is the scrapyard and motor launch on the pebble beach. However, this is private property so ask permission before having a look around.
Finally, if you did enjoy A State of Sin, it is always helpful as an author to receive short reviews on Amazon or Goodreads. Your words are as important to an author as an author’s words are to you.
You can keep up-to-date on The Amsterdam Occult Series as well as other upcoming projects and novels on my website
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Pieter and Lotte will be back soon.
Mark Hobson
October 2020 – April 2021
Real-Life Terror in Amsterdam
During the writing of the first two books in the series, I visited Amsterdam on many occasions to conduct research, wishing to explore the city and find some great locations, and to try and better understand what makes the people of the place tick. I thought to myself that there is only so much you can learn by using the internet from the comfort of my own home and that I needed to get there for myself.
In 2018 and 2019 I spent nearly three weeks in Amsterdam. For the purposes of writing the novels and settling on good plots, I quickly learned that I needed to get away from all of the usual tourist sites and explore the darker side of the city, to wander down the creepiest alleyways, call in for a drink at the most notorious of cut-throat pubs, to go to the places that all of the travel guides tell people to avoid. After all, this is a horror story, isn’t it? I needed locations that felt suitably frightening. I wasn’t there to look at tulips.
So that is what I did, and I kept telling myself: what could possibly go wrong?
I had my mobile phone with me, in case I found myself in difficulties.
I had a set of excellent maps, in case I got lost.
I even learned how to scream for help in Dutch (well, not really).
Big mistake.
On two consecutive evenings, I faced my own real-life frightening episodes. Not of the supernatural kind – which would have been quite fun for a horror writer – but of the more human, down-to-earth and quite nasty, but still unsettling, variety.
One evening, quite late on and when the tourist crowds had sensibly gone back to their hotels for the night, I decided somewhat foolishly to have a walk down the narrow and unlit Blood Street. I was searching for creepy places to set a particular scene in WOLF ANGEL involving a gang of killers racing away through the night after dispatching their latest victim.
So there I was, aimlessly walking up and down the alleyway, poking my nose into places I shouldn’t be, camera slung over my shoulder and looking every inch like the stupid, naïve, British tourist. Suddenly, from out of the shadows, stepped a gang of youths. Quickly surrounding me, they grabbed my arms and pinned them to my sides and pushed me up against the wall, and commenced to go through my pockets and rob me.
Luckily I only had on me my camera and phone (which, oddly, they didn’t seem interested in) and a small amount of cash (which they wanted), and as soon as they had the money they were gone in a flash, leaving me standing there, breathless and shaken but thankfully unharmed.
Lesson learnt, I went back to my digs.
The following night, having realized how stupid I had been, I decided simply to pop out to have a beer, have a little walk around Dam Square and the busy Leidseplein with its pavement cafes and nightclubs, and do nothing or go anywhere that was in the slightest bit dangerous.
But on the way back, ready to hit the sack and get some shut-eye, I was approached by a man of unsavoury appearance. He was a drug dealer. A very pushy and aggressive drug dealer, who was determined that I should purchase some of his ‘skunk’ despite my insistence that I had no wish to. Once he realized I wasn’t going to part with my cash, he decided that he would just part me from my cash anyway.
Pissed off at his cockiness, and still somewhat upset about the previous night’s street robbery, I told him where to go (like all Dutch people, he spoke perfect English, and so my fruity language was not lost on him).
Obviously, I hadn’t really learnt my lesson after all, because he took exception to my refusing to hand over my money. In the blink of an eye, there was a flash of cold steel in the moonlight (I like to add lots of tension whenever I tell this true little tale) and out came a small knife which he pointed at my belly.
What should I do?
Meekly hand over my cash? (this would have been the sensible option).
Stand and fight? (anybody who knows
