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Biology is destiny.

For those born feet-first, life is normal. Civil rights are enshrined in law, the world is a comfortable place, and every full moon night, you lock yourself in a secure room to fur up in peace. But for those born head-first, the damage done is more than just physical. For a non, locked in his or her human skin, is first and foremost a conscript, drafted at eighteen into DORLA, the Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity.

For a DORLA agent, insultingly referred to as a 'bareback', full moon creates a battle zone, where they patrol the silent night in search of citizens breaking the curfew. The rest of the month is a civil service nightmare, mopping up the after-effects of the trespasses, the fights and the maulings. DORLA has lasted centuries, since the Inquisition first set it up, and it's no less hated now than it was then.

Lola Galley, twenty-eight and already a scarred veteran, is assigned to defend a curfew-breaker who mutilated a good friend of hers. She doesn't want the case, but she's used to doing things she doesn't want. Only something happens: her maimed friend is murdered before her client can be tried.

Lola wants justice. She'll settle for the truth. But in a divided world, asking for the truth may bring answers that you don't want to hear.

Kit Whitfield has created a world that is wholly, unnervingly convincing. This work shows her to be a novelist of rare gifts and astonishing imagination.

BOOK FAQs:

What’s with the different titles? Are there two books?

No, there’s just one book. The only major difference between them is the titles; Benighted is a US edition and Bareback is UK, so there are some differences of spelling and occasionally a different word (flat/apartment or pushchair/buggy, for example), but that’s just tweaking for the different markets. As the story is set in an imaginary city, I wanted it to feel as local as possible to whoever was reading it, so the differences are just there to stop your eye snagging on the word ‘colour’ spelt ‘color’ or vice versa. I’d recommend you get whichever one best matches your own accent, but if you have a yen to read it in a different one, you won’t be losing out.

So why the different titles?

Primarily because Americans have dirty minds. It’s traditionally the English who have a schoolboy sense of humour, but I’m here to tell you: the Yanks have us beat.
In England, the word ‘Bareback’ meaning unprotected sex does exist, but it’s mostly still used within the gay community. I was well aware of the meaning when I decided to use the word; that actually confirmed my decision to use it. I decided that a sexual undertone would add a usefully sharp edge to what is, basically, a bigoted term. Racist and homophobic words are for my money much more offensive than ordinary swearing, so I figured that the nastier the word sounds, the better; at the same time, as it can equally mean saddle-free horseback riding, and as the movie Brokeback Mountain wasn’t out yet, with all the jokes that went with it, I assumed that the double entendre wouldn’t entirely dominate people’s perceptions of it. The UK publishers were very keen on the title, and it all seemed to be working okay.

Then the American publishers started to worry. They pointed out that the term is in much wider use in the US than in England. I had to take their word on that, as I live over here, but the concern was that people would simply hear the title, and then either fall off their chairs laughing like thirteen-year-olds or buy the book full of misguided hopes, only to return it when they discovered it wasn’t teeming with sex scenes. Various solutions were proposed, and my editor fought valiantly to keep the title, but in the end, it was decided that argument about the title would swamp any interest in the actual book. I therefore came up with ‘Benighted’ as an alternative, which was suggested by the Christina Rossetti poem I quote at the beginning, and has various overtones I thought were interesting. The American publishers accepted this, and everyone came away pretty much happy.

If I refer to the book in conversation, I still think of it as Bareback, but to avoid confusion on this site, I’m going to refer to it as ‘the book’ as much as possible. If I slip, please excuse me.

I’m English and I find it funny too.

Well, I do write to entertain. And remember, my friends, nothing says ‘thanks for a good laugh’ like buying lots of copies.

Are there any other differences?

There’s a difference in the marketing: Jonathan Cape in the UK are selling it as a literary novel, and Del Rey in the States are selling it as science fiction.

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