Monthly Archives: March 2025

I first started writing The Neon Yak about three years ago. I was going through some old poems that I had written while staying with my Grandmother in Surrey, she lived in an old two up two down cottage in the woods and there were glimpses of London in the distance, and I realised what a magic place it all was. And then I started to think about all of the emotions a teenager has at the time, and the events which occur which, looking back, seem magical in themselves. Add to these the usual teenage longings, and the inner struggle of accepting my own homosexuality, and the story just seemed to seep into my consciousness.

The Neon Yak is heavily autobiographical, but not totally. Some of the things which happen in the novel actually did happen to me. In fact, I would say that about three quarters of the ‘supernatural’ events in the novel happened. I’m not sure whether they took place in that strange realm of half dream, half awake, or in actuality, but they felt real and they still feel real now.

And what of The Neon Yak itself? This entity is something I created for my 2017 Edinburgh show, In the Glare of the Neon Yak, but it is based on the local legends and folklore which were prevalent in the area where I grew up of Herne the Hunter. If you’ve never heard of Herne, then a Google search will prove enlightening, though there are theories that he was invented by William Shakespeare for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Whatever the origins, Herne the Hunter seemed real for us kids growing up, and any visit to the woods always carried the risk of being confronted by The Hunter.

The novel takes place during the summer between middle school and secondary school, which is always a strange time when you are growing up. For me it was especially auspicious, because it meant commuting to a busy town in the suburbs of west London instead of staying in our cosy little Surrey village surrounded by woods. The secondary school felt like another world and of course, along with it came a growing sense of my own sexuality, and my own denial of that. The events which are laid out during that summer, in actuality, probably occurred over the space of a few years. If you ask me nicely one day, I might tell you which are real and which are works of imagination.

I wrote the first draft of the novel over a frenetic month in 2023, and then spent the next year refining it and editing. I am hugely grateful to Stoat Books for publishing it.

You can order a copy here https://www.lulu.com/shop/robert-garnham/the-neon-yak/paperback/product-2m4jj2e.html?q=The+Neon+Yak&page=1&pageSize=4&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR24JqIowDGJ-t10StfCY8FSIrOKB3Pn7k9momkiK_AYBZBVfAwUS8Icivk_aem_aXHTimgkDLXM2AXc8pzPCA