LYME–Frustrated screenwriter-turned-author Faulkner Hunt’s first novel is a hardcover story for the ages in an era consumed with 30-second reels and 80-character posts on social media.
Hunt, a Texas transplant whose career spans the media and technology industries, has emerged with a back-to-basics approach that eschews the trappings of the digital world for pure storytelling.
“A book, at its worst, is a beautiful distraction,” he said. “At its best, it’s among the highest forms of art.”
The Ballad of Innes of Skara Skaill is set for release this month as an adventure story modeled after classics like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Those are the bedtime tales he read to two boys and two girls, now grown, whose childhoods spanned decades.
“I had kids in my house for 28 years,” he said of the 18th century farmhouse shared with wife Ann Lightfoot. “It felt like I was reading nonstop.”
The couple, who met as students at Wallingford’s Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school, moved to Lightfoot’s hometown in Lyme in 2001. That was several jobs and two children after Hunt packed up his University of Texas degree and moved to New York just to be near Lightfoot again, “even though she may not have known it.”
Their identical twin girls were born in Lyme.
He described his own youth and time spent reading to their children as “classic training” in storytelling structure. But fast changing realities forced him to adjust his narrative view.
“Look, if the world’s attention span is shorter, then you have to adapt to that,” he said. “And so this book is very much designed to be a page-turner. It’s written kind of like a screenplay is written, where there’s no wasted time, space, and you’re not meandering around listening to an author show off. It’s just very straightforward that way. It travels quick.”
Hunt’s years studying English and history at college, where he roomed with the now movie star Owen Wilson and traveled in the same circles as filmmaker Wes Anderson, helped forge an early affinity for screenwriting inspired by the burgeoning cinematic powerhouses.
But when he couldn’t land a deal on any of several screenplays – including one project with Wilson’s backing about a scofflaw dad assigned by a judge to the Marine Corps – his plans changed.
“I started thinking, well, maybe just write a book,” he said. After three years of writing, revising and pitching, he had it: 314 hardbound pages with cover art that revealed a Welsh woodcarving of the imaginary North Atlantic island of Skara Skaill.
“It comes out September 23rd,” he said. “There it is; it’s the shape of a book.”
The Ballad of Innes of Skara Skaill, published by Regalo Press, tells the story of a bereaved son, who takes up with two young brothers living on the village streets and moors of Skara Heath as they search for fortune and truth in the island’s buried past.
Describing “a tale for all ages,” Faulkner said he sees the book as a story to be passed through the generations by word of mouth rather than marketed in a social media blitz.
He admitted to a counter-revolutionary approach that comes at a time when authors, whether they land a traditional publisher or go the self-published route, must sell themselves aggressively online.
“I have no social media presence, and I won’t,” he said.
That doesn’t mean he won’t go on podcasts and talk with BookTok influencers. But he emphasized none of that outreach will point back to his own pages on the likes of X, Instagram and Facebook.
His X account, going back to 2009, remains empty except for a profile picture of a father and child.
“When I see a line of kids all together and they’re all staring at their phones, it literally just breaks my heart,” he said. “I think, ‘what are you missing?’ Everything! You’re missing it all.”
The Ballad of Innes of Skara Skaill goes on sale Sept. 23. Visit faulknerhunt.com for more information.
Editor’s Note: Visit this link to order a copy of the book.