Project VI

Every nightmare starts as a dream.

When Allie receives a gilded letter in the mail, she doesn’t hesitate. The offer is an unprecedented research visa to a tiny, affluent offshore country near North America’s west coast.

At first, Allie and her young daughter fall in love with the Island and its generous lifestyle. But she learns too much and discovers a system that doesn’t tolerate meddling.

Help appears in mysterious forms. But who can she trust? And will it be enough to save both Allie and her daughter?

As a young man, James Badke spent a summer on Vancouver Island providing helpful information to the hundreds of backpackers who wanted to hike the fabulous forty miles of the West Coast Trail. That summer was the beginning of his fascination with the Island. Since then, he and his wife and two boys have lived there on several occasions, most recently for the past sixteen years. He thought it would be interesting to take a setting with which he was familiar and alter a bit of its history, creating a new setting for what he wanted to say. His inspiration was Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, in which nineteenth century Britain under King James III is overwhelmed with wolves that swarmed through the Channel Tunnel from Europe, which of course was not built until the late twentieth century. Nor was there ever a King James III.