About Frank De Sales, Author of the debut novel Devil's Island

Saint Francis Frank de Sales, a convert to traditional Roman Catholicism, was born in the suburb of Hillbrow (now a high rise slum) in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1974. Despite a well-off background in a progressive Protestant family, attending private schools, he ambled through school life without being particularly interested, or good, at anything. After school he was drafted into the apartheid army where he personified every good argument against conscription before having to learn to look after himself.

He now holds a series of degrees, works as a lawyer and is married with a young son. He collects pets and is interested in martial arts and fascinated by history and language. He serves at the altar for a Traditional Latin Mass every Sunday.

Frank on Devil's island

I’m sometimes asked why anybody would write an occult thriller like Devil’s Island. Typically whoever is doing the asking falls into one of two categories, they either accuse me of being a medievalist crank looking for vampires and jumping at shadows, harking back towards a ‘dark’ period of history, or they want me to be won over to their particular brand of crankiness.

Devil’s Island, I think, can best be described as a novel containing a catechism for a society that has forgotten its faith. Why do we need a novel like this? The Church nowadays (and I mean the Roman Catholic Church) began a process shortly before my birth where its focus largely shifted to making people more happy and comfortable in this lifetime. Admirable goals, yes, and also a major feature of the mission of the Church roughly before the second half of the twentieth century.

The real role of the Church is however the salvation of souls: life on earth, the here and now, is very brief. Our lives are part of a wider interaction, a conflict, between good and evil. If you are going to believe in only one thing, believe that evil exists!

The plot? What happens when a portal into hell opens on a tropical island hosting an exclusive resort for the super rich and powerful, a young Englishman arrives on the island after killing London's most notorious gangster and another steals an invite in an attempt to save a doomed relationship? Devil's Island tells the riveting story of an island dominated by a volcano that the stubborn resident priest believes to an opening into hell and has the remnants of a pitiful congregation and battle scars with evil to prove it.

Ultimately the new arrivals realise that they are in a place where the sole purpose of everything revolves around the satanic corruption of the world's most privileged. Haunting visions, possession, torment from the condemned the men knew earlier in their lives who are eager to see the arrivals join them in the pit and the promise of almost irresistible debauchery, force the young men to choose between giving into temptation or joining forces with the priest whose only weapons appear to be the sacraments and his faith. Ultimately, only a descent into hell itself will bring a stop to the horrors threatening the sanity and souls of everyone on Devil's Island.

And where does the plot come from? I suppose the correct answer is a very fertile imagination. I got the original spark of an idea from a nightmare I had. I subscribe to Freud's ideas of where dreams come from so I won't claim any kind of unworldly influence. It did make a good start however.

You don’t have to be religious to follow the story anymore than a belief in a deity was necessary to understand The Exorcist. Part of the ‘danger’ of Devil’s Island, I’m told, is that it’s ‘well written’ and ‘seductive’. Another apparent ‘danger’ is that the book ‘is funny’. – I choose to take these opinions as compliments. A good read is after all, a good read – and worth being found!