Fearless opens with Ava, with someone born into the club; raised by it, taught to love it, someone unquestioningly loyal to it from her first breath. Mercy comes to the club as a young adult, but without his family - the only two people he loved - and given the level of violence that lives in his bones, he's quick to throw himself fully into the new family the club provides. During all the trials and traumas of their story, their loyalty to the club is never in question.
Book two flips the script, though. We meet not one, but two club outsiders. In chapter one, we walk through Bell Bar from Holly's POV, far, far outside the Lean Dogs MC. We quickly realize that her perspective is not that of your average, middle-class, nine-to-five Knoxville resident. The guys intimidate her, the women confound her, but she's not thinking "ooh, bad criminals." No, in fact, she's thinking she'd very much like to work up the courage to introduce herself - to one in particular. Because what do you do when you feel small and frightened and someone's after you? You get a big, mean, scary dog. In this case, a Lean Dog.
Then we meet Michael. He's named for the Archangel St. Michael - it seemed fitting for the Sgt. at Arms. For the club-sanctioned killer. It was St. Michael who put Lucifer in the pit, and the book carries this bit of biblical lore throughout as an extended metaphor. Within the club, Michael is the one who gets his hands dirty; Ghost makes the decisions, decides who lives and dies, but it's Michael who carries out the orders. He's coldly unemotional, and he's willing to do the unthinkable when his president tells him to.
Michael's first POV scene is rather shocking, and that was by design. It's another of those unpleasant moments that tells the audience "these guys live by their own rules and that means doing some bad things." It's a testament to the utter ruthlessness of the club, to Ghost's brand of leadership, and to Michael's willingness to follow orders. It's ugly. And I think it's an important moment because it reinforces what we learned in the first book: the other guys might not like Michael, but they need him for this sort of thing.
But why don't they like him? Why would he be accepted as a part of the club if he's not good buddies with everyone else?
Insert Miranda Lambert's "All Kinds of Kinds."
The club is a family, and they're all brothers and sisters and friends...but, get down to the nitty gritty details, and the club is an organization. A small country, a business - however you want to look at it, it serves an economic function that must be preserved in order to continue existing - and existing in a position of power. This means two things:
One: the man in charge is going to ruthlessly guard the interests of the organization over that of the individual, which explains Ghost's behavior toward Holly in the book.
Two: There will be members who don't quite fit. Wallflowers and outcasts who aren't as tight with the others.
I wanted to use this book to explore both those concepts as they might play out within an outlaw MC. Michael being an awkward, socially inept outcast amongst his brothers felt very much like a real-world problem.
We'll work our way through the book this week: here, on Instagram (@hppress), and on my author Facebook page. You can grab it for the sale price of 99 cents all this week. Welcome to the discussion!
No comments:
Post a Comment