"Never forget how small you are, Felix. When a man starts thinking he can control the beast, that's when She swallows him whole. No one remembers his name; he ain't nothin' but bleached bone washing up amongst the reeds, bits of him deep in the belly of a gator somewhere along the slimy bottom."
Like Chapter One, Chapter Three is putting in the work with this book. In Chapter Three, we finally, properly, meet Mercy.
Nothing about him surprised most anyone, really.
One of the things I'm doing as we go along with this reread is address some of the cutting, usually hilarious bits of criticism the book, and I, have received over the past decade. Not because I have an axe to grind, but because I'm hoping to offer some insight into my process, and explain the mindfulness behind all the little creative choices in the novel. One such funny critique was - paraphrasing here - "Why should I care about alligators?" I wrote this post about it last year, so I won't rehash it all, but it's a very intentional choice in Chapter Three to introduce Mercy's POV with a glimpse at his childhood. Mercy is an unlikely combo of childishly sweet and extravagantly enthusiastic about violence. I don't think that characterization works without understanding the ways his early years were his most formative.
Mercy's a strange bird. I researched the current MC romance trends back in 2014 when I started writing, saw the man-of-few-words, grunting, woman-ordering-around stereotypes, and swerved hard in the other direction. With all the guys, but mostly with Mercy. If I was going to write a Southern Epic, I was going to write a Southern Epic Byronic hero to go with it. My Cajun Heathcliff crossed with a modern Rhett Butler. His Cheerfully Murderous personality is 100% inspired by my now-departed dog, Viktor.
A visit to the swamp of the past is a slow start here...but it all comes back in the end, and it's an essential part of understanding Mercy.
Our other big introduction here is, of course, Ghost.
Though a few inches shorter, Ghost was an imposing figure in his own right. The kind of man who made taller men want to bend their knees so they were on the same level. Lean and hard with muscle, his parentage of Aidan had never been in question: the same strong nose, dark hair and eyes, low brows that gave him a perpetual scowl, and a firm jaw that was always grinding. He’d boxed in the army, and he still had a fighter’s wide shoulders and catlike grace. Ghost never fidgeted; he had no nervous tics. He occupied a room with such indomitable presence, a radiant, unaffected confidence that was a part of his every fiber, and never a show.
Writing Ghost has always been fun, because I've always greatly enjoyed his role within the story, and have always spun him in a way that I knew would make readers dislike him. Let's be blunt: he's an asshole. But it was super important to me to showcase a couple of things, especially early on:
Firstly, that he's not going to be the same sort of president James was. He cares about the success and viability of his club beyond the social aspects. Lots of guys love to talk about being an outlaw, and playing by their own rules, but Ghost has the ambition and the ruthless savvy to back it up. In all honesty, I hope no one expected an MC president to be a nice guy.
I also wanted to show a clear juxtaposition between Mercy's dad's "Daddy" bonhomie, and Ghost's relentless practicality and total disregard for niceties. It's something that will, ten years later, be echoed quite satisfyingly in Lord Have Mercy when Mercy stands up at church and says that there are times he's wanted to strangle Ghost, but that he loves him better than he loved his own father. That's a big deal.
One last parting note: I love this line, because it's Mercy acknowledging what we'll all soon learn about Ava:
It seemed only fitting that as Ghost became the new president, Maggie would finally take her rightful place as queen of the MC.
Ava didn’t know it yet, but she had that same steel in her.
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