#ThrowbackThursday: Happy B-day to White Wolf

Two monsters studied one another, and for them, the war was over.

White Wolf released on this day six years ago. How has it been that long? 

The road to the first Sons of Rome book was long and paved with self-doubt and heaps of necessary patience. It was an idea that first germinated when I was still in high school. Its first characters were Fulk and Anna, and Val and Mia. I didn't then know how those four characters fit together within the larger narrative, but when I played with them on paper, I was running two parallel storylines that I hoped to some day converge. Val was always a vampire, and always Vlad's brother, but in my earliest drafts, Fulk was a demon instead of a werewolf, though always the First Baron Strange of Blackmere, a delightfully real nobleman listed in the annals of British aristocracy. 

I never managed more than a page or two; mostly, I was jotting notes, daydreaming, and collecting aimless plot bunnies in spiral notebooks. After I graduated college, and started my blog, I attempted several times to begin the series, in a variety of ways: efforts that all stalled out before I'd made anything like progress. Something was missing. Some vital piece of the puzzle that would click everything into place. The project had become monstrous in scope in my mind, and I couldn't figure out how to attack it. I needed an order of operations. 

White Wolf, and all its characters, chiefly Nik and Sasha, proved to be that missing piece. Not only did I quickly fall in love with them, and feel the need to tell their stories, but Alexei and the Romanov/Muscovite/Third Rome storyline proved to be an essential and galvanizing building block of the overarching plot of the whole series. By the time I was halfway through the first draft of White Wolf, my vision for Sons of Rome was complete, if daunting, and I knew I had something special on my hands. 

This series is my intricate and convoluted love letter to vampires, to wolves, to magic; to Gothic romance, and Classic horror, and epic fantasy sagas. It's bloody, and violent, and spans literal centuries. Not just a "few of my favorite things," but all of them.

The first four books are available, and book four ends on a positive, uplifting, satisfying conclusion, opposed to a cliff hanger, which is a good thing because I don't know when I'll return to this world. One day, I tell myself. After all, I haven't had the chance to introduce Richard, yet. And there's a certain pantheon of old gods waiting its turn as well. 

One day.

Until then, Happy Birthday to White Wolf, and Happy Halloween, everyone! 

 

Happy Halloween Week: Edgar Allan

 

There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

- "The Masque of the Red Death"

I love Halloween. How utterly uninspired and cliche of me for loving Poe as well, but here we are. 

I think the brilliance of Poe is the brevity of his short stories, and what he manages to accomplish within that limited narrative space. As someone whose skills lie in long-form storytelling, I'm always wildly impressed by a successfully executed short story. It's no easy feat to convey a wealth of conflict and sentiment in just a few-thousand words, but Poe not only managed it, he carved himself indelibly and forever famously in the landscape of American literature. Why? Skill, yes. But mostly because of the horror. Horror is affecting and memorable. 

I think there are readers who enjoy horror (me), and those who might not enjoy it, per se, but are both fascinated by it, and by the fascination it holds for fans. In either case, everyone's heard of at least one Poe story or poem, and even those who don't enjoy his work still felt some kind of way when they read "[T]ear up the planks! - here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!" There's something visceral and touching about the macabre; the contemplation of dark, unpleasant, or wicked deeds grips us with the same kind of fervor as love or heartbreak. True Crime wouldn't be such a runaway hit of a genre if not. 

Stylistically, Poe does two things that I think make his fiction effective. One, he throws the reader immediately into the narrator's deepest confidence. There's no slow intro, no convoluted backstory; in the stories that seem to be taking their time establishing setting, those paragraphs are pulling double duty: they're establishing the setting and vibe of the story, and they're also lulling you into a sense of calm so he can spring The Horror on you at the perfect moment. Some of his narrators, as in the case of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat," are truly horrendous people, but he presents their perspectives in a plain-spoken, unselfconscious manner that trusts the audience to come to the right conclusion without a lot of hand-holding or moralizing. 

And two: he punches you right in the face with The Horror, and then ducks neatly away without dawdling about with any sort of conclusion or lesson-learning. Just boom, look at this! And out. 

No one currently writes in Poe's prose style, nor should they: as delightful as it was/is, language has evolved and modernized, and a modern-set story written by a modern author is going to reflect the pose stylings of today. But the set up and payoff approach of his stories is something we still see in most horror writing. It's a formula that still works, as timeless as it is stirring. And his prose is inspiring and useful; while I wouldn't want to duplicate it exactly, his particular, handpicked approach to detail is a worthy area of study. 

I also happen to think that all of Poe's work is ripe for modern interpretation. Every one of his short stories and poems has the potential to become a long-form novel, TV series, or film, given the right approach, and a broad enough imagination. 

#ReadingLife: The Twisted Ones

 

Sharing more spooky reads! This one's a personal favorite that I read back in 2019, and which I still think about every time I hear a woodpecker tapping away on a tree trunk. 

Because I'm a masochist, I gave myself a firm Christmas Eve release date for Golden Eagle. I wanted to give myself a full month for editing and proofing, which meant that, with Halloween looming, I was sweating that deadline. I still had the entirety of the multi-cut-scene action finale of the novel to write, and mental exhaustion set in hard. One of my strategies in that kind of situation is to keep a book that I'm reading at my desk, and work in short bursts. I write a few hundred words, then pick up my Kindle and read a few pages. Instead of the drag of checking email or scrolling social media, reading fiction in this instance helps keep the brain muscles working, and enables me to power through high-octane chapters. In 2019, I downloaded The Twisted Ones on a whim, and it helped me finish the office building/Ingraham Institute showdowns in Golden Eagle. It also became one of my favorite horror novels. 

T. Kingfisher's prose is a deft blend of casual, intimate, and literary. Colorful and lyrical descriptions are brought down to earth through the immediate familiarity her first-person narrators establish in the opening paragraphs. It's a kind of comfortable intimacy that persists through the course of the novel, and which makes us terrified for the main character - "Mouse" in this instance - as the familiar and the quaint and the safe give way to gasp-inducing horror. Kingfisher is good: she's clever but doesn't need to flex those muscles in a braggadocious way; her writing is easy. You slide into it right away and never want to leave. Best of all, and a rarity in horror fiction: her characters are likeable. The mains, yes, but the supporting cast, too. 

I won't offer spoilers in case you want to go read the book (and you should!), but the basic premise is that our main character, nicknamed Mouse, inherits a junk-filled house after her great-uncle dies, and she makes the trek with her dog out into the woods to start sorting through the detritus of his hoarding streak. Initially, the unsettling occurrences can be chalked up to a new, unfamiliar place, and the typical noise characteristic of all forests. But things quickly go sideways from there. (Like I said before, woodpeckers weird me out a little to this day, after reading the book.) Amidst the scares, Mouse makes friends with her kindly neighbors, and, no worries, the dog makes it to the end; that's one spoiler I don't think you'll mind. 

Reading this book felt like stumbling upon a horror novel written specifically to meet my tastes: well-rounded, likeable characters, creepy-crawly atmosphere, legitimate scares, but a positive ending. As much as I love spooky stories, I do so hate dour or dire endings. I'm a weeny that way. 

This spooky season, I hope to read A House With Good Bones by the same author. I also want to recommend her novel The Hollow Places, which scared the heck out of me, and also gave me a whole new outlook on river otters (IYKYK).