O is for—Opera
There's a reason I keep on calling the
Hexslinger series my “blood-soaked black magic gay porno horse
opera” (or various recombinations thereof), aside from the fact
that it obviously amuses the crap out of me. And essentially, that
reason goes right back to my formative years, when I would tell
people I liked horror and people would wrinkle their noses and ask:
“Uh...why?” The implication always being that horror is (to any
reasoning human being) a disgusting, exploitative genre which aims to
make entertainment out of our most intimate and dreadful fears—it's
sexist by nature because of fetishizing female victimhood, often -ist
of multiple other stripes through exoticization-of-evil tropes,
heterosexist and heteronormative, nihilistically bleak, etc. Also
just plain gross, with all those bodily fluids. What kind of a person
are you, tiny Gemma?
Answer: I'm the kind of person who
likes opera, lit and fig. I don't see these things as icky or
wrenching. They uplift me in a literally awful way. I don't know why,
but each succeeding clusterfuck is like yet another aria, black and
red and purple all over. It's glorious. Expect more of the same.
P is for—Pinkerton
Oh Allan Pinkerton, you probably
weren't a good guy, exactly, but you sure weren't as bad as
I've spent three books making you out to be. That being said, I think
the way Pinkerton's degenerated by the beginning of A Tree of
Bones is set in stark, fairly intentional parallel with Ixchel's
degeneration on the other side of the War on Hex: He's the same sort
of villain, the same sort of monster, the same sort of addict, but he
thinks he's different, because he's using science rather than
superstition to tap into that massive field of what one can only
assume is a natural force, hexation. But just like her, he's
sacrificing other people right and left to his “cause”; just like
her, what he really wants at base is to usher in a bold new era of
parasitism and slavery. And half my people have to work with/for him!
Then again, lurking in the background,
we do have those two agents who've broken from the fold and are now
working against Pinkerton, Frank Geyer (first introduced in A Rope
of Thorns) and George Thiel, who we've heard of but not from,
thus far. Like Pinkerton, both are actual historical characters who I
seized on and bent to my own ends; Thiel, for example, is mainly
known as the guy who split off to form his own detective agency, but
didn't manage to eclipse Pinkerton's original brand. The great
part about alternate universes, however, is that things can end up
very differently—and to me, in both cases, the true legacy of Allan
Pinkerton is the “detective agency” concept he pioneered, an
unacknowledged branch of the government with ties to the Secret
Service who functioned as a sort of proto-Federal Bureau of
Investigation. A very useful thing to have control of, in any
universe that contains hexation.
Tomorrow: Q and R!
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