In slightly more personal news, I'm just back from World Horror Con in Brighton, England. Here's my affable and discreet traveling companion, David Nickle, with a far better run-down of what occurred than I could possibly manage (http://tiny.cc/ldndr). It has pictures! Some of/including me!
Plus, it sub-showcases my first official review for A Book of Tongues, here (http://tiny.cc/s25mi). Publisher's frickin' Weekly thinks I'm dope! (Not that they used that exact word, of course. But I'm happy nevertheless.;))
Also: Bev Vincent, whose own WHC blog entries are well worth your time, notes a great review of EVolVe here (http://tiny.cc/7xqhf), in the wonderfully-monickered Innsmouth Free Press. Apparently, "When I'm Armouring My Belly" is actually uplifting, at least a li'l bit. Who knew?;))
So, the VERY short version goes thus: I had a great damn time. Met many people I've respected for years, along with people I didn't know at all but who knew me, at least by reputation. Ate great food, stayed in a...not-so-great hotel, got drunk consistently and substantially, partied with a horde of like minds. Bought far too many books. I'm very glad I went, and I'm very glad to be home.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
A Book of Tongues Cast of Characters (III): Pinkerton, the Pinks, Ed Morrow
Allan Pinkeron and his “Pinks”
Since we’ve spent a fair deal of time on the opposite (considering that my two great fictional loves are the motivations and internal lives of villains and antiheroes), it only makes sense that we should perhaps take a brief moment to talk about “good guys”. But then again, in A Book of Tongues, the forces of law and order are mainly represented by Allan Pinkerton’s Pinkeron National Detective Agency, a state of affairs which hits the ground already dicey, and never really recovers.
It all started back in the 1840s, when former Glasgow cooper Pinkerton—disillusioned by the failure of the British Chartrist movement—came to America, where he was appointed the first police detective in Chicago. In the 1850s, he then partnered with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker to form the North-Western Police Agency, later known as the Pinkerton Agency. Or, as historian Frank Morn writes: "By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago."
Pinkerton developed several investigative techniques that are still used today. Among them are "shadowing" (surveillance of a suspect) and "assuming a role" (undercover work). Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Pinkerton became head of the Union Army Intelligence Service in 1861–1862, foiling an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland, while guarding Abraham Lincoln on his way to his inauguration. His agents often worked undercover as Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, in an effort to gather military intelligence; Pinkerton himself served in several undercover missions under the alias of Major E.J. Allen. Pinkerton was succeeded as Intelligence Service chief by Lafayette Baker. The Intelligence Service was the forerunner of the U.S. Secret Service
As the agency’s scope grew, its ruthless yet only sometimes efficient methods soon attracted the notoreity that Pinkerton—a genius at self-promotion who literally wrote his own pulp history—so craved; the Pinks were soon universally feared as well as somewhat despised, since their services always went to the highest bidder. Pinkertons were often hired to protect banks so large they feared robbery, and also rode shotgun while trains and stagecoaches transported money and other high quality merchandise between cities and towns, making them vulnerable outlaws. Pinkerton agents gained a reputation for resistance to bribery, easily explained less by their high moral standards than by the fact that they were usually both well-paid and well-armed.
In 1871, Congress appropriated $50,000 to the new Department of Justice to form a suborganization devoted to "the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law." The amount was insufficient for the DOJ to fashion an integral investigating unit, so the DOJ contracted out the services involved to the Pinkertons—thus effectively making the Pinkertons an arm of “the government”, a status which Pinkerton hastened to exploit.
In 1872, Franklin B. Gowen—then president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad—hired the agency to investigate the labor unions in the company's mines. A Pinkerton agent, James McParland, infiltrated the Molly Maguires using the alias James McKenna, leading to the labor organization’s downfall. The incident was the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear.
Perhaps on the strength of this nonfiction-to-fiction crossover success, Pinkerton agents were also hired to track western outlaws Jesse James, the Reno Gang, and the Wild Bunch (including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). On March 17, 1874, two Pinkerton Detectives and a Deputy Sheriff Edwin P. Daniels encountered the Younger Brothers (associates of James Gang); Daniels, John Younger, and one Pinkerton Agent were killed. The Pinkertons later retaliated by blowing up a house where the James boys were “known to stay”—understandably, since it belonged to their mother, Zerelda. But since they weren’t there at the time, all the Pinks managed to do was blow off Zerelda James’ leg and kill Jesse and Frank’s retarded half-brother; not the world’s most useful P.R. event, in retrospect.
(In 1872, meanwhile, the Spanish Government hired Pinkerton to help suppress a revolution in Cuba, which intended to end slavery and give citizens the right to vote. Pinkeron said “yes, please!”, thus further endearing himself to many, many people who thankfully weren’t of much import, because they didn’t speak English.)
In late June, 1884, Pinkerton slipped on a pavement in Chicago, biting his tongue as he did so. He didn't seek treatment and the tongue became infected, leading to his death on July the first. At the time, he was working on a system that would centralize all criminal identification records, a database now maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Agency continued ever onwards, pursuing Pinkeron’s original methodology. On July 6, 1892, during the Homestead Strike, Henry Clay Frick called in a force of 300 Pinkerton detectives from New York and Chicago to protect the mill and replacement workers. This resulted in a fight in which 16 men were killed (7 Pinkertons and 9 Strikers), and to restore order, two brigades of the state militia were called out.
The next year, Anti-Pinkerton Act was passed, and since then federal law has stated that an "individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia."
In 1895, detective Frank Geyer restored the Pinkertons’ reputation somewhat by tracking first known American serial killer H.H. Holmes to Toronto, Canada, where he also uncovered the bodies of the three murdered Pitezel children. This lead to Holmes’ arrest and execution, but also exposed the fact that the Agency had previously apprehended Holmes just a year before in Boston, on an outstanding Texas warrant for horse theft.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the Pinkertons slowly drifted away from spying and union-busting, eventually dropping their criminal investigation work altogether, and removing the word “detective” from their letterhead and becoming primarily involved in protection services. In 2003, Pinkerton's was acquired—along with longtime rival the William J. Burns Detective Agency (founded in 1910)—by Securitas AB, and the two were folded together to create Securitas Security Services USA, Inc., one of the largest security companies in the world. Securitas and several other major security companies are now under union organization, through the SEIU (Services Employees International Union).
Here’s a .jpg of the Pinkertons’ famous logo, the Unsleeping Eye:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/We_never_sleep.jpg
Since he was still alive at the time, I thought it only fitting to involve Allan Pinkerton directly as one of the characters in A Book of Tongues. I see him as reasonably young and energetic at this point, having just emerged from the furnace of the War, and extremely excited by the possibilities attendant on finally being able to track, apprehend and control hexes. It only makes sense that he’d be concentrating on hexslingers rather than human outlaws, since there’s almost no fair degree of competition between the two (especially in terms of attracting positive media attention). Physical template: Maybe Gerard Butler, but definitely in his slightly puffy Law Abiding Citizen mode rather than his ripped-to-hell-and-back 300 mode. So just try superimposing Butler’s face onto this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Pinkerton_allan_late_harpers.jpg
Ed Morrow
Pinkerton Detective Agency man Edward Rumsfield Morrow is, on first sight, about as close as we come to a “hero” in A Book of Tongues. Granted, he spends a lot of his time A) lying through his teeth and B) letting Chess and the Rev ride rough-shod over everything in sight, but that’s the nature of his game: He’s gone undercover with the West’s currently most-feared hexslinger, and spends much of his time standing within easy killing distance of a man who’ll pretty much shoot you for looking at him, the Rev, or virtually anything else in a manner he considers funny. When the chips are down, however, this is definitely the guy you want in your corner—someone who’s perceptive, sympathetic and loyal to a fault.
It goes without saying (though I’m saying it anyhow) that Morrow is also the default audience POV character here--the person whose innate decency allow us to be slowly tricked, much as he himself is, into feeling something for far less agreeable characters like the Rev and Chess. And in Chess’s case, eventually, that understanding comes to extend far further beyond the bounds of propriety than a big, straight dude may initially care for—but while I can certainly appreciate the results, I’ve actually come to find the mechanics of Chess and Morrow’s odd little workaday partner/friendship far more interesting, overall.
Finally: Though Morrow originally derived much from a minor character in 3:10 to Yuma named Jackson, the physical template he’s since come to resemble most is that of Liev Schreiber, probably best-known at this point either for playing Sabretooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine or knocking up Naomi Watts (twice!). He was also the latest iteration of hapless political Cylon Raymond Prentiss Shaw, in Jonathan Demme’s unjustly overlooked/decried 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and I always see Ed as slightly more Raymond than Victor Creed, except in the sideburns department.
Here’s some mainly-shirtless Liev Schreiber goodness, to see us out:
http://www.topnews.in/light/files/Liev-Schreiber.jpg
http://cdn.buzznet.com/media-cdn/jj1/headlines/2008/03/liev-schreiber-shirtless.jpg
http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2008/startracks/080317/liev_schrieber.jpg
Since we’ve spent a fair deal of time on the opposite (considering that my two great fictional loves are the motivations and internal lives of villains and antiheroes), it only makes sense that we should perhaps take a brief moment to talk about “good guys”. But then again, in A Book of Tongues, the forces of law and order are mainly represented by Allan Pinkerton’s Pinkeron National Detective Agency, a state of affairs which hits the ground already dicey, and never really recovers.
It all started back in the 1840s, when former Glasgow cooper Pinkerton—disillusioned by the failure of the British Chartrist movement—came to America, where he was appointed the first police detective in Chicago. In the 1850s, he then partnered with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker to form the North-Western Police Agency, later known as the Pinkerton Agency. Or, as historian Frank Morn writes: "By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago."
Pinkerton developed several investigative techniques that are still used today. Among them are "shadowing" (surveillance of a suspect) and "assuming a role" (undercover work). Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Pinkerton became head of the Union Army Intelligence Service in 1861–1862, foiling an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland, while guarding Abraham Lincoln on his way to his inauguration. His agents often worked undercover as Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, in an effort to gather military intelligence; Pinkerton himself served in several undercover missions under the alias of Major E.J. Allen. Pinkerton was succeeded as Intelligence Service chief by Lafayette Baker. The Intelligence Service was the forerunner of the U.S. Secret Service
As the agency’s scope grew, its ruthless yet only sometimes efficient methods soon attracted the notoreity that Pinkerton—a genius at self-promotion who literally wrote his own pulp history—so craved; the Pinks were soon universally feared as well as somewhat despised, since their services always went to the highest bidder. Pinkertons were often hired to protect banks so large they feared robbery, and also rode shotgun while trains and stagecoaches transported money and other high quality merchandise between cities and towns, making them vulnerable outlaws. Pinkerton agents gained a reputation for resistance to bribery, easily explained less by their high moral standards than by the fact that they were usually both well-paid and well-armed.
In 1871, Congress appropriated $50,000 to the new Department of Justice to form a suborganization devoted to "the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law." The amount was insufficient for the DOJ to fashion an integral investigating unit, so the DOJ contracted out the services involved to the Pinkertons—thus effectively making the Pinkertons an arm of “the government”, a status which Pinkerton hastened to exploit.
In 1872, Franklin B. Gowen—then president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad—hired the agency to investigate the labor unions in the company's mines. A Pinkerton agent, James McParland, infiltrated the Molly Maguires using the alias James McKenna, leading to the labor organization’s downfall. The incident was the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear.
Perhaps on the strength of this nonfiction-to-fiction crossover success, Pinkerton agents were also hired to track western outlaws Jesse James, the Reno Gang, and the Wild Bunch (including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). On March 17, 1874, two Pinkerton Detectives and a Deputy Sheriff Edwin P. Daniels encountered the Younger Brothers (associates of James Gang); Daniels, John Younger, and one Pinkerton Agent were killed. The Pinkertons later retaliated by blowing up a house where the James boys were “known to stay”—understandably, since it belonged to their mother, Zerelda. But since they weren’t there at the time, all the Pinks managed to do was blow off Zerelda James’ leg and kill Jesse and Frank’s retarded half-brother; not the world’s most useful P.R. event, in retrospect.
(In 1872, meanwhile, the Spanish Government hired Pinkerton to help suppress a revolution in Cuba, which intended to end slavery and give citizens the right to vote. Pinkeron said “yes, please!”, thus further endearing himself to many, many people who thankfully weren’t of much import, because they didn’t speak English.)
In late June, 1884, Pinkerton slipped on a pavement in Chicago, biting his tongue as he did so. He didn't seek treatment and the tongue became infected, leading to his death on July the first. At the time, he was working on a system that would centralize all criminal identification records, a database now maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Agency continued ever onwards, pursuing Pinkeron’s original methodology. On July 6, 1892, during the Homestead Strike, Henry Clay Frick called in a force of 300 Pinkerton detectives from New York and Chicago to protect the mill and replacement workers. This resulted in a fight in which 16 men were killed (7 Pinkertons and 9 Strikers), and to restore order, two brigades of the state militia were called out.
The next year, Anti-Pinkerton Act was passed, and since then federal law has stated that an "individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia."
In 1895, detective Frank Geyer restored the Pinkertons’ reputation somewhat by tracking first known American serial killer H.H. Holmes to Toronto, Canada, where he also uncovered the bodies of the three murdered Pitezel children. This lead to Holmes’ arrest and execution, but also exposed the fact that the Agency had previously apprehended Holmes just a year before in Boston, on an outstanding Texas warrant for horse theft.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the Pinkertons slowly drifted away from spying and union-busting, eventually dropping their criminal investigation work altogether, and removing the word “detective” from their letterhead and becoming primarily involved in protection services. In 2003, Pinkerton's was acquired—along with longtime rival the William J. Burns Detective Agency (founded in 1910)—by Securitas AB, and the two were folded together to create Securitas Security Services USA, Inc., one of the largest security companies in the world. Securitas and several other major security companies are now under union organization, through the SEIU (Services Employees International Union).
Here’s a .jpg of the Pinkertons’ famous logo, the Unsleeping Eye:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/We_never_sleep.jpg
Since he was still alive at the time, I thought it only fitting to involve Allan Pinkerton directly as one of the characters in A Book of Tongues. I see him as reasonably young and energetic at this point, having just emerged from the furnace of the War, and extremely excited by the possibilities attendant on finally being able to track, apprehend and control hexes. It only makes sense that he’d be concentrating on hexslingers rather than human outlaws, since there’s almost no fair degree of competition between the two (especially in terms of attracting positive media attention). Physical template: Maybe Gerard Butler, but definitely in his slightly puffy Law Abiding Citizen mode rather than his ripped-to-hell-and-back 300 mode. So just try superimposing Butler’s face onto this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Pinkerton_allan_late_harpers.jpg
Ed Morrow
Pinkerton Detective Agency man Edward Rumsfield Morrow is, on first sight, about as close as we come to a “hero” in A Book of Tongues. Granted, he spends a lot of his time A) lying through his teeth and B) letting Chess and the Rev ride rough-shod over everything in sight, but that’s the nature of his game: He’s gone undercover with the West’s currently most-feared hexslinger, and spends much of his time standing within easy killing distance of a man who’ll pretty much shoot you for looking at him, the Rev, or virtually anything else in a manner he considers funny. When the chips are down, however, this is definitely the guy you want in your corner—someone who’s perceptive, sympathetic and loyal to a fault.
It goes without saying (though I’m saying it anyhow) that Morrow is also the default audience POV character here--the person whose innate decency allow us to be slowly tricked, much as he himself is, into feeling something for far less agreeable characters like the Rev and Chess. And in Chess’s case, eventually, that understanding comes to extend far further beyond the bounds of propriety than a big, straight dude may initially care for—but while I can certainly appreciate the results, I’ve actually come to find the mechanics of Chess and Morrow’s odd little workaday partner/friendship far more interesting, overall.
Finally: Though Morrow originally derived much from a minor character in 3:10 to Yuma named Jackson, the physical template he’s since come to resemble most is that of Liev Schreiber, probably best-known at this point either for playing Sabretooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine or knocking up Naomi Watts (twice!). He was also the latest iteration of hapless political Cylon Raymond Prentiss Shaw, in Jonathan Demme’s unjustly overlooked/decried 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and I always see Ed as slightly more Raymond than Victor Creed, except in the sideburns department.
Here’s some mainly-shirtless Liev Schreiber goodness, to see us out:
http://www.topnews.in/light/files/Liev-Schreiber.jpg
http://cdn.buzznet.com/media-cdn/jj1/headlines/2008/03/liev-schreiber-shirtless.jpg
http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2008/startracks/080317/liev_schrieber.jpg
Sunday, March 21, 2010
For All Your Media Outlet Needs:
"The Gemma Files" (ha, ha), a combination FAQ and Media Kit, can now be found here:
http://sites.google.com/site/thegemmafiles/
Enjoy.
Nota bene: Though I had hoped to have the rest of the Book of Tongues pre-release material up before I leave for World Horror Con, things are moving pretty fast, so maybe not. Apologies in advance. I'll see y'all when I come back...
http://sites.google.com/site/thegemmafiles/
Enjoy.
Nota bene: Though I had hoped to have the rest of the Book of Tongues pre-release material up before I leave for World Horror Con, things are moving pretty fast, so maybe not. Apologies in advance. I'll see y'all when I come back...
Monday, March 8, 2010
A Book of Tongues Interstitial: Magic, a Beginner's Guide
You may have already noticed I’m not much of a classic world-builder—resonance interests me far more than consistency, for which I rely on back-up from my RPG-designing husband Stephen J. Barringer (with whom I co-wrote the story “each thing I show you is a piece of my death”, first published in Clockwork Phoenix 2, from Norilana Books; it will be republished later this year in Best Horror of the Year #2, from Night Shade Books). But today I’m going to talk a bit about my theory of magic, specifically as it applies to the Hexslinger Series universe.
As Dr Joachim Asbury explains in Chapter Two of A Book of Tongues, what “everybody knows” in this alternative version of the 1860s-era Wild West is that there are people—magicians, commonly called hexes—who are born with the capacity to suddenly manifest reality-changing power. This manifestation’s methodology seems sex-linked, in that for (most) females it happens during the onset of their first period, while for (most) men it happens during a moment of extreme physical trauma. Since no one has hitherto been able to test people for hexacious potential, however, it always comes as a world-rocking surprise, transforming the person in question into something stuck forever halfway between a pariah-monster and a demigod.
How does magic work, exactly? In the hexes’ case, it seems to be a version of the “quantum magic” powers displayed by DC Comics characters like Arcanna Jones—they are able to choose one quantum possibility from a million-to-the-million undetermined outcomes, through sheer force of will. Because they’re still human, however, they do seem to need a structure to filter those choices through—most start out fetishistically clinging to things like Reverend Rook’s Bible Verses, or Lady Ixchel’s insistence on interpreting everything she does/encounters according to the Mayan-Aztec Blood Engine world-view she originally learned when she was still “alive”. Some graduate from that to a slightly more self-driven philosophy, but all retain the idea (perhaps an instinctual understanding of the law which states that energy cannot be destroyed or created, only transformed) that nothing can be made from nothing, and that everything must be paid for somehow.
No result without sacrifice: You get what you pay for, nothing more or less. And if you really want something to work, if not necessarily to last, you pay for it in blood.
As it turns out, hexation creates a magnetic field, which Dr Asbury has been able to detect and measure with his Manifold. He thinks this field may be something like “what the Chinese call ch’i”, the force which drives everything physical. And this makes a sort of sense, since its’ already been proven that there are sub-sets of “magic” which mere humans also appear to be able to wield—power which comes from working in concert with natural/universal forces (faith-based shamanism), or the types of power which come from inside a person’s mind (psi power). These capacities, like hexation itself, may be genetically linked, but it’s hard to say.
(In case you’re wondering, I like some mystery with my explanations, which is one reason I chose to root this narrative in a time-period where true science and junk science were all-but-indistinguishable. Also, outlaws!)
There aren’t a lot of hexes, thankfully; equally thankfully, they are unable to work together, because whenever you get two or more of them in close proximity, they’re driven to parasite upon each other, sucking out each other’s magical force. "Mages don't meddle," is the truism. Thus all friendships and love affairs end in betrayal at best, murder at worst, and there are no organized “schools” of magic, only apprenticeships which climax quickly and dirtily. Magicians are like tigers, wandering through the world alone, occasionally raising human-based cults and support-systems which will inevitably turn on them—drawn together by mutual hunger, they meet to fuss and screw, then crawl off to lick their wounds, afterwards. This is the mechanism which prevents them from taking over the world…
…or has, thus far.
As Dr Joachim Asbury explains in Chapter Two of A Book of Tongues, what “everybody knows” in this alternative version of the 1860s-era Wild West is that there are people—magicians, commonly called hexes—who are born with the capacity to suddenly manifest reality-changing power. This manifestation’s methodology seems sex-linked, in that for (most) females it happens during the onset of their first period, while for (most) men it happens during a moment of extreme physical trauma. Since no one has hitherto been able to test people for hexacious potential, however, it always comes as a world-rocking surprise, transforming the person in question into something stuck forever halfway between a pariah-monster and a demigod.
How does magic work, exactly? In the hexes’ case, it seems to be a version of the “quantum magic” powers displayed by DC Comics characters like Arcanna Jones—they are able to choose one quantum possibility from a million-to-the-million undetermined outcomes, through sheer force of will. Because they’re still human, however, they do seem to need a structure to filter those choices through—most start out fetishistically clinging to things like Reverend Rook’s Bible Verses, or Lady Ixchel’s insistence on interpreting everything she does/encounters according to the Mayan-Aztec Blood Engine world-view she originally learned when she was still “alive”. Some graduate from that to a slightly more self-driven philosophy, but all retain the idea (perhaps an instinctual understanding of the law which states that energy cannot be destroyed or created, only transformed) that nothing can be made from nothing, and that everything must be paid for somehow.
No result without sacrifice: You get what you pay for, nothing more or less. And if you really want something to work, if not necessarily to last, you pay for it in blood.
As it turns out, hexation creates a magnetic field, which Dr Asbury has been able to detect and measure with his Manifold. He thinks this field may be something like “what the Chinese call ch’i”, the force which drives everything physical. And this makes a sort of sense, since its’ already been proven that there are sub-sets of “magic” which mere humans also appear to be able to wield—power which comes from working in concert with natural/universal forces (faith-based shamanism), or the types of power which come from inside a person’s mind (psi power). These capacities, like hexation itself, may be genetically linked, but it’s hard to say.
(In case you’re wondering, I like some mystery with my explanations, which is one reason I chose to root this narrative in a time-period where true science and junk science were all-but-indistinguishable. Also, outlaws!)
There aren’t a lot of hexes, thankfully; equally thankfully, they are unable to work together, because whenever you get two or more of them in close proximity, they’re driven to parasite upon each other, sucking out each other’s magical force. "Mages don't meddle," is the truism. Thus all friendships and love affairs end in betrayal at best, murder at worst, and there are no organized “schools” of magic, only apprenticeships which climax quickly and dirtily. Magicians are like tigers, wandering through the world alone, occasionally raising human-based cults and support-systems which will inevitably turn on them—drawn together by mutual hunger, they meet to fuss and screw, then crawl off to lick their wounds, afterwards. This is the mechanism which prevents them from taking over the world…
…or has, thus far.
Friday, February 19, 2010
A Book of Tongues Cast of Characters (II)
Today, we'll talk about two men of faith. Let's start with...
“Reverend” Asher Elijah Rook
There’s just something about a bad man who knows his Bible. Much like with Chess and Ben Foster, it all began with Russell Crowe’s Ben Wade in 3:10 to Yuma—but Ben’s a happy hypocrite in many ways, an atheist autodidact who uses the Good Book as just another way to work his will on idiots. I wanted Reverend Rook to have the sort of faith which can sour, but never entirely evaporate; to be a man literally in love with his own method of damnation, capable of dreadful things, but also capable of teaching a wild boy who’s never cared for anything to at least care for himself. I also wanted him to be big and deep-voiced, ‘cause I (and Chess) like that.
Enter, therefore—as my primary physical template for the Rev—one Clancy Brown.
Now, I realize that to most people these days, Brown’s an official old dude…chiefly recognizable as either the Kurgan in Highlander (which you may or may not find an attractive image—I do, but then, there’s a lot that’s wrong with me), Drill Sergeant Zim from Starship Troopers or Brother Justin Crowe from HBO's Carnivale. When I first began thinking nasty thoughts about Brown, however, both he and I were considerably younger. Here’s a pretty good shot of him from the days when he was also Rawhide in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and might even occasionally be found cavorting naked onscreen with the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis (in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, in case you’re wondering); do feel free to ignore the attached screencap of Lobo, though:
http://www.comicbookmovie.com/images/users/uploads/8558/clancy-brown.jpg
Plus, a good selection of recent Clancy Brown pics can be found here (including one next to Nick Stahl, for body-size reference):
http://www.superiorpics.com/clancy_brown/
So: What we mainly know about the Rev is that he’s from Missouri, the Mother of Outlaws herself, and only ended up on the Confederate side of the War because he headed south when he first took off running. He’s also a damn man-mountain with an impressive command of Scripture and a not-so-secret liking for “the Other”. This impulse is what spurred him to flee his original posting as town preacher, after his flock burnt a goat-eyed boy alive for the sin of simply having been born a witch-child, and Rook didn’t feel quite morally-uncompromised enough to stop them. It’s also what he thought at first pushed him towards Chess, though the gravitational pull of another magician-to-be actually had far more to do with it, as he eventually learned.
There’s a line I heard once in a terrible movie—it might have been The Wraith, starring Charlie Sheen—that’s always stuck with me: “When you feel nothing, you can do anything.” In Rook’s case, as with all hexes, I think that goes the other way, as well; when you literally can do anything, it’s hard to feel much at all, especially for the day-to-day. What keeps Rook bound to Chess, however, is that he can’t stop feeling for him—it’s impossible for either of them not to get a rise out of the other, whether that be sexually or what-have-you. They were married long before the Mayan goddess Ixchel ever chose Rook as her quote-quote “little” husband.
Like Chess, Rook’s family originally hails from England, though they’ve been in America since before the Revolution. His last name means either “crow” (sometimes used as a euphemism for preacher, due to their propensity to dress in black) or “a swindler—someone who betrays”.
Sheriff Mesach Love
Like Rook, Mesach Love knows his Bible inside-out. He’s a decorated former Blue-belly, a Nazarene preacher of fierce devotion, lawman for and founder of Bewelcome township in New Mexico, and runs his tiny slice of post-War paradise like a combination of former soldier rescue and redemption-through-hard-work boot-camp. People let him get away with it, though, because he’s got great charisma and they’re more than slightly afraid of him. You see, he has God on his side.
When I first sketched out Sheriff Love, he owed a great deal to the music of the band 16 Horsepower, as well as the physicality of their lead singer, David Eugene Edwards. They specialized in "incendiary gospel, hallowed folk and mordant tones infused with a high, dark theatricality worthy of Nick Cave," as AllMusic critic Eric Hage puts it. Here’s the video that really got me thinking they were the cloggin’ shit, “Black Soul Choir”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-vpAn15-vE
Then, after watching the video for their song “Haw”, it suddenly occurred to me: Hey! That guy looks somewhat like a rawboned-up Jared Padalecki (the young Texan actor probably best known as Sam Winchester on Supernatural)! See for yourself:
http://handson.provocateuse.com/show/jared_padalecki
So now, whenever I think about Sheriff Love declaiming on how GOD hath given him the power to SMITE whomsoever GOD doth choose that he do so unto, part of me is always seeing Jared making that black-eyed nosebleed squinch-face at a demon, before sucking its unholy smoke-soul out and gulping it down like a dry drunk. Or him and Clancy Brown wrestling, which’d be fun as hell, since they’re both Sasquatch-sized.
The variety of Protestant Christianity both Rook and Sheriff Love subscribe to is an offshoot of Calvinism known as Wesleyan Arminianism, which traces his roots back to the teachings of Arminius and John Wesley. Although its primary legacy remains within the various Methodist denominations (the Wesleyan Methodist, the Free Methodist, the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, the Christian Methodist Episcopal, and the United Methodist), the Wesleyan tradition has also been reinterpreted as catalyst for other movements and denominations as well—Charles Finney and the Holiness movement; Charles Parham and the Pentecostal movement; Phineas Bresee and the Church of the Nazarene.
Like a lot of “power in the blood” faiths, Wesleyan Arminianism’s a fascinating mixture of free will and predestination which states outright that although God can save anyone, it won’t work unless that person wills himself to be saved; you are put in charge of your own redemption, knowing full well that Man’s essentially sinful nature will make the road to Heaven an unending up-hill slog. The Scriptures are the primary engine through which a sinner can refine himself, so both study and the expostion of Scriptural ideas through everyday actions are equally important. But the absolute pinnacle, the moment in which we know for sure that salvation is real, is when the Holy Spirit speaks to/through us directly. As Wikipedia puts it:
“Although we are justified by faith alone, we are sanctified by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that makes us holy.
To fulfill all righteousness describes the process of sanctification. Wesley insisted that imputed righteousness must become imparted righteousness. God grants his Spirit to those who repent and believe that through faith they might overcome sin. Wesleyans want deliverance from sin, not just from hell. Wesley speaks clearly of a process that culminates in a second definite work of grace identified as entire sanctification. Entire sanctification is defined in terms of "pure or disinterested love." Wesley believed that one could progress in love until love became devoid of self-interest at the moment of entire sanctification.
Apart from Scripture, experience is the strongest proof of Christianity. ‘What the Scriptures promise, I enjoy’. Again, Wesley insists that we cannot have reasonable assurance of something unless we have experienced it personally.”
And herein lies the main difference between the Rev and Sheriff Love. Rook has never heard the “still, small voice” of the God he purported to serve directly, though he’s trucked with all sorts of supernatural forces and literally gotten into bed with dead gods from other cultures. Sheriff Love, on the other hand, either has, or is convinced he has—and he certainly does have something looking out for him, though what that really is has yet to be determined.
But both of them yearn after salvation, and for both of them, true salvation can come only through sacrifice on another’s behalf. For Love, it’s his wife, his son, his town, America. For Rook, it’s Chess…most days.
“Reverend” Asher Elijah Rook
There’s just something about a bad man who knows his Bible. Much like with Chess and Ben Foster, it all began with Russell Crowe’s Ben Wade in 3:10 to Yuma—but Ben’s a happy hypocrite in many ways, an atheist autodidact who uses the Good Book as just another way to work his will on idiots. I wanted Reverend Rook to have the sort of faith which can sour, but never entirely evaporate; to be a man literally in love with his own method of damnation, capable of dreadful things, but also capable of teaching a wild boy who’s never cared for anything to at least care for himself. I also wanted him to be big and deep-voiced, ‘cause I (and Chess) like that.
Enter, therefore—as my primary physical template for the Rev—one Clancy Brown.
Now, I realize that to most people these days, Brown’s an official old dude…chiefly recognizable as either the Kurgan in Highlander (which you may or may not find an attractive image—I do, but then, there’s a lot that’s wrong with me), Drill Sergeant Zim from Starship Troopers or Brother Justin Crowe from HBO's Carnivale. When I first began thinking nasty thoughts about Brown, however, both he and I were considerably younger. Here’s a pretty good shot of him from the days when he was also Rawhide in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and might even occasionally be found cavorting naked onscreen with the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis (in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, in case you’re wondering); do feel free to ignore the attached screencap of Lobo, though:
http://www.comicbookmovie.com/images/users/uploads/8558/clancy-brown.jpg
Plus, a good selection of recent Clancy Brown pics can be found here (including one next to Nick Stahl, for body-size reference):
http://www.superiorpics.com/clancy_brown/
So: What we mainly know about the Rev is that he’s from Missouri, the Mother of Outlaws herself, and only ended up on the Confederate side of the War because he headed south when he first took off running. He’s also a damn man-mountain with an impressive command of Scripture and a not-so-secret liking for “the Other”. This impulse is what spurred him to flee his original posting as town preacher, after his flock burnt a goat-eyed boy alive for the sin of simply having been born a witch-child, and Rook didn’t feel quite morally-uncompromised enough to stop them. It’s also what he thought at first pushed him towards Chess, though the gravitational pull of another magician-to-be actually had far more to do with it, as he eventually learned.
There’s a line I heard once in a terrible movie—it might have been The Wraith, starring Charlie Sheen—that’s always stuck with me: “When you feel nothing, you can do anything.” In Rook’s case, as with all hexes, I think that goes the other way, as well; when you literally can do anything, it’s hard to feel much at all, especially for the day-to-day. What keeps Rook bound to Chess, however, is that he can’t stop feeling for him—it’s impossible for either of them not to get a rise out of the other, whether that be sexually or what-have-you. They were married long before the Mayan goddess Ixchel ever chose Rook as her quote-quote “little” husband.
Like Chess, Rook’s family originally hails from England, though they’ve been in America since before the Revolution. His last name means either “crow” (sometimes used as a euphemism for preacher, due to their propensity to dress in black) or “a swindler—someone who betrays”.
Sheriff Mesach Love
Like Rook, Mesach Love knows his Bible inside-out. He’s a decorated former Blue-belly, a Nazarene preacher of fierce devotion, lawman for and founder of Bewelcome township in New Mexico, and runs his tiny slice of post-War paradise like a combination of former soldier rescue and redemption-through-hard-work boot-camp. People let him get away with it, though, because he’s got great charisma and they’re more than slightly afraid of him. You see, he has God on his side.
When I first sketched out Sheriff Love, he owed a great deal to the music of the band 16 Horsepower, as well as the physicality of their lead singer, David Eugene Edwards. They specialized in "incendiary gospel, hallowed folk and mordant tones infused with a high, dark theatricality worthy of Nick Cave," as AllMusic critic Eric Hage puts it. Here’s the video that really got me thinking they were the cloggin’ shit, “Black Soul Choir”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-vpAn15-vE
Then, after watching the video for their song “Haw”, it suddenly occurred to me: Hey! That guy looks somewhat like a rawboned-up Jared Padalecki (the young Texan actor probably best known as Sam Winchester on Supernatural)! See for yourself:
http://handson.provocateuse.com/show/jared_padalecki
So now, whenever I think about Sheriff Love declaiming on how GOD hath given him the power to SMITE whomsoever GOD doth choose that he do so unto, part of me is always seeing Jared making that black-eyed nosebleed squinch-face at a demon, before sucking its unholy smoke-soul out and gulping it down like a dry drunk. Or him and Clancy Brown wrestling, which’d be fun as hell, since they’re both Sasquatch-sized.
The variety of Protestant Christianity both Rook and Sheriff Love subscribe to is an offshoot of Calvinism known as Wesleyan Arminianism, which traces his roots back to the teachings of Arminius and John Wesley. Although its primary legacy remains within the various Methodist denominations (the Wesleyan Methodist, the Free Methodist, the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, the Christian Methodist Episcopal, and the United Methodist), the Wesleyan tradition has also been reinterpreted as catalyst for other movements and denominations as well—Charles Finney and the Holiness movement; Charles Parham and the Pentecostal movement; Phineas Bresee and the Church of the Nazarene.
Like a lot of “power in the blood” faiths, Wesleyan Arminianism’s a fascinating mixture of free will and predestination which states outright that although God can save anyone, it won’t work unless that person wills himself to be saved; you are put in charge of your own redemption, knowing full well that Man’s essentially sinful nature will make the road to Heaven an unending up-hill slog. The Scriptures are the primary engine through which a sinner can refine himself, so both study and the expostion of Scriptural ideas through everyday actions are equally important. But the absolute pinnacle, the moment in which we know for sure that salvation is real, is when the Holy Spirit speaks to/through us directly. As Wikipedia puts it:
“Although we are justified by faith alone, we are sanctified by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that makes us holy.
To fulfill all righteousness describes the process of sanctification. Wesley insisted that imputed righteousness must become imparted righteousness. God grants his Spirit to those who repent and believe that through faith they might overcome sin. Wesleyans want deliverance from sin, not just from hell. Wesley speaks clearly of a process that culminates in a second definite work of grace identified as entire sanctification. Entire sanctification is defined in terms of "pure or disinterested love." Wesley believed that one could progress in love until love became devoid of self-interest at the moment of entire sanctification.
Apart from Scripture, experience is the strongest proof of Christianity. ‘What the Scriptures promise, I enjoy’. Again, Wesley insists that we cannot have reasonable assurance of something unless we have experienced it personally.”
And herein lies the main difference between the Rev and Sheriff Love. Rook has never heard the “still, small voice” of the God he purported to serve directly, though he’s trucked with all sorts of supernatural forces and literally gotten into bed with dead gods from other cultures. Sheriff Love, on the other hand, either has, or is convinced he has—and he certainly does have something looking out for him, though what that really is has yet to be determined.
But both of them yearn after salvation, and for both of them, true salvation can come only through sacrifice on another’s behalf. For Love, it’s his wife, his son, his town, America. For Rook, it’s Chess…most days.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
A Book of Tongues Cast of Characters (I)
Predictably, we begin with:
Chess Pargeter
This pretty little Satan of a man wears his preferences the way he wears his guns—outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel. An unrepentant man-killer in both senses of the phrase, he’s both known since damn early on that ladies ain’t his meat and he ain’t theirs, and consistently sneered at the dangers of living life the way he chooses to. Practical to a fault, Chess is also completely apolitical; he saw the War Between States mainly as a double chance for travel and recreation, even while still serving as a Private in the Confederate Army.
Born in San Francisco, a literal son-of-a-bitch straight out of the Barbary Coast’s deepest stew-pits, Chess spent the first ten to twelve years of his life like any other whore-get—his days were lost in alternately avoiding his Ma, “English” Oona, and helping her feed her opium addiction, his nights robbing tricks or turning them. It took some time to breed what lingering affection he still had for her out of himself, but it certainly helped when she figured out where his true interests lay, and sold him a time or two to cover her debts.
The real moment of decision, however, came after Chess cut the throat of a Pinkerton who was beating him for taking his billfold, stole his first gun from the corpse, and started practising with it. Soon, he discovered that size meant nothing when adjusted against skill with weaponry, especially if you were always willing to shoot fast, shoot first, and shoot to kill—so he signed up with Lieutenant Saul Mobley’s Irregulars and started putting that personal philosophy to work, to deadly effect.
Chess made few friends in the army, though he did gain at least a few admirers (Kees Hosteen included) based on his willingness to swap blow-jobs for extra bullets. Unluckily for everyone around him, however, it was under the Lieut’s command that he eventually met “Reverend” Asher Rook…and the rest is history.
Just as the Hexslinger Series in general takes a good portion of its inspiration from James Mangold’s 2007 3:10 to Yuma remake, I’ve never made much secret of the fact that whenever I think of Chess, the physical template I most often see is that of Ben Foster as Charlie Prince in that same movie, antihero Ben Wade (Russell Crowe)’s ambiguously gay sidekick. Like Chess, Charlie’s young, mean, odd-eyed, bearded, given to sartorial flourish, served in the War, wears his guns cavalry-style, and will do almost anything for his beloved “boss”. However, I do like to think there are enough points of difference to make Chess his own man, coincidental initials aside.
Here’s a representative sampling of Foster, as Charlie and otherwise:
http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2007_3_10_to_yuma_006.html
http://chud.com/articles/content_images/5/benfoster.jpg
http://goremasternews.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/ben-foster.jpg
You’ll note that while his eyes do occasionally look green in some shots, the whole “red-haired” thing is me. And Chess.;)
Finally: Chess’s first name derives from the county of Cheshire, in Britain, which is where his mother thought her mother originally came from. He doesn’t know this, however, having never asked her. Which brings us, hopefully less predictably, to the second part of the Pargeter equation—
“English” Oona Pargeter
Oona’s one of those difficult characters, a classic reduction—ie: “your Mom’s a whore!” “Sure is. So?” We don’t know her for very long in A Book of Tongues, and meet her at the very end of her descent into addiction and bitterness, but I’m hoping to do better with her in A Rope of Thorns. She’s a small, red-haired woman with a strong Cockney accent, and the things Chess doesn’t know about her will always make for make a far longer list than those he does.
Oona’s first name means “famine”, and is Irish in origin. Her last name means, roughly, “plasterer”. It’s Norman French. I have this strong sense that Oona’s father’s family may have originally been Jewish, and adopted the name as a way of passing for Christian during the reign of Henry II. One way or another, however, she was born into crime and poverty in the area of London then known as Seven Dials.
Once most of the rest of her family had been Transported, clapped in gaol or hanged, Oona traveled to America as an indentured servant at age ten, was seduced and turned out by age twelve, and had become a gaiety-hall gal/prostitute by age fourteen, working in dives like San Francisco’s Bella Union.
From her point of view, pregnancy with Chess ruined her “chances” of ever graduating from penny-a-dance whore to kept girl, as well as leaving her physically debilitated—pelvis cracked, parts torn, with almost no time off to heal between “engagements”. She suffered from childbed fever, lost her complexion and developed her opium habit. From there, it was a slowish yet inevitable road to the “hospital” under Selina Ah Toy’s.
Sharp-tongued and not unintelligent but woefully undereducated, Oona bequeathed Chess her anger, her stubbornness, her perverse brand of pride, and a world-view which holds that all men are tricks, all women whores, and while most people lie about it to themselves, you’re a fool to do the same—get the money up front, give nothing for nothing. Love’s a mug’s game. Sure, she was more than willing to beat Chess and pimp him out to strangers for as long as he’d let her get away with it, but on some level she always knew there’d come a time when he’d turn against her—and part of her, the part for whom self-destruction had become the only victory left to her, saw that inevitable betrayal as something to be celebrated: Good for you, ya flamin’ molly. Yer free now.
While Oona may have sometimes claimed what she wanted—or considered her due, more like—from Chess was his support, I think his “success” as an outlaw pleased her far more. It’s like his revenge on the world was hers.
Physical template: Emily Watson when younger, Katrin Cartlidge when older. Freakishly, here's a pic of them both (from Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves):
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/32/38218477_a8473fcec4.jpg?v=0
Chess Pargeter
This pretty little Satan of a man wears his preferences the way he wears his guns—outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel. An unrepentant man-killer in both senses of the phrase, he’s both known since damn early on that ladies ain’t his meat and he ain’t theirs, and consistently sneered at the dangers of living life the way he chooses to. Practical to a fault, Chess is also completely apolitical; he saw the War Between States mainly as a double chance for travel and recreation, even while still serving as a Private in the Confederate Army.
Born in San Francisco, a literal son-of-a-bitch straight out of the Barbary Coast’s deepest stew-pits, Chess spent the first ten to twelve years of his life like any other whore-get—his days were lost in alternately avoiding his Ma, “English” Oona, and helping her feed her opium addiction, his nights robbing tricks or turning them. It took some time to breed what lingering affection he still had for her out of himself, but it certainly helped when she figured out where his true interests lay, and sold him a time or two to cover her debts.
The real moment of decision, however, came after Chess cut the throat of a Pinkerton who was beating him for taking his billfold, stole his first gun from the corpse, and started practising with it. Soon, he discovered that size meant nothing when adjusted against skill with weaponry, especially if you were always willing to shoot fast, shoot first, and shoot to kill—so he signed up with Lieutenant Saul Mobley’s Irregulars and started putting that personal philosophy to work, to deadly effect.
Chess made few friends in the army, though he did gain at least a few admirers (Kees Hosteen included) based on his willingness to swap blow-jobs for extra bullets. Unluckily for everyone around him, however, it was under the Lieut’s command that he eventually met “Reverend” Asher Rook…and the rest is history.
Just as the Hexslinger Series in general takes a good portion of its inspiration from James Mangold’s 2007 3:10 to Yuma remake, I’ve never made much secret of the fact that whenever I think of Chess, the physical template I most often see is that of Ben Foster as Charlie Prince in that same movie, antihero Ben Wade (Russell Crowe)’s ambiguously gay sidekick. Like Chess, Charlie’s young, mean, odd-eyed, bearded, given to sartorial flourish, served in the War, wears his guns cavalry-style, and will do almost anything for his beloved “boss”. However, I do like to think there are enough points of difference to make Chess his own man, coincidental initials aside.
Here’s a representative sampling of Foster, as Charlie and otherwise:
http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2007_3_10_to_yuma_006.html
http://chud.com/articles/content_images/5/benfoster.jpg
http://goremasternews.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/ben-foster.jpg
You’ll note that while his eyes do occasionally look green in some shots, the whole “red-haired” thing is me. And Chess.;)
Finally: Chess’s first name derives from the county of Cheshire, in Britain, which is where his mother thought her mother originally came from. He doesn’t know this, however, having never asked her. Which brings us, hopefully less predictably, to the second part of the Pargeter equation—
“English” Oona Pargeter
Oona’s one of those difficult characters, a classic reduction—ie: “your Mom’s a whore!” “Sure is. So?” We don’t know her for very long in A Book of Tongues, and meet her at the very end of her descent into addiction and bitterness, but I’m hoping to do better with her in A Rope of Thorns. She’s a small, red-haired woman with a strong Cockney accent, and the things Chess doesn’t know about her will always make for make a far longer list than those he does.
Oona’s first name means “famine”, and is Irish in origin. Her last name means, roughly, “plasterer”. It’s Norman French. I have this strong sense that Oona’s father’s family may have originally been Jewish, and adopted the name as a way of passing for Christian during the reign of Henry II. One way or another, however, she was born into crime and poverty in the area of London then known as Seven Dials.
Once most of the rest of her family had been Transported, clapped in gaol or hanged, Oona traveled to America as an indentured servant at age ten, was seduced and turned out by age twelve, and had become a gaiety-hall gal/prostitute by age fourteen, working in dives like San Francisco’s Bella Union.
From her point of view, pregnancy with Chess ruined her “chances” of ever graduating from penny-a-dance whore to kept girl, as well as leaving her physically debilitated—pelvis cracked, parts torn, with almost no time off to heal between “engagements”. She suffered from childbed fever, lost her complexion and developed her opium habit. From there, it was a slowish yet inevitable road to the “hospital” under Selina Ah Toy’s.
Sharp-tongued and not unintelligent but woefully undereducated, Oona bequeathed Chess her anger, her stubbornness, her perverse brand of pride, and a world-view which holds that all men are tricks, all women whores, and while most people lie about it to themselves, you’re a fool to do the same—get the money up front, give nothing for nothing. Love’s a mug’s game. Sure, she was more than willing to beat Chess and pimp him out to strangers for as long as he’d let her get away with it, but on some level she always knew there’d come a time when he’d turn against her—and part of her, the part for whom self-destruction had become the only victory left to her, saw that inevitable betrayal as something to be celebrated: Good for you, ya flamin’ molly. Yer free now.
While Oona may have sometimes claimed what she wanted—or considered her due, more like—from Chess was his support, I think his “success” as an outlaw pleased her far more. It’s like his revenge on the world was hers.
Physical template: Emily Watson when younger, Katrin Cartlidge when older. Freakishly, here's a pic of them both (from Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves):
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/32/38218477_a8473fcec4.jpg?v=0
Monday, February 1, 2010
A Book of Tongues Apologia
Due to space and time constraints, CZP Publications were unable to allow me to include my original Apologia at the back of A Book of Tongues. So I thought I'd start my pre-release series of related promotional materials there--by proving I did actually do some research, though not a lot, and explaining a little bit about my "process" (ha ha). Enjoy.
A BOOK OF TONGUES: Apologia, References, Etc.
I began writing A Book of Tongues with one very selfish idea in mind: To keep myself occupied and amused while looking after my son, then less than five years old and newly diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, in the wake of recently having lost my job. Though I’ve been a writer all my life, for the last twenty years my main focus had been short fiction with a side-order of reviews, articles and scripts; the very notion of being able to write a 100,000-word book by the end of the year seemed laughable—let alone end up with a narrative so large it spilled over into another 100,000-word book, slated for the year after that!
All of which means that from the start, the main audience I was thinking about was composed of me, myself and I. The epic romance of Reverend Rook and Chess Pargeter was an unabashedly fetishistic fantasia spun around things I enjoy, because I enjoy them: Blood, (gay) sex, magic. Bad people behaving badly. Ancient civilizations and not-so-dead mythologies. A vaguely steampunk-y alternate history setting whose twin visual precedents were far too many viewings of James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma and Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Yes, I did research here and there, but it wasn’t exactly deep—and the result, I’ll be the first to admit, is a lot like poetry reformatted on a ridiculously grand scale: Full of metaphor and analogy rampant (next time ‘round, I should probably invest in a search engine which automatically removes the word “like” from random sentences), a shadow-show of red-gold cut heavily with black, in which emotion and sensation very firmly rule over cold, hard fact.
At base, this book exists because I wanted to throw two equally screwed-up dudes together and see if they’d stick; all the girls are monsters (except when they’re also whores), all the boys are whores (except when they’re also monsters), there are pretty much no (really) good role-models of any sex, and I also moved the days of the Mayan and Aztec calendars around at will because I wanted to be able to have things happen on my terms, with cool-ass meta-commentary attached. For all of the above, shame on me: I may try to do better in future, though I know for a fact I will probably never live up to anyone’s expectations (particularly my own).
Still, I do hope you enjoyed at least part of what you found, gore, moral greyness and ass-fucking notwithstanding. If so, there’s more to come. If not, catch you on the flip-side.
For those who are interested, meanwhile, here’s an incomplete list of reference materials I stole from freely throughout: The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Wild West from 1840-1900, by Candy Moulton (Writer's Digest Books, 1999); Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, by Manuel Aguilar-Moreno (Oxford University Press, 2006); The Lost History of Aztec and Maya, by Charles Phillips and Dr. David M. Jones (Select Editions, Anness Publishing, 2004); Children of the Night, by Tony Thorne (Indigo, Orion Books, 1999); The Barbary Coast, by Herbert Asbury (Basic Books, 2002); plus a whole host of various Google-searched Internet sources, including BibleGateway.com (King James edition), Wikipedia.org (yes, I know), Azteccalendar.com, Olmec.com, Native-Languages.org, Atheism-about.com, and the Firefly cursing cheat-sheet page.
I was inspired by T.A. Pratt’s use of Aztec mythological tropes in Blood Engines, his first Marla Mason book, and Tess Gerritsen’s wonderfully graphic description of ritual sacrifice in her book The Surgeon. Not to mention Alexander Irvine, whose A Scattering of Jades set the pattern, and Kenneth Mark Hoover, whose Haxan stories do Weird West ten thousand times better than I ever will.
A massive retroactive thank-you also goes out to my tireless pre-Draft Zero readers: Sonya Taaffe, Francesca Forrest, and above all Valerie David, without whose aid and correction the character of Grandma would quickly have degenerated into Yoda gone Dine. I appreciate the time you all took, especially when life and issues interfered.
I’d like to thank my publishers and editors at ChiZine, Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi, for enabling my lurid balderdash. Thanks also to all the friends who, over the years, continued to assure me I would eventually write novels: Michael Rowe, David Nickle, Sephera Giron, Mike Kelly, Marcy Italiano, Leah Bobet, Ian Rogers, Nancy Kilpatrick, Bob Knowlton, Peter Halasz, Monica S. Kuebler, Jason Taniguchi, Donald Simmons, Sarah Ennals, Andrew Specht and many, many others. If I’ve forgotten to mention your name, please take it as wrote.
Next time: Character generation, with photos of the original models. I'll try to get it up ASAP.
A BOOK OF TONGUES: Apologia, References, Etc.
I began writing A Book of Tongues with one very selfish idea in mind: To keep myself occupied and amused while looking after my son, then less than five years old and newly diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, in the wake of recently having lost my job. Though I’ve been a writer all my life, for the last twenty years my main focus had been short fiction with a side-order of reviews, articles and scripts; the very notion of being able to write a 100,000-word book by the end of the year seemed laughable—let alone end up with a narrative so large it spilled over into another 100,000-word book, slated for the year after that!
All of which means that from the start, the main audience I was thinking about was composed of me, myself and I. The epic romance of Reverend Rook and Chess Pargeter was an unabashedly fetishistic fantasia spun around things I enjoy, because I enjoy them: Blood, (gay) sex, magic. Bad people behaving badly. Ancient civilizations and not-so-dead mythologies. A vaguely steampunk-y alternate history setting whose twin visual precedents were far too many viewings of James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma and Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Yes, I did research here and there, but it wasn’t exactly deep—and the result, I’ll be the first to admit, is a lot like poetry reformatted on a ridiculously grand scale: Full of metaphor and analogy rampant (next time ‘round, I should probably invest in a search engine which automatically removes the word “like” from random sentences), a shadow-show of red-gold cut heavily with black, in which emotion and sensation very firmly rule over cold, hard fact.
At base, this book exists because I wanted to throw two equally screwed-up dudes together and see if they’d stick; all the girls are monsters (except when they’re also whores), all the boys are whores (except when they’re also monsters), there are pretty much no (really) good role-models of any sex, and I also moved the days of the Mayan and Aztec calendars around at will because I wanted to be able to have things happen on my terms, with cool-ass meta-commentary attached. For all of the above, shame on me: I may try to do better in future, though I know for a fact I will probably never live up to anyone’s expectations (particularly my own).
Still, I do hope you enjoyed at least part of what you found, gore, moral greyness and ass-fucking notwithstanding. If so, there’s more to come. If not, catch you on the flip-side.
For those who are interested, meanwhile, here’s an incomplete list of reference materials I stole from freely throughout: The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Wild West from 1840-1900, by Candy Moulton (Writer's Digest Books, 1999); Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, by Manuel Aguilar-Moreno (Oxford University Press, 2006); The Lost History of Aztec and Maya, by Charles Phillips and Dr. David M. Jones (Select Editions, Anness Publishing, 2004); Children of the Night, by Tony Thorne (Indigo, Orion Books, 1999); The Barbary Coast, by Herbert Asbury (Basic Books, 2002); plus a whole host of various Google-searched Internet sources, including BibleGateway.com (King James edition), Wikipedia.org (yes, I know), Azteccalendar.com, Olmec.com, Native-Languages.org, Atheism-about.com, and the Firefly cursing cheat-sheet page.
I was inspired by T.A. Pratt’s use of Aztec mythological tropes in Blood Engines, his first Marla Mason book, and Tess Gerritsen’s wonderfully graphic description of ritual sacrifice in her book The Surgeon. Not to mention Alexander Irvine, whose A Scattering of Jades set the pattern, and Kenneth Mark Hoover, whose Haxan stories do Weird West ten thousand times better than I ever will.
A massive retroactive thank-you also goes out to my tireless pre-Draft Zero readers: Sonya Taaffe, Francesca Forrest, and above all Valerie David, without whose aid and correction the character of Grandma would quickly have degenerated into Yoda gone Dine. I appreciate the time you all took, especially when life and issues interfered.
I’d like to thank my publishers and editors at ChiZine, Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi, for enabling my lurid balderdash. Thanks also to all the friends who, over the years, continued to assure me I would eventually write novels: Michael Rowe, David Nickle, Sephera Giron, Mike Kelly, Marcy Italiano, Leah Bobet, Ian Rogers, Nancy Kilpatrick, Bob Knowlton, Peter Halasz, Monica S. Kuebler, Jason Taniguchi, Donald Simmons, Sarah Ennals, Andrew Specht and many, many others. If I’ve forgotten to mention your name, please take it as wrote.
Next time: Character generation, with photos of the original models. I'll try to get it up ASAP.
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