A Meme of Alphabet, Part 12

W is for—War

I'm no Harry Turtledove, so the minute I realized that pretty much the entirety of A Tree of Bones was going to take place during all full-on clash between Hex City and the forces surrounding it (hexacious, as well as non-), I knew I was at least partially boned. So I opted for both a flash-forward which would skip a fair amount of build-up and establishment—a bit of an HBO's Game of Thrones model which would jump my characters right into the battle (or string of battles), ensuring I could hit the ground running with my tools already assembled—and a certain timeline compaction which would force me to keep bulling on through, finishing things up with a spatter of plot twists and a multi-part climax. While A Book of Tongues takes place over roughly two years, folding back and forth through time throughout, A Rope of Thorns takes place sequentially over roughly a month, and A Tree's action is the shortest yet—four days at the most, barring an epilogue.

X is for—Xenogenesis

In case you haven't noticed, “X” words are pretty damn hard, both to find and to define. But since we've already established that hexation has a genetic component (which is how the Chinese maintain their breeding-for-hexation program, one assumes, as well as the main reason it's generally considered a bad idea for hexes to hook up with each other), and because this one means “the supposed generation of offspring completely and permanently different from the parent”, I'm going to use it as my opportunity to talk about the problem of hexacious kids, in general.

At the start of A Book of Tongues, Doc Asbury tells Ed Morrow and a bunch of other agents that most hexes “express” either at puberty (if female) or after suffering life-threatening injuries (if male). So you might think that there are very few hexes who express as children...except, of course, for the fact that our story is set during a time-perid when infant mortality was crazily high. One can't help but think that there must be a fair portion of people who express as children, or even as infants. Most of them probably don't make it to adulthood, because either they're killed by the non-hexacious around them once their power is recognized, or because other—older—hexes suck them dry, sometimes even their own parents, sometimes without even knowing they're doing it. Mrs Followell admits as much, in her brief back-story.

With these possibilities always looming, it makes sense that much more of A Tree than you might think is predicated on the idea that the Hex City Oath may make it possible for hexacious and non-hexacious parents of hex-babies alike to deal with their dangerously unpredctable offspring in a slightly more humane way—to bond together in a literal way, facing the future as a unit, nurturing, tutoring and supporting each other. And given that (as Asbury also observes) much of the general misery hexes have inflicted in the past springs from their sense of themselves as spiritual lepers feared and hated wherever they go, forever aloooone, this may bode well for human/hex relations in future...once this current war is put to bed, that is.

Tomorrow: Our alphabetized tour of the Hexslinger-'verse concludes, with Y and Z!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 11

U is for—Underworld(s)

Given how A Rope of Thorns finished up, it's no kind of spoiler at all to say that at least one subplot of A Tree of Bones takes place almost entirely in the Underworld. Not quite Mictlan-Xibalba, so much, as a larger, linked constellation of Afterlives, a Hell-spectrum whose individual parts mirror each other. Parts seem a bit more like Limbo, while other parts seem like Purgatory, and where you end up definitely depends not only on who you are while alive but what sort of business you leave unfinished when you die. At any rate, I had fun designing and referencing the various sections Chess and his Ma have to pass through on their upwards journey. Having a fairly good grasp on both myself and my druthers, though, I guess I always knew that one of them would end up “having” to be Valhalla.;)

V is for—Victory (Ambiguous)...a nebulous concept in most modern Westerns, since we all “know” that this is an era in flux, a moment which is already being overtaken by its own entropy. Also difficult in terms of the shake-down from Pinkerton's Skirmish is the fact that no matter who wins, the world has already been irretrievably altered: Mages now can meddle, just like it's been amply demonstrated that the non-hexacious can fight against hexes, with arcanistric help. Which is probably all just a roundabout way of saying don't expect anything quite as unequivocal as the end of your basic superhero movie, because I don't have much interest in that. This is horror, after all—or at least dark fantasy, depending on where it's shelved.

Tomorrow: W and X!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 10

S is for—Seven Dials

As the Five Points was to Gangs of New York-era Gotham, so Seven Dials was to 1800s London—the centre of the rats' maze, a place where the city's criminal underclass had congregated and bred since long before Transportation to Australia was enacted into the Criminal Code. It was, in other words, a truly superlative slum which gave rise to a culture and language of its own (Thieves' Cant, whose roots are still recognizable even today in Cockney rhyming slang, and indeed also made the jump over to Amerikay along with various immigrant groups, forming the base of the flash palaver Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher speak), and it's here that Chess's Ma Oona was born and raised. Which is why he ends up in a sort of half-memory, half-parody version of it at the end of A Rope of Thorns, his own personal Hell into the many-roomed prison of Hell Proper. I was particularly interested in how claustrophobic and gross Chess, who's spent his entire life in a series of non-industrialized places—many of the empty of almost everything except landscape—would find the fog and soot-saturated, black-and-grey heart of London's steam- and coal-driven machine. I guess it also stands in for the unrecognizable truths about our own backgrounds and histories we sometimes have to have our faces rubbed in in order to progress, literally or figuratively...but in a lot of ways, this was mainly for the lulz.

T is for—Two-Spirited

At the end of A Rope of Thorns, we were introduced to Yiska, aka The Night Has Passed, a “woman chief” with magic-worker genes who has deliberately chosen not to pursue that part of her heritage, mainly because she really enjoys kicking ass in a way her culture labels specifically “male”. This makes her effectively “Two-Spirited”, a category left open for people who don't respond well to gender norms—men who want to be wives, for example, as well as women who want their own. And while I'm not sure whether or not I'd categorize Yiska as FTM transgendered per se, what I found increasingly fun about her existence is that it offers an alternative to the automatically antagonistic way Chess has been living his life. As Grandma points out, they're pretty similar people, except for the fact that Yiska was raised with a certain sense of responsibility which comes out of having a community to call her own. And while it may well be too late for Chess to develop anything of the same sort, the hexes and hex-allied in and around New Aztectlan could do far worse than to copy her example.

(Then again, he is young, as even he probably forgets, most of the time. It's possible he may yet settle.)

Tomorrow: U and V!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 9

Q is for—Queerness

As I've stated, my motivation for writing a trilogy in which the main character is gay was two-fold: A) I was writing A Book of Tongues “for me”, and as a slasher, that's my bag, baby, but B) around the same time I began, I also ran across some of Hal Duncan (Vellum, Ink)'s writing about QUILTBAG representation in popular media, and though “yes, I can do that—complicated, tough gay dudes whose tragedy doesn't necessarily come attached to their sexuality ahoy!” By the end of A Book, however, I was happy to see that the spectrum of non-default character sexuality already seemed to be expanding far beyond the “hard gay” axis, embracing functional bisexuality and straight-with-an-exceptionality alike. This has continued to happen throughout the rest of the series, with A Rope of Thorns adding polysexual relationships and lesbianism with a hint of transgender issues, depending on how Yiska actually sees herself (more on that later); in A Tree of Bones, those existing currents are continued, hopefully remaining emotionally front and centre as the characters those sexualities come attached to stay in play. And while I'm sad to say I wan't quite able to push it far enough to include any overtly asexual characters, who knows? I already know this universe ain't completely done with me.

What's become particularly interesting for me, however, is that while my original impulse contained a healthy dose of prurience, the actual ratio of sex-to-action has gone down in each instalment, partly due to lack of time vs. intensity of immediate physical threat. This hopefully reduces the fetishistic angle somewhat, which I'm happy with, but it also goes back to Duncan's observation that while sexuality is obviously a cornerstone of most people's motivations, it's not the be-all and end-all we privilege it as in most narratives. And since queerness is a concept which has its roots in a reclaimed slur, a way of self-definition which says: “Yes, I am 'different', but there's nothing wrong with that”, how much further do you have to push before you can note that that sounds as much like hexes defining themselves “against” non-hexes and vice versa as it does like it necessarily has anything to do with who does or doesn't sleep with whom? So the spectrum widens further, hopefully, the default shifting, until you end up in (to my mind) an interesting world where maybe even the non-default characters can feel pretty “queer” themselves, in certain contexts.

(Apologies, of course, for any interesectional toes I may have stepped on with this line of rumination—as a straight person with a particular kink, it's never my intention to co-opt anyone's identity, except in fiction.)

R is for—Red Weed

By A Tree, the Red Weed—Datura nazacul, as Doc Asbury calls it, that parasite infestation of Hell Kudzu spawned by Chess Pargeter's Xipe Totec incarnation throughout A Rope of Thorns—has become a bit of a non-speaking supporting character in some ways, a plot device in others. Some people have rightly noted that it's reminiscent of the trickster predator vines in Scott Smith's The Ruins, which I'll totally cop to; frankly, I don't see how the two couldn't have had some sort of relationship, considering said ruins are those of a Mayan temple. I'd say the main difference in presentation with the Weed this time 'round is that in Rope, Chess didn't know how to control it, and didn't want to know—but here it's being wielded by the Enemy, who understands innately how best to let it do his bidding. Also, given that I'm not a big fan of the re-set mode in storytelling, the Weed is probably here to stay, even by this part of the saga's end...a severe ecological shift, a sort of lasting hex-pollution. Which will have interesing implications for my version of the Weird West in future, no doubt.

Tomorrow: S and T!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 8

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!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 7

M is for—Mommy Issues

Though not exactly otherwise describable in any way, shape or form as a typical Mama's boy, our frilly Mister Pargeter is nevertheless doomed from his first appearance in A Book of Tongues—when a drunken San Francisco idjit tries valiantly to insult him by explicitly comparing him to his drug-addicted (literal) whore of a mother, “English” Oona—to always be thinking about the ways in which they're either similar or different. Doesn't help that they're both small, red-headed, vicious and apt to trade sex for favours, of course...but from the very minute I decided to have Chess let his boyfriend dispose of Oona long-distance, I knew that the worst place he could ever end up after that would be getting stuck in some version of Hell with only his dead Ma for company. Not exactly coincidentally (and not a spoiler, per se), it is this exact situation Chess finds himself in at the end of A Rope of Thorns/beginning of A Tree of Bones. Cue bonding! Sort of. Let's put it this way: Oona and her flamin' molly of an only child will never not have far more in common than either of them are happy to admit. And frankly, I like it that way.

N is for—Normals (Badass)

Much like Hawkeye, Black Widow and Nick Fury when compared with the rest of the Avengers, “normal” people often tend to take a certain background stance when everybody else in a given narrative has genuine superpowers. Except, of course, that all three of the above-mentioned actually do have a shared superpower: Being badass. In a funny way, part of the internal debate driving Chess Pargeter at this point has a lot to do with the fact is that while he started out thinking he was awesome/cursed for being so special-snowflake different, it actually turns out he was part of a bigger picture all along—that at least part of him, possibly the most important part, comes with a semi-predictable set of rules attached. Having always been a hex explains his ridiculous way with guns, if not the inclinations that prompted him to take them up, in the first place; does it automatically dismiss every other ingredient of what makes him him?

Meanwhile, my favourite badass normal—Ed Morrow—just keeps on keepin' on, even surrounded as he is by magic-addicted once and future bosses, drunken arcanists, various hexacological consorts, his demigod pal with benefits and the not-exactly-girlfriend he thought was normal when they first hooked up, but is now carving out a corner of the board for herself, using a completely different set of powers. Luckily, he has good instincts, stamina and a fair sense of humour to support him, so I'm pretty sure he'll manage to come out of things all right.

Tomorrow: O and P!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 6

K is for—Kill Your Darlings

The great part about making a horror movie, director Bernard Rose (Candyman, Paperhouse) used to say, is that you can kill off your entire cast, if you want/need to. To that observation I would add a paraphrasing of Stephen King's explanation of The Ghost Trick, as used in the supernatural soap Dark Shadows: Yes, but the problem is—especially when you're dealing with magicians, in a universe already full of both resurrected gods and simple human ghosts—killing people off doesn't always take. So the lure is knowing that you can exploit at will the narrative emotional outpouring which accompanies the “death” of any given character, without ever actually having to permanently shift them off the board at all. Do that too many times, however, and you end up being Marvel (or DC); nobody believes the stakes anymore, because you've bent them so many times in order to bring your darlings/franchises literally back to life. Nothing matters.

I told myself many times that if I pushed the Hexslinger series to where it should logically go, I really would have to kill a lot of people. Which is why it didn't surprise me when the characters I knew I knew in my gut were probably going to survive did, but I must admit, it did surprise me how much the other ones not doing so actually hurt. Which is good, I guess...

L is for—Love's A Curse

Or so Chess Pargeter's Ma always used to say, and she'd certainly know. It continues to interest me how much of my idea of epic love seems to have been inextricably influenced by listening to way too many Joan Baez albums as a kid, in that I just can't reconcile myself with the concept that a love big enough to kill or die for is ever a good thing, exactly. Instead, it strikes me as a sort of wound, a two-person trauma which inevitably hurts as much as it heals. Within the context of the Hexslinger series, for example, I don't think it's debatable that Chess has learned a lot from loving Reverend Rook, and that the people around him have benefited from that same sorrowful tuition in self-knowledge. And once upon a time, Chess's automatic reply to that observation would've been a simple: Oh yeah? Well, fuck 'em all, anyhow...but the fact that he isn't quite as inclined to do so anymore (or rather not as inclined to act on it, because he'd probably still say it, if only to be a bitch) is another consequence of the same scar tissue. Ash Rook has changed him, irreparably, making him a different person. Yet in much the same way Chess has already benefited from the damage he took in loving Rook, by the beginning of A Tree of Bones, Rook—who still justifies the worst of his betrayals by saying he only did what he did in order to “save” Chess from future harm—has already begun to accept that his baseline ideal of love may be exactly as hollow as his hypocrite preacher's faith ever was...and that if he wants to redeem himself at all, if not his choices, he has to give up on the idea of getting any sort of return on his investments, to serve without expectation—or even hope—of gain, like the “true” Christian he's never really felt himself to be. Which really can't help but get messy, as a strategy.

Tomorrow: M and N!