Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

It’s difficult to see how he wins, if we’re being honest. That is to say, if we’re also being logical. But we do not live in an honest age. Or a logical one.

Still — reality has stacked itself against him. The pattern isn’t good, though patterns do not always hold true, and few of them are forever. Just the same, increased voter turnout has yet so far not rewarded Republicans very much, and this cycle we are definitely seeing increased turnout. Polling, which already slightly seems to favor her, also has been wonkier and wonkier with each cycle, largely undercounting Democratic momentum. And each cycle since 2016 has more or less been a repudiation of the man, a turn away from him and many of his chosen acolytes. His own staff of the past doesn’t support him. He’s a felon. He’s suffering some manner of cognitive decline, where a brain that was once made of pudding is now made of old pudding, pudding that gets that gross chitinous skin on top of it, pudding that starts to leak its own brown deliquescence out onto the countertop. He’s old. He’s hateful. He brings little joy and mostly — well, it’s not even anger, it’s not even wrath, not precisely. It’s grievances. A thousand petty grievances, leaking from his pores, from his pale lips, from his puckered butthole eyes. Denethor with the tomato. As for her — a campaign that was relegated to feeling like two old sacks of white guy slugging it out turned into a thing of hope and delight and potential, even if that potential is complicated by the crass realities of politics. She’s got energy. She’s got momentum. She’s got bigger fucking rallies, and if the size matters, then she’s got size on lock.

Were you to dangle me over a pit of crocodiles and demand I pick who I thought would win this horrible contest on Tuesday, a contest between a savvy, capable woman and a bigoted inside-out Halloween mask, I’d say I think she’s going to win. Not just because I want her to. But because that’s just how it looks from here.

But looks can be deceiving.

And he can very much win.

He can win because we may not clearly see the deeply sunken groundswell of hate that refuses to report on itself, that will soon burst forth like an infection. He can win if there are enough aggrieved young men, mostly white, but not all, each taught that things aren’t working out for them because They, with the conspiratorial capital T, are viciously working against them from the shadows, from the borders, from the gender-neutral bathrooms. He can win because, simply put, there are horrible people who like him, who like that he’s horrible. He can win because some of them have been hiding in plain sight. Look no further than that neighbor who you liked very much, who you thought was normal, who one morning went out and stuck one of his fucking signs on their lawn. He can win because logic and honesty do not always win the day. He can win with racism and sexism. He can win because we live in the upside-down and chaos definitely reigns.

And I think it’s important to realize that if he wins, which he can —

We are pretty fucked.

I do not want to be a huge bummer — after all, it’s Wednesday, it’s Hump Day, we’re over the hump, we do some humping, whatever, I dunno what it even means — but we are very seriously in super-fucked territory if he wins.

Which he can.

I am tired, of course, of existential elections — and sure, all elections, big and small, are important in ways that are obvious and in ways that are not, but very few of them feel quite like an apocalyptic hinge. Where if the door swings one way, we all get to leave and go out and play in the sun — but if it swings the other way, the lock clicks and we’re trapped in a house on fire.

If he wins, climate change — already at a tipping point — falls off the agenda, and shit definitely tips in the other direction, probably for good.

If he wins, bigotry wins, too — our trans friends are in trouble, our migrant friends are in trouble, women are in trouble. They’re already targets in this life, but now the bullseyes get a whole lot bigger. They’ll suffer.

If he wins, abortion rights are gone, gone, gone. Women will die in numbers far greater than they do now. IVF, also gone. Birth control, gone. Not right away. But the front sights are set. They’re targets. We’re targets.

If he wins, Elon Musk will be in charge of the economy, which is like — well, how do you quantify that with a metaphor? He’s already the best worst example. He bought Twitter, fucked its rock-solid branding, then drove it off a cliff into a swamp. The Cybertruck is easily the most embarrassing American product released, and that’s in a country where we have Shake Weights and hats that say FBI FEDERAL BOOB INSPECTOR. Musk wants to cut all “non-essential” spending, which is to say, he wants to set fire to the American economy, either because he’s a skipping dipshit or because he knows if he crashes the car they can sell the scrap metal to Russia.

If he wins, RFK Jr. will be in charge of health policy, which is like — well, it’s like if you let Elon Musk run the economy. They want vaccine mandates in schools gone. Vaccines. Vaccines. Easily one of the most crucial victories for civilization, they want to kick to the curb. We’ll all be licking roadkill and sharing brainworms. Elon Musk’s mind-chips will have a little glass terrarium for RFK Jr.’s brainworms. A match made in hell.

If he wins, democracy is skewered. That’s not my promise. It’s his. And he has a Supreme Court who has confirmed that he has a truly alarming freedom from consequences. Worse, he’ll get to pick more justices, potentially.

If he wins, it’ll be another four years — and maybe more — where we wake up every day, every fucking day, and the moment we glance at the news we know we’re going to be inundated with some new stupid shitty thing he said or did or both, some racist shit, some sexist shit, some ignorant shit, one more thing broken and left on the floor in shards. Guardrails kicked over, systems dismantled, safety nets sliced into ribbons. Every day, every goddamn day we’ll have to joylessly wake up and bear witness to the great dismantling.

If he wins, Russia wins. Ukraine is in deep. And Netanyahu wins, too, and Palestine ends up as beachfront property, with blood soaking the sand.

If he wins, billionaires and corporations get more rights than we do, and our already-termite-chewed regulatory state will collapse into sawdust. Lead in our toys, listeria in our food, planes breaking in half, every car an 8-bit dumpster. What brittle trust we have now, stepped on like a cookie, turned into a scattering of crumbs.

If he wins, the next pandemic — bird flu, if I had to put money on it, though in this hell-age it’ll probably be aerosolized gonorrhea or a zombie plague– is gonna get us real good. It’ll be worse, somehow, than the last one. What, you think RFK, Jr. is going to fix it? We’ll all have to line up at our chiropractor to get our daily ivermectin shots as we cough and puke and boil.

If he wins, information will mean nothing. Misinformation and disinformation will be the best we get. A hurricane of bullshit.

If he wins, AI will be absolutely everywhere.

If he wins, truth will be absolutely nowhere.

If he wins, the rich get richer, and the rest get fucked.

If he wins…

It’ll all come crashing down.

All of it.

Everything. And though some may romanticize this as some essential breaking of a corrupt and corroded cycle, the romantasy of it dies under the pile of wreckage and the heaps of actual dead people.

And the thing is, what I’ve mentioned here, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Haven’t talked about education, or surveillance, or book bans, or holy fuck, how he has threatened to use the military on the “enemies from within,” enemies he has identified as being his political opponents.

It’ll be a nightmare, unfolding slow, then fast, where we get front row seats watching a dystopia form to carry us through an apocalypse.

But we have another way.

You gotta vote, and you gotta vote Harris / Walz. You gotta help others do the same. And I know, there are certainly policies you don’t agree with of hers, and here I encourage you to watch Bernie Sanders on that point. It’s good to have principles, but not when the execution of those principles serves only your moral comfort and not, say, the greater good. The perfect cannot be the enemy of that good. We choose the path that gets us collectively closer to a better place — not the path that will take us into only darkness.

If you’re like me, you’re currently gnawing yourself down to the nerve bundles. You know how when you have an appointment at 3PM, you have a hard time accomplishing anyfuckingthing until 3PM? The election is like that 3PM appointment for me. Mostly I’m just sitting here, staring forward, trying to accomplish something but mostly only rawdogging reality like it’s a bumpy overseas flight. But there are things you can do.

You can phonebank, knock on doors, and you can also call folks who have already voted to help cure problematic ballots. Talk to your friends, your relatives, talk to people online. Help them do what has to be done.

Let’s do this.

Let’s get it done.

Let’s never go back to him. Because if he wins —

Nah. Let’s just not let him win, okay? Right? Right.

LFG.

EVEN GREATER LONDON, 1887: a vast, uninterrupted urban plane encompassing the entire lower half of England and, for complex reasons, only the upper third of the Isle of Wight… The immense Tower casts electricity across the sky itself, powering the mind-boggling mechanisms of the city below; the notorious engineer-army swarms through its very veins, building, demolishing, and rebuilding whatever they see fit; and – at the heart of it all – sits the country’s first ever private detective agency.

Archibald Fleet and Clara Entwhistle hoped things would pick up quickly for their new enterprise. No one is taking them seriously, but their break will come soon. Definitely… Probably.

Meanwhile, police are baffled by a series of impossible bank robberies, their resources wholly absorbed by the case. Which means that when a woman witnesses a kidnapping, Fleet-Entwhistle Private Investigations is the only place she can turn for help. Luckily they’re more than happy to oblige.

But what’s the motive behind the kidnap? As Clara and Fleet investigate, they find more than they could ever have imagined…

1. Don’t wait for permission

My debut novel (co-written with my husband Chris) wouldn’t exist if we had gone about things in the traditional way, that is to say, if we had waited for someone to give us permission to write the thing we wanted to write.

Chris and I have spent a long time writing comedy together, and spent many years performing with our comedy troupe at fringe festivals around the UK in the hope that we would be “discovered” by one of the gatekeepers who could give us permission to write something for a wider audience. This didn’t happen, and eventually we got fed up with waiting and decided we’d find a way to reach that wider audience ourselves. This led to us creating the audio-drama podcast Victoriocity: a neo-Victorian detective comedy. This decision was one of the best we ever made, because after the show’s second season we were contacted by our publisher (Gollancz) who encouraged us to write a novel set in the same world. That novel is High Vaultage,but it’s a standalone story that doesn’t rely on prior knowledge of the series.

What we learned was this: don’t wait for permission from the gatekeepers. We spent so many years waiting for someone to invite us to write for radio or TV, following the usual advice of touring live shows and submitting (unsuccessfully) to the very limited and hugely competitive open-door initiatives run by traditional broadcasters. Victoriocity was a way to showcase our writing and build an audience without having to wait for a commission, and it led to opportunities including the book contract and – funnily enough – writing for a traditional broadcaster (in our case the BBC). That’s not to say writing an audio drama is the right route for everyone, more that it is worth considering alternative routes to achieve your writing goals.

2. A good editor is worth their weight in gold

Chris and I were extremely lucky to be paired with the supremely talented editor Claire Ormsby-Potter at Gollancz. One of the biggest challenges of writing is not always being able to see where the cracks are. You can have such a clear idea of what your story is and where it is going, that you can miss different – often better – opportunities for story direction and development. This is where a good editor can help transform your book into something much stronger than your initial draft, something we definitely learned whilst editing High Vaultage with Claire (who would never let us get away with using clichés like ‘worth their weight in gold’).

Our novel is essentially a cozy crime mystery set in an alternate Victorian London. In one chapter, Chris decided that a fun location to visit would be one of the many building sites run by the in-world engineer-army of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In the first draft this was simply a colorful backdrop against which one of our detective protagonists could learn some information that would propel the plot forward. This led to our favorite editorial note to date: ‘you’ve accidentally invented a doomsday weapon as a casual aside, perhaps we should… do something about that?’

3. We remain as preoccupied as the Victorians with trying to make sense out of chaos

Floating over London in a hot air balloon in 1862, Henry Mayhew reflected on the ‘special delight’ the mind experiences when it is able to ‘comprehend all the minute particulars of a subject under one associate whole’ (‘A Balloon View of London’). Invoking the metaphor of London as a ‘monster’, Mayhew casts the city as a frightening, unfamiliar thing of chaos. Yet the piece as a whole works to subdue this threat, to tame this monster by demystifying it through the demonstration that, given the right vantage point, it is capable of being viewed and understood as ‘one associate whole’. As Mayhew observes the vast cityscape from the air, he renders the ‘Great Metropolis’ comprehensible ‘at one single glance’, creating from the ‘previous confusion of the diverse details’ a ‘form and order of a perspicuous unity.’ Mayhew achieves this feat through the clever use of metaphors that describe the ‘strange conglomeration’ of the London landscape in terms both familiar and domestic: meadows become ‘table covers’ and steam trains ‘ordinary tea-kettles.’ 

Mayhew’s desire to make the world around us familiar and unimposing, to make it comprehensible and communicable in everyday terms, has always reminded me of the Victorian novelist’s desire to create the sense that human mastery over the world is possible (see further: Peter Brooks’ The Realist Vision, Lyn Pykett’s The Sensation Novel, Raymond Williams’ The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence). I think a large part of what lay behind that impulse to render the world knowable and communicable in meaningful ways was the sense, or fear, that the world might just be chaotic and meaningless. There are a multitude of reasons why people felt this way, not least the huge technological and scientific advancements that completely transformed the way people thought about, for example, time and space (the coming of train travel, the invention of the telegraph) or even their own existence (Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theories of evolution).

High Vaultage is set in Victorian London, albeit a reimagined one, and during the writing process I think we learned that part of the appeal of writing about Victorian England is that we are still troubled by the same worry that everything, in the end, might just meaningless chaos, especially as we are ourselves experiencing our own age of techno-bafflement. In many ways I think High Vaultage and the chaos of its world is a working out of our own feelings and fears about the tumult of our own lives. But we hope – like any good mystery story or Victorian novel – the resolution of High Vaultage brings the comfort that there is meaning behind everything after all, even if that meaning is to be found in the relationships, and in particular friendship, with those around us.

4. Out-imagining the Victorians is really hard

The setting of our novel is Even Greater London: a nineteenth-century megalopolis which covers the entire lower half of England. The idea for a London that never stopped expanding came from Chris, and was inspired by Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower. Tesla’s tower – a project that began on the eastern seaboard of the US and was eventually abandoned – was a very early experiment with wireless power transmission. The tower was intended for communications, but Tesla’s experiments also reveal that he believed it was possible to beam electrical power wirelessly through the atmosphere. In Even Greater London, this wireless transmission of energy has been achieved, resulting in a supercharged industrial (and electrical) revolution. This setup was intended as a way for us to pose the questions: what if the Victorians, but uninhibited by the limits of their technological progress of the time? What if the Victorians, but more bonkers? What if the Victorians, but more bizarre? What we learned was that this imaginative exercise is reallyhard because not only are you contending with the gigantic minds of geniuses like Nikola Tesla, you’re also competing with people who already dreamed up some pretty bonkers inventions.

A perusal of various Victorian periodicals reveal countless advertisements and designs for electric corsets, oscillating bathtubs, tent-coats, drawbridge pavements to deter burglars, a transparent spherical velocipede (which looked like some sort of early zorb ball prototype), and street lighting suspended from hot air balloons which doubled as viewing platforms with telegraphs in order to create a panoptic network across the city in a sort of terrifying early imagining of CCTV. I even once read about a piano oven that was designed to bake the perfect meringues while you delighted guests with, presumably, whatever musical piece paired best with a pavlova.

5. Always say what happened to the dog

When we had what we felt was a good draft of High Vaultage, we sent it out to a few beta readers to get some much-needed feedback. When that feedback came in, there were a number of things that a few of the readers had picked up on or agreed about – aspects of the novel that needed to be improved or better drawn, for example. But there was no one thing that everyone unanimously agreed on. With one exception: the dog. At the start of the novel our detective protagonists have just set up Even Greater London’s first detective agency, and it’s not going well. To indicate this we introduced the idea that the only active case they had was a lost dog, a case which they had taken to appease their landlady and owner of the downstairs coffee shop and to whom they owed rent. In the draft sent to beta readers, the mention of the poor lost beagle was merely meant as chapter one scene and scenario setting, as a way to indicate to the reader that business wasn’t exactly booming for our detective duo. But it turns out there is no such thing as an incidental dog: the readers demanded to know what became of the missing hound. And who are we to argue?

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Jen Sugden is one of the co-creators of the audio drama podcast Victoriocity, a comic sci-fi detective thriller set in a reimagined Victorian past. She holds a PhD in Victorian Literature from Royal Holloway, University of London where her research focussed on nineteenth-century sensation and detective fiction. Alongside her studies, Jen began writing and performing comedy with her now husband and co-writer Chris Sugden, who she met whilst an undergraduate at Oxford University. After a number of years performing live improvised and scripted comedy together, the pair moved into writing audio drama and were part of the writing team behind the BBC Sounds weird fiction anthology series Murmurs.

Originally from Doncaster, Jen now lives in Oxford with Chris, their son, and two intermittently obedient cairn terriers.

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High Vaultage: Bookshop.org | Amazon | B&N

A couple weeks ago, I headed to Harrisburg for the stellar Harrisburg Book Festival, run in part by the also stellar Midtown Scholar bookstore, and at that event I had the privilege of being on a super-fucking-cool panel with CJ Leede, Catriona Ward, and Richard Chizmar about, specifically, the legacy of Stephen King. It was awesome for a number of reasons —

First, it’s always nice to be on a panel that very little to do with you. Just because, ahh, I can talk about something other than trying to pitch my book. I want you to read my book! But so often we’re called to talk about ourselves so much it feels like we’re crawling up our own asses too much. (And once you crawl up your own ass, you inevitably have to crawl back out.) So the chance to be like, “This is all about Stephen King,” is a fantastic one.

Second, again, great fellow panelists. I know all of them online, never met any of them in person, and it was great to hang with them on stage.

Third, the crowd there was legit wonderful. Lots of folks, huge audience, great questions, enthusiasm for King but also, mysteriously, us.

So, great event.

But in that event, Mister Chizmar — who also doubled as the moderator of the panel — asked a question about, y’know, what Stephen King has meant to us as writers and to our careers and, I do really love that question. And I love the answers everyone gave. Further, I thought I might… answer the question here a bit, given that King has now been publishing books for holy shit fifty fucking years, and certainly my books have been compared to his at a number of points along the way.

I think certainly there’s a lot of things you can say about King and his effect on individual writers and the genre as a whole. He didn’t invent THE HORROR GENRE but he is definitely the one who, I think, made the genre, so to speak. His name and work is synonymous with the genre — not to be unfair to every other horror writer, each of whom are imprinting upon the genre in ways of equal importance. I just mean, he showed up, became huge, and (I suspect unintentionally) moved the horror genre out of pulp sensibilities to something approaching Classic Americana. And I love how his work made that transition in real time, in his life and in ours. He went from being kind of dismissed and then turned more into a pop culture icon and then his work went on to be appreciated as… literature, and beyond that, as part of the canon of America. An icon. An institution.

And I’ve loved his work. I’ve fallen off of it in recent years not due to the quality and not due to my interest in it, but because I read a lot of books that are sent to me, particularly to blurb. And I also have access to a pretty far ranging gamut of books and so I’ve missed out on more recent Kingian reads. (I’ve been repairing this gap slowly over the last few years. Latest I picked up and enjoyed was Fairy Tale. Which I loved a lot, and I could give you some deeper thoughts on eventually, if anybody actually wants those?) But I love so much of his work and it’s inarguable that I get to do what I do now because of what he did and continues to do. Full-stop.

But for me? Here’s one of what is for me the most important things I, well, let’s call it gained from his presence as a writer:

When we’re starting out, and even as a writer enters what you might think of as the middle of their career, you get a lot of people pressuring you to have a brand of some sort. To pick a lane and stick to that lane. You’re this, you’re that, stick to it, don’t fuck it up. There’s comfort in the brand, a steady base of readers for Your Content, a fast-food-level of consistency in The Product. Now, for writers who want to write to a more singular thing, there’s no harm, no foul in that — write what you want to write. Write what you love to write. If it’s this type of story, that particular genre, if it’s ABC or XYZ, have at it. No shame, no issue. But! But—

Publishers, I think, sometimes want writers to do that even when it’s not who that writer is. So many of us grew up reading a very diverse set of books, across the genres, across the spectrum, into non-fic, into literary, and it just makes sense to a lot of us to mash all that stuff up and care less about the codified walls of genre. (And genre is just some made-up shit anyway.)

And I think it’s hard, especially for new writers, to resist that kind of thinking. It’s hard to say to a publisher, HEY FUCK THAT, MAN, A BRAND IS WHAT YOU PUT ON A SHEEP TO SIGNIFY WHO OWNS IT, MAN. I WON’T BE CONTAINED BY YOUR FENCE. DON’T BRAND ME, BRO. I think a publisher or whoever says we need a brand, so we start to think, okay, what’s my brand, who am I, what do I write now, what will I write forever?

But, what I do think worked for me as an example was pointing to someone like Stephen King.

Stephen King, oft-associated with horror, doesn’t really have horror as his brand. Stephen King has Stephen Fucking King as his brand. Sure, he writes horror. All kinds of horror. And then he writes some fantasy. And then some sci-fi. And non-fiction. And crime. And, and, and. But every last word feels like Stephen King wrote it. The man is his own brand.

I find that freeing. I find it empowering. And this has more or less guided my career right from the get-go. It’s set the path as being not something pre-defined or worse, pre-destined, but rather, the path I choose to hack for myself out of the brush and briar. And every time I do that, I think about how Stephen King doesn’t write this that or the other thing — Stephen King writes Stephen King. The only brand that matters is you. Which is to say, no brand matters at all — you, the author, matter. Voice matters. Who you are, matters. The things you believe, the things you’ve seen, the things that you’re afraid of? That’s what goes into the books.

I want people to read my books and say, this is a Chuck Wendig book. Even if they never saw my name on the cover. I want it to feel like me. Warts and all. I want it to be my voice, my vibe, all the stuff that goes into and comes out of my weird brain. I love that. That to me is where the joy of doing this thing really comes into play — just being me, on the page and off of it. And not worrying about trying to put on a show, or be something or someone different, not being some persona, some variant of myself. True North is always just me. For better or for worse. It governs the career. I set the path.

And away I go.

So, thanks to King for that. For the books, yes, for sure. For the horror, absolutely. But for that other stranger piece of the puzzle, too.

I have no idea what that title means. And I will be taking no further questions at this time. *kicks over podium*

ANYWAY, some little bits of stuff going on:

1. While normally I don’t direct people to that site to buy physical copies of my books, ahem ahem, now that Black River Orchard is in paperback, it looks like AMZ is rocking a fairly low price for the hardcover ($20), if you wanted one before they gone. Oh! And I’m also seeing the Kindle is… $4.99? No idea why! But it’s spooky season, and it’s apple season, so it must be spooky apple season. (This also means the e-book is cheaper on all the e-book sites, including Kobo, B&N, Apple, and so forth.)

2. My hang-out at the new B&N in Doylestown has been rescheduled — I’m there tomorrow from noon till 2pm! Come say hello!

3. The auction for five of my books (signed, personalized) in support of Ashland Library in MA is still cooking here.

4. Was Monster Movie! named one of the best Halloween books of 2024 by Parade Magazine? WHY YES IT WAS. Also it gets a shout out in BookTrib for 12 Halloweenie brand-new kid-lit reads for you and, well, your kids. Also your pets. Read to your pets, folks. No I don’t know if that’s a thing. But it should be a thing. A thing you do and put it on instagram or tiktok or something. It’ll be a new trend. It’ll be adorable. Shut up.

5. Reminder to those at NYCC — if you’re there, and you wanna go to the Penguin Random House booth and say the password, “I’m Invoking The Covenant,” they might just give you a brand new shiny advanced reader copy of The Staircase in the Woods…

And again, there’s a pre-order page at Doylestown Bookshop to get a signed, personalized copy of the book with unique inscription and other (as yet unnamed) goodies, and you can find that here. There’s still a giveaway at Goodreads, too. Book hits shelves in April 2025, and already talking to some other authorfolk and bookstores about potential appearances…

5. Finally, fuck yeah there’s a cover for The End Of The World As We Know It:

… and there’s a (loose?) release date too of August 2025.

Really geeked to be a part of this.

ALL RIGHT I GO NOW

*runs up the staircase, disappears*

Heyooooo. If you’re feeling charitable and you want sweet, sweet books, I have five books up for grabs at eBay in an auction supporting the Ashland Public Library. You can check out the entry here.

It’s five books–

• Black River Orchard
• Dust & Grim
• Wanderers
• Wayward
• A Book of Accidents

All trade paperbacks, and all can be signed and personalized to the winner of the auction. Plus, there are other auctions up, too, and you can check ’em out here if you feel so inclined.

Get books! Support a library! A win for all.

OKAY BYE

In this fresh-yet-familiar gothic tale—part historical fantasy, part puzzle-box mystery—the worlds of Dracula and Sherlock Holmes collide in a thrilling exploration of feminine power.

At the dawn of the twentieth century in Paris, Samantha Harker, daughter of Dracula’s killer, works as a researcher for the Royal Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena. But no one realizes how abnormal she is. Sam is a channel into the minds of monsters: a power that could help her solve the gruesome deaths plaguing turn-of-the-century Paris—or have her thrown into an asylum.

Sam finds herself assigned to a case with Dr. Helena Moriarty, daughter of the criminal mastermind and famed nemesis of Sherlock Holmes and a notorious detective whom no one wants to work with on account of her previous partners’ mysterious murders. Ranging from the elite clubs of Paris to the dark underbelly of the catacombs, their investigation sweeps them into a race to stop a Beast from its killing rampage, as Hel and Sam are pitted against men, monsters, and even each other. But beneath their tenuous trust, an unmistakable attraction brews. Is trusting Hel the key to solving the murder, or is Sam yet another pawn in Hel’s game?

WRITE TO YOUR STRENGTHS

Strange Beasts is my debut, but it’s hardly the first manuscript I wrote. I wrote three manuscripts before it—each of which got so close I could practically taste the cigar smoke, only to be missing that ephemeral something.

So I did what any obsessively analytical person would do and made myself a quiz. Actually, a few quizzes. The first broke down the stories I love into the narrative elements that drew me to them. The second explored every aspect of what I love to write—from the themes I gravitate to, to what kinds of scenes I enjoy, to where I crave the most complexity. The third quiz was actually just the second quiz again, but answered in terms of my readers.

My theory was that my best stories were somewhere at the intersection between what I love to read, what I love to write, and what other people love about my writing. That if I could build a story around that, I could play to my strengths. After all, it’s not like readers crow about how your worldbuilding is so… adequate, your dialogue, present and accounted for. No, readers go feral for the things you shine at. I just had to uncover what they were.

GUT vs RUT

If you had asked me if I was writing what I loved before, I would have said yes, absolutely, why write anything else? These are the books I’ve pulled bloody from the cavity of my chest because what else is worth writing. But the strangest thing happened when I turned off the mood lighting and began my authorial autopsy. I realized I wasn’t following my gut—I’d fallen into a rut.

For example, writing secondary world felt right because it’s what I’d written since forever, but more specifically, since I was devouring fantasy books at the school library during lunch. But it turns out that what I love to write is a subset of what I love to read.

One of my questions on that questionnaire was “what do you enjoy most about world building.” For this, my readers and I are in agreement: it’s bringing a world to life, making it feel real, as if you could press yourself into the book, and walk its crooked streets. Mostly because if I can make the world feel real, then I can make magic feel real. I can make monsters feelreal. A feeling I’ve yearned for ever since I was a child, horrified that the world could dare to be so boring as to be bereft of magic.

You’ll notice I didn’t say “creating a new world and cultures,” which is what I was doing every time I wrote secondary world. I had fallen into a rut writing secondary world and not even realized it, thinking I was following my heart. The funny thing is, I wouldn’t have said I was unhappy writing secondary world, but I was so much happier when I began writing historical fantasy—and my readers were, too.

PERFUME IS FEMINIST

I dug into a wealth of research for Strange Beasts, most of which was rendered down into a single line here or there, but all of which was utterly fascinating (I regret nothing!). I was particularly drawn in by the stories of perfume in the Edwardian era. There were alarmist newspaper articles about socialites in France who bathed in perfume, drank perfume, or even injected perfume into their skin. (These stories might have a grain of truth to them, but were definitely not the cultural norm. If they did happen, it was most likely only socialites scheming for attention).

And then there was the lance-parfum rodo, developed using technology used for anesthesia which couldn’t possibly go wrong (reader: it did), which shot a provocative jet of perfume out, supposedly to make scenting your sheets easier, though that was definitely not what was selling it. See Alphonse Mucha’s rendition, with a reclining, artfully undone woman with a jet of perfume arcing toward her chest (ostensibly to the handkerchief she held), if you’d like a deeper ah, education in the matter.

But my favorite aspect of period perfume is how, in an era when the ideal woman took up as little space as possible, it was inexplicably feminist! Proper ladies, you see, only wore perfume on their artefacts, never their skin (the scandal!), and only perfume of a single note so their fragile lady minds wouldn’t get overwhelmed (there were whole books written about their fragile lady minds getting overwhelmed).

To wear perfume on your skin was to remind men you had skin. Which sounds like something out of a horror story, as one generally hopes women have skin, and all other genders too for that matter. But in that era, it was devastatingly provocative. What’s more, said perfume would linger in her wake, taking up space in an era where women were supposed to take up as little space as possible.

THE BEAST OF GÉVAUDAN

Werewolves often represent man’s inability to escape his primal nature. But after they were cunningly used by cult horror classic Ginger Snaps as a metaphor for puberty, I became obsessed with variations in monstrous symbolism. Werewolves, I decided, would be the perfect symbol for feminine rage. And using werewolves meant that my story had to take place in France, for France was the home of the Beast of Gévaudan.

Featured in the fantastic movie The Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Beast of Gévaudan is a real historical monster. Or… something. Accounts vary. There were theories it was just an exceptionally large wolf, a young lion escaped from a traveling menagerie, a striped hyena, a prehistoric predator, a pack of wolfdogs in cunning armor, and a even a man in a wolf costume. And then, of course, there were the theories that it was a werewolf—for the way it seemed impossible to kill, not even flinching at musket shot, until a silver bullet (allegedly) took it down at last.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before the silver bullet found its heart, the Beast killed 100 people in rural France between 1764 and 1767. Even the king of France got involved, eager to prove himself after the humiliation of the Seven-Year War. He set a bounty on the Beast’s head, and sent his own gunbearer (among others) to hunt it down. When said gunbearer shot a large wolf, the king promptly declared “mission accomplished,” and ignored all the subsequent Beast attacks that followed in its wake.

Of course, there is one major difference between the Beast of Gévaudan and the Beast in my book—the Beast of Gévaudan primarily devoured women and children, whereas my Beast saves its appetite for rich and powerful men in the heart of the city. Rarefied taste, for a Beast. A werewolf, undoubtedly, if they hadn’t all been hunted down decades ago. Political? Almost certainly. A metaphor? Of course. And the mystery at the heart of Strange Beasts.

WOLFSSEGNERS: THE PIED PIPER OF WOLVES

Before I started writing Strange Beasts, I researched everything I could find on historical werewolves. This led me to Peter Stubbe, a werewolf who made a deal with the devil for a magic girdle that would turn him into a wolf; Thiess of Kaltenbrun, the so-called Hound of God, or self-proclaimed good werewolf; and, of course, Wolfssegners, which were kind of the Pied Pipers of wolves.  

Wolfssegners could, by way of a Wolfssegen charm, protect your flock from wolves—or, by way of a Wolfbann, sic wolves on your flock (which really incentivized you to pay the Piper). But when I looked deeper, the nuance I found was fascinating.

Their charms varied as much as the Wolfssegners themselves. There are more than 200 established variants in Nassau-Dillenburg alone. One famous example used bread imbued with the magical sayings/prayers to saints, and left in hollows of trees at crossroads while naming devils. Another used a blend of wormwood, asafetida, and other herbs with soil from the stable in a pouch buried under the threshold of your barn. Some also wore Benedictine clothes and taught their clients to bake this spell-bread, sometimes requiring them to say prayers afterwards for days.

By the 17th century, this had the fascinating effect of getting them equally accused of being charlatans (when their charms didn’t work), witches (when wolves attacked and they hadn’t secured the Wolfssegner’s services), and, of course, werewolves. This obviously perked up the Church’s ears because WITCHES, but also because the Reformation happened, and it was Germany, so they weren’t happy with the pre-Reformation feel of their spells.

This proved a deadly catch-22 for Wolfssegners, which lead to the dying out of the practice—though I see it’s echo in the equally fascinating Pennsylvania Dutch Braucherei. Interestingly, Braucherei leans much more heavily on the Bible, the practitioners are required to help others, and there’s a taboo against accepting payment for their work—all of which neatly counter the pitfalls that Wolfssegners fell into centuries before.

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Susan J. Morris is a fantasy author and editor best known for a writing-advice column featured on Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog (which TIME magazine online once called “clever,” and which she hence forth has never let anyone forget), and her work editing Forgotten Realms novels. Susan delights in running workshops for Clarion West and in moderating panels for writing symposiums. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner; her cats, Adora and Kitava; and entirely too many plants. Strange Beasts is her debut novel. Find her online at susanjmorris.com.

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