Stephen Blackmoore: Talking To The Dead

Stephen Blackmore is a friend and a bona fide bad-ass who writes killer urban fantasy about LA necromancer, Eric Carter. Here’s Stephen talking about… well, you’ll see.

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Sometimes I get to write about the things I’m not writing about.

Themes and metaphors, subtext and meaning. I can talk about one big theme, how you can’t go home again, say, and then scatter smaller ones throughout. Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes not so much. And I can couch it all in a fast-paced adventure, a violent detective story, a monster hunt.

My books DEAD THINGS and BROKEN SOULS are about a modern day necromancer named Eric Carter who can see the ghosts left behind by traumatic deaths. Gunshots, stabbings, stranglings, car crashes. Haunts trapped where they died, Wanderers flitting from place to place, unanchored and lost. Echoes repeat their deaths over and over again like a busted record player. He can’t not see them. To make things more confusing for him, he doesn’t just see ghosts of people. He sees the psychic landscape of the world that was left behind. The torn down buildings of a bygone era in all their glory, the grand hotels, the street corners that made history. The skyline of Los Angeles looks very different to him than it does to most people.

For him the Dead can be goddamn scary. They can’t touch him from his lofty perch on the living side. In his ivory tower he’s safe and secure. But if he crosses to their side, goes into their world, it’s a whole new set of rules. They’ll tear him apart given a chance. Fucking things might as well be sharks.

But they’re not. They’re still people, people with needs most couldn’t possibly understand. Tormented, confused, desperate. He forgets that sometimes. He’s alive and they’re not. Other times he doesn’t care. He’ll use them to his advantage. They’re everywhere, after all. Hidden in the spaces in between. And though they themselves go unseen and unnoticed they see a lot themselves.

Let’s be clear here, he is NOT a nice man. He’s arrogant, angry. Sometimes he’s really fucking stupid. His moral compass is as broken as the ghosts who wander past him and his blind spots cause more problems for the people around him than they do for himself.

But for all his fear of the Dead for reminding him of how fleeting life is, and how tenuous our grip on this reality might be, sometimes he’s the only voice they have, even if the best he can do is to scream their names into a howling wind.

To him the Dead are a cautionary tale. It’s luck of the draw if someone winds up a ghost, but if they do they can expect to spend a good long while draining away into the ether until they end up wherever they’re supposed to go. It’s not a good existence. He’s got a unique ringside view of what happens when things really go to shit. And he doesn’t know how to help them.

Years ago I met a friend for coffee at a place in West Hollywood. When I got there she had five, maybe six teenage girls with her. Youngest looked to be about twelve, the oldest couldn’t have been more than sixteen. They were crashing at my friend’s place for the next few days before heading up to San Francisco. She had only just met them that week.

The girls were from Texas and had hopped a bus two weeks before. They weren’t all related, but they were very clearly a family. The oldest watched the world around her like a Mountain Lion protecting her cubs, scanning for threats and making it clear with nothing more than her body language that if the world fucked with her or her friends she’d fuck the world right back. My money was on her.

We hung out for about an hour and from that I got that they were getting away from things they didn’t want to talk about. Violence was involved. A couple of the older ones were clearly in a relationship with each other. Before we parted I gave them some money, wished them well. Heard from my friend a few days later that they had moved on. I have no idea where they ended up or what became of them.

I didn’t get the sense that anything else I could have said or done would have been helpful or even welcome. Though they were exhausted, scared, lonely and largely invisible, they had a plan that I wasn’t privy to. I don’t know what they had gone through, what their world was like, I wasn’t even a tourist to them, but I got the distinct impression that whatever they were going through at that moment was world’s better than what they had left.

And so when I write about Wanderers, Haunts and Echoes, I think of those runaways. I think of a wheelchair bound vet who can’t get his PTSD meds. I think of broken families who can’t get Section 8 housing. The hidden homeless, the people we don’t want to look at, the ones we don’t know how to help. I see Carter’s disjointed skyline of Los Angeles disappearing into a haze of gentrification. Of Downtown squatters being pushed out of buildings so developers can convert them into $5000.00 a month lofts. Carter’s uncertainty is my own. His ghosts are my ghosts, peeking out through the cracks in the pavement, swept over by the tidal forces of change, powerless to do anything about it.

Sometimes I get to write about the things I’m not writing about.

Stephen Blackmoore: Website | Twitter

Broken Souls: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N