A re-post from my Live Journal archive: [In 2008,] as part of my annual Irish readings, I went through the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and Roddy Doyle.  I finally finished The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes given me on my 10th birthday.  I also read much of AC Doyle’s other works:  his non-Holmes short stories, his Brigadier Gerard stories, and his historical adventures from the 100 Years War (The White Company and the prequel, Sir Nigel).  Two of the Professor Challenger stories (The Lost World in book and silent film version, and The Poison Belt), and Maracot Deep.  I read Arthur and George — a fictionalized biography with a focus on the George Edalji case, and Teller of Tales, a literary biography.  I also read some of an unreadable play Holmes play co-written by AC Doyle, and Baker Street, the Broadway musical.

Until this year, I knew nothing about AC Doyle, except that he wasn’t really “Irish,” and that he was goofy about spiritualism.  I had seen an episode or two of Murder Rooms, which transposed Joseph Bell and AC Doyle as Holmes and Watson.  I had previously read a critique of the silly fairy photographs.

There’s a reason that Holmes is still with us, while the rest of Doyle’s creations have faded into obscurity, at least here in America.  Holmes’s concerns are still ours.  For instance, identity in a mass urban and global society (e.g., can a respectable man also be a beggar?).

Motivation is another, perhaps the major, subtext to the Holmes stories.  The surface stunt is how Holmes’s powers of observation and “deduction” allow him to see the significance of small details.  But the little secret is that Holmes often already knows what he’s looking for, because he’s already deduced the probable motivation of the criminal.  When I read some of these stories as a kid, I couldn’t see the adult Victorian motivations.  As an adult, the cases are nearly as transparent to me as to Holmes.  Did contemporary readers see them so clearly?

AC Doyle plays with other Victorian and early 20th century  blind spots, particular the effect of race on perception.  This counterbalances his own pervasive racialism, which at his time may have seemed scientific and even progressive, but seems hopelessly racist to the modern.

Another feature of Holmes stories that sustains them in our time is the great friendship at its core.  Watson gets dumbed-down for the classic movies, but his role in the stories is essential, and the relationship is right up there with Kirk and Spock.  He’s one of Holmes’s few links to the normal human world.  The movie treatment in Murder by Decree captures this, as much as it fails in other respects, particularly the resort to the supernatural.  (Murder by Decree also anticipates From Hell by a couple decades.)

For Roddy Doyle, I finished reading the Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van).  I had already read Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and its sequel Paula Spencer, the early play Brownbread (rhyming slang for “dead”), his most recent collection of short stories The Deportees, and the first two books of his “The Last Roundup” trilogy, A Star Called Henry and Oh Play That Thing.

I enjoy most everything Roddy Doyle writes.  He has a delightful transparent style:  easy, understated, humorous, human.  It’s sprezzatura at its finest.  Those who fail to respect R Doyle’s craft haven’t tried to duplicate it.

What follows is a loose transcript of my presentation at the Center for Millennial Studies Conference in 2002:

TIME FOR PREMILLENNIALIST APOCALYPTIC FICTION.  Thomas M. Doyle

For my third and apparently final presentation on premillennialist apocalyptic fiction, its easy for me to speak to the theme of this conference — disappointment.  I’ll miss these gatherings.

As before, my definition of premillennialist apocalyptic fiction is books and movies that, like the bestselling “Left Behind” series, follow the modern premillennialist “rooster” script as first popularized in The Late Great Planet Earth.  Fortunately, we’ve had a discussion of the Left Behind books in one of the morning sessions by Heath Carter, but just to make sure, does everybody understand the type of fiction I mean?  Good.  Then on to the disappointing stuff.

As posed to us in the call for papers, apocalyptic disappointment is a function of time.  Time is a central element of apocalyptic discourse generally, as elaborated by Stephen O’Leary.  With disappointment, time is still more important.  A typical scenario is that a millennial movement sets a date or time with more or less precision, anticipation builds, the date passes, disappointment sets in.  Without a predictive time frame, both great anticipation and great disappointment are less likely.

Disappointment is a function of time, but time is different in fiction.  A fiction author has more flexibility than a non-fiction author in controlling and constructing time differently than it is socially perceived.  How does apocalyptic fiction create (or fail to create) disappointment with its distinct relationships to time?  And what are the disappointments peculiar to fiction?

I’m going to discuss three kinds of time that relate to disappointment in fiction.  First, external time, meaning the time when the work is written and published.  External time relates to my second category, predictive time, meaning the end time dates set within the book (explicitly or implicitly).  Finally, and most distinctive of fiction, is internal time, the flow and “feel” of time within the books.

In terms of external time, premillennialist apocalyptic fiction emerged into mainstream culture only within the last decade.  This is puzzling, as The Late Great Planet Earth script was published in 1970, and was quickly a huge crossover hit.  Tim LaHaye, one of the Left Behind authors, published his own Late Great Planet Earth style book in 1972, and he claims that he thought of the idea for the Left Behind books in the 80s (or even possibly the 70s), but the first Left Behind book comes out in 1995, and only after other such novels had already been on the market  Why then did it take so long to put LaHaye’s idea into execution?

As I’ve noted in previous presentations, there were serious inhibitions against publishing premillennialist apocalyptic fiction, particularly the perception that fiction was a less serious medium and compromised the claims to truth and underlying biblical certainty in the prophetic argument.  As we approached the years 2000-2001, however, reasons arose for overcoming such inhibitions.  One important reason was the inevitable apocalyptic disappointment that would accompany nonfictional writings focused on those years, accompanied by a desire to maintain and guide end times enthusiasm.

From this emergence, one might have predicted that the genre would peter out after 2000-2001.  My own prediction was that the genre would endure, though sales might be weaker.  The events of September 11, however, have given unforeseen energy to the genre (particularly the Left Behind series) and to apocalyptic speculation generally.  This boost came even though the no book in the genre predicted those specific events.  The end has not yet come for premillennialist apocalyptic fiction.

So, the emergence of the genre in external time is related to the genre’s ability to finesse predictive time, in which it has a clear advantage over non-fiction biblical interpretation.  As noted by Stephen O’Leary regarding non-fictional discourse, Hal Lindsey had already improved on Millerite-style apocalyptic rhetoric by strategic ambiguity regarding the timing of the end.  This allowed him to “maintain the sense of apocolyptic anticipation without resorting to falsifiable predictions” which could lead to disappointment.  But there are limits on such as strategy — eventually, even ambiguous time periods such as a “generation” run up against the limits of their range.

Fiction can take the Lindsey strategy further.  A novel can set fictional dates for the end without standing behind them, and that became more important as we approached 2000-2001.  Thus, Pat Robertson could set a year 2000 date for the beginning of the Tribulation in his 1996 book, The End of the Age, and yet not face questions regarding that date now that we are past it.

The Left Behind books take this strategy further still — they avoid specific date setting altogether.  It is hard to imagine similar non-fictional interpretations being so restrained while still fulfilling the goal of maintaining apocalyptic anticipation.  To maintain such anticipation, the Left Behind series relies mostly on its descriptions of available technologies and the global situation to convey the sense of “always now.”  Appropriately written fiction can also to some extent rely on the reader’s  imagination to continually update certain ephemeral details (clothing styles, etc.) to avoid becoming quickly out-of-date.  In this context, the use of the political or techno-thriller form is appropriate:  unlike science fiction, the date for such stories could usually be today.

Why then did the Left Behind authors, LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, insist last summer at the National Press Club that their descriptions of technology place their books in the future?  The authors’ idea that mere incremental improvements in existing technologies (particularly information technologies) make the books futuristic shows very little sci-fi reading/exposure or even common sense.  But the Left Behind authors may have particularly good reasons for this inconsistency.  The authors have expressed their concerned about an undue association of the Left Behind series with the events of 9/11 in the same manner that they expressed their concern about an undue association with the years 2000/2001.  The authors refuse to be caught date setting, and take deliberate care to avoid it, thereby avoiding disappointment and any link to extreme behavior before, during and after such dates.  But the technology and geopolitics of the Left Behind books still gives them away — the time is now.

Some other books in the genre took the opposite approach and dared to explicitly set dates close at hand — for instance, the Robertson book I mentioned and the novel Flee the Darkness, which was contingent on the Y2K crisis being much worse than it was.  It would seem, however, in terms of book sales, that most readers prefer the vague approach to time, perhaps because they can place the time themselves at some mildly exciting point while avoiding any serious anxiety of anticipation or disappointment.

As a final way of dealing with predictive time, an author may set a fictional date artificially late, yet fully intend that the reader perceive the events as more immediate.  For instance, the Omega Trilogy is set at a more distant future date (2050), yet clearly describes a society and a Y2K like crisis that belong in 2000.  This approach creates a strange sense of time that is both “always now” and “to come,” and avoids setting a closer date that could create disappointment.

So, emerging into popular culture in the last decade, premillennialist apocalyptic fiction avoids creating disappointment while still creating anticipation by effectively finessing the issue of date setting.  Another way that the genre avoids creating disappointment is through its internal representation of time as jumping or collapsing from biblical times to the present.  The time in between is extremely compressed and largely irrelevant, and biblical writers are always writing for now even when they are also writing about their own time.

Although apocalyptic nonfiction similarly collaspses time, fiction does it even more thoroughly.  Most non-fictional interpretation has to delve into recent history to make its case, while fiction is capable of ignoring even this much history.  For instance, in Hal Lindsey’s own novel, Blood Moon, each near future event finds a parallel in biblical history.  Blood Moon has no sense of the weight of years in which the end has not happened.  Time skips directly from prophecy to fulfillment, erasing generation after generation of disappointment

Even books where the premise requires some history, the history intrudes only sketchily.  In the Fourth Reich, we have a clone of Hitler, but we are never given any historical perspective on his character.  In book The Illuminati and similar works, we have powerful ancient conspiracies, but their activities in the modern era are painted broad and vague (for example, propagation of the theory of evolution), with few details that would make them appear historically real.  Again, I think the reason for this is that the temporal priorities are the biblical past and the immediate present.  Such thinking has real political implications; for example, the Arab-Israeli conflict can be rendered as continuous for 3000 years, rather than discontinuous for most of that period.

In the Rift in Time books, about a born-again Christian archeologist, the biblical past literally erupts into the present — Mt. Sinai starts turning into the Garden of Eden, the Ark of the Covenant is retrieved.  This fictional present re-affirms a particular vision of the past which in turn reaffirms the end times vision.  Such an excavation of the past is particularly appropriate where the fictional apocalyptic chronology has been played out or has risks.  So it is perhaps no surpised that the Left Behind team may go on to another series about a Christian archeologist much like the “Rift in Time” books.

While Christian apocalyptic fiction may thus have a mitigating effect on any sense of disappointment vis a vis the external world, there are other forms of disappointment intrinsic to such fiction, particularly the finiteness of apocalyptic stories.  Within the limitations of the genre, there are only so many ways to tell the apocalyptic story, and these stories must all come to a similar end.  It does not help that most apocalyptic authors have derived their story structure from the political thriller genre, tired and cliche ridden as it is.

The finiteness of the apocalyptic story is related the finiteness of apocalyptic time.  Premillennial dispensationalism has a fairly rigid orthodox chronology which presents problems for authors of fiction.  Writing about the end times, an author must cover the Rapture, then move through a seven year Tribulation in which each event procedes according to schedule (for example, the Beast rules as such for precisely 3 1/2 years) and then cap things off with the Glorious Appearing of Jesus.  How may authors tell an original story within this strict time frame?

One answer is that they no longer can, at least when we’re talking the standard Tribulation scenario.  The Left Behind books have, in effect, pushed out the numerous competitors in telling a standard fictional version of The Late Great Planet Earth script.  This situation may continue for a while (what is a “generation” in book terms?); it is difficult to imagine something of similar scope (12 volumes!) anytime soon.

The most direct way to escape the constraints of the standard apocalyptic chronology (and its dominance by the Left Behind books) is to play with time in ways that only fiction can.  One of the best examples of how apocalyptic chronology was changed in fiction in response to the success of the Left Behind books is the Left Behind books themselves.  Their best seller status led the authors to telescope the internal sense of time, devoting more and more pages to fewer apocalyptic happenings.  To be fair, some telescoping was already in evidence when Jenkins sat down to write the first book and realised that the story he wanted to tell would have require several volumes.  But a comparison of the concentration of significant apocalyptic incidents in the first volumes to the most recent ones clearly shows an effort to milk the apocalyptic judgments.  Indeed, the reader is now bombarded more with endless chase sequences than with God’s wrath.

As the Left Behind authors attempt to extend the series, they give events more detail the closer they get to the end.  This is the exact opposite of most books in the genre, where events in the last part of the Tribulation are compressed, though we may be seeing some compression now in the Left Behind story as it fast forwards to Armageddon.  The reason for the compression is that closer the plots of these books are to the end, the more the plots become stereotyped by the strictness of the apocalyptic script and its inevitable conclusion.  For instance, by the point in the script when the Beast insists on his Mark, everybody must choose salvation or damnation — and so subsequent further character development becomes difficult.

In response to the growing success of the genre, one series of books, The Millennium Trilogy, took its story all the way to the post-millennial period, then cycled back to tell the premillennium story again from a different, spiritual warfare point of view.  This cyclical telling would almost seem incompatible with the fatalistic linear time of apocalyptic chronology, but its quite compatible with market imperatives.

Another related way to milk the same basic plot parameters is to tell another story in parallel.  The Left Behind authors have been telling a parallel serial story for children, which like the Harry Potter books are regarded as a guilty pleasure for adults while they wait for the next book in the adult series.  These efforts are further evidence that for Left Behind fans, finiteness of story is the real disappointment.

Film has been equally if not more successful in milking the maximum number of stories from the limited apocalyptic chronology.  The Lalonde brothers have managed to create several movies by telling different incidents of the Tribulation from different perspectives, jumping about from film to film with no particular regard to time.  For example, an amusing narrative trick in one Lalonde video was to take a normal unbelieving person pre-Rapture and put him in a coma to awaken during the Tribulation, skipping over the incidents already covered in another film.

Faced with the overwhelming dominance of the Left Behind books, however, the solution that most authors seem to be adopting is to set their stories in a period that is end times yet pre-Rapture, allowing them to break with the strict chronology yet convey the sense of temporal immediacy.  What, then, makes something “end times” when the Rapture hasn’t happened yet?  In the context of Christian fiction generally, it seems that merely setting a work in the present makes it end times, so long as the author enhances the present with some behind the scenes political intrigue, the secret designs of hubristic science and the hidden spiritual agendas of evil.  For example, Perretti’s spiritual warfare books are often described as end times fiction, though there may be no indication that we’re in the Tribulation per se.  A generic end times setting seems also to allow for an easier use of sci-fi tropes, which have become increasingly common in response to Left Behind’s market dominance.  The generic end times, particularly the fictional end times, can continue indefinitely.

Changing to a generic end times also changes the need to be orthodox in non-temporal ways.  In this pre-Rapture, pre-Tribulation loosely defined end times, debates about who the two witnesses are, the timing of the judgments, or even the very existence of a Rapture or a Tribulation become less relevant.  Such works can potentially appeal to a broader segment of the Christian audience than simply premillennialists in the Dallas Theological Seminary mold.  (Though crossover appeal has apparently been no problem for Left Behind.)  A work such as Rift in Time, set in a pre-Trib world, can thus take on what the author calls the “prophets of literalness” without much stir.  (p. 480)

Of course, an author may successful survive in this Left Behind story simply by telling a more original if still orthodox version of the story.  For example, of we look at the other books that have survived on the shelves, The Christ Clone Trilogy has shown remarkable resilience.  It has more of a sci-fi premise, and more of an active philosophical engagement with New Age ideals.  Indeed, as I discussed last year, the use of sci-fi tropes in this genre (such as aliens who are really demons) has become more common and a somewhat crowded area in its own right.  Another highly original work, We All Fall Down, tells its story from the perspective of a damned soul.  Its approach is character driven, focused on particular events in the life of the indivdual, and apocalyptic events are just window dressing.  Such a literary approach is the most thorough liberation from the orthodox chronology, but it is also most difficult for the authors in this political thriller derived genre.

To sum up:  Although it may still be early in the career of premillennialist apocalyptic fiction, I think it is safe to say that a strong conventional disappointment related to such fiction is unlikely, both because of the place of such fiction in time and the place of time in such fiction.  The genre may have arisen as a response to potential disappointment in the first place.  To the extent it sets dates, premillennialist apocalyptic fiction gives fictional dates that do not disappoint most reader’s expectations and for which authors cannot be held accountable.  The weight of history and previous disappointments is thoroughly absent in these books.

Some might look for evidence of real world apocalyptic disappointment in the genre’s plots, but this is a tricky area.  For example, the Left Behind series books published since the year 2000 have grown more permissive regarding violence by the good guys against the evil doers.  But the growing permissiveness also occurs at the same point in the plots of books written prior to 2000; that is, the point in the plot when all of humanity has chosen sides in the struggle.  This also indicates the importance of not reading the Left Behind series in isolation, which has been the temptation of many other commentators (and which is understandable, given the poor quality of the genre).

Instead, apocalyptic fiction’s disappointments are mostly those of the fanatic reader in Stephen King’s “Misery” — eventually all the books and series have to come to an end.  To counter such disappointment, apocalyptic fiction actively alters the flow of time to meet audience expectations and extend the story possibilities.  The setting of books in the less strictly scheduled pre-Rapture end times will help to extend the range of plots and the potential length of any series.  But even in this expanded area, we already see duplication — Christian archeologists and alien Nephilim seem to be everywhere.  Eventually the worlds described in such fiction and their literal ideological conservatism will begin to seem stale even to the fans of the genre.  Everything has to end sometime, including the end times fiction story.

So, how do audiences ultimately respond to the disappointment of story’s end?  I think the answer may be found in previous examples from other genres.  What do people do after reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?  They literally try to recreate Middle Earth, delve into further details, create their own fan music, stories, etc.  We can see this happening in Christian apocalyptic fiction.  For example, there’s a Left Behind website, which features discussion groups, music and other kitsch.  Perhaps this is analagous to real world apocalyptic disappointment — both may unlease mass creative energy, of a sort.  Fiction allows the end times to be like Middle Earth, and the true fan’s disappointment is that she will never get there (God willing).

Thank you.

These are the rough notes that I prepared prior to my meeting at the DC Public Library with a group of Nanowrimo winners. They aren’t even in proper outline form, but they may be helpful to some new authors, Nanowrimo or no:

Congratulations on your participation–you’ve already done what most only talk about. I a bit in awe of your achievement.

My talk mostly assumes a professional publication trajectory, whether through traditional publishing or self-publishing. At any stage, you can say, “I’ve had enough” and self-publish what you’ve got at whatever level you’ve reached. If it’s not at a professional level, you’re unlikely to get large numbers of readers, but that’s a question of your ambition. My talk mostly focuses on traditional publishing, as that’s my own experience.

1. Finish your draft.

50,000 is a lot of words, particularly in one month, but (in most genres) it’s not a novel.

You probably know better than anyone that your novel is incomplete (if it is complete, you have a novella–which may be fine in romance, for example).

Look at your genre for the optimal word count range (remember, some publishers still go by the 250 words/page count).

SF/F first novel 100K

1. Revise.

You have a complete draft. Now the painful part (for some–I actually enjoy this). Revision.

But, beyond the obvious how do you know what needs more work?

1. A Writer’s Group

You should get a critique circle, a writers group.

Who?–look around you (other nanowrimo winners).

But some limits. First, if you’re writing genre, you want a group that writes and knows that genre.

There are great online groups, but I prefer the in-person sort.

1. Workshops

And you could attend a workshop. Many (but not all) are oriented toward short fiction. For SF/F, Clarions and Odyssey. I attended one of the Clarions.

Workshops are also helpful for the networking I’ll describe later.

1. How to revise, and when are you done.

Revision includes putting your ms. into standard format.

Revisions at all levels. Storydoctor and line edits.

Anything nags you, but you tell yourself nothing you can do, and hope no one notices–they’ll notice.

A couple of ways to make you freshly engage with your ms.

1. Read it aloud.
2. review backwards chunks (as you can get tired of the beginning.

You’ll want a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style–answers many questions

1^st three chapters particularly important (a typical query package size); opening very important; but whole thing important too.

As your first novel, I recommend a book that can stand alone with a slingshot ending.

1. Start your next book.

After you finish your current book, what should you do before anything else? Begin your next book. For starters, it’ll probably be better.

Don’t make it a sequel.

Short stories are good too, if there’s a market for your genre in short fiction–good in themselves and as resume builders.

You should do this because the rest of what you do with your first book isn’t actually writing, and writers write.

1. Self-publish versus Traditional Publish

Questions: again, what are your ambitions/goals?

What is your skill set (or what skills do you have the time and ability to learn)? Or do you have the money/connections etc. to get others to do certain things for you.

To self-publish at a professional level, you’re going to need to do for yourself (or have someone else do) all of the things a traditional publisher is supposed to:

1. cover design and art
2. copy edit and format for all e-versions
3. get blurbs
4. publicity–get your work noticed amidst the 100Ks of self-published books.
5. Sales. Everyone I know in self-pub or small press is selling all the time.

You can skimp on these (depends on your ambitions/goals), but don’t fool yourself–people will notice.

TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING (aka, here comes the hard stuff)

1. Find an agent

This is very difficult, but remember, a really bad agent is indeed worse than no agent at all

Money always flows to the author, so any agent who asks reading fees, or sends you to his for-pay editorial service, etc.–they are by definition a bad agent.

What can improve your odds of getting out of agent slush and getting a good agent?

1. Research the agents
   1. Figure out who represents your style of work (and sells it).
   2. Who is taking queries?
   3. What they want in query package? Most are specific about what they want and you should follow directions, as this may be a threshold test.

B. Meet the agents

Venues different for each genre. Some opportunities free, some have the cost of attending a convention, some are higher priced “speed dating” sessions. For science fiction/fantasy writers, the SFWA industry reception in NYC is a great place to meet agents.

What does meeting an agent tell them? That you can at least present yourself as sane and socially competent, and that you may not be an instant nightmare to work with.

Meeting an agent will often get you out of the unsolicited slush pile into the requested material category, and typically you’re asked to send in more than the usual query.

C. Resume builders

D. The Dirty Secret (ask me in person)

Queries: How many do you send? Lots and lots. Authors tend to send them out in waves. First, because you might succeed with your favored choices. Second, you may figure out you’re doing something wrong in your query.

An agent may then request a full ms. (Some may do that from get-go, because of electronic ease.)

They may then offer representation or reject. Some may give you reasons for rejection, but unless they offer to look at a revised ms. (or unless what they’re saying is objectively an improvement) you probably shouldn’t revise (authors should revise their final ms. only in response to money/editorial demand).

Agents can take a while, but the good ones will get back to you in some reasonable timeframe.

1. Find a Publisher

Why can’t you just skip to the publisher step?

1. Many houses no longer take unagented/unsolicited manuscripts. You could take the approach with editors that I advised with agents, but for the reasons below, that doesn’t really save time, and to really get results, it takes a lot of contact with the editor.
2. Publishers want no simultaneous subs from the unagented.
3. Despite no simultaneous subs, publishers take forever to response to the unagented.
4. Once you’ve tried an editor, you’re done with them with that ms., and that means you’re reducing the opportunities for an agent to succeed for you. An agent isn’t going to like this muddying of the waters.

I have other thoughts for further on in the process if you get this far.

My guest post, “Foes and Friends,” regarding the military aspects of American Craftsmen, is up at SciFi Book Reviews. http://sfbookreviews.com/guest-post-foes-and-friends-by-tom-doyle/

This Saturday at MLK Library, I’ll be one of five authors talking to twenty-two people who finished their nanowrimo goal of 50,000 words. I’ll be advising them on what to do next with their writing. I’m always a little bit in awe of the folks who meet this goal, btw–I don’t think I even did 50K for Clarion.

NB: I’ll be editing this text, but for now, here’s the rough of the transcript of today’s talk (with the power point slides here–AMERICAN MAGIC):

[1] AMERICAN MAGIC: The Continuing Influence of the Classic Stories of the Fantastic or Uncanny

I think this topic is more than appropriate to this venue. First, a warning: my talk is going to contain some mild spoilers regarding my first book and even some details regarding my second book that might be spoilers for the first. But I figure this is my last best chance to annotate one aspect of my novels before I forget too much of the research I did. So if you’re very spoiler adverse, be warned.

In my debut novel, American Craftsmen, Captain Dale Morton is a magician soldier, a “craftsman”, fighting against a treasonous cabal at the heart of the Pentagon. American Craftsmen has also been called “a book haunted by other books” because I’ve created a backstory from the early American stories of the fantastic. The Mortons and the other craftspeople are the secret magical descendants of real-life founding figures (such as John Endicott and Anne Hutchinson), and their fictional family histories are interwoven with American history and literature.

[2 Baum picture] To my own surprise, one of my initial inspirations for this book was L. Frank Baum. When he began telling children’s stories, he had the notion of discarding the existing European folk tales and building a fantasy that was modern and distinctly American. [3 oz cover] That’s how we got The Wizard of Oz.

I wasn’t going to write a children’s story, but the thought of confining myself to a U.S. mythos for an adult fantasy was oddly exciting. With plenty of books retelling European myths and folklore, it seemed like our own stories had been neglected. I looked at American folklore, but I ended up spending more time with the great early American writers of the fantastic.

Today, I’m going to discuss ten authors and their classic American stories of the fantastic or the uncanny (well, eleven if you count my mention of Baum). I’ll note how their stories have continued to influence us, and also what I took from them to create the background for American Craftsmen and for its sequel, The Left-Hand Way (the Left Hand is the euphemism for evil in my story). I used these authors as if they were all writing about a single world of the American occult from different angles, and that’s not completely off-base, in that there are lineages of influence running from the earlier to later authors here. If I seem to move quickly early on, it’s because I’ll be giving more attention to the last two writers on my list, Hawthorne and Poe.

[4-Gilman picture] My first author is Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman was a social activist and suffragette. Most of her work was poetry, literary fiction, or nonfiction related to her activism, so we might not have expected a classic genre story from her, yet Gilman has given us “The Yellow Wallpaper.” [5 book cover] Do you know this one? In this semi-autobiographical account (published in 1892), a woman suffering from post-partum depression is kept mostly isolated by her husband for her “health” in a room with the titular nasty wallpaper. The woman descends from depression into psychosis. (Note the clever design of this cover here.)

Is this truly a story of the fantastic? While it makes a clear point about the role of women in society and has become a regular part of courses in women’s studies, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also a horror story. The descent of a seemingly sane person into madness due to confinement or mistreatment is a standard horror trope–[6 Shining image] for example, in The Shining, the degenerating cabin fever of Jack Torrance  

I didn’t really use that trope myself, but as a tribute to this feminist horror story, I have yellow wallpaper decorating one of the rooms in Dale Morton’s House, and unlike the wallpaper in the original, it really does have a supernatural predatory power. As I describe it: “Even if the guest avoided looking at the wallpaper, in the corner of one’s eye it seemed to breathe like a tired old woman.”

[7 James] Henry James is another author that, for most of his work, we don’t associate with tales of the fantastic–or indeed much in the way of action. He is the stylist’s stylist of literary fiction. [8-title page] But he was fond of ghost stories, and if one takes The Turn of the Screw (published in 1898) at face value, it is about ghosts possessing children. In my novel, such possession is a skill of certain evil ancestral Mortons, and the villains even recall once possessing children to disturb a governess, just for kicks.

(If one doesn’t take it at face value, it’s about a mentally disturbed governess causing the death of a child.)

[9 photo from Screw] The theme of possessed or evil children has, if anything, grown more common with time, and with considerably less ambiguity—Village of the Damned, The Omen, The Bad Seed, and of course The Exorcist. Adaptations of and homages to Turn of the Screw also abound, including one of the tales within Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. I like this picture with the creepy children as almost like the twins from Diane Arbus or The Shining.

[10 Chambers] My third author, Robert W. Chambers, switched careers from painting to writing (and he often wrote about artistic types). [11 book cover] The first four stories in his collection, The King in Yellow, (1895) are united by references to a play, The King in Yellow, which drives its readers mad and which seems to spread like a virus. (What is it about the color yellow anyway? Yellow Wallpaper, King in Yellow? Apparently the color had an association with decadence in the 1890s.)

These stories by Chambers form a link between Poe (for example, the figure of the king in yellow appears to be partly inspired by the Red Death), and H.P. Lovecraft (as both Chambers and Lovecraft are concerned with otherworldly or otherdimensional evil, which puts them in the subgenres commonly called “weird fiction” and “cosmic horror”). The King in Yellow stories have gained some recent notice through their use in HBO’s True Detective (though that show never delivers on such supernatural hints). I quote Chambers’s work in my book two, The Left-Hand Way (as it’s the second book in the series, I used a title that, in the jargon of my world, basically means “The Empire Strikes Back).

A fact about Chambers I didn’t use was that he’s a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, Rhode Island.

[12 young Melville] Herman Melville may have been the first fanboy of American letters in his effusive and somewhat obsessive friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. He’s looking pretty young in this painting compared with the big bearded fellow of later years. [13 whale hunt] Moby-Dick (1851) is not an overtly supernatural tale. But in his novel, Melville alludes to secret society rituals and dangerous obsessions, and it’s clear that Melville’s whale may be much more than an animal. Is he a stand-in for nature? Evil? In my novel, the black ops section of the Pentagon’s craft command is color coded with the whale’s ironic white.

Also, my ante-bellum Endicott character, Abram, obsessed enemy of the Left-Hand Mortons, was in my own mind a sort of “Ahab Endicott,” but I thought a direct link by name would go too far for reader and writer alike.

One story of Melville’s that I wasn’t able to use was “Benito Cereno.” In that story, enslaved persons take over a transport ship and put on a performance of continued enslavement in an effort to fool the captain of another vessel. This story about slavery is subversive, but to the modern eye, perhaps not subversive enough without explanation, and the rest of the early American canon seems similarly problematic regarding slavery and race. Though I touch on the role of slavery in craft family history, I really don’t take it on with appropriate attention until book 2.

[14 Bierce] Ambrose Bierce has been called the major American writer of horror between Poe and Lovecraft. His forte in horror was the ghost story, but his most famous story doesn’t technically have a ghost. [15 title page] That’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” (1890). Do you know it? OK, spoiler alert: this is a Civil War tale about a man who, about to be hanged, experiences a vision of escape and return home in the seconds prior to death. [16 comic illustration] This story is famous for its representation of how subjective consciousness can stretch time. A similar near-death experience sort of stretching was later used in such diverse works as Jacob’s Ladder and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. In contrast, my craftspeople are able to objectively enter a time-stretched, accelerated mode for combat, as in this scene:

“The time sense of Sphinx’s bodyguards slowed as I moved between them with craft-enhanced speed. Sphinx spun on her heel to face me. She adjusted time’s rush with the ease that flowed from its constant observation. She exactly matched my speed, two blurs in a land of statues. “Hello, Casper,” she said.

The guards were reacting now, reaching for me and for their hidden weapons. Eddy crouched for some crazy leap. Sphinx held up a hand to restrain them. She smiled again, baring her terrible, brown-stained teeth. “Are you ready to die?”

[17-Time cover] And here’s a man that Bierce is often paired with: his friend Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. He wrote a few stories of the fantastic (when he wasn’t simply exaggerating beyond all bounds of reason). He is also the author that I use the most for my section quotes (whether the source is fantastic or not)–as you might expect. He’s a very quotable guy. The continued influence of his work is obvious–for example, the central time travel conceit of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court has been riffed on countless times (perhaps most notoriously in the Evil Dead 3).

[18 Stranger scene] But the novel of his that influenced my books more was his late in life project, The Mysterious Stranger. (1916, but written 1897-1908). In that book, the nephew of Satan visits 16th century Austria and exercises a power of command over friend and foe alike while declaring that nothing is real. Some of my craftspeople, particularly the Endicotts, have such a power of command.

A final Twain note: when my characters find themselves scattered overseas in book two, I title that section “The Innocent Killers Abroad.”

[19 Irving stamp] Our ride number six: Washington Irving. He’s one of the first major American writers, and perhaps as such a transitional figure it’s not surprising that a substantial part of his writing came from filing the serial numbers off European stories and giving them an American setting. Other authors have engaged in the same retelling of European folklore and mythology on a U.S. stage–witness Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (but this was exactly what I was trying to avoid in American Craftsmen).

[20 Sleepy Hollow] As you all probably know, “The Legend of Sleep Hollow” (1820) is now a TV series. I’m not sure if Irving would have laughed or cried at hearing that Ichabod Crane has been re-imagined as a hero of anything. Due perhaps to its retellings for children, this is a frequently misinterpreted story. The greedy Crane is the villain of the piece, vampirically hungry for the town’s food and wealth, particularly in the form of the daughter of a wealthy farmer, and the town was right to drive him out. In my world, Ichabod would (will) be one of the evil Morton ancestors.

One can see the influence of this plotline on stories such as Saki’s “The Open Window,” in which another interloper is scared off by a well-executed ghost story.

Also, Irving popularized the name “Gotham” for New York, so at least two currently running TV series owe him a debt.

[21 Rip Van Winkle] Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” (1819) is the story of a man who sleeps through the American Revolution and awakens quite confused by the changes. The story continues to live in numerous adaptations and in most any story with time travel to the future. From this classic yarn, I’ve taken the name of a family of farseers in my book two, the Van Winkles, as I’ve creatively misread the story to be about the sense of being unstuck in time that a farseer might experience.

[22 Lovecraft] And now we approach the Mountain of Madness himself: H.P. Lovecraft. He was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, which was one of the reasons I chose it as a main setting for my first book (though once I did, I soon noted its connections to other authors–Poe, Gilman, Chambers). I went on the HP Lovecraft walking tour of the city, and saw the monument to him just outside of Brown University–one of my villains laughs at it as if some bad joke has been played upon the author. I also chose Providence because if my non-believing, magic-practicing Mortons chose to remain in European-settled lands at all, they would have chosen the relatively tolerant city of Roger Williams to lie low in.

Lovecraft is an author that, as a person, has fallen out of favor due to his god-awful racial views, even as the world of his horror continues to expand under other pens.

[23 Peanuts] Here’s a funny story: when I wrote American Craftsmen, I was of course familiar with various works in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos (e.g., The Call of Cthulhu 1828, At the Mountains of Madness–1936). Those works concerned other dimensional beings who ruled our world in the distant past and who threaten to reawaken and resume their reigns, bringing slavery and madness to all humans. In my story, such beings are apparently worshipped as the Left-Hand gods.

But one Lovecraft story I wasn’t familiar with was The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (first published posthumously in 1941, written in 1927). This saga of a New England family with an evil sorcerer ancestor who finds a key to immortality might have scared me away from the topic altogether. But reading it after I’d finished writing my novel just convinced me that I’d been on the right track.

I’m far from alone in having played (if only briefly) in Lovecraft’s world. One other recent example is Charlie Stross, whose Laundry series concerns the British secret agency in charge of protecting humanity from incursions of Lovecraftian beings.

Now we reach of the two main sources for my American Craftsmen mythos. [24 Hawthorne] First, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who we briefly met earlier as Herman Melville’s sometime friend).

[25 story list] Hawthorne is important to my world building because, even more so than Lovecraft in “Charles Dexter Ward,” he grounds his fiction in New England historical details. American Craftsmen is in part a cryptohistory–all the facts we know remain true, but with an occult narrative running beneath the official surface. But in choosing my facts, I often use a history that’s already been mediated by fiction, particularly Hawthorne’s stories about real Puritans (versus the more fantastical Scarlet Letter).

Two of his historical stories in particular were important to me. [26 May pole] The first, “The May-pole of Merry Mount,” concerns the colony founded by Thomas Morton in an area neighboring the colonies of the Separatists and Puritans in Massachusetts. Thomas Morton is the historical ancestor of my fictional Mortons, both good and evil. He has been called “America’s first rascal.” He opposed the Puritans, and the Puritans didn’t like his religious views and his close relationships with Native Americans (he sold them guns). “The May-pole of Merry Mount” is Hawthorne’s fictional account of an attack that John Endicott and other Puritans mounted on the Morton colony during its paganish May festival.

John Endicott of Salem is another historical ancestor of some of my fictional characters–the Endicott family, represented by Major Michael Endicott in the present day. John Endicott represented some of the worst extremes of Puritanism, advocating veils for women and brandishing his sword against the dissenter Anne Hutchinson. [27 red cross] But in Hawthorne’s story, “Endicott and the Red Cross,” John Endicott cuts the cross of St. George from the English flag in what some have called “America’s first declaration of independence.”

In my first book, the sword John Endicott used is still in the hands of his descendant, Michael, who puts it to bad and good use.

Also in my story, the Morton and Endicott descendants have continued the family feud for hundreds of years, and in the present day Michael Endicott suspects that Dale Morton has turned to the evil Left-Hand ways of some of his ancestors.

By the way, when the artist was asking about the type of sword for the cover of book two, I could point him to images such as this one–one of the advantages of using an item known both history and literature.

[28 flaming A] Hawthorne was an excellent chronicler of the darker side of the Puritans’ story. In works such as The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown,” he is particularly concerned with Puritan hypocrisy and a psychologically driven supernaturalism that doesn’t fit well with Puritan theology. In The Scarlet Letter, the adulterous Hester Prynne has to wear a scarlet “A” indicating her sin, but more supernatural seeming As pop-up elsewhere in the story. In that vein in my novel, one of the Morton powers is to see sins as glowing letters radiating from a person’s body.

Here’s Dale’s description of what his strike force looks like to him immediately before a mission: “But with my power running high, one of my natural gifts showed itself without effort. The team’s auras flickered around me; the small letters of their sins, scarlet a’s of petty fornications and k’s of military duty, tried to distract me. I ignored them.”

Also, a craft oracle reporting a soon to arrive threat says “the dark man in the woods, Papa?”—a reference to Scarlet Letter’s Black Man (the devil), which I altered slightly to avoid any confusion with skin color. Also, the secret name of one of my characters is Pearl, in a nod to the elf-like child of Hester Prynne.

[29 Easy A] Most recently, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was re-imagined as a teenage rom-com, Easy A. Which just goes to show how times have changed.

[30 House] Another story of Puritan hypocrisy and guilt is The House of the Seven Gables. The story concerns a family whose ancestor was an accuser in the Salem witch hunt, and the curse which may or may not be upon them. One of Hawthorne’s own ancestors was a judge during the witch hunt and the reason for Hawthorne adding a “w” to his name. “Seven Gables” was influential on H.P. Lovecraft, particularly with the Charles Dexter Ward story I discuss earlier. Also, when first constructed, my House of Morton in Providence, RI had seven gables to allow for sympathetic magic against the Morton’s enemy’s “House of Seven Gables” in Salem.

[31 Rappaccini] In book two, I take Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” about a woman who, by exposure to poison, has become poisonous to others, and extend the idea to a woman who has been deliberately weaponized in this way. This idea also used in for comic book character. Poison Ivy.

[32 Poe] And now, drumroll please, we come to the main event–the biggest influence on the tone of the background story to American Craftsmen. Edgar Allan Poe wrote in many genres, invented the detective fiction story, and contributed to the development of science fiction. [33 list of stories] But he’s primarily know for his Gothic horror, for his tales of mystery and macabre.

From Poe, the first important source story for my novel was “The Fall of the House of Usher.” [34 Madeline] I’ve reimagined the House of Usher as Dale’s ancestral home, the House of Morton. The twins Roderick and Madeline Usher become Mortons as well, and they were the leaders of the evil, Left-Hand branch of the family. As in Poe, Madeline ended up being prematurely buried, but it was by Roderick’s deliberate design to see if her spirit could escape from the sealed coffin into another body.

I also title one of the sections of the book “The Fall of the House of Morton,” and I there quote from a poem in the House of Usher story. At the end of that section and the beginning of the next, I use language very similar to the end of the House of Usher story:

“With a tumultuous shouting sound like a thousand rivers pouring into the abyss, the House of Morton fell.” And then: “Through the still open door, we fled, appalled, from that chamber. The booming of the Morton home echoed after us. The storm was at its wild peak as we left the unkempt grounds for nearest side street. Suddenly, the rain and wind ceased and a wild light shadowed us from behind. Still gripping the stone in my hand, I turned to see where the ghastly gleam came from. It was the full, setting, and blood red moon, which now shone vividly through sullen and silent fragments of the House of Morton.

“How could you fuck things up so quickly?” said Scherie.”

Given their history of burying others alive (even their own family), it’s perhaps not surprising that the Mortons commonly suffer from taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive themselves. This was of course inspired by Poe’s “The Premature Burial.” For the Mortons, closed underground spaces are a lot like snakes are to Indiana Jones–something they’d rather avoid, but always seem to be running into.

By the way, this illustration and the ones that follow were all done by the Irish artist Harry Clarke for a 1923 edition of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination–very cool and creepy, like an earlier, nastier version of Edward Gorey.

[35 Red Death] Another important source for me from Poe is “The Masque of the Red Death,” about a ruler who attempts to isolate himself and his peers from the plague. Thinking himself safe, the ruler throws a fancy costume party, only to have the uninvited plague show up personified. This story supplied my inspiration for the evil Roderick’s ritual killing garb.

Again, to quote my own riff on Poe: “The guest descended the stairs like a king in procession. He was tall and gaunt, dressed in a gray robe resembling a funeral shroud that covered his legs, making his movement look like hovering. He wore a mask of a stiffened corpse with a rictal smile, a likeness of death that even I couldn’t quite see through. His robe was dabbled in blood, and his broad brow and face were sprinkled with scarlet horror. The motherfucker was dressed as Poe’s Red Death.

“You goddamned idiots,” said Endicott. “You brought him back.”

This was the attire of Roderick Morton as high priest to his gods. This was what Roderick wore when he would murder every motherfucking soul in the room.”

I also like Poe’s Masque because it’s about how the Decameron fails; that is, storytelling fails when we attempt to isolate it from the dark aspects of the world.

[36 Ligeia] Three of Poe’s stories helped me create two variations on evil’s attempts at immortality. The first method of immortality, involving metempsychosis or reincarnation, was inspired by “Morella” and “Ligeia” (1838) (“Ligeia” also gave me Madeline Morton’s middle name). In “Ligeia,” a man’s dead wife returns to life by taking over the body of his second dying wife; in “Morella,” the dead wife returns through the daughter.

[37 Valdemar] The other Left-Hand method of immortality involved creating a trance to sustain a spirit’s bond to a body even as it decays. This method was inspired by “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), where mesmerism is employed on a dying man to truly disgusting effect–this drawing isn’t the half of it. As an aside, you can see how the name Valdemar may have helped to inspire the name Voldemort in Harry Potter.

[38 Man of Crowd] Besides direct murder, the Left-Hand Mortons engaged in mass psychic vampirism. One of my models for this is an interpretation I’ve heard of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.” (1840) In this story, the narrator tracks an old man as he goes with the flow of human activity in a major metropolis. The old man is seemingly innocent of any wrong doing in his wanderings, though he may have some secret guilt that impels him to always roam in a crowd. But at least one academic thinks the old man might be feeding off the crowds he follows [Weinstein at Brown in, of course, Providence].

Various items from Poe decorate the House of Morton. The grandfather clock in the main hall has a pendulum with a sharp blade at the end, as an homage to “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The subbasement of the House of Morton is like a theatrical props warehouse for the evil side of the family, and there one can find a mummified black cat from Poe’s story, as well as the skeleton of the ape from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the still-beating heart from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and bricked-off rooms as in “The Cask of Amontillado.”

In my book 2, a character obliquely refers to Poe’s brief story “Silence: A Fable” with the phrase “poisoned land of Poe.”

With Poe’s stories, it would be difficult to list all the adaptations, homages, and influenced works, but to note just one: Ellen Datlow recently edited an anthology called Poe, in which the authors each wrote a new story inspired by a different Poe story.

My characters are aware of their literary connections, somewhat like the characters in Don Quixote. The Morton library holds the draft manuscripts and notes of authors such as Poe and Hawthrone, as those documents reveal too much about the craft and its practitioners for outside attention. So my military characters are all in a sense poet-warriors–literature for them is as much of family history as stories of long ago wars.

(One thing I noted in putting together this presentation was that the material I borrowed seems to have been clustered in two time ranges 1835-1851 and the 1890s (fin de siècle)–with Irving and Lovecraft as outliers. Not sure what that means yet.)

[39 Book two] I’ve noted that there’ll be a book 2 in this series—in fact, there’ll be at least three books. Having established my American mythos in book 1, in books 2 and 3 I can expand outward, and give the same treatment to, for example, English history and literature as I’ve given to American. But I also continue to add to my American literary references. In book 2, I introduce the Gales (as in Dorothy) as another family of magician soldiers. On meeting a Gale, the main protagonist of book 2 remarks that: “I could tell her flat accent and corn-fed farm-girl looks resembled those of the Gale Family line, notorious for their countercraft assassinations and fine-tuned weather control.”

By the way, this cover is still a draft, so you’re some of the first to see it.

I left a lot out of my literary stew. Because of concerns about copyright, I avoided using 20th century works, so there’s not much Southern Gothic here, and despite the military elements in my story Hemingway only makes a stylistic appearance in parts. I also kept to older American works to give the sense of a primal common myth, but my choices have been problematic not just in terms of geographical representation, but in terms of race (they’re all white) and sex (only one woman). I’ve tried to make up for that lack with the characters and situations I describe, and as I noted in passing regarding Melville’s Benito Cereno, I expand not just geographically in book two, but also deal more directly with slavery and women’s issues.

As a final thought, I’m all in favor of strong copyright, though it does restrain writers in the dialogue we can have with more recent works. But we can have an unrestrained conversation with the early American fantastical canon. And that’s really how these stories continue to live–not through required reading in schools (though that certainly helps), but through their influence on and antagonism with today’s writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

[40 website] If you’d like to read or listen to some of my stories, you can go to this website. www.tomdoylewriter.com

American Craftsmen was published by Tor and is currently available in hardcover and e-versions wherever books are sold, and I guess the folks from the Library’s book store have some when we’re done here. I’ve also got these cards with just some of the many generous blurbs the book has received. The mass market paperback will be released on June 30^th, 2015. The sequel, The Left-Hand Way, will be released in August 2015.

Thanks again to Helen and the “What If” forum for having me here, and thank you for coming.

Questions?

 

Reading: Sunday 11AM (shared time slot)
Autograph: Friday 8PM
Panels: Mary Shelley Sat. 5PM
GRRM’s Other Fiction Sun. 2PM
I’ll also be at the Meet the Pros party Friday evening.

I will be the guest speaker at the LCPA “What If…? SF&F Forum” on November 20 at 1:00 p.m. in the 6th Floor Staff Multipurpose Room (right off the cafeteria) in the Library of Congress Madison Building.

This weekend, I’ll be at the World Fantasy Con in Crystal City. My panel “Capitol Fantasy” is at Sat. 10PM

The mass autograph signing is at Fri. 8PM.

Here’s the flyer for my Library of Congress “What If” presentation next month: