The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  Carrie Vaughn, in her successful original paperback Kitty series, chose the sympathetic route. Her series heroine is Kitty Norville, a closet werewolf in a world where werewolves coexist uneasily with vampires and witches. When she's not running on four legs, Kitty is a Denver radio deejay. She broadcasts a phone-in show called "The Midnight Hour," on which she doles out advice to the troubled and lovelorn undead.

  Kitty's show is popular enough to achieve syndication—straight people think it's a howl—but the attention it draws doesn't please everyone. The local vampires threaten her. Kitty's pack leader is not happy about it, either. Kitty knows she is providing an important public service, though. That's evident from the anguished calls she gets on the air.

  Kitty's first program at the beginning of Kitty and the Midnight Hour (2005) illustrates the depth of need in the undead community. After a couple of joke calls, requests for Pearl Jam songs, and questions about whether vampires are real, Kitty gets the call she's been waiting for:

  Then came the Call. Everything changed. I'd been toeing the line, keeping things light. Keeping them unreal. I was trying to be normal, really I was. I worked hard to keep my real life—my day job, so to speak—away from the rest. I'd been trying to keep this from slipping all the way into that other world I still hadn't learned to live in very well.

  Lately, it had felt like a losing battle.

  "Hi Kitty." His voice was tired, flat. "I'm a vampire. I know you believe me." My belief must have showed through in my voice all night. That must have been why he called me.

  "Okay," I said.

  "Can—can I talk to you about something?"

  "Sure."

  "I'm a vampire. I was attacked and turned involuntarily about five years ago. I'm also—at least I used to be—a devout Catholic. It's been really ... hard. All the jokes about blood and the Eucharist aside—I can't walk into a church anymore. I can't go to Mass. And I can't kill myself because that's wrong. Catholic doctrine teaches that my soul is lost, than I'm a blot on God's creation. But Kitty— that's not what I feel. Just because my heart has stopped beating doesn't mean I've lost my soul, does it?"

  Now there's a good one for you. How would you answer that question? Kitty delivers a discourse on Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, and Satan's big mistake, which was not pride or rebellion but failing to believe that God would forgive him. She counsels faith over rage at one's fate, and striving for an honorable life. The caller is comforted.

  A Catholic vampire having a crisis of faith? That's pretty heavy for a popcorn read. It's also logical. Vaughn assumes that her creatures are real and that their problems are ones they'd actually face in our world. Kitty's call-in shows make it easy to slip into Vaughn's alternate Denver and the conflicts that its supernatural denizens face.

  Verisimilitude is carried a step further in Max Brooks's World War Z (2006), which followed on his prior cult hit The Zombie Survival Guide (2003). World War Z purports to be an oral history of humanity's ten-year struggle against an army of zombies. It is full of faux-documentary trappings—including an introduction by the disgruntled archivist Max Brooks, who collected accounts of the war from around the globe—plus interviews, footnotes, and more.

  It's not the scholarly trappings, though, that give World War Z its authenticity; rather, it's the varied and all too human vignettes that Brooks has "recorded." The initial section of the novel chronicles warning signs and early encounters with the zombies. A doctor in Chongqing, China, recounts a night when some residents of the obscure hamlet New Dachang come to his hospital requesting help with an emergency:

  What could I say? The younger doctors, the kids who think medicine is just a way to pad their bank accounts, they certainly weren't going to go help some "nongmin" just for the sake of helping. I guess I'm still an old revolutionary at heart. "Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people."1 Those words still mean something to me ... and I tried to remember that as my Deer** bounced and banged over direct roads the government had promised but never quite gotten around to paving.

  I had a devil of a time finding the place ...

  I found "Patient Zero" behind the locked door of an abandoned apartment across town. He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing twine. Although he'd rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds, not on the gouges on his legs or

  arms, or from the large dry gap where his right big toe had been. He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his growls.

  At first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch him, that he was "cursed." I shrugged them off and reached for my mask and gloves. The boy's skin was as cold and gray as the cement on which he lay. I could find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild, wide and sunken back in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a predatory beast ...

  Take another look at that passage. The young boy's bloodless-yet-alive condition is made more chilling by the doctor's cold assessment. That objective tone would be enough to achieve the desired effect, but Brooks also takes time to humanize the doctor, even to make him heroic, with the doctor's rueful admission of his old-fashioned Red idealism.

  We feel for this doctor just as we do for so many of Brooks's one-time-appearance characters. To put it another way, Brooks is not asking us to buy his zombies (though his slow buildup of them is persuasive) but instead banks on bonding us in sympathy with his eyewitnesses to the Zombie War. If you think about it, isn't that the same technique used by the conspiracy novelists cited earlier? Don't try to convince your readers of the improbable premise; instead convince your characters.

  A focus on villains can also aid in putting over improbable— scratch that, impossible—monsters. That technique is just one of an array of methods employed by the prolific Sherrilyn Kenyon in her Dark-Hunter novels. If you haven't read any of this interwoven series, get ready to immerse in an alternate America crowded not only with us plain old mortals but also with Dark-Hunters, Apollites, Daimons, Were-Hunters, Dream-Hunters, Charontes, Squires, and Oracles. And will someone please explain to me the Chthonians?

  Never mind. I'll wait. For now it's enough to know that Dark-Hunters are shape-shifters whose job it is to track down and kill the evil Daimons, who start out as less-objectionable Apollites but later, in their twenty-seventh year, make the ugly choice to prolong their lives by stealing human souls. (Paying attention? There's going to be a quiz.) All of this derives, somehow, from Greek mythology and makes for stories in which our drab human society is but a thin soap opera compared to the titanic struggles of the immortals around us. Fortunately, a few humans are clued in.

  In the tenth Dark-Hunter novel, Dark Side of the Moon (2006), the lucky crossover human is a disgraced political reporter, Susan Michaels, who is reduced to writing for a Seattle rag, the Daily Inquisitor, which specializes in articles about killer moths, alien babies, and other paranormal drivel. Susan is destined to perform an act of animal rescue, the animal in this case being hunky Dark-Hunter Ravyn Kontis, who when we first meet him is in the form of a cat.

  Ravyn has been snagged by Apollites in Seattle's Pike Market with the help of a slinky streetwalker whom he hoped would pet him, the jerk. Over in Kenyon's version of hell, Kalosis, the Apol-lites and Daimons rejoice over Ravyn's capture. As they celebrate in baths of Apollite blood, we learn of the plans of their leader, Stryker, to bring about the final salvation of his unfairly (as he sees it) cursed subjects:

  Like the other Spathis gathered here, Stryker envisioned a better world. A world where his people weren't condemned to die at the tender age of twenty-seven. A world where they could all walk in the daylight that he'd taken for granted as a child.

  And all because his father [Apollo] had knocked up a whore and then gotten pissed when the Apollites had killed her off. Apollo had cursed them all ... even Stryker, who had been the ancient god's most beloved son.

  But that was eleven thousand years
ago. Ancient, ancient history.

  Stryker was the present and the Daimons before him were the future. If everything went as planned, they would one day soon reclaim the human realm that had been taken from them. Personally, he'd have rather started with another city, but when the human official had come to him with a plan for the humans to help rid Seattle of Dark-Hunters it had been a perfect opportunity to start aligning the race of man with the Apollites and Daimons. Little did the humans know that once the Dark-Hunters were cleared, there would be no one to save their souls. It would be open season on all mankind.

  How sweet for the Apollites that Stryker is a visionary, not to mention a good guy. He is. I mean, all he wants for his people is a little sunlight and fresh air ... well immortality, too, at the expense of our human souls. That's forward thinking, though, wouldn't you say? Why can't we get that kind of leadership out of Washington, D.C.?

  Kenyon's slangy, tongue-in-cheek narrative style helps bring her cosmology down to human level. Do you find her approach cartoon-ish? Maybe so, but you have to admit that Stryker's motives are accessible, even sympathetic. By slipping us easily into his head, Kenyon also eases us into a world of her own devising.

  What about simply launching into a supernatural scenario and forcing the reader to go with it? Can that work? Sure. It can even be fun. Julie Kenner's demon-hunting suburban soccer mom (Carpe Demon [2005] and sequels) may owe a lot to Buffy but her sprightly tone unfailingly seduces. Charlaine Harris in her Sookie Stackhouse fantasy-mysteries (Dead Until Dark [2001] and sequels) gives the supernatural a fried-green-tomatoes Southern twang.

  The king of humorous horror, though, is undoubtedly Jim Butcher, whose series about down-at-heels Chicago wizard-detective Harry Dresden has soared high on the New York Times best seller list and spun off tthe Sci-Fi Channel TV show The Dresden Files. Harry's sardonic narration never fails to amuse even if guts are flying and ghouls are dying. Butcher, indeed, gives the supernatural its sting with that very juxtaposition.

  In the ninth novel in Butcher's Dresden Files, White Night (2007), Harry Dresden is once again brought in by the Chicago police to consult on a series of murders with occult overtones. Someone is killing the witches of Chicago, all mild-mannered Wiccans of modest

  magical talents. As Harry investigates, he begins to suspect that the murders are related to a larger conflict between the White Council, the ruling body of paranormal practitioners, and the Vampire Courts, the analogous institution for the undead.

  Indeed, it looks like someone is trying to frame a Grey Cloak (that is, a Warden or law enforcer of the White Council) for the murders. In the following passage, Harry discusses the warlock-vampire war with his cute police department contact Lieutenant (temporarily demoted to Sergeant) Karrin Murphy:

  ... "So," [Murphy] said, filling time. "How's the war going?" She paused for a beat, and said, "God, what a question."

  "Slowly," I said. "Since our little visit to Arctis Tor, and the beating the vampires took afterward, things have been pretty quiet. I went out to New Mexico this spring."

  "Why?"

  "Helping Luccio train baby Wardens," I said. "You've got to get way out away from civilization when you're teaching group fire magic. So we spent about two days turning thirty acres of sand and scrub into glass. Then a couple of the Red Court's ghouls showed up and killed two kids."

  Murphy turned her blue eyes to me, waiting.

  I felt my jaw tighten, thinking back on it. It wouldn't do those two kids any good, going over it again. So I pretended I didn't realize she was giving me a chance to talk about it. "There haven't been any more big actions, though. Just small-time stuff. The Merlin's trying to get the vamps to the table to negotiate a peace."

  "Doesn't sound like you think much of the idea," Murphy noted.

  "The Red King is still in power," I said. "The war was his idea to begin with. If he goes for a treaty now, it's only going to be so that the vamps can lick their wounds, get their numbers up again, and come back for the sequel."

  "Kill them all?" she asked. "Let God sort them out?"

  "I don't care if anyone sorts them or not. I'm tired of seeing people they've destroyed." My teeth ground together. I hadn't realized I was clenching my jaw so hard.

  Let me ask you something: In the passage above, what stands out? What got your attention? Was it the backstory review of training wardens, the ghoul attack, the Red King and peace negotiations? Or was it Harry's not-so-buried anger? I'll bet, as it was for me, it's the emotion that has impact.

  There's plenty of action in White Night, including a series of gory ghoul attacks. Butcher writes violence effectively yet Harry's matter-of-fact narration doesn't aim to shock us, surprise us, or creep us out (much) with visuals. Butcher knows we've seen in all on TV. Instead, the horror comes largely from inside Harry; that is, from his feelings.

  Later in the novel, Harry goes on a rampage after ghouls kidnap a pair of sixteen-year-old twins and chow down on them:

  I kicked the ghoul's wildly thrashing lower body into the blackness of the mine shaft. I turned to the upper half.

  The ghoul's blood wasn't red, so he burned black and brown, like a burger that fell into the barbeque just as it was finished cooking. He thrashed and screamed and somehow managed to flip himself onto his back. He held up his arms, fingers spread in desperation, and cried, "Mercy, great one! Mercy!"

  Sixteen years old.

  Jesus Christ.

  I stared down for a second. I didn't want to kill the ghoul. That wasn't nearly enough to cover the debt of its sins. I wanted to rip it to pieces. I wanted to eat its heart. I wanted to pin it to the floor and push my thumbs through its beady eyes and all the way into its brain. I wanted to tear it apart with my fingernails and my teeth,

  and spit mouthfuls of its own pustuled flesh into its face as it died in slow and terrible agony.

  The quality of mercy was not Harry.

  I called up the Hellfire again, and with a snarl cast out the simple spell I use to light candles. Backed by Hellfire, directed by my fury, it lashed out at the ghoul, plunged beneath its skin, and there it set fat and nerves and sinews alight. They burned, burned using the ghoul for tallow, and the thing went mad with the pain.

  Gee, do you think Harry is pissed off? Okay, what is the most horrific part of that passage: the descriptions of the burning, bisected ghoul ("like a burger that fell into the barbeque"), or Harry's own rage ("I wanted to ... push my thumbs through its beady eyes")? Both aspects of the passage are graphic, but really isn't it Harry's anger and actions that are the most awful?

  What pulls us through White Night and all the novels in the Dresden Files, I'd argue, is not any macabre fascination with the occult but the innate appeal of Harry Dresden. What makes Harry compelling? His sardonic humor, of course, but also his high personal stakes. Each plot problem matters profoundly and personally to Harry, and therefore it matters to us. What horrifies him horrifies us.

  In all the examples above, notice that what makes monsters scary is what makes them human. Indeed, the trick of frightening readers has always been to first make the world of the story highly believable, then gradually add what is weird. From Wilkie Collins to H.P. Lovecraft to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King to Joe Hill, what is scary is not the buildup of what is supernatural but the buildup of what is real.

  Don't get me wrong. Any type of suspense novel must accomplish a lot and successfully deploy many techniques: heroic heroes, high stakes, ticking time bombs, relentless pressure, endless new obstacles, escalating consequences, taut writing, and more. All of that has been covered in any number of good books on thriller construction. What concerns me, and what I see missing in so many manuscripts, is passion.

  How is passion expressed in a thriller? Is it exhaustive knowledge of the underlying threat? Certainly. But that by itself is not enough. That kind of passion we can get from any conversation with a conspiracy nut in a bar.

  Passion in a suspense novel means giving a protagonist the a
uthor's own paranoia, either gradually or right away. It means constructing a villain out of compelling motives and high convictions. It means pouring research-gleaned details into the story both to feign verisimilitude and to build believable character motives.

  If what you feel genuinely is paranoia, great. Use it. But don't confuse paranoia with passion. Passion is patient and hardworking. It's crafty. It doesn't rest until every last consumer is turning the pages without ceasing.

  We have been talking about thrillers, but the techniques in this chapter have important applications in every kind of fiction. Even contemporary realism lifted straight from your own life will, at some point, strain credulity.

  How can you counteract that? In the same ways we've been discussing. First, give your protagonist real reasons to act. Second, motivate your antagonist convincingly and at length. Third, and above all, find what is improbable in your story and remove every shred of reader objection and answer every reason why these improbable things don't happen in real life.

  When readers are drawn into a story, especially one that can't really happen, it is not a lucky accident. It's because the author has worked hard to make the impossible feel real.

  Are you having a nice time? I'm glad. Isn't it great when you hit one of those days, or even a whole stretch of your existence, when you just cruise along, no particular worries, everything going pretty well? How wonderful to be able to drop phrases like same-old, just routine, and nothing new.

  At times like those, problems are in perspective, drama queens don't draw you in, you remember to exercise, you say no to dessert, and you speak to your kids and co-workers in thoughtful and measured tones. Life is in balance. Your outlook is sunny.

  If that describes you right now, stop working on your manuscript immediately. You could be in terrible danger. Why? You may be seeing the world and its woes in a way that is calm and rational. Nothing could be worse, at least for your fiction. Effective storytelling doesn't minimize problems, it exaggerates them. To the passionate novelist, everything isn't smaller than it really is—everything is bigger.