AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE, LINDA & LOUISE CAREY

by Rebekah Lunt

When I finished the last page of The City of Silk and Steel, and started to think about the review I would write, (which can be seen HERE) I quickly started to become distracted. I loved the book and it had been a very satisfying read, but once I was outside of it again, I began to wonder about its creation and the logistics of writing together with two other authors. As much as I was interested in the creation and foundations of the story, I became curious about the experience of creating it and working together to achieve such a seamless chorus of voices and tales.

So, it was with great pleasure that I was able to interview the writers of the book, Mike, Linda and Louise Carey, and I hope that the questions and answers therein will enable you to enjoy and engage with the book even more than previously.

N.B. Some of the information contained within the questions and answers might be considered by some to be spoilers, so if you haven’t already read the book then read on at your own risk…

I am aware that Mike and Louise have written together previously but what inspired you to write together as a unit of three?

Mike:  It just sort of came together that way, with nothing so grand or glorious as a plan.  I came up with an idea, which was the seed for what became Seraglio/City, and I pitched it – but I pitched it as a comic book series, and it was very different back then from what it would eventually turn into.  Prince Jamal was the main protagonist!  Anyway, I couldn’t get any interest in it as a comic book, and eventually I dropped it into the Basket of Dead Ideas.  Then one night the three of us had a conversation about the 1001 Nights, and what we loved and hated about it, and somehow in the course of that conversation Seraglio got resurrected and dusted off.  We decided to write it together, and to approach it from a very different perspective.  And the inspiration, if I can call it that, was to use the Arabian Nights Entertainment as a formal model – to borrow its radical shifts in style and content, its digressions, its nested stories.  But we would do it entirely (or almost entirely) from the perspective of the female characters.  Because what bugged us about the Arabian Nights, even allowing that Scheherazade is a somewhat empowered heroine, was the sexism.  There’s a lot of stuff in there about the unfaithfulness of women and there are a lot of bad women who get punished.  We wanted to write a homage that would also be a riposte.

What drew you to this particular sub-category of the fantasy genre?

Lou:  I don’t think we really approached it with the sub-genre in mind.  We’re all fascinated by stories, the ways in which they are told and how they interact with and fragment reality, and the Arabian Nights style structure of the book allowed us to explore this in some interesting ways.

Lin: Partly it was the huge scope of the Arabian Nights stories. In modern terms, they actually range over multiple genres: there’s romance, horror, adventure, even a whodunit, where two men confess to the same murder.  We loved the idea of having that whole range to draw on.  Then there was the chance to take on the djinni (or jinn as they’re called in some versions): terrifying, totally arbitrary creatures who could equally easily grant your dearest wish or reduce you to a smear on the ground. And just a bit, I suspect, it was the visuals.  Mike and I both grew up with Arabian Nights picture books: no group of stories have been so gorgeously drawn by so many great illustrators.  Vast desert sands, jewelled turbans, rocs and ifrits and the aforementioned jinn…  So when the idea came up, we could visualise it straightaway.

Did you each have specific characters or voices that were more ‘yours’ than the others?

Mike:  Oh yeah!  Very much so.  Once we had our three leads – Gursoon, Rem and Zuleika – it was immediately obvious that each of us had a favourite.  Lou created Rem, and always had a very clear idea of who she was and where she was coming from.  Lin liked Gursoon, the wily elder statewoman, and I wanted to write Zuleika.  Yeah, I know.  To hell with subtlety.  I was tickled by the idea of this concubine who’s also a death machine.  But also I had what I thought was a great idea for her backstory and I wanted to be the one who got to write her origin, as it were.  So for those three, it was sort of a case of one of the three of us taking the lead and defining the territory.  Other characters evolved in a more haphazard way.  Anwar Das wasn’t even a named character in the original outline.  He just happened, and once we had him we decided to make full use of him.

Lou: ‘My’ character was Rem.  Although dad wrote her narrative sequences, The Tale of the Librarian of Bessa (Rem’s backstory) was mine.  I think I related to her the most because, like her, I spend a lot of my time in very old libraries late at night (Oxford is great for that sort of thing).

What were the challenges of writing a multi-charactered, multi-layered, multi-storied text as a team of three? Did any of the struggles of the women to cohere as a group derive from any of the issues you faced together?

Mike:  No, I don’t think our art was imitating life in any significant way.  But it was a more exacting process than writing alone, certainly.  Writing always includes an element of triangulation, for me.  You have a clear sense of some things, a much vaguer sense of others – and for the vague ones, things will tend to get clearer as you approach them.  So you reach a certain point and you finally know how this or that beat will play out.  And then you go back and harmonise all the stuff that’s behind you, so it fits together smoothly.  But if you’re collaborating, it can never be that simple.  You can’t mess with your co-writers’ beats, so every new insight leads to a summit conference and a new version of the plan.

Speaking of the struggles of the women – the harem which grows into a city – I found this aspect to be a really satisfying examination of the possibilities of a feminist/womanist type of utopia. I really enjoyed the realism within the fantasy, and that nothing was simple and often required significant sacrifice – even to the point that whilst utopia was not necessarily maintained (or achieved in some instances) each story and character achieved its own appropriate completion and didn’t result in complete entropy or dystopia. Is the woman-centred aspect of the story something you intended?

Lin: Very definitely. The Arabian Nights inspired us both in terms of setting and in the structure: the multiple-stories approach worked well for us, allowing for a lot of self-defined tales within the larger narrative so that we didn’t have to meet up and harmonise every single chapter.  But the stories in the Arabian Nights are mostly male-centred, with women seen as rescue-fodder or rewards for the heroes. And (as Mike’s said), the ones that show women with a bit more agency are often downright misogynistic: the woman uses her power to cheat on her man or betray him. So a huge focus in this story was the question: what would all these women do if they were set free from the men completely?  What would they want for themselves?

There have been historical “City of Women” stories before: the oldest one I know of was by the medieval writer Christine de Pisan, and there was also a Country of Women created by the fabulous Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in the 17^th century.  Both of those showed the women running a rational, peaceful society, each living very much by the values of their own age.  In our case we pretty much agreed on what our utopia would look like (eg it would still have men in it, just not running everything; and plumbing and nursery schools would be more important than palaces of justice).  But as soon as you start thinking about how you might really build a utopia, you come up against the real-life problems you’d face, and the fact that you have to keep on working endlessly to maintain what you’ve built. This was a fantasy, so we allowed our women to achieve their utopia and to enjoy it for a while.

Lou: From the very beginning, I was drawn to the story by its strong female characters and reversal of patriarchal conventions.  Initially, though, our cast of main characters was much smaller.  In the earlier stages of planning, the only characters we had really fleshed out among the women of the harem were Rem, Zuleika and Gursoon.  It was mum who first began developing the other women, like Farhat and Umayma, into characters, and we soon realised that this large cast was indispensable for conveying a sense of scale, of the growth of an entire city.  I think this was when the novel really started to take off, and one of my favourite parts of the writing process was coming up with the back-stories and characters of all the women, trying to imagine how they had joined the harem, and why each one would decide to join in with the attempt to retake the city.

Did you find it difficult to keep the voices authentic?

Mike:  I’m not sure what authentic means in this instance.  We were writing in a modern idiom, but with shout-outs to more archaic forms of language, in an attempt to pastiche nineteenth century English translations of a text that had been compiled over centuries from folktales amassed in Arabia, India, Persia and probably half a dozen other countries.  The 1001 Nights was already a palimpsest, and the time it referred to was a semi-mythical one, so it felt like it was enough to capture the flavour.

We did take voice very seriously, and we probably spent more time on that one thing than on anything else.  We tried out several different approaches, one of which was a much more faithful copying of the narrative voice from the Richard Burton translation.  But it really didn’t fly.  We needed something that would feel like that but would be a bit lighter on its feet.  And the fact that Rem stands out of her time and looks directly at the modern reader, speaking to us partly as a contemporary, enabled us to have our cake and eat it.

Were there any issues of cultural belonging or ‘appropriate’ respect for a culture to which none of you belong? Or did you find that the cultural inheritance of One Thousand and One Nights has allowed this literary context (ancient eastern cultures) to become a substitute cradle for this genre? I am thinking of the effect the Grimms and the Shakespeares of the western world have had on our literature and comparing that to the effect the One Thousand and One Nights had on not just the eastern world but on ours too so that the context of The City of Silk and Steel is as familiar as gingerbread houses in the woods and witches gathered round a cauldron awaiting a king-to-be.

Mike:  Well, indeed – and see previous answer.  We were writing within a cultural tradition, but it’s a tradition that, by the time it reaches us, is at least twice removed from its own roots.  The original core text, the Alf Layla, is eighth or ninth century.  It probably originated in Persia, and with a different title, but once it got going it ricocheted around the Middle East like a rubber bullet.  And everyone who got hold of it and translated it added in stories from their own culture, and changed the emphasis of some of the stories that were already there.  Then when it came to the West, the best part of a millennium later, the same thing happened again in a more extreme way.  The very first European translations, which I think were French, added vast amounts of material in – and the new stuff was some of the most popular!  Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, for example, is generally thought to have been a European addition.  So that was the source material, and it’s a glorious mish-mash of stuff.  We certainly weren’t aiming to strip away those layers of interpretation to get back to the truth of the original tales or the original historical era.  If anything we were adding our own layer on top of what was there.

Now a question just for Louise! Writing with a partner is becoming more common but I believe this is the first instance I have come across of a whole family, or three people, writing together. For you, as the daughter in this team of three, and working with your parents, did it pose any particular challenges to you which were different from writing with a peer?

Lou:  I’ve never actually co-written anything with someone who isn’t my parent, so my experience of writing with mum and dad felt like the norm to me!  There were some challenges which I think were unique to the experience though.  Nagging, for example, was a bit of an issue.  When ‘have you finished that chapter yet?’ became as regular a refrain at home as ‘did you remember to tidy your room/ hoover the carpet/ do the dishes?’, it made it difficult at times to work at my own pace.  I suppose the gap in experience between me and my parents also made a difference.  Since they’re both writers, I often felt that I should defer to their creative opinions.  Luckily, they were always quick to remind me that the novel was a joint enterprise, and they never let me take a back seat in the planning process!

And finally, come on guys, are you a perfect family or what?! Having assumed no-one has ended up under the patio or disappeared in mysterious circumstances, how on earth have you managed to maintain the well being of your family dynamic at the same time as wrangling a book to completion?!

Lin: Well, just being in a family means you occasionally want to murder each other, right?  I mean just the daily hassles, like the assault course to get to the cupboard and the vanishing keys which were there last night and the jamjar that someone put away empty, I mean, not even a SCRAPE! And I just did the shop! What kind of IDIOT?… So we long ago developed coping mechanisms.  Mine is a time-out with a Terry Pratchett book and large quantities of chocolate: an hour of that and I’m quite civilised again.

[Mike unloads the tension by retro-gaming: he can slaughter Professor Robotnik in about six seconds, especially when I’ve just eaten the last biscuit in the pack. Louise is currently too overworked to unwind properly, so she has to make do with rolling her eyes and making a really cutting remark. It’s worked OK so far.]

The City of Silk and Steel is out now.

This July, Pan Macmillan are incredibly excited to be publishing The Sleep Room by F.R. Tallis. This is a taut and well written page-turner which will appeal to fans of Susan Hill and Christopher Ransom.

When promising young psychiatrist, James Richardson, is offered the job opportunity of a lifetime by the charismatic Dr. Hugh Maitland, he is thrilled. Setting off to take up his post at Wyldehope Hall in deepest Suffolk, Richardson doesn’t look back. One of his tasks is to manage Maitland’s most controversial project – a pioneering therapy in which extremely disturbed patients are kept asleep for months. If this radical and potentially dangerous procedure is successful, it could mean professional glory for both doctors.

As Richardson settles into his new life, he begins to sense something uncanny about the sleeping patients – six women, forsaken by society. Why is Maitland unwilling to discuss their past lives? Why is the trainee nurse so on edge when she spends nights alone with them? And what can it mean when all the sleepers start dreaming at the same time?

In this atmospheric re-invention of the ghost story, Richardson finds himself questioning everything he knows about the human mind, as he attempts to uncover the shocking secrets of The Sleep Room . . .

F.R.Tallis is a writer and clinical psychologist. He has written self-help manuals, non-fiction for the general reader, academic text books, over thirty academic papers in international journals and several novels. Between 1999 and 2012 he has received or been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the New London Writers’ Award, the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, the Elle Prix de Letrice, and two Edgars. His critically acclaimed Liebermann series (written as Frank Tallis) has been translated into fourteen languages and optioned for TV adaptation. The Forbidden, his ninth novel, is a horror story set in nineteenth-century Paris and this, The Sleep Room, is his tenth. @franktallis

“If someone isn’t getting beaten up in the first five pages of the book, something is wrong.” This is according to pulp fiction aficionado Dustin Rahn.

Contamination, a book written by author Dave Jeffery based on an original story by filmmaker Jason Wright marks a return to the horror that children of the 80’s grew up on.

Protagonist Dean Sharp wakes up from a drinking binge to find that overnight, the world has changed. People are dying in the streets as mobs wander aimlessly through town looking for the next fight. Men and women tear into one another on sight, and even children join in the fray.

“Contamination was a story I had been writing for a while, and wanted to make into a film, but there were so many other things going on, we didn’t have time,” Jason Wright explained. “It made sense then to make it into a book first, and then film it later so people would have time to read it and experience it before it was filmed.”

After being introduced to Jason at a festival by mutual friends, Dave Jeffery sat and talked with the filmmaker for hours about the project. Together they spoke of the outline for the book, and the direction it would take.

“When Jason first showed me the outline for Contamination, I couldn’t help but see it as a pulp project,” said Dave Jeffery. “The story had a gritty, brutal aspect and played with chronology which made it interesting to take on.”

Wright, with his company, Silent Studios, will begin filming of the movie version in 2014. But to release the book, the team needed a publishing house.

Jeffery, whose novel Necropolis Rising hit the #1 position in the UK last year, approached his publisher, David Youngquist at Dark Continents Publishing about getting the book into print. After Skype meetings with both Wright and Jeffery, Youngquist gave the green light for a May 2013 release of the book.

As a small press in the era of instant communication and technology that allows people to work together from opposite sides of the globe, Dark Continents is always looking for innovation and ways to reach more people and develop more markets. A partnership with a film studio provides just that, by getting Silent Studios further into the literary world and Dark Continents into the realm of film.

The birth of Contamination is unusual in the writing realm, with a novelist and filmmaker working together on the project. But as Youngquist said, “The writers in Hollywood are always complaining they don’t have enough fresh ideas, so why not have a novelist involved from the beginning?”

Contamination will be released in May 2013 in stores as paperback books, and as downloadable files for your e-readers. Get a copy and follow the fast paced story as Dean Sharp tries to sort out reality from his dreams and sanity from madness, while the fate of humankind hinges on him.

Reeltime Pictures are pleased to announce a new drama production for release on DVD to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Doctor Who.

White Witch of Devil’s End is a spin-off from the highly regarded Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story The Daemons and will star Damaris Hayman reprising her role as Miss Hawthorne.

At the grand age of 84 (in June this year), you’d expect Damaris would be happy to be enjoying retirement quietly in her Cheltenham home … but no! When approached by producer Keith Barnfather about the idea she jumped at the chance. “I shall retire, I think, in my coffin!  Miss Hawthorne was my all-time favourite role and I was enchanted by the thought of being her again for a little while.”

“I was amazed and delighted that, as an octogenarian, Damaris was prepared to take this on,” says Keith. “We had recently recorded an interview with her for our Myth Makers series profiling actors who had appeared in Doctor Who and I already knew she still had a hunger to act. But I really didn’t expect her to be so keen.”

Although eager to take the project on, Damaris knew she had to pace herself, so in an innovative move, director Anastasia Stylianou decided to film the drama in a “talking head” style – adding dramatic cutaway material to bring Damaris’s words to life!

Says Anastasia; “I knew it would be a challenge. We needed to film a 50 minute drama at least, so I decided to make an asset out of a limitation.”

Primary filming has already taken place at a cottage near Damaris’s home. The crew collected and returned Damaris each day – allowing her to return home each evening to recover and study the next day’s script!

“We used autocue to help Damaris,” says Keith. “It was an impossible task for any actor to learn so much dialogue. Damaris was a true professional and took to it instantly.”

With a planned release date of 31^st October, which is appropriately also Halloween, Anastasia hopes to have the project completed for the 50^th anniversary celebrations. “It’s just getting all the dramatic cutaway material ‘in the can’ that is crucial. The drama is really an anthology – a set of connecting stories about Olive’s life told, as it were, in her own words.”

When considering who to approach to write these stories which would exist within an overall theme, Keith immediately thought to contact old friend David J Howe at Telos Publishing. “I thought it would be fantastic to ask individual writers knowledgeable in the occult and magic to write each story and David, through Telos, knew so many of the best young talent in the country.”

“I was delighted when Keith got in touch,” says David Howe, “and immediately started to think of who might be a good fit for the project. Along with my partner, the award-winning author Sam Stone, we contacted several authors who we felt would be sympathetic to the material and were pleased to get them all on board for the project.”

“I took on the task of outlining the whole story,” says Sam Stone, “and then asked the writers to come up with ideas which fitted that framework. We needed to tell stories at different points in Olive Hawthorne’s life, and the writers rose to the challenge and delivered scripts which exceeded all my expectations. I then worked with them to refine the scripts into the completed screenplay.”

The writers involved in the project are, as well as David J Howe and Sam Stone, Raven Dane, Debbie Bennett, Jan Edwards and Suzanne J Barbieri, with a final script-polish from Big Finish writer Matt Fitton. All have brought a unique perspective on Olive’s life, and the end result is an anthology of tales which will surprise, entertain and hopefully move the viewer.

Does Damaris have any regrets about throwing herself into such a big commitment? “Definitely not! I was enchanted to work with Anastasia and Keith again, who are great friends anyway. After a lot of working together consulting over the scripts, I’d subsequently never enjoyed filming more – and I can’t wait now to see the final result.”

The DVD can be pre-ordered from Galaxy 4 HERE

Strange Chemistry, the YA imprint of Angry Robot Books, is delighted to announce the signing of Danielle Jensen, in a three-book World English Rights deal concluded by Strange Chemistry’s editor Amanda Rutter and Tamar Rydzinski of the Laura Dail Literary Agency.

The first of the three books is called Stolen Songbird and will be published by Strange Chemistry in early 2014.

Trolls are said to love gold. They are said to live underground and hate humans, perhaps even eat them. They are said to be evil.  When Cécile de Troyes is kidnapped and sold to the trolls, she finds out that there is truth in the rumours, but there is also so much more to trolls than she could have imagined.

Cécile has only one thing on her mind after she is brought to Trollus, the city she hadn’t even known existed under Forsaken Mountain: escape. But the trolls are inhumanly strong. And fast. She will have to bide her time, wait for the perfect opportunity.

But something strange happens while she’s waiting – she begins to fall in love with the handsome, thoughtful troll prince that she has been bonded and married to. She begins to make friends. And she begins to see that she may be the only hope for the half-bloods – part troll/part human creatures who are slaves to the full-blooded trolls. There is a rebellion brewing. And her prince, Tristan, the future king, is its secret leader.

As Cécile becomes involved in the intricate political games of Trollus, she becomes more than a farmer’s daughter from Goshawk’s Hollow. She becomes a princess, the hope of a people, and a witch.

Danielle Jensen said: “I am beyond excited to begin work on the trilogy with Amanda and everyone else at Strange Chemistry. It is a dream come true to see my novels on their way to publication.”

Danielle was born and raised in Calgary, Canada. At the insistence of the left side of her brain, she graduated in 2003 from the University of Calgary with a bachelor’s degree in finance.

But the right side of her brain has ever been mutinous; and in 2010, it sent her back to school to complete an entirely impractical English literature degree at Mount Royal University and to pursue publication. Much to her satisfaction, the right side shows no sign of relinquishing its domination.

Danielle can be found on her website danielleljensen.com as well as on Twitter @dljensen_.

The May booklist “Maypole E13”  is online now with nigh on 450 books, magazines and paperbacks in superb condition.

The list includes early UK firsts of Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert and Kurt Vonnegut as well as some superb paperbacks. Don’t miss out!

A TASTE OF BLOOD WINE by Freda Warrington

Titan Books, 501pp  p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Alex Bardy (@mangozoid)

Originally published back in 1992 — long before Stephenie Meyer and Charlotte Harris made vampires trendy again — the majority of those featured in A Taste of Blood Wine are charming, sophisticated, and to quote the author, ‘devastatingly gorgeous’; and they all debunk the popular vampire myths about exposure to daylight, stakes through the heart, garlic, crosses, etc. This makes for a promising start in my book, and I’m pleased to say this delicious tale of love, lust and a passionate affair that stretches beyond the grave, is truly delightful. Step forward Charlotte and Karl, a magnificent pairing, and a timeless couple that deserve a place up there with the very best of genre lovers.

Set against the decadent backdrop of 1920s England, a post-WWI society enjoying a hedonistic boom in which champagne parties and illicit substances are all par for the course, we meet the Neville family, and the incredibly charismatic Karl von Wultendorf… Needless to say, Karl is the vampire in question, and despite his best efforts, falls for one of the Neville sisters.

For her part, Charlotte is the odd one out: while her two sisters, Fleur and Madeleine, spend their days enjoying the social aspects of society; she herself longs for the isolated comfort and familiarity of her father’s Cambridge laboratory, away from what she considers a circus parade of bourgeois grooming rituals. It takes a special kind of man, like Karl, to bring her out of her shell, but alas, not before he is already engaged to be married to her sister, Madeleine… Cue the beginnings of a great love story, and a gothic romance that tugs at the heart strings and leaves you all a-tingling, with hairs down the back of your neck, the works… It’s interesting to note that at no point does Karl ever deny being what he is, and he goes to great lengths to keep Charlotte firmly ‘in the loop’ in a vain effort to steer them off a path that could — and inevitably, will — lead to a life of ruin and damnation for them both…

I should say that prior to reading this, I never really cared for vampire tales: surely there’s nowt new to say about handsome Dracu-likes and beautiful preening teen tearaways? And even True Blood seems to have wandered so far off base in later seasons as to be nigh unrecognisable… But there’s the trick, y’see… Blood Wine isn’t just a gorgeous love story at heart, it’s about social suffocation, about a pair of individuals who are striving to break free from family ties, and it’s about a divided family who through no fault of their own have become embroiled in vampire politics. Moreover, the author’s clarity of vision and interesting take on vampire myth is both original and dare I say, breathtaking.

Among the vampires on Karl’s side, we’re introduced to Kristian, the closest thing to a lord of vampires in the book; one who believes wholeheartedly that vampires will inherit the Earth and are servants of God brought to this world to cleanse it of humans by sending their souls — their very essence — to the Lord himself for judgement. Karl is but one of his ‘flock’, but he is the unruly child, if you will, the one who resists all attempts to bring him to heel, and yet still Kristian loves him over and above all the others, eventually resorting to dastardly tactics to try and goad him into submission. It’s a battle of wills that crosses time and death itself, and makes Kristian a truly frightening and obsessive antagonist.

There’s so much here to love, not least of which is the concept behind The Crystal Ring, a whole other realm that vampires can use to escape the binds of the human world; also, there’s the  Weisskalt, a mysterious icy cold plane that Kristian uses to great effect to detain those who displease him. Then there’s the writing, the characters, the depiction of forbidden love, and betrayal, the setting… To be honest, there’s very little herein that I didn’t love.

To say more would be to reveal too much, and I want you to read it for yourself, but I would like to add that the writing is gorgeous, by turns haunting, lucid, and all-round beautiful, and I am hugely grateful to Titan Books for republishing such a great series — a series that many, like me, would have probably missed the first time round — and for giving them such a great set of new covers as well. This first instalment is eminently readable, absorbing, and all-round brilliant, a lovely piece of work, and definitely a must-have whether or not you’re a fan of vampires. It’s a book for fiction-lovers and anyone that claims to appreciate the written word, I think. And I for one am looking forward to reading the rest of the series: A Dance in Blood Velvet, The Dark Blood of Poppies, and The Dark Arts of Blood (the latter an all-new instalment due October next year).

From award-winning British fantasy author Freda Warrington, A Taste of Blood Wine (Titan Books, May 2013) is the first novel of a gothic vampire melodrama.

To celebrate the return of the critically acclaimed Blood Books in collectable paperback and e-book edition, Titan Books and Freda Warrington are serialising two rare and risqué stories set within the universe of the Blood Books across a series of websites and blogs. 

We’re publishing the fourth part of a short story called Little Goose. Read the rest of the tale here: http://titanbooks.com/blog/freda-warringtons-blood-wine-tour/

—

Little Goose: Part 4

By Freda Warrington

Her designs grew wilder. Eggs of dark pink tourmaline cupped in storms of jet. Snow-white jade, cracked with veins of blood ruby.

One day her father came unannounced, and I must be stuffed like a corpse into a cupboard. Yet I have ways of watching unseen, and I saw.

He stalked the gallery, a forensic examiner. He frowned. His nostrils flared as if he could smell me. Rebecca watched in silent annoyance as he perused her workbench; the designs scattered everywhere, the new pieces taking shape in chaos. He picked up drawings, judged and set them down again, lips pursed.

‘You have done all this in so short a time?’ he said.

‘Why?’ Her voice was high and taut. ‘Is the work substandard?’

‘No. No.’ Then, harshly, ‘How long have you been taking drugs?’

She was indignant, outraged. ‘I’m not taking anything!’

‘Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?’

She clutched her dressing gown to hide her throat. For she had indeed the look of one who makes love to a vampire, then rises from bed to work the night through. Drained, pale skin. Eyes like feverish rubies deep in purple-brown pits. ‘I’ve been working hard, that’s all.’

‘You will burn yourself out! What is it that keeps you awake, speed, cocaine? For God’s sake, Rebecca, what’s happening to you?’

I chose my moment. Stepped out of the shadows, strolled up the gallery stairs in my robe, dishevelled, cool and ironic, as if in a movie. I said, ‘Rebecca, are you not going to introduce us?’

She looked mortified. There was a terrible silence. At last, in a small voice she said, ‘Father, I’d like you to meet Sebastian.’

It was worse than I had expected. When he looked at me – I say looked; really it was like being X-rayed – he saw what I was. Not literally, perhaps, but so keenly that he was half a whisker from the truth. His eyes burned me black.

‘I knew it would be something like this. Knew. I see it all. He’s the one forcing you to work too hard. He’s the one who procures the drugs, yes?’

‘No! He is my inspiration!’

A hissing sneer of contempt. ‘I know him, and dozens like him. They’re all the same. They want to feed off your glory, your money! “One more objet, dearest, for us. A few extra works, and we’ll be rich.” He’ll bleed you dry!’

‘Get out!’ she screamed. ‘You’ve never let me live my own life! You have to let me go!’

‘Make a choice,’ he said, droplets spitting from his lips. ‘Go on seeing him and you will never see me again.’

In answer, she drew close to me and slid her hand through my arm. ‘You make a choice, Daddy,’ she answered. ‘Let me grow up, or get out. They’re not all the same. Everyone I’ve ever loved, you’ve driven away! Well, not this time. Not this time.’

White-faced and vibrating with emotion, her father left.

And I would have been proud of her if only, sadly, he had not been so right.

Apart, they were paralysed.

For weeks they sulked and grew gaunt, while their workbenches lay idle, and their phones rang unanswered. I know, for I watched them both, even when they had no idea I was there. They wasted in every sense. Yet neither, straight-backed and stubborn, would give in.

I haunted the old man’s house. He was there at his workbench, playing a file, not on gold but on his own callused fingertips. Staring at the dark.

‘Go to her, Bartholomew,’ I whispered. ‘Take her in your arms and tell her you’re sorry.’

He started, but looked at me without surprise, didn’t even ask how the hell I got in. Hoarsely he said, ‘She sends you as a go-between?’

‘No. I came because I can’t bear to see her pining.’

‘She has her lover, what use has she for a father? I have only loved her all her life. I only taught her everything she knows.’

‘And this is how she thanks you,’ I added. ‘Have pity on her. She can’t work.’

‘Can’t she.’ A sneer of grim pleasure.

‘Nor can you.’

‘You only care for her work, for the wealth and glory you leech from it! I know you were forcing drugs on her. Nothing else could make her look so ill. I know your sort, predators on my daughter. Happy now, are you? You cut the goose open in your greed and look! No more golden eggs!’

‘I am irrelevant,’ I said softly. ‘It’s that your daughter dares to defy you, that’s what you can’t accept. It’s that she dares to step from under your wing and be an artist in her own right, to be better than you. And you know you’re in the wrong but you can’t admit it. You’d rather torture her for the rest of time with your hubris than admit you’re wrong.’

‘You devil!’

With a roar he leapt at me and I, taken by surprise, defended myself. The file jabbed into my eye. Searing pain jolted through my skull. My hand sprang out to grip his throat. What must he have seen? My white face, my eye socket a gelid mess with the file sticking grotesquely from it. And I, not screaming but enflamed, monstrous. For then he was unmanned. He turned purple, he screamed, he twitched and I – I swear I did not mean to harm him but the pain, turning from fire to ice as my unnatural body pushed out the foreign object – the pain took over and I had him to my lips, my mouth full of his neck, his neck a spouting hose of blood, delicious, hot…

 —

The first book in Freda Warrington’s Blood Books series, A Taste of Blood Wine, is out now from Titan Books, £7.99. Read the rest of the short story Little Goose here: http://titanbooks.com/blog/freda-warringtons-blood-wine-tour/

© Freda Warrington 

AN INTERVIEW WITH RAYMOND E. FEIST

by Craig Knight

Thirty years ago it began with Magician and rather fittingly concludes with Magician’s End. Did you ever imagine the Riftwar Cycle would be so successful and span so many books?

Not until I got deep into the Serpent War saga.  Then it started to dawn on me we might end up doing all 5 Riftwars.  Didn’t know how many books that would take at the time.

How do you feel now that the Riftwar Cycle has come to an end and you reflect on the series and its conclusion?

It’s too soon for anything like perspective.  I’m pleased the series found an audience and that for the most part that audience stuck it out.  I find like any project I can look back and think of a couple of things I could have done better, but that’s always the case.  On the whole I’m pleased with how things turned out.

Looking back at the entire series, is there anything you would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight?

Appropriate follow-up to the previous question.  Nothing major.  There are a couple of places where I think I could have made a different choice.  And some stuff that got put in that never went anywhere.  In Shadow of a Dark Queen I introduce Miranda through the gimmick of her saving Erik and Roo while she’s disguised as an old crone, a whole spy disguise thing I basically dropped as soon as Miranda came on stage.  I could have cut that entire bit, for example.

There are quite a few plot strands to resolve from the previous books, not least being Pug’s prophesised demise. What can readers expect to encounter in Magician’s End?

Without getting into spoilers, I hope the reader finds the conclusion makes sense given what has occurred in the previous books.  There will be some triumphs among all the ashes, and a few happy endings for some characters.  What I hope the reader finds satisfying is the explanation of why things went the way they did.

Has writing Magician’s End been more difficult or challenging than previous books as you seek to bring things to a conclusion?

Not really.  The most challenging aspect was the wrapping up of loose ends, some of which go back to Magician.

Will you be bidding a fond farewell to Midkemia or do you think you’ll return at some point in the future?

Never say never.  Midkemia is a virtual world, and I’m writing basically a history of an imaginary place.  Lots of things went on after the Rifwar Cycle, though not on that comic scale, of course.  I certainly could do more stories in Midkemia.

Do you have any other projects planned that you can tell us about?

At this point I’m in discussion with my publisher about what’s next.  We’ve more or less agreed in principle to a new series, The War of the Five Crowns, which appears to be a trilogy.  The first book is entitled King of Ashes.

I’m sure all your readers will want to express their heartfelt thanks for giving us such a fascinating and enjoyable story over the years. Do you have any words for your fans before we get to grips with Magician’s End?

Yes, please.  Thank you for the support.  Without your affection and spending your hard earned money on my stories, I’d be doing something else.  So, again, thank you all very much.

Check out our review of Magician’s End HERE

MAGICIAN’S END by Raymond Feist

HarperVoyager, h/b, £20.00

Reviewed by Craig Knight

The fate of the Black Magician and all of Midkemia is revealed in the last volume of the Riftwar Cycle. The Kingdom of Isles teeters on the brink of civil war as the throne lies empty and the most terrifying threat ever to face the Conclave of Shadows emerges in the mountains of the GreyTowers. All races, ally and enemy alike, must unite if Midkemia is to survive.

In 1983 a book named simply ‘Magician’ appeared on the shelves of bookstores and began the epic Riftwar Cycle that would span three decades and thirty books. Readers would journey to alien worlds, other dimensions, the depths of Hell and even to the Big Bang itself. Now, Raymond Feist brings this amazing saga to a conclusion with Magician’s End.

Pug, the eponymous Magician, has long been prophesised to see all that he loves die before he himself can finally rest and this story brings all the events of the previous novels to a head. Feist has set himself an enormous challenge with this final book and the expectations are high. The Riftwar Cycle itself has produced some incredible books over the years from the stunning heights of the original Magician to the outstanding spin-off Empire trilogy (written with Janny Wurts). It hasn’t all been good though and there were low points with some dubious stories crawling out of Midkemia (yes, Demonwar Saga, I’m looking at you) but Feist has always shown that he can deliver enthralling stories and maintaining the same story world for thirty years is an amazing achievement.

Magician’s End is a large book, bigger than usual for a Riftwar novel at a lofty 650 pages or so. This isn’t surprising really given the number of story lines that Feist has to wrap up here. The story jumps and darts between characters and worlds which risks losing the reader but Feist shows his skill and manages to hold it all together well. All of the characters, both new and old, are given story time and there are even a few cameo appearances from some unexpected characters. Their appearance does seem a little contrived in places but Feist can be given this indulgence as he brings his tale to an end and seeing them again brought a smile to this reviewer’s face.

The story does take its time to build up the action and the world-ending threat appearing in the GreyTowers is given little attention in the first half of the book, concentrating as it does on the civil war of the Kingdom. Pug himself is conspicuously absent for a long time and the story initially seems to focus a little too much on the characters of Hal and Ty. Readers wanting to see Pug and Tomas, his boyhood friend from Magician, appearing on every page may be disappointed, but fear not, there is plenty of time to tell their story and Feist does manage to pull this off on the whole. It’s quite easy to imagine that Feist could have written a 2,000 page novel here with all that is happening and sometimes the action does feel a little rushed, but the frantic pace actually serves this story well and the feeling of chaos and impending doom seeps out of every page.

Feist has always been one for epic fantasy and this novel takes epic to a new level. The very existence of reality itself is under threat in Magician’s End and the scope of the story is quite dizzying. This could almost have been a saga in itself and Feist packs a lot in so there’s no room to get bored here.

Magician’s End is an ambitious book and almost succeeds in living up to the high expectations of this final novel. The characters are the centre-point of this story, quite rightly, and even the usually flat character of Magnus is fleshed-out with more of his emotions and backstory revealed. Feist manages to close the annals of Midkemia on a high note and goes out not with a whimper but a giant, ear-shattering blast. I challenge anyone who has been with the saga over the years not to have a lump in the throat or a tear in the eye as they close the cover on this incredible book and incredible saga. Thank you, Ray, for this worthy conclusion and all the wonderful tales over the years, it’s been quite a ride.

Oh, and does Pug meet his Magician’s End? Well, you’ll just have to read the book and find out for yourself, won’t you?