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The protagonist of Search Party, a ruminative yet rudderless young woman named Dory who jilts her staid hipster existence to try to solve the mystery of an acquaintance’s sudden disappearance, has frequently been referred to by critics as a sort of “millennial Nancy Drew” (which, to some, means she’s an “Anti-Nancy Drew”). This comparison generally stands to establish her as a particular type of protagonist: a young female amateur detective. It also serves to remind audiences of the narrative pitfalls commonly associated with such a character, namely, the cliché of how “seemingly inconsequential objects like a necklace or a torn check all take on greater meaning”— the ability to find direct and obvious clues that act as clear signposts on the way to a solution. But Search Party is not a mystery peppered with the obvious evidential breadcrumb trail of a Nancy Drew story so much as a warning to those (audiences and characters alike) who expect all mysteries to play out this way. Those who might expect this, the show suggests, are those who have grown up on police procedural dramas, or consumed the mystery stories put out by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (which produced The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, et al.), tales with highly predictable, and even dependable formulas. Indeed, the show is sprinkled with reminders of the expectations of these works: cutting often to the CSI-style TV-show-within-a-TV-show which employs Dory’s blonde, Upper-West-Side-bred best friend Portia, an actress terribly miscast as a young Latina cop. Additionally, the episode titles themselves mimic the cadence of Stratemeyer titles: “The Secret of the Sinister Ceremony,” and “Password to the Shadows.” This warning, against relying on the events in Season One of Search Party to follow the conventions it flags, is pulled off effectively by swapping in hallmarks from many other groups of detective stories: mostly from film noir and neonoir, but also hardboiled crime, and thriller. But these thematic and aesthetic twists that play out against a backdrop of another entirely different, heretofore unrelated genre: the millennial city comedy. Indeed, the multi-layered Search Party, which aired its first season in pairs of two out of ten half-hour episodes each week (and made all of them simultaneously available online, ready for bingewatching), has been hailed for its particular conformity to the noir genre and its relatives, while retaining the feel and structure of a twenty-two-minute sitcom. It is, many critics have discussed, a comedy about millennials (the white, privileged, Brooklyn-based cut of it), and it retains this sensibility even as its protagonist turns it into a mystery (just not the kind she thinks it is). Search Party, which initially premiered on TBS and then moved to HBO, becomes an entirely different type of show in each of its five seasons. Genre is a kind of alchemy in Search Party; the different stylistic and thematic associations of each leg of the show seem to activate certain qualities in the characters and then allows those qualities space to grow. This essay is about Season One of Search Party, which is firmly a pastiche that both explores and overthrows the “plucky amateur girl detective” story that has been a sub-genre staple of the detective story for generations. Dory’s own boring life seems to transform into a nostalgic mystery when Dory believes she sees the missing girl, a former college classmate named Chantal Witherbottom, at night, through the windows of a Chinese restaurant. Dory’s observation is illuminated by glowing red neon signs so commonly associated with neo-noir, a genre which, like its predecessor of film noir, is overwhelmed by antagonistic forces such as conspiracy and corruption, and faces its protagonist with gritty futility. Dory’s first clue – her own view of Chantal—in her Nancy Drew-ish quest, is literally illuminated and colored by a hallmark from another genre. The juxtaposition suggests a darker take on Dory’s discovery than her own excited expectation. Generic trades such as this force a character who has perhaps stylized herself on such an effortless, hyper-successful and ubiquitous archetype, to confront the ambiguity, disillusionment, misapprehension, and failure more familiar to the investigators populating other, less-triumphant detective subgenres. [Spoilers aheads] Indeed, what makes Search Party truly noir is that it turns out there is no mystery at all, like The Third Man (1974) or Chinatown (1974), the film’s dangling carrot is revealed to be an illusion—more specifically, an exaggeration fabricated by over-reading on the part of the detective, perhaps fostered by the expectation that real-life clue-following is just like the kind that appears in the genre’s more clichéd texts. Dory’s entire journey, starting from this first clue, is based on misunderstanding, miscalculation, and the hope that she can save the day, and will lead to a sensation quite unlike the ending of a Nancy Drew story—the detective’s being entirely wrong. The show builds a perfect conspiracy featuring the missing girl’s secret pregnancy, a simple paper trail leading to a dangerous real estate company making secret deals, a baby-obsessed cult housed inside a pretentious artist collective, and several ambiguous characters, including a gruff, duplicitous private investigator, and a possibly-paranoid woman who insists that there are darker forces at work shortly before she is found dead. Ultimately, though, it turns out that Chantal has chosen to abscond only to take an extreme kind of emotional-health cleanse—leaving her family, friends, responsibilities, and social media profiles to go concentrate on herself for a while and be free from the various pressures in her life. It’s common, in noir, for the detective to fail in fixing the problem at hand, or to realize that he (in this genre, the detective is rarely not a “he”) has been duped. Often, the mysteries picked up by detectives are dummy-cases generated by enormous and powerful powers, to distract from more substantial, crooked dealings. In such works, the detective must discover that he has been led in the wrong direction, and work to find the truth, even if he is not powerful enough to indict the guilty group. In Search Party, though, the fault lies with the detective. (Well, the show’s missing girl, Chantal, is revealed as being unbearably, cluelessly selfish for disappearing in the first place. But Chantal is a subject for a later episode.) While such noirish elements pervade the story, the tale also becomes a Hitchcockian thriller for a while (the second episode, after Dory sees Chantal in the restaurant and grasps her first clue, is even called “The Girl Who Knew Too Much” instead of the usual titles). For a while, it hovers in Hitchcockian territory. In Rear Window, an amateur saves the day. In Shadow of a Doubt, the amateur detective on the case is a very young woman who is doubly jeopardized when she figures out that her beloved uncle is a serial killer, while, for example, her even more amateur armchair detective father and his friend sit on the porch solving fake mysteries night after night. The show even threatens to veer into a tragedy with some playful but very heavy foreshadowing; in an early episode, an older man next to Dory on the subway notices the book Dory is reading—a copy of Anna Karenina that had once belonged to Chantal—and ominously informs her, “I’ll save you the five hundred pages. She dies at the end.” Search Party does become dangerous, turning the show from a Nancy Drew story, in which an amateur detective learns of and solves a problem perpetrated by someone else after following a string of noticeable clues and putting them all together, into a story that harps on the impossibility of being a Nancy Drew figure in actual life, collecting various genre hallmarks from Hitchcock to noir to tragedy. It even becomes a little Gothic, with Dory’s quest starting to look more and more like Northanger Abbey (which is a novel about a young woman who reads so many Gothic romances that she starts to think she might be in one; she starts applying the ludicrous narrative logic of those books to her own relationships, suddenly suspecting her friend’s father of being a murderer and the like). As much as the references in Search Party stress that the “mystery” of it all is entirely in Dory’s mind, a product of her imagination, oments like the Anna Karenina comparison punch up the potential for danger in Search Party… not in the sense that “someone will come after” our protagonists, but that there are dark realities of “playing detective” for a real crime or strange event. The problem with Dory’s presentation as, or perhaps even identification with, Nancy Drew is not that such mysteries present a lack of danger—at least once in every book, Nancy gets too close to solving the case, so an attempt is made on her life (she is driven off the road by a suspicious car, she is attacked from behind with chloroform, etc etc). It’s that all of the crimes in the Nancy Drew stories are easily surmountable by Nancy and her friends—while danger is a risk, death is not. Nancy Drew is much too resourceful, clever, and damn lucky for this ever to be her fate. (It is important to note that Nancy Drew is an incredible detective. No human alive could solve every single one one of those things.) But also Nancy Drew is never wrong! Where she sees a mystery, there is a mystery. There is never a consequence for rampantly speculating about a crime taking place. This is what Search Party tries hard to emphasize: there are consequences, in real life, for playing Nancy Drew. Indeed, the show takes great pains to unearth a kind of cynical realism in light of Dory’s self-fashioning, and reveal that trying to become someone like the fictional Nancy Drew is in fact highly dangerous, because Nancy operates in a world governed by a very different set of rules. Nancy might play with fire in terms of her own personal safety, but she never comes close to ruining someone else’s life. She never lets her own desire to solve a crime become a desire for attention, validation, or the need to feel important. She never gets to “feel” like she’s the protagonist in a mystery because she is in one. On the other hand, Dory’s suspecting that she might be the heroine in a detective story, is revealed as a kind of narcissism, a kind of selfishness, a adrenaline-junkie’s cure for the boredom and malaise of her everyday life. Search Party isn’t the only show that interrogates the theme of “a normal person wanting to be in a mystery.” That’s a new, reflexive subgenre I have termed “the millennial whodunnit.” In that genre, as I’ve written, “characters lead unfulfilling, unhappy lives, until a murder in close proximity serves to make life interesting again, propelling their daily existence into another genre entirely.” That our Nancy Drew turns out to be a self-serving, self-absorbed schmo is one of the smart bait-and-switches of the series. Another is that the sexual politics of the Nancy Drew stories are very quickly overthrown in favor of a more disillusioned, realistic take. Ron Livingston plays Keith, the male investigator Dory works with, and it turns out that he does not want to be her professional partner so much as her romantic one. He compliments her beauty while they are sorting through evidence, seduces her at his grimy bachelor flat when they are going over the clues. (This is a show in which older men constantly assail younger women with romantic and sexual overtures.) In the G-rated sexual realm of Nancy Drew, this level of boundary-crossing is never an issue (they’re kids’ books after all); sure, Nancy is belittled by male criminals or underestimated by male clients, but no one does her the indignity of making a pass at her, or trying to turn her from a detective into a sexy sidekick or trophy partner. Everyone in Search Party is revealed to be less than their crime-story counterparts. We see how they want to be seen, and yet we see theme entirely for who they actually are. That’s the real point of the show. The only mysteries are how low we ourselves are willing to go to prove to ourselves that we are the main character of an exciting story. View the full article

I Chapter 1 Spring Last Year, 1277 -- Licoricia, an Old Woman, in her Home Early afternoon. Wisps of a late snow were melting between the cobbles on Jewry Street, one of the few cobbled streets in Winchester. It made for less mud than the other streets, but there was still mud enough for all. Winchester was a wealthy market town, and Jewry Street was a wealthy street, or it had been not so many years ago. Not so now. The last week of riots had burned themselves out. The street was quiet now, almost empty. Few people lived there any more. There were few Jews on Jewry Street, few left in all of Winchester, hardly worth the trouble of mobs rising to riot against them, but then, that’s the nature of mobs. Some of the Jews had fled the country, but not many—most couldn’t afford it, the king put too high a price on his Jews for them to leave the realm. Many had been killed—in the civil war more than a decade ago, many more in the coin clipping trials, in the riots, in King Edward’s orgies of execution. The king would have preferred to have seen them convert, or so he said, but of course, how can one ever trust them after that, how to trust a Jew who converted to a new faith, so it was only fitting that they be tried and executed, converted or not. A few Christians had moved into empty houses on the street. They didn’t have to be purchased—they were empty. No one talked about the whereabouts of the former owners, or the technicalities of buying and selling. The new owners simply took possession. From somewhere, from nowhere, the clopping of three horses came down the street. They stopped in front of the big stone house set back from the street, the home of the widow Licoricia—an old woman, a money lender, a woman of some influence a long time ago. Licoricia had lived in this house for many years. She raised four sons and a daughter here. She never knew her own parents, but she never lost her children. She was raised right here in town by Chera—financier, moneylender, who became the mother of the orphan Licoricia as a small girl. This house was the largest on the street, two stories, glass windows, three brick chimneys, gracefully set back from the street and towered over by tall trees—still bare of leaves this early in spring. A grand home at one time, with lights in the windows, people coming and going—now the whitewash faded and chipped, a few shingles clacking their demand to be repaired, the house shaded by years as well as trees. She lived here with Alice, her companion of many years, a servant girl elevated to sister by their years together. Three men dismounted and tied their horses—men in hauberks covered by tunics, gray or brown or just covered by dirt, no one took notice, and in barrel helmets so no one could see a face, and they knocked on the door. Knights, mercenary soldiers—who could know, no one saw them. Not pounded, not to draw attention, just knocked lightly, in no hurry. Inside there were only the two old women. Licoricia was in her seventies. She never really knew her actual age but the years were inscribed in the lines of her face. She paused her needlework and called, “Alice, can you see who is there?” Alice was not quite so old as Licoricia, but old enough to have earned her stoop. She stopped sweeping, she worked so hard to keep the floors clean, just long enough to open the door a crack to peek out, just a crack. They had not had callers for a long while, and she had grown cautious since the riots. She was no longer strong. The men did not have to push hard to let themselves in through the crack. They closed the door softly behind them, and drew their swords. Alice’s eyes widened as she took in the sight of them—their barrel helmets, their hauberks and sooty tunics, drawing their longswords like the teeth of dragons—they had the look of monsters. She gathered her breath but she did not have time to scream. Licoricia could only watch as Alice thudded to the wooden floor, as her eyes bulged wide with terror and her blood sprayed on the walls and spread pools on the wooden floor. Licoricia’s eyes widened and she felt her own heart fall to the floor with Alice. She stood bolt upright, faced them, not tall but still straight. She brushed a crease from her skirt and then brushed her palms, and stepped forward. She thought, so this is how it ends… She said, “Finally you are here...” II Chapter 2 Today, Spring 1278 – Florent D’Egremont 1 Florent d'Egremont stands in file on the rocky hillside with the black robed monks of the Dominican priory, the obligatory audience at this grisly performance. The hillside just beyond Winchester’s northern wall, a short way from the Durn Gate, forms a natural amphitheater between the wall and the woods higher on the hill. The Gray Friars file to the left of the Black Friars, and some homeless mendicants straggle up to watch the spectacle as well, probably hoping to get a hot meal and maybe a bath at one of the monasteries later. A few patches of snow still dot the hillside where the spring grass struggles to surface. Florent snarls inside, angry, revolted at the spectacle of the hangings, hangings and more hangings. He wants to turn away. The Black Friars priory is not far away on the other side of the wall, where Florent serves as a lay cleric. He wears the cassock and cord to please the abbot, it’s little enough and doesn’t really keep Father John pleased anyway, but Florent keeps his sword and dagger with him as well. He is of the priory but not of the priory. Bad enough, that first round of executions. That was last fall when the hillside was turning brown and cold winds were blowing eastward. It was just after King Edward issued an edict that usurers and coin clippers should be arrested, tried and executed. All over England, people heard the signal; they took Edward’s proclamation as an invitation to pillage the communities of Jews. When word reached Winchester, the strike of that flint ignited days of riots in the streets, mobs setting bonfires in the market and in front of the Jewish synagogue. Some of the houses on Jewry Street caught fire, but the fires failed to make any distinction between Jewish or Christian homes. The Jews who lived there on the street tried desperately to pass buckets of water through the mobs to the burning houses—most of whom on some other day might have helped pass buckets themselves. And since Christian homes were catching fire as well, cries arose that the Jews started the fires, as though it made any sense that the Jews would set fire to their own homes first. That first day of riots, the bailiff stood on the auction block at the market, and the crier read charges against the accused, while the conservator of the peace danced around on his horse, trying to disperse the mobs. Deputies rounded up the accused, carpenters set up the gallows. Everyone stayed busy. The accused were money lenders and coin clippers, Jews and Christians both, accused of lending money at usurious interest, or stealing the king’s own silver—and all silver coin belonged to the king—by snipping a bit off the edges of his coins. Some were guilty and some innocent—and so were some of the accusers—but few of the accused had a chance to prove their innocence. And so many more were Jews than Christians, even though there weren’t many more Jews than Christians in Winchester—in fact, far, far fewer. The mobs and riots were the worst that first week, and the bailiff Roger Dunstaple had wasted no time in hanging the accused right there in the marketplace, right in the center of town, the trials could wait until after, as though exhibitions of hangings would quiet the rioters and quell the fires. Roger was a hulking beast of a man, and if there were ever a shard of love in his heart, he spared none of it for Jews. He directed the conservator of the peace and his deputies from the garrison to hang a dozen of them that first night. It worked. As the hangings began, rioters cheered. They jeered at the convicted, flailing from their ropes. They threw rotting cabbages, eggs and stones at the dangling bodies. But as the limbs of the dying went limp, the rioters fell still. And the dead were left to hang for seven days. Not all who watched were rioters. Many that first day, like Florent, were incidental observers, trapped by the mob. As the dying finished their task, the conservator rode through the crowd, separating them, sending them home. The fires ebbed, the smoke blew away with the wind, the ashes settled. The city sulked. Then it happened again, in the winter. A new round of accusations and arrests, and a new tempest of riots, lootings of homes and shops of the accused, fires. And another round of executions. But this time Roger was better prepared. Despite the frozen ground, carpenters had somehow set up gallows on the hillside outside of town. Only those most determined to watch the hangings made the trek to where Florent stood now. But Roger and Father John de Dureville, the abbot of Black Friars, and the abbots and priors of all the other monasteries, had set the time and place and given the order, so that all the rank and file of monks must line the hillside to watch the hangings. Florent guesses this act of witness might be supposed to give the weight of churchly righteousness to the spectacle—but he doesn’t feel righteous. And now, with spring about to flower, a third round of accusations, arrests, riots, lootings. And a show trial—this time held right at the gallows on the hillside, as though to save time and trouble, and the executions immediately to follow. At least this time, the trials preceded the executions. Roger claims the riots are less and he has saved the city some damage. Maybe so, but Florent doubts if anyone is really doing any accounting for it. Only a few townspeople gather to watch today, and of course the boys circle around to throw stones—by now, most townspeople would probably rather be plying their trades or at their hearths than standing too close to the rot they could sense being played out. And those few who do make it to the hillside are people Florent might want to avoid in other circumstances, like unwelcome encounters in the town’s darkest, narrowest alleys at night. The friars are here only at the abbot’s command, and he says the command comes from the bishop. So he says, but Florent is not convinced. He notices that neither Father John nor Bishop Nicholas are present. Florent and the monks stand, fidgeting witnesses to the mass execution. Three at a time, three after three, all left hanging while the next three are hoisted up. As before, not all of them are Jews—but most are. Anger seethes low in Florent’s guts, it churns. It is not witnessing death—that is all too commonplace. A plague—that comes from God. No, this is the pointless repetition of death upon death, a plague sprung from the black places of men’s souls. It recalls the executions he had witnessed after battle during his time as a squire during the war now more than a decade past, when Lord Edward—now King Edward—had slaughtered so many of the barons and their warriors. Florent has no sympathy for criminals if they break the laws of God or king, and of course he has no sympathy for Jews. Either way, they deserve justice and punishment, in this world or the next. He stands up for the laws of God and Church, without question, of course. But why are he and the monks his brothers forced to watch this punishment, time after time? Are they also being punished? Does their presence bring with it the weight of God’s acceptance of this sacrifice? He scans the faces of those about to be hanged, the third batch today. He is jolted into a shock of recognition—a pair of eyes looks straight into him. It is Jankin the doctor. Not the tanner who nearly killed Florent’s tiny daughter with his phony potions and his incompetence, it’s the real physician who spent five days in his home at Kathleen’s bedside and saved her life. The scar on Florent’s cheek burns in that way that is all too familiar to him. He forgets the revulsion evoked by the orgy of executions. He breaks ranks and rushes to the gallows, and cries out, “Free that man! Release him! He’s a physician. He saved my daughter’s life! I vouch for him, he never loaned a mark on interest in his life. I will put up my own life that he’s never clipped a silver coin.” He calls up to him, “Jankin, Jankin!” As he scrambles to climb the ladder, he draws a dagger from his waist to cut the man’s noose, if he can just climb high enough. But Roger comes from behind, pulls him down the ladder by the rope cord around his cassock, and beats him as he falls to the ground. The black robed Dominicans are now getting even more of a show. The boys in the crowd stop chucking stones at the hanging bodies to watch and point, and even the crows stop circling, and settle on their perches to see what will happen. Florent jumps up to try again to climb the ladder and slice the rope when the conservator of the peace, a knight called Philip, pulls his horse up behind him and pulls him back by the scruff of the cassock. Roger takes advantage of the instant to pummel Florent, until the conservator grabs the back of Roger’s head and yanks him, leaving Roger howling on the ground and Philip with a fistful of hair. Florent scrambles to his feet in time to see the executioner kick the ladder out from under the physician’s feet, but not fast enough to stop him. Jankin’s body jerks and dances like a macabre marionette. Florent struggles to grab his dangling legs and right the ladder. But the executioner blocks his way, the bailiff tackles him from behind, and they slam into the rabble. By the time he is able to get up from under Roger’s stinking, hulking mass, it is too late. The physician’s dance is done. The crows hop from the branches to the gallows and squawk impatiently for their turn at the eyes of the hanging. But it is not over. Roger is back on his feet and grabs Florent by the shoulders from behind, yanks him to the ground, and slams him over the head with a board broken from the gallows. Now it is over.

The Retreat (gothic horror/women’s fiction) Logline: After losing her job as a tenured professor, a fifty-year-old mother of twins attends a writer’s retreat in rural Georgia, where she must confront her own demons, defy the monster who is stealing her ideas, and manage the ghost of his sister, who wants their family’s shameful secrets exposed. Opening chapters – inciting incident, establish setting, introduce protagonist and antagonist Chapter One “Here we are – Lammermoor.” Bobby’s voice dragged Ginny up from the depths of her car nap. An elaborate wooden sign dangled between two tall posts above a dirt road that wound its way into a thick stand of longleaf pine. A newly mended fence fronted the country road for miles in either direction with pristine boards shining here and there amongst their weathered cousins. Bobby turned into the drive as Ginny looked around taking it all in. Birds darted through high branches searching for respite from the intense sunlight. When they came out of the woods, there it was, looming large, at the end of a long straightaway directly in front of them: Lammermoor. The sun dappled the gravel with dark contours as it filtered through live oaks flanking the road. Their branches curved overhead, forming a thick tunnel that was simultaneously grand and claustrophobic. Ginny marveled at the thick strands of Spanish moss dripping from the trees. She found it beautiful but knew it was a deadly parasite on its host. A cloud passed in front of the sun, just beginning to weaken in the early May evening and the scene was suddenly cast in shadow. But up ahead, the white house gleamed, its imposing presence presiding over the landscape like a queen who refused to be ignored. Built in the antebellum Greek Revival style, it had matching upper and lower front porches, held up by eight square columns and a large staircase leading to the front door. Its large, evenly spaced windows were hung with black shutters and from a distance they resembled dark eyes that contained unfathomable secrets. “Wow. It’s an old plantation. Looks like something out of Gone with the Wind.” Bobby’s comment betrayed an undercurrent of distaste and Ginny wasn’t sure how to respond. She felt bad that the retreat’s caretaker had hired this particular Lyft driver to transport her. It wasn’t her fault, but somehow, she felt responsible. She tried to steer the conversation in a different direction. “These old trees are beautiful. I wonder how long they’ve been here.” “Since before the Civil War, I’d say. Tended to by who knows how many slave gardeners.” Bobby wasn’t wrong, and it made Ginny even more uncomfortable. “From what I read, the Slakes bought the place in the 1980s when the last of the original family members had passed. Got it for a steal I think . . . must have taken a lot of money and time to fix it all up.” “Well, I guess if you have that much you can decide what to do with it. Can think of other things they might have done . . .” Bobby trailed off. “Speaking of time and money, I’d better get back to civilization if I want to pick up anyone else today. Is there someone here to meet you?” Bobby helped Ginny unload her things and bring them up onto the porch. The space glowed blue from the ceiling paint, which Ginny remembered was meant to keep away spirits. Small tables and rocking chairs were scattered along its length. Propped against a sweating pitcher of lemonade on the table closest to the front door was an envelope with Ginny’s name on it. She ripped it open to reveal a short, handwritten note and a set of keys. Dr. Walker: Welcome to Lammermoor! I apologize for not being here to greet you, but please make yourself at home. This is your set of keys for the duration of your stay. Feel free to settle into your bedroom – it’s the blue room – last one on your left down the hall on the second floor. There’s food in the refrigerator and I’ve chilled a bottle of rosé. Help yourself. I hope to be back later this evening. Owen Slake Ginny felt a tingle of excitement at the prospect of staying in a gigantic historic house all by herself. It was like being in a movie – she thought of the Sofia Coppola film with Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell. What was it called? Bobby hovered at the bottom of the steps. Ginny could tell he wanted to get back on the road but also felt a sense of responsibility for her. Clearly, he was unsure about leaving her on her own. “Please, go ahead. I’m fine – the house is all ready for me, and I am so tired. I just want to crash.” “Well, if you’re sure. Here, put my number in your phone, just in case. I’ll call you –what’s yours?” It took a few tries to find a spot where the service was reliable. They ended up trudging up the drive toward the main road to get a signal. After they exchanged numbers, Bobby got back in his car. Ginny stood on the porch and watched the Toyota recede into the distance, kicking up a plume of dust all the way down the drive. The sound of tires crunching over gravel echoed across the silent lawn. She stopped watching when Bobby’s car was obscured by the shadow of the woods and the crunching was replaced by the insistent screams of a crow. Clouds floated languidly overhead, but she noticed that they were slashed with red like they had been stabbed. Chapter Two The sound of a car door slamming startled Ginny awake. Her room was dark. Night had begun to fall while she was resting, and she woke disoriented, wearing the clothes she had travelled in. It took her a few minutes to remember where she was. She caught a faint whiff of jasmine in the air and wondered if she’d left a window open. She heard footsteps crunching in the gravel and went to look outside, noting that both windows were shut tightly. Her room faced the property behind the house. In the fading light she could just make out a close-cropped lawn flanked by several outbuildings. A barn and what she assumed was the old schoolhouse sat in the near distance and beyond that lay vast woods. A tall man in a cowboy hat, jeans, and work boots was making his way toward the barn, his flashlight beam dancing along the path. Ginny kept her room dark so she could follow his movements without being seen. She noticed that he walked with a slight hitch in his step. As she watched, a light came on in the barn. After a short while it went out again and the flashlight beam veered into the woods. Owen Slake, Ginny thought with a twinge of disappointment. She had hoped he’d introduce himself to her when he got back and offer a more formal welcome to the retreat. But then again, I was asleep, she thought. He saw no lights on in the house and probably didn’t want to disturb me. Still, she was curious. She wanted to know who he was. Ginny crept downstairs to the kitchen by the tiny light of her cell phone and found a flashlight in a drawer. She exited into the back yard and carefully followed the path she had seen Owen Slake take into the woods. It was deeply dark outside the circle of her flashlight’s beam and Ginny shivered at the thought of getting lost in the woods. After a few steps, she heard music playing – she recognized Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” – and up ahead she saw a light in the window of a small cottage. Pausing behind a tree, she watched as Owen opened a beer and sat down at a table. He toasted an imaginary companion, took a long swig from the bottle and then dropped his head into his hands. Reflecting on what little she knew about this man and his family history, Ginny was moved. But it didn’t look like a good time to knock on the door and introduce herself, so she picked her way back to the house and turned in for the night. As she struggled to fall asleep, she imagined what George would say if he knew about the unusual circumstances of her arrival at the retreat. He’d been dubious from the moment she introduced the idea. “So, what’s in it for them? Do they own whatever work you do there?” After twenty years together, George remained mystified by the workings of academia. “No, of course not.” “Then what do they get out of it? You’re not paying them, so . . .” “This guy has a big estate and a house that he can’t possibly use all of, so he’s opened it up to writers and artists to give them space to do their work.” Over the years Ginny had grown weary of trying to explain the protocols for intellectual exchange in her profession. While it had become a joke for George to ask how much she was getting paid for the articles and book chapters she published, it was clear he was still puzzled by the whole thing. Jack and Cooper had begun to parrot their father when they heard about her writing projects, asking: “Does it pay?” “I just don’t see why they would pay you to go there and not get anything in return.” “George, they get the prestige that comes from being associated with the creative process.” Ginny smiled, satisfied with her answer. George looked skeptical. “Who’s going to be there when you go? Is this some kind of wacky artist colony situation?” “I’m not sure. I think there’s just one writer at a time . . . and a caretaker, of course. I’ll pull up the description.” Ginny found the classified ad on the Poets & Writers website. Lammermoor Writer’s Retreat Looking for the time and space you need for sustained creative activity? Commune with nature and the Muses at Lammermoor, a historic property 140 miles southeast of Atlanta. On 150 acres of land, with a lake, a garden, goats and an ornery donkey named Igor, Lammermoor is a perfect retreat. You will have the run of the property, plus the use of the antebellum Greek Revival house, including a bedroom, bathroom, and several well-appointed workspaces. The kitchen has been recently updated, with modern conveniences. Artists have access to a studio space in the re-modelled one-room schoolhouse. There is an old Steinway on the property that can be tuned for guests. Lammermoor is an isolated rural property, 18 miles from the nearest town. There is a convenience store/gas station 3 miles away. An old pick-up truck is available for guests’ occasional use. While we have Internet access, it is spotty at best; cell service is available with most providers at specific locations on the property. We welcome applications from artists and writers who are comfortable in a rural setting, highly self-motivated, and eager for quiet. We offer a $1000 stipend. One writer or artist at a time will attend for one of our three-week sessions. Please note your preferred dates in the application form. Transportation from the Atlanta airport can be arranged in advance. Contact Owen Slake with any questions: oslake88@gmail.com. “Who is this Owen Slake guy? Is he the caretaker?” “Actually, I Googled him and I think he is related to someone famous. His parents were in music – they died in a car accident. The Slakes owned the property, Lammermoor, named after the opera, and I guess he inherited it after they died. There’s all sorts of news stories about the crash, but not much about him. I guess he had a sister who died in the accident too. She was some sort of promising dancer. “That’s tragic – but it sounds like he came out okay.” “I guess he fixed up the house and the property and opened this retreat.” “So . . . does he live there too? Who takes care of it?” “I’m not sure.” “So, you’d be at this house out in the middle of nowhere, alone for three weeks, with no contact with the outside world?” “Yeah, I guess.” Ginny tried not to sound eager, but the thought of twenty-one days of peace and quiet with nothing to do but enjoy nature and write made her halfway delirious. “What else have I got going right now? Remember the ‘pink slip’ that came in my last paycheck?” “I’m not sure about this. It doesn’t sound safe.” “George, it’s perfectly safe. This is a real thing, it’s professional.” “Well, it sounds too good to be true, and if it sounds too good to be true . . .” “Look, chances are slim that I’ll even get this thing. Who knows how many hundreds of applications they’ll get, from actual writers. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” George encircled Ginny with his arms and patted her bottom. “You’re an actual writer – after all, you have published poetry and a novel in progress.” His smile seemed sincere, but Ginny found his tone slightly mocking. She still could not believe she’d actually been chosen for the retreat. Even after all the official emails and contracts, George’s doubts persisted and he had been reluctant to let her go. It was only when she’d conjured the image of herself as a depressed former professor, mooning about the house that he’d agreed it might be good for her. “It will give me time to figure out what’s next. Academia is going down the tubes and I am trained as an Art History professor. I have to consider my options.” “There’s so much you could do – don’t sell yourself short. I have no doubt you’ll find something else.” “Well, that makes one of us. But thank you for your confidence.” Ginny pushed her memories of the past six months to the back of her mind. The whole “academic prioritization” process that had resulted in the closure of her department had been ugly and contentious. “Academic prioritization” turned out to be a euphemism for faculty cuts. The Board of Trustees was determined to reduce costs and the future of small liberal arts colleges was bleak. “Enough.” She stopped her brain from going down that dark path. Here she was, in a beautiful home steeped in two hundred years of history, surrounded by a pastoral landscape out of a Joshua Shaw painting. What stories this place could tell. There was even a donkey and goats! Ginny was sure that the Muses would visit her at Lammermoor – how could they not be drawn to such an idyll?

I wrote my first novel that was published during grad school. Here I was thinking I was writing the ultimate love story, but it turns out it was a horror novel. The protagonist Michael’s wife and kid are dead, but still living with him. I was exploring a space of grief, not letting things go and the harm that can come from that. Okay, there may have been a demon involved (the harm that comes). Still, when it sold to a horror imprint, 47North I was a bit taken aback. I was very lucky it sold to a horror imprint because I was welcomed into a really wonderful community of supportive writers, wonderful conversations around genre, writing, history, and plain outright geekery and commonality as it seems everyone I met had grown up on the same stuff I loved from Poe to horror movies to Oz. I’m not kidding, Baum’s books are absolutely disturbing, creepy wonderful books. But I don’t sit down to write in a specific genre. When I am writing, I’m usually sitting down with a question, a wisp of an idea. In the case of Harrowgate, I was dealing with fear. I love my husband and kids so much, what would I do to keep them with me if they were taken from me? I wanted to explore love set at the edge of life and death. What followed was a very claustrophobic ghost story, with its own worldbuilding and rules. When I sat down to write my next book, I was having lunch in a kitchen nook with Toni Ann Johnson a friend who knows me very well and, with Harrowgate out to editors with my agent, I was noodling what to write next. She said, matter of factly, “You’ve always loved old movies, why don’t you write about that?” I started talking about my love for the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, and I checked out biographies of my favorites from the library. Edith Head. Barbara Stanwyck. Cary Grant. It was Cary Grant’s sad story, his long relationship with Randolph Scott and the looming Hollywood closet that generated Alterations. The skills from different genres only help each other. My worldbuilding skills from Harrowgate came in handy as I drove my main characters, Rose and Adriana through late 1930s Hollywood. It was important to ask questions like: what was that part of Santa Monica Boulevard like in 1939? (a dirt road apparently) and what did the Formosa Café serve? What was it like as a woman working at a studio filled with men? How was Paramount laid out? I also explored the operational reality of being in a Boston marriage, living with the love of your life and when exactly the hammer would come down that made that more difficult. Sadly, Grant’s story yielded a lot of that—it was when the studio threatened that he drop Randy or lose his job that he chose his job. My mom’s great Aunt lived with Mary the love of her life in 1920s Jacksonville Florida as part of a conservative Catholic family, and the couple lived happily together for the rest of Mary’s life. I wanted to explore that space of love when met with societal norms, and how some choices might be outright, but others are a slow erosion. The book also takes place in 1990s Baltimore which was its own research tunnel. Alterations came together nicely and I’m quite proud of it, but I realized that the nongenre world doesn’t really understand how a horror writer can write…not horror. I’m always hesitant to use the word “literary” for realism, because it implies horror isn’t literature. I’d argue that some of the finest prose I’ve ever read is in horror: Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Stephen Graham Jones, Jesmyn Ward (yes, Sing, Unburied Sing was released as realism but that was honestly the best horror book I read that year). There is this inherent ghettoization when it comes to horror writing. You tell an ordinary person you write horror and you get the nose wrinkle and the change in tone. Maybe that’s why horror folks are so kind. We’re all on the margins, so there’s no room for a notion of hierarchy. We write the books we love and come to each other with enthusiasm rather than ranking. But here I am with a new book I love very deeply out in a different world of promotion. Being known for horror leads folks to jump to conclusions over this book. Its cover, which is meant to evoke sadness of a time gone by, a bit of regret has evoked the words, “creepy!” from people who don’t understand this is something else entirely. I can’t rely on my comfortable horror community for the space in which to promote this book, and I’ve hired a publicist. I do have so many friends who are writers of realism who have been most helpful, but the worlds are completely different and have different operational realities. There is an idea of sticking to one genre and creating a “brand” but honestly, I can’t command myself to write a story about a specific thing in a specific genre. My stories come from a different space, from questions I have or feelings I’m trying to evoke. And it’s usually the story that decides its genre. Harrowgate chose horror. Alterations couldn’t be anything but realism. After writing my second horror novel The Collective (out now from Writ Large Press) about a cult, a demon and the film industry, I sat down to write a supernatural story that explored a marriage through the lens of Alzheimer’s. I had an idea that a couple could reach each other on a different plane when a diminishing memory pulled them apart…I was super excited about that angle. But the story came out over many drafts and characters and points of view and reorganized and told itself as realism. If I tried to wedge the supernatural on it, it would have rebelled. That liminal space for memory simply became…memory. And I love that book and it’s fully realized and I’m proud of it, realist though it is. I told my Cal State LA fiction students that our drafts are like children. Whatever our influence, they are fully their own people. It’s up to us to help them become the best version of themselves they can be. Even though I feel like I’m writing about the same stuff over and over: questions of love, relationships, friendships, “branding” eludes me as my stories dash between genres. This will definitely not lead me to fame and fortune but I have to say, with everything going on in the world and life, my writing life is quite content as I poke at new questions, ask questions of my characters, and write forward. One of my mentors, Rob Roberge said, “If you show up, and work hard enough, and listen, your novel will make itself apparent to you.” I quote that to my students all the time, and I live by it. But now, as science fiction short stories are working their way into my life (I’m writing a collection and have published one in Asimov’s and one in Analog.) I’d likely add: if you tell the story what it’s going to be, it will laugh and go in another direction. Just write. *** View the full article

It can be hard to pick where a novel begins. Both in the sense of remembering the spark that made you want to tell the story in the first place, and in terms of deciding on the moment that starts the book – the scene that is going to usher readers into the tale you have created. With my second novel, a story of dangerous female friendship set in the Australian Blue Mountains, both are clear to me. I wanted, from the very beginning, to write a love triangle with stakes. In my opening scene, my narrator, her high school best friend, and the narrator’s girlfriend go rock-climbing. The reader can sense the tension as the young women get ready to go over the edge: something is not right. But in terms of where the story really started, it was the breakdown of a friendship in my personal life that forced me to delve into bad friendships in all their messy glory. That was the spark that set the fire of the book alight. That moment on the cliff top was, put quite simply, me working through some stuff. Why are bad friendships so interesting? Perhaps because we have a script for romantic breakdown, but not for what happens when the people who are supposed to like us – to see us – bring out something in us that we don’t know how to handle. When I say criminally bad friendships, I’m thinking less buddies-in-crime, and more the friendships that push the needle into the darker parts of human experience. If we’re talking about this particular kind of bad friend in literature (which, dear reader, I can assure you we are!), then Patricia Highsmith has to get a mention. Not least Tom Ripley and the ill-fated Dickie Greenleaf in Highsmith’s iconic The Talented Mr Ripley. Dickie, a rich golden boy, shows Tom Ripley everything he wants to be, and is murdered as a thank you. Friends are supposed to be a reflection of who we are, and – as with Tom and Dickie – often offer a tantalizing glimpse of a self we would like to be. What is shocking is when they bring out a part of us that we don’t want to see or acknowledge. I think the most interesting bad friends show us something in ourselves that we weren’t even aware of before we met. I also happen to think the perfect bad friendship has a one-sided sexual tension or unrequited love element. Something my narrator, Finn, and her best friend Daphne have in spades. Many of us, when asked, can conjure at least one friendship that soured. Where we felt deeply and were fully invested, but some essential miscommunication or mismatch took place. Perhaps you lingered in the boundary between love and hate, or experienced a dismayingly visceral reaction to something relatively small. Precisely because they are supposed to be the result of free choice, extricating ourselves from a bad or ill-fated friendship can seem especially fraught. Keen for more bad friends in literature? Then look no further than The Secret History by Donna Tartt, where the narrator is drawn into a world, and a murder, by his desperate longing to belong in a glamourous group of old-money students. The Group by the Swedish writer Sigge Eklund has shades of both Highsmith and Tartt and features young museum-intern Hanna, desperate to ingratiate herself with a group of wealthy, startlingly beautiful Swedes she sees one day while working in Spain (things escalate). Tartt revisits intense friendship vibes in The Goldfinch, when the narrator’s friend pulls him into a dangerous world of crime after they help each other survive childhood. I’m particularly interested not in the bad friends that we hold at bay, that we know are bad for us, but the ones that get under our skin, that know things about us that the rest of the world doesn’t. It’s like taking two magnets that are strongly attracted each other and flipping one. The intensity of the connection becomes the intensity of the repulsion. My narrator Finn asserts again and again that no one knows her like her best friend Daphne, that she owes her everything. I’m interested in the sort of character that feels powerless in the face of that kind of physics. If you’ve ever found yourself unable to say no to someone, what does that give you permission to do? And what happens when we let our boundaries be trodden on? I came across more than one bad friendship while serving as a judge for the 36th Lambda Literary awards (which celebrate queer writing) in the LGBTQ+ Mystery category. (Side note, I instantly wanted to tweak this for my own Instagram: My name is Hayley Scrivenor and I identify as a Bisexual Mystery). The judging process revealed two shortlisted books that stood out to me in their portrayal of friendship. Polly Stewart’s The Good Ones starts with a missing woman named Lauren. When Lauren’s best friend Nicole returns to the town where they both grew up, and that Lauren went missing from, Nicole is forced to revisit her often-claustrophobic friendship with the difficult Lauren. This is one of those friendships that chafe in the best way. Attraction, jealousy, anger, love: it’s all here. Rebecca McKanna’s Don’t Forget the Girl tells the story of another missing girl, Abby – presumably the victim of a notorious serial killer, but there is a lack of proof. One of the friends Abby leaves behind, Chelsea, was more than just a friend. As an adult, Chelsea becomes a (bisexual) priest, struggling with the ambiguous loss because no one knew about the depth of her connection with Abby. While maybe not a true criminally bad friend (as the love is not unrequited, just messy), the intensity of this connection when the girls are in college together does have terrible consequences when Abby finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone – and this is not a spoiler, it’s on the back of the book – dies on that cliff in the opening of my novel Girl Falling. The fractured friendship at the heart of my second book has deadly consequences. The irony of course is that because my own second novel grew out of a friendship breakdown in my life, I am the undisputed worse friend in this scenario: what sort of weirdo goes and writes a novel about the private, painful breakdown of an intimate connection? Even if they disguise it through every possible change in particulars. Who would then write an article about that breakdown, even in the most general of terms? I think of this person, my former friend – blue light on a face in the dark on the other side of the computer screen – reading this essay and I feel something that is between sick and a thrill. (For anyone trying to keep track of my life through book-release-related-craft-essays, it’s the same friend that I mention at the start of this CrimeReads Essay). So it’s me. Hi. I’m the bad friend. I’m the one who’s gone and written a crime novel about the whole thing. I think I needed to write about the consequences of letting parts of you be eroded, of saying yes when you mean no, and of the responsibility we all have to hold our own line. As I learned through writing my novel, it takes two people to have a bad friendship. In the end, I hope this book rose above me and my stuff, to become a story that is greater than the sum of these (shameful) parts. But of course I would think that. I acknowledge that when all is said and done, it still makes me the bad friend. *** View the full article

“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.” —Oscar Wilde Fiction, like dreams, is truth in an acceptable disguise. And mysteries are all about disguises, particularly about disguising the truth itself. Mysteries satisfy us in so many ways, partly because, like dreams, they can bring order to our minds. They speak to our desire for justice, for righting wrongs and setting the world straight. They show us the best and worst of human character. Most of all, though, they’re a lot of fun. I’m hoping to add to the fun with A Promise to Die For, a suspense thriller set in Paris. I’ve enjoyed reading countless cozies. But when it comes to writing, I’ve followed a path more like Dashiell Hammett, who said he took murder out of the vicarage and put it in the back alley, where it belongs. In A Promise to Die For you won’t find either the vicarage or the back alley. In it, Sam Hough promises a dying friend to find his five-year-old son, born out of wedlock, living in Paris. This challenging, yet seemingly innocent promise, quickly leads Sam into a web of mystery, danger, and romance—and the suspicion that his dying friend hadn’t told him everything. Where do I get off writing a book set in Paris? Oscar Wilde notwithstanding, I got to Paris without dying, and had the great good fortune to know it well. After a decade of various jobs, mostly in politics, that never quite added up to a career, I fell in with bad companions and ended up a diplomat. After passing the requisite tests, the physical, the security clearance, I entered the foreign service as a Junior Officer Trainee. The title alone tells you how low I stood on the bureaucratic totem pole. Once sworn in, someone decided the national interest was best served by posting me and my family to the American embassy in Paris. I didn’t argue. During my time there—and in later visits—I walked the city endlessly, coming to know the city’s ancient, narrow streets and modern broad avenues and its colorful neighborhoods in ways I had never imagined while growing up in Tigard, Oregon. As a boy in that tiny town of fewer than two thousand souls, I had in fact travelled broadly without leaving the bounds of my neighborhood. The fact that I had done it entirely in books didn’t matter to me. Lounging on our couch or hiding under the blankets at night with a flashlight, by the time I was twelve I had roamed the world, going to Bayport to solve mysteries with the Hardy Boys, voyaging twenty thousand leagues under the sea with Captain Nemo to find the wonders of the ocean, roaming the foggy crooked byways of London with Holmes and Watson to discover the darkness in the human heart. Transported by my wanderings, I made a list of all the places my reading took me and often read it over. I’m proud to say it; I was a nerd. These vicarious adventures raised in me a desire to lead a globetrotting life of adventure—and to be a writer myself, if only to tell tales of my own adventures. Life in the foreign service gave my family and me all the travel we could have ever imagined, and adventures far beyond the vicarious. After Paris we were posted to Madagascar, Morocco, Mexico, Sri Lanka. We shared with our embassy colleagues the risks and rewards of this peculiar life. First among those rewards was the privilege of serving our country. Though it may sound corny to some, coming into work I was often stirred by the sight of the American flag flying over the foreign post in which I served. The two great additional perks were meeting fascinating people and seeing places we had never imagined we would see. And we were allowed to live in cultures vastly different from our own. When we first arrived at these posts, we found the often-profound cultural differences baffling, disorienting, impenetrable. Often, my first question was, “What in the world am I doing here?” Quickly, though, we started to adapt, stopped resenting change and embraced it. We entered into a truly foreign way of acting, of speaking, of looking at the world. And, in a healthy sort of dual identity, we did it while retaining our own identity. We were all, after all, professionally American, not only by nationality but by trade. Along with these rewards came the risks. In Madagascar a soldier at a checkpoint pulled back the bolt on his AK-47, aimed it at me, and braced to fire. I’ll never know why he did that or why he didn’t shoot—and I didn’t stick around to quiz him about it. In one post, terrorists targeted the building I worked in. Only the infiltration and arrest of the group by local security services kept them from succeeding. In another post, illness took my 6’3” frame down to 145 pounds. I looked like that picture that goes with the warning on an iodine bottle. In the same post, a fascinating but sometimes perilous place to live, my wife and our son, four-years-old, came down with a deadly form of malaria that almost took their lives. The diplomatic life can look charming and elegant in movies. In reality, it can prove dangerous and stressful. What does this have to do with writing? Everything. I would never say that my service to our country, the trials and joys we went through, were simply grist for the mill of my writing. When I retired, though, and we came home to Oregon, I had time to reflect on our experience, to try to make sense of it. I came to feel an obligation to share what I had learned. The best way to do that, I found, was to write. Yes, it was what I had wanted to do since childhood. Now, though, I had what I had lacked: a subject, a firm base to stand on as I wrote. In previous novels—Tangier, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar—I returned to the places where I had lived and worked, and used them as the settings for my novels, writing stories I believed could only happen in these places, stories of intrigue, suspense, and romance that would bring to readers something of the truth of what these places are about. The truth. I bring myself back to where I started. And the truth is that these places, these cultures, even my own experiences remain a stubborn mystery, a mystery I pass along to you in my writing. *** View the full article

Chapter One I am still finishing up the hemming on Mari’s stack of tunics when Thea bursts through the door, her small frame quivering with sobs. I toss the fabric from my lap and crouch beside her, stroking her knotted blonde curls as she wipes her nose across her sleeve. “What’s wrong?” “The-the…” she tries to get the words out between gasps, but all that erupts from her mouth is another incomprehensible wail. My heart swells and pushes up into my throat. Tears come easily to my little sister, but her raw eyes and red-rubbed nose are beginning to frighten me. I know. “The… soldiers… are here,” she squeals out between cries, confirming my fears “The raiding ones!” But they were just here four days ago. No wonder she’s terrified. The “raiding soldiers,” as we’ve called them, always mean trouble. They scavenge and abuse, looking for extra supplies and funds beyond the monthly taxation that already turns out our pockets and leaves every woman struggling to put a full meal on the table each night. “They took Roe!” Thea’s face scrunches at my quizzical look, and she lets out another loud sob. “I saw them take him, Fayre! They took him and they’re looking for others!” Merek! I’m up, flurrying about the room as she sobs to stuff the unfinished tunics in my bag and rake a brush through my hair. I throw off my laundering smock and snap open the top button of my dress. Whatever works. My heart is pounding so fiercely in my chest, I fear I’ll faint before I make it out the door. “What side did they come from?” “The west,” she whimpers, “I think.” I sip in a breath. So they didn’t find him. He’s safe. He has to be. I didn’t warn Merek about the soldier’s arrival, not this time. He wouldn’t have had time to find cover if they passed through the eastern woods, if they saw the ravine tucked between the layers of hunched trees. I pray Thea is right. “Fayre!” Thea snatches my hand as I stoop to lace up my boots. “Didn’t you hear me? They took Roe!” I pass a hand over her cheek before resuming my laces. “It’s his time,” I mutter. Thea shakes her head violently and practically screams. “No! He’s not a sixth-year till the snow flies!” Her bottom lip puffs out as she trembles. “You’re mistaken, dear.” But if anyone, Thea would know. Roe’s a friend of hers, a scrappy little boy who always wanders over to our cottage around midday looking for extra food from Mari. He’s got the biggest dimples you’ll ever see and Mari says she simply can’t resist the freckles that splatter his face like stars. Thea usually ends up roping him into her game of house; he’s the father, she’s the mother, and the little ones Mari watches for the village women during cotton-picking hours are the children. “They took Silas too early,” Thea whines. Silas… another one of Thea’s friends, who left for enlistment last month. “His Ma said he still had four months left. Now he’s gone, and so is Roe!” Her wail shakes all four feet of her. I try to swallow, but the air lodges like dry cornmeal in my throat. She can’t be right. The women here won’t fight the soldiers over much, but they’ll spit tooth and nail to protect the precious months before their sons’ enlistment. Birth papers are safeguarded like silver in the Oustridian parts, only flashed when a soldier tries to lay his hands on a boy too early. They couldn't have taken either of the boys before their time. But then again, Silas was another of Thea’s friends. He, too, was recruited to play “father” of her corn husk dolls and the little ones months before the soldiers took him. Thea would have known the exact date he became a sixth-year. It’s all the little boys ever talk about here, for fear or excitement or sorrow. If they’re taking boys too young, what would they do with Merek if they found him? As soon as it comes, I push the thought away. Today is not that day. And it won’t be for Roe either. “C’mon.” I grab Thea’s clammy fingers in mine. “Let’s go get Roe back.” Thea’s sob of relief turns into a squeal as I tug on her arm and we hurry out of the small cottage. I shove open the door, squinting in the light that blankets the outdoors. The noon-day sun glints off the freshly watered plants in Mari’s garden, sinking into the surrounding cobbled paths and patchy grass. Without the little ones scampering around the front yard, our home seems so peaceful. The solemn serenity of a widowed woman whose only son went to war. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why Mari so willingly watches the village women’s children. No matter how misbehaved, how sick or snivelly, the chaos is always welcomed over the quiet. But for me, leaving the quiet fills me head to toe in a sudden dread. Thea’s grip on my hand tenses as we rush past threadbare homes and pastures toward the markets. I should have made her stay in the cottage, I realize quickly. She’s the first to scamper into the darkest closet of the house when the soldiers come–the monthly taxers or the raiders alike–even though I’ve told her she’s much too young for them to pay her any mind. We round the bend of the street corner, entering the chaos of the markets. Women push past us on all sides, carting sackcloths, grains, and measly coppers to appease the soldiers, who feign dissatisfaction at whatever they’re offered. Thea’s squeezing my palm so tight, the blood isn’t flowing to my fingertips anymore. “Relax, will you?” I chide. “Where’d they take him?” Her lower lip warbles. She doesn’t know. But just as I ask, a woman’s wail pierces the clearing. I jerk my head up and see the caravan ahead, the soldiers stamped in front of it, hands hovering over their sheathed weapons. My heart palpitates to the drum of one name, even as the woman mournfully cries for another. Merek. Merek. Merek. It’s a familiar fear, the feeling of my chest shrinking, clamping tight over my pounding heart. But the terror never eases, no matter how many times I’ve seen the caravans, no more than the salt of my sweat never ceases to sting my eyes in the cotton fields. He’s safe. He’s hidden. He knows the plan for when they come. It’s the same story, the same reassurance I tell myself, but the words wrap me with about as much comfort as a chilled morning shroud. It’s always been true. He’s always been safe. So far. Now it’s my fingers that tighten around Thea’s small hand. I loosen my grip at her yelp, apologizing. She stares up at me, her fierce blue eyes swimming and gleaming in the sunlight. “He’s not in there,” she whispers. “There’s only two boys they’ve taken and they already fined a different mother for being overdue.” A tear beads and drips down her cheek. The little smile she shows me as I feel the breath ease back into my lungs is wise beyond her years. Gone is the overtired girl screaming you only care about him! or the pleading cry to come with me on my daily ventures to visit him. Here and now, seventh-year Thea knows he is just as much a part of me as she, and that losing him would render my very soul split in two. The shriek of a blade leaving its sheath sings through the markets. The woman bustling about stop and stare at the scene in front of the caravan, where two soldiers have shoved the sobbing mother to the ground and threatened her with a sword lest she come closer. I slip away from Thea and rush toward the woman, stopping and falling down beside her. I don’t know what I’m doing as I reach out to rub her shoulders, trying to offer any semblance of comfort, but even so I am appalled that she only yanks away from my gentle touch. She jerks a crooked finger up at the soldier. “He’s a thief!” she howls. Beneath the shadow of his helm, I could swear the soldier grins. “He took my boy too early! He’s not due for months yet, and I got the papers to prove it!” The woman raises her other fist, clutching tightly to a folded worn document that must prove her helpless plea. I look past the soldiers into the caravan, where two boys are huddled inside. One sits in the back corner, his head up, silent tears dribbling down his chin. He’s terrified, but unwilling to make a scene. He’s overdue at the garrison as it is, and is smart enough to know that resisting will only make more trouble for him and his Ma. Roe, on the other hand, is shaking like a sheaf of wheat in the wind and crying audibly. His face is a mess of tears and snot, and he’s wet himself, a dark splotch spreading over his grain-sack pants. The distance between Roe and his mother is only a few feet, but it might as well be miles away for the soldier that stands between them. I rise on shaky knees and glare up at the man who holds the sword. “Let him go.” There’s a trill in my voice and in my body, and not to my surprise, the soldier only laughs. I say it again, more determination clipped in my tone. “He’s not due at the garrison yet. Let him go.” The soldier beside the one holding the sword scoffs. “You want fines for insubordination, girl? Or just a good cuff to the face?” I want to squeeze my eyes shut and disappear. But all I can think about is Merek. If I can’t defend Roe, who they have no right in the world to rip from his mother’s outstretched arms just yet, how will I ever be able to defend my friend? “We’ll go to the courts,” I say, the lie hot on my face. Like the monarch would ever care to waste three of his precious minutes hearing the plea of an Oustridian mother, much less offer her son three spare months away from the training grounds. The soldier knows it too, and he steps forward with a humored snort, rolling his wrist like he’s prepared to strike. But it’s another pair of hands that rests on my shoulders: the gentle, weathered palms of my Mari. I could sob for relief and anguish that she’s here to whisk me away from the soldiers. “That won’t be necessary,” she says in her cracked, sing-song voice. “Go get your sister, Fayre.” In her stormy gray eyes and the wrinkles that purse around her face, there’s a message beneath the gentle tone. Go get your sister and take her far away. Now. As I slowly back up, Mari stoops to pick up Roe’s weeping mother. To her touch, the mother doesn’t shy away, although no one ever resists Mari’s comfort. I watch my adoptive mother help the woman up with as much tender care as she once held me, wipe her tears, and lead her away silently as the caravan doors shut the boys inside and the soldiers take their leave. The silence that hung for the mournful scene dissipates as the caravan rumbles away from the village and the soldiers riding on the footboards turn their heads. Women resume the bustle of buying and selling, carting grain for a copper, and shoveling a mid-day meal of pottage and bread into their mouths before venturing off in groups to work in the fields. Even the birds call back and forth to one another as the chatter rises like the curling wafts of steam from the large pots of pottage cooking over the fire. Mari and the woman are gone by the time Thea comes to find me, and I have to shake myself back to reality when I feel her press up against my leg. “Fayre,” Thea says, and her little hand stretches toward my cheek. “You’re crying. You never cry.” It’s not true–I cry often enough–just not in front of her. Sure enough, my eyes have welled up and the tears I tried to suppress are finding their way to my nose. I offer Thea a sad smile and slip her under my arm. We walk, close together and quiet, back to the house.

Opening scenes Ch 0, 1: Establish the tone and mythological foundation of the story, introduce the antagonist, depict the circumstances surrounding the main character’s birth, and foreshadow the central conflict. Excerpt from Ch 3: Establish the main character’s voice. Most of the book is in first person POV, sprinkled with third person POV chapters. 0 Long, long ago Before the breath of life flowed over the world, the earth burned in youthful abundance. Amid the primordial sea of flames, a single bubble rose to the surface and hardened into a perfect sphere--an empty vessel, white and smooth, a Pearl. When the first of the old gods fell, the Pearl absorbed bits of his life force as his flesh turned to mountains and his blood to seas. For several millennia afterward, that energy seeped from the Pearl, sustaining the world, till one day it was depleted. Then the sky collapsed and the earth caved in. The old god's sister took pity on the lifeforms she created on earth and went about fixing the world. To patch the hole in the sky, she used stones forged within the five-colored flames of creation. Light from the dying embers were absorbed by the Pearl. Dimly, the Pearl began to glow beneath the earth, where it lay buried, hidden, till mountains rose, oceans fell, and a new generation of gods uncovered the light that shone through the darkness. 1 Fourteen years ago THUMP! THUMP! The nánmù gates, adorned with nine rows of gilt-bronze studs, trembled beneath the relentless onslaught. Splinters of wood rained down, their edges glistening with hardened cedar resin. The air thickened with the scent of sacred groves—a sweetness that clung to the invaders as if the Lotus Palace itself sought to anoint even its destroyers. Each swing of the battering ram echoed through the palace corridors like the gnashing of a primordial beast’s teeth. At the heart of the palace, the Third Holy Princess lay within her canopy bed, her divine aura flickering like a star on the verge of collapse. Obsidian hair spilled in disheveled waves across silk pillows, strands clinging to her damp, alabaster skin. She clawed at her bedsheets, knuckles white as moonstone as another wave of pain took hold. A girl burst into the bedroom, her peach-colored hànfú flaring around her like autumn leaves caught in a tempest. Delicate hair ornaments jingling, she skidded to a stop and knelt beside the bed. “My lady, the shields are down! The doors won’t hold!” “Quiet, Línyán,” an older girl whispered without turning. She held back her amethyst sleeve, embroidered with magnolias, as she gently dabbed the princess's brow. The sword sheathed at her side caught the shifting, fractured light of the lotus-shaped lamp on the bedside table. "It's alright, Jǐnyuè." The princess said through panting breaths. "Línyán's still young. We've been safe for the last thousand years. She's never had to fight." She smiled kindly at the two girls before closing her eyes against the pain once more. "I can fight, my lady!" Línyán got to her feet eagerly. Jǐnyuè put a hand on Línyán's shoulder and softly said, "I know. Now make yourself useful and bring the Third Holy Princess a basin of boiled water." "Right. I can do that." Línyán ran out with gossamer ribbons trailing behind her. The other attendants clustered around the bed like spooked birds--some fluttering fans over the princess, others clutching trays of untouched tea and honey cakes. Their eyes darted between the bedroom door and the Third Holy Princess's bulging belly. The princess breathed against the rhythm of the battering ram, and released herself into the pain. She heard Línyán return, heard the slosh of water and the soft clang of the basin being set down at the foot of the bed. Then she heard the final splintering crack of the gates and the victorious shouts of the intruders as they barged into the courtyard. She whispered to herself, I'm sorry child, there's no more time, then pushed with all her strength. The multicolored light of the lotus-shaped lamp flickered and dimmed in response to her efforts. Jǐnyuè and Línyán looked to the lamp, concern etched on their faces. Trembling rainbow fractals shifted against the white walls, till with a final push, the room went dark. A new voice entered the world with a soft cooing whimper. Jǐnyuè placed the infant into the Third Holy Princess's arms and said, "She's beautiful." The Third Holy Princess nodded wearily as she gazed upon the tiny face lit by the faint light of the moon filtering through the skylight. Línyán poked the baby's chubby cheek. "Hello, little one." A clanging crash interrupted the moment, followed by the sound of broken vases and a cacophony of snarls and scraping steel in the hall leading to the bedroom. The Third Holy Princess quickly wrapped the baby in a blanket and whispered a spell. A golden seal bloomed on the infant's forehead then dissolved into her pink skin. Struggling out of bed, she handed the baby to Línyán then whispered in her ear for a long while. Línyán held the precious bundle awkwardly, looking lost. The Princess picked up the lotus-shaped lamp and took a small item from beneath it. She placed it in Línyán's hand. "Take this. Fly away when the intruders are distracted." "Yes, but my lady--" "That's an order." With her head down, Línyán nodded. She muttered a spell and her hànfú transformed into a dark hoodie and jeans. The intruders banged on the bedroom door. A deep voice boomed, "Come out now! There's nowhere to hide!" Jǐnyuè and the other attendants drew their swords and gathered between the princess and the door. The Third Holy Princess said in a commanding voice, "Stand down." Cradling the lotus-shaped lamp in one arm, she slowly walked past everyone, her long, glossy hair cascading like a waterfall down the back of her pale, regal hànfú. For a fleeting moment, her gaze rested on the child, her expression unreadable. Then she raised her hand and cast a subtle gesture toward the doors. The doors swung open. She stepped through, and they closed behind her. The clamoring voices outside went silent. Someone shouted, "The Lotus Lamp!" Uneasy whispers radiated through the crowd. Inside the bedroom, some attendants sobbed while others fell to their knees. Jǐnyuè held onto her sword and stood frozen before the bedroom doors. Biting her lip, Línyán floated up to the ceiling, opened the skylight, and flew into the cloud layer with her precious bundle. Before exiting the realm, she dared to pause at a break in the clouds and looked down at their beloved mountain peak. She saw the intruders escort the Third Holy Princess from the Lotus Palace in chains. A cloaked figure summoned a swirling portal, and with a merciless shove, the princess was cast into its depths. A large armored man on a beast mount raised the Lotus Lamp over his head in triumph. As the crowd cheered, the lamp unraveled into ethereal petals that dissolved into light as they fell. The man clenched his fist, his howl of fury echoed across the mountainside. Not daring to stay any longer, Línyán pushed out of the boundary of the realm and flew away at full speed. 3 Thursday In a town where diversity means identifying as a blonde, brunette, or redhead, someone decided to put up a "Celebrate Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May" printout on the wall right next to my locker. Is this some school administrator's idea of showing support? We feel bad for the only non-white person in school. I know! Let's put a poster next to her locker so she'll feel better about herself in the month of May. Hey look, everyone. We have an Asianish person among us. Let's clearly label her locker in case it wasn't obvious enough. Lucky for me, whoever did this didn't discover AAPI Heritage Month till the last week of May. Hopefully, this eyesore of a flyer with yellow highlighted letters over a stereotypical Japanese red and white sunburst pattern will be gone soon. But what if it's still there after the weekend? What if it stays up past finals? The flyer suddenly takes on a more sinister tone--that of a countdown to the end of May. A stark reminder that they may dedicate a month to people like me, but the whole year belongs to them. I want to laugh about it with Will, but he's not here. He's always here. Something's wrong. I make my way to his locker down the hall. From a distance, I see him having trouble approaching his locker. I quicken my steps, then break into a run as I see it. A drone. Hovering between him and his locker. With a printed piece of paper hanging from it that reads: "Say pretty please." "Those assholes." I snatch the drone out of the air, smash it to the ground, and stomp on it as it makes a feeble death rattle attempt to take off. "Lee-oh," he stretches out my name in his familiar slow and slurred speech. "Waait. I'll taake dat." "Oh, right." A smile spreads across my face. We've been friends for so long that I already know what he's going to do. "They've given you the perfect gift." "I'll con-siider it a giiift from yooou." He's already fidgeting with the drone through his tensed-up fingers. I smile and tap on his locker. "Come on, let's get out of here before someone comes for your prize." We walk home at a leisurely pace using our shortcut through the cemetery behind the school. Will's forearm crutches click along the paved path between the manicured lawns as birds yell at each other in the surrounding woods. This place may looks like a park, but I don't like to think of what lies beneath. Beyond the dwarf forest of tombstones, I can see the brown roof of my double-wide in the distance--the only home between the cemetery and an abandoned lot. We laugh about the poster by my locker till tears come out. "Neeext thing yoou knoow, theey'll put upp a diiveeersity poooster of kiiiids in wheeelchaairs neeext to myyy lockker." As I catch my breath between bouts of laughter, I realize something's off about my place.

Hell Hath No Fury Part 1: Ripples “Only fools and idealists believe that no one has anything to complain about.” -Emperor Justinus ïst Lucinti de Vincentius, 854 Imperial Year Chapter 1: A Flimsy Grip The sound of beautiful violin music suddenly died. A moment later, the elegant instrument was dashed to pieces on the amphitheater’s stage, producing the decidedly less beautiful sounds of cracking wood and popping strings. “Oh no,” Özcan said, barely even trying to keep it under his breath, “here it comes.” Right on que, the sound of tortured screaming followed the sound of tortured wood. “You dare fall asleep at my concert,” shrieked Emperor Lucius ïst Havice de Vincentius. He stood in the middle of the stage, black locks, black doublet, black cape, and black ostrich feather in his gold cap all shaking with rage. Just because he's slender and pretty like a woman doesn’t mean he has to be shrill like one, Özcan thought, disgusted at the emperor’s effeminate outrage. If you must throw a hissy fit, at least have the balls to bellow like a man. Özcan leaned forward and looked down the row of prim and proper lords and ladies, craning to see around the backs of finely manicured heads. “Oh no,” he moaned, this time loud enough for even his neighbors to hear. General Demir Claixtus’s eyes fluttered open as he straightened in his chair, uncrossed his thick arms from his chest. His broad, lined face blinked about like he’d forgotten where he was. If the great general had been sitting in the back, his mid performance nap likely would have gone unnoticed. Unfortunately for everyone in the concert hall, he was the guest of honor for tonight’s show; and thus, was seated in the very front. Right where Emperor Lucius could see him. “Bloody disgrace,” Özcan breathed again but no one was listening. They were too busy pretending not to listen to their Emperor tirade. “I put on this grand event,” Lucius was still yelling for some reason. “Wine, food, and music all paid for by the Imperial treasury.” “He paid himself to perform at a concert he paid for?” This time Özcan didn’t bother whispering. A neighboring wife of some bureaucrat tittered at his joke. The elder bureaucrat did not. Lucius ranted on, shrill as his once intact instrument. “And this is how you repay your Emperor? By falling asleep?” For General Demir’s part, the man seemed totally unperturbed. His heavy-lidded eyes blinked once. He reached one scarred hand up and gently ran it over his stubbly salt and pepper hair. Özcan watched his steady blue eyes evenly stare back at the red-faced Emperor. Ater a moment, he gently slid from his seat and down onto one knee. “I apologize, your highness,” he said in a voice that seemed too booming for his short stature. “Since returning from campaign I haven’t much time to rest, and I cannot shrug off sleeplessness as I could in my youth. Forgive me. Your playing was excellent, and I would love to hear more.” The calm, civil response starkly contrasted Lucius’s childish rage, and when placed side by side, the emperor’s terrible temper seemed even more terrible. However, Özcan couldn’t help but notice that despite the general’s calm acquiescence, his son Vadim Claixtus, appeared to be growing quite indignant. “I refuse,” Lucius said. The black ostrich feather dipped back as he turned up his nose. “True art must be appreciated the first time. If you cannot do so, then you do not deserve it.” “Very well,” Demir grunted as he rose to standing. “The hour is late, and you deserve to perform for an audience who can truly appreciate your talent. So, I will retire for the evening.” Lucius’s face went beet red. “Wrong answer,” Özcan winced, bringing his nails to his lips. “You cannot be serious,” Lucius snapped out. The poor General paused, looking as confused as a dog with four tails. “My lord?” “You are supposed to beg for more! I was willing to play again but not if you didn’t genuinely push for it.” “Oh, uh, right, well would you please play more, your grace? Please.” “Well, I’m not going to do it now!” Lucius screeched. Özcan thanked the gods that there was no glass around lest it be shattered by sheer decibels. “You had your chance to grovel. It has passed. Now out! You have wasted enough of my time already!” While the general sighed with evident relief, that last comment was apparently a bridge too far for the younger Claixtus. Though he looked nothing like his father, the gangly youth he sprung from his chair, finger pointed at the emperor in the best impression of his father ordering a charge. “You dare insult my father?” He whined, voice not that much deeper than the Emperor’s. “At his own celebration?” With the first sense of urgency he’d shown all evening, the general turned and scolded his son, “Quiet boy.” But the damage had been done. Emperor Lucius had been presented with the fuel he needed to keep the fires of another famous tantrum roaring hot. “What did you say to your Emperor, you little pissant?” “Please your highness, forgive my son,” Demir held a hand up, “he has forgotten himself. It was his first campaign we most recently returned from, and he seems to have taken it harder than most.” Lucius wasn’t listening. He spun on his heel and walked backstage. A moment later, he returned. Oh, dear me, now what is he doing with that? Holding it by the scabbard, Lucius brandished Worldrender like a torch against the dark. He made sure everyone present saw the gold hilt, jeweled cross piece, and the deadly splendor of the strongest Hexerax in the entire Empire. A Hexerax now in the hands of an unreasonably irritated man child. Based on a thumping of floorboard from behind him, Özcan was sure someone had fainted. He felt his ass clench in its seat with the rest of the room/ All except General Claixtus it seemed. While his prickly son took a weary step back, Demir simply stood at the base of the stage, heavy eyes looking up somewhat unimpressed at the emperor’s threatening display. He was not a tall man, shorter than most women. But the set of his thick legs and broad shoulder conveyed a sturdiness that wouldn’t be easily shaken. It appeared Lucius, however, was ready to give his best effort. He took another step towards the pair. “Speak another word contrary to mine and I’ll have your tongue, boy,” Lucius hissed. “No, you won’t.” Demir replied. Not with any defiance or challenge. Just a statement. Like the Emperor had said the sky was red and Demir had politely but firmly corrected him. It wasn’t received well. He snarled at Demir. “You presume to command your Emperor?” “Of course not,” the general replied nonchalantly, bowing. “I merely stated that you will not draw that Hexerax. I am truly sorry for my uncouth behavior tonight. Your highness’s prowess with bow and string are truly as masterful they say. I will be happy to reimburse the treasury out of pocket if I have wasted any imperial Arens on this lovely evening.” He straightened to his full height. “But you will not draw that blade.” Lucius faltered, clearly unsure of what to do with that calm but firm acquiescence. He stuck with his rage. “I shall not be spoken to like that in my own palace!” Demir drew a long, deep breath through his nose. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge. Özcan felt the tension in the air like a yolk on his shoulders. Maybe they all did. “Fine,” Demir finally said slowly, “then draw.” Özcan heard someone near him audibly gasp. A woman to his left swooned, the back of her hand to her forehead. A second casualty of dramatics. “Wh-what?” Lucius was properly thrown out of sorts now, his anger faltering. Demir held his gaze level and folded his arms, crisp doublet crumpling around bulky shoulders. “If you are so keen to draw Worldrender then do so.” Özcan’s initial fear of Woldrender being used had begun to fade and was now replaced by a sort of morbid fascination. He leaned forward, genuinely intrigued by what would happen next, studying the faces of those around him. Because despite all the palatable unease and tension in the amphitheater, the most uneasy and most tense of all now appeared to be Emperor Lucius himself. “Woldrender mustn’t be drawn,” Lucius hesitantly said, “unless the Empire itself is under threat.” “I wholeheartedly agree,” Demir replied, “and given you are Worldrender’s Handler by birthright as Emperor, I’m assuming you threatened to draw it against my son because you believe he poses a threat to the Empire. Does he?” The question was meant to be rhetorical, but General Demir avoided making it sound condescending. He spoke like one friend trying to help another through a difficult life problem. Two buddies solving it together. Lucius’s face seemed to experience ten different emotions at once. His mouth was hanging open like he might say something. His hand inched towards the hilt like he might actually draw the damn thing. His eyes darted back and forth like he was looking for a target. Only then did Özcan realize just how close he was seated to the potential zone of violence. Oh dear. And here I got into politics to avoid this sort of thing in the Army. What a pity. However, it appeared that this evening, Emperor Lucius had as much appetite for violence as Özcan did. “Out of my sight,” he finally barked. Worldrender dropped limp by his side. “Out! Before I change my mind.” With that he spun on his finely tailored boots and stormed off, limp feather swishing in time with his angry footsteps. If he’d been an actor, it would have been a very well executed exit stage left. But since Lucius was an Emperor, Özcan thought it was frankly unbecoming, bordering on embarrassing. “Thank you very much, my Lord,” the general called after him. “I once again apologize for my behavior as well as that of my son’s. Please send a receipt to my residence for your immediate reimbursement.” The sound of a slamming door back stage showed what Emperor Lucius thought about apologies and reimbursement. The general stood for a moment longer, and Özcan watched intently to see what he would do next. Storm out? Yell? Chase after the Emperor? Based on the stories I heard about him in his last campaign, I wouldn’t be surprised if he rode Emperor Lucius down in the Square of Emperors, Worldrender or not.

I told you not to have that damn baby, "he said, throwing his third beer can across the kitchen in the direction of the already overflowing trashcan. "I told you to get an abortion!" He looked at the sink that held stacks of dishes and floating bits of food, which was now spilling over onto the decaying Formica countertop, and made a sound of disgust. Passing on his way to the refrigerator, a strong whiff of curdled milk drifted from the sink. He brought his fingers to his nose and blew air out in an attempt to get rid of the smell that had settled in his nostrils. He cursed at the dishes and raised his arm in preparation to hurl them onto the floor but stopped himself and instead went to the refrigerator for another beer. The remaining beers rattled as he yanked open the door. Grabbing another, he popped open the top and allowed cool air to get rid of any lingering odor. After taking several long swallows, he did a quick scan of the refrigerator's contents: beer and butter. He gritted his teeth and slammed the door shut. "F---" he stopped, mid-curse surprised by the small figure staring up at him. He smiled, bent down, and ran his hand across his son's hair. "What a shithole this place is, huh James?" He didn't wait for confirmation. "Things were a lot better when it was just the three of us, wasn't it" The boy nodded, not wanting to disappoint his father. "Yeah," he chugged the rest of his beer and tossed the can in the direction of the sink. He leaned down and looked directly into his son's eyes. He said, "I'll see ya, boy." He opened up the refrigerator for the last time, took another beer, and opened the back screen door, ready to leave. Holding it open with one hand, he turned and yelled into the air, "I'm not working my ass off to feed a kid I don't know is even mine!" He let go of the hinge-less screen door, and it slammed behind him. James watched silently as his father walked out of his life. It had been months since he walked out. Initially, she believed that things might improve without her husband's hostility in the house, but things had only gotten worse, especially her relationship with James. Tears streamed down her fame as she remembered holding her firstborn son with such love and hope. Now. he would barely look at her. The revulsion from his father had passed down to their eleven-year old son. She now held the only ally she had left, hoping for another chance at renewed love from a child, and closed her eyes to hold on to her memory. She was brought back to the present by a sense of James standing in front of her. Before she could put any thoughts together, he asked, "When is Dad coming back?" She lifted her head at the sound of his voice, her eyes welling up. She had been waiting for the question but still did not know how to soften the answer. "I don't know James. I don't know if he is." He looked straight through her. She watched him go into the kitchen and heard the slamming of the cabinets. She shuddered and bent her head down to focus once again on the sleeping innocence in her arms.

In the early years of the 1980s, the East Village, a neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, had a population of roughly sixty thousand. But the worlds of art, music, and literature operating east of the Bowery and Third, south of Fourteenth, and north of Houston felt far smaller. The neighborhood of low buildings and crooked streets, a place so hollowed out and reduced to rubble that it resembled postwar Vienna, was intimate. Everyone seemed to be only one degree of separation from Madonna, from Jean-Michel Basquiat, from Keith Haring—from people on the cusp of changing the world but who were still, for the time being, well known only in New York. The community was so small that a gallerist estimated that 3,500 members of the art world lived in the neighborhood. Another number discussed was 500. The “Fabulous 500” was the coinage of fashion designer Dianne Brill to describe “the conceptual movers and shakers of everything” who made up the Village. Brill, with her big, bleached blonde hair and aheart-shaped smile, was herself one of the 500. In his 1988 work Andy Warhol’s Party Book, the wigged-up artist would observe, “Dianne Brill . . . was the first young girl in decades to really play up a big body with big curves and big cleavage. [She] operated full tilt all night all over New York as the ultimate Party Girl and earned herself the title ‘Queen of the Night.’” Michael Jerome Stewart wasn’t among the Fab 500. Still, he was very much a part of their world. The modeling job he’d told Patricia Pesce about had been for a spread in Mexican Vogue featuring Brill’s fashion. Michael hadn’t taken a single bad shot, the designer later said. “He always gave gorgeous faces.” Michael was also tightly connected to the Pyramid Club, the nightclub on Avenue A, just off Tompkins Square Park, where he’d met up with Pesce that night. Once a Ukrainian haunt frequented by local babushkas, the club fell on hard times until, in the early 1980s, new managers decided to dramatically alter the joint’s appeal. They left the tiles embedded in the pyramid shape of the floor that had given the club its name, but changed pretty much everything else. At the Pyramid’s grand reopening in 1981, the reconceptualized establishment on the Village’s perimeter announced itself as the place to be for the pansexual, the punk, the queer, those in drag, and anyone else comfortable in the milieu—anti-hierarchy; no velvet ropes; an alternative, coiled energy. On opening night, a classically trained dancer in a bustier, a red wig, and black-painted eye sockets performed The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian as a nod to the gay icon. For the finale, he flipped himself over a railing and pretended to die—all while made up in, as he later put it, “glamorous gender-fuck punk drag.” The celebration was titled On the Range, a nod to the “frontier” that was Avenues A through D. Depending on whom you asked, it was also variously called Alphabet City, Loisaida, or just “the neighborhood.” Incredibly, real estate vultures had already begun to circle, but back then, it was still a mostly rundown, desolate area that was so quiet, one tabloid claimed, that “you can hear a rat crossing the street.” The neglect stretched from one end of the neighborhood to the other: Avenue A was dotted with empty storefronts, while there were lines around the block on Avenue D to buy heroin. A local poet, seeking solace, observed that such conditions would ward off gentrification, at least for a while: “. . . keep it looking messed up / Maybe the gentry can’t set up shop.” The Pyramid, thoroughly impervious, was printing money. Future indie rock royalty like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore was among the many willing to pay the ten-dollar cover to enter what he viewed as “the most significant spot in the East Village.” Night after night, a scrum of bodies rubbed up against one another, figuratively and literally. And what bodies! The patrons, observed one attendee, were “the right mix of lunatics, friends, drunks, and intellectuals.” It was a largely white and often queer crowd, but Pyramid regulars were intensely accepting. It was an odd oasis in which gender, sexuality, and race didn’t determine whether you got through the door. Michael, hired as a busboy, was welcomed there with open arms. * Michael Stewart was born on May 9, 1958, to Millard and Carrie Stewart of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The Stewarts had left Kentucky three years earlier, during the Second Great Migration. Mrs. Stewart, a short woman with a thin smile, worked as a public school teacher. Mr. Stewart, whose tall, thin frame his son would inherit, was a veteran of World War II and Korea and now worked for the Transit Authority. Michael was the eldest of four children, all raised in a two-story home on a block of old brownstones within arm’s reach of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. What Michael loved, from the time he was a little boy, was to draw. In elementary school his passion was obvious. “He would write imaginary stories and illustrate them,” his mother said years later. “He started sketching on paper napkins or drawing on top of photographs, or doing strange kinds of things that maybe you wouldn’t really call painting—or even artistic—but he started making things that seemed strange to other people but made sense to him.” Michael wasn’t academically minded, but he gave higher learning a try. After a year at City College, he enrolled in a summer program at Pratt Institute, a four-year university in Brooklyn that had graduated many eminences in the worlds of music, film, and fashion. There, he further developed an interest in art, working backstage on sets. Even after the program was over, Michael continued to orbit Pratt’s campus, which wasn’t far from the Stewart home. Sometimes he’d come straight from his job at the phone company, still clad in a dark blue jumpsuit and gear, his locs tucked under a hat. On an October night in 1981, a pair of Pratt students were at the Mudd Club in Manhattan to see the band Liquid Liquid. One gestured to Michael, who was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt. It was easy to notice Michael, who stood out in predominantly white spaces. The student knew him as the deep and sotto voce host of a show on the campus radio station, WPIR. Located on the first floor of the Willoughby dorm, WPIR had become a home away from home for Michael. Its deejays were divided into two camps: the art students, who played punk, rockabilly, and the like; and the engineering students, who preferred disco. Michael aligned himself with the art students. Allergic to the chart-toppers, his crowd gravitated toward the abstruse. Michael fit right in, collecting albums from labels like England’s Rough Trade Records, which distributed the Raincoats and a Certain Ratio. His musical tastes, said an awed deejay, “were pretty reaching at that point.” It didn’t bother anyone that Michael had a radio show despite no longer being a Pratt student. After his show was over, Michael would hang around the station, dancing along to music in the listening room adjacent to the studio, or making faces at whoever was on the air. Late at night, after the security guard stopped checking up on them, the deejays would gather to drink, play records, and make out. In those years, Michael would leave home, portfolio in hand, to return in the early morning hours after a night of drinking and dancing. Dancing was an activity he particularly loved. He and Cheryl Ricelyn “Rice” Jackson, a close friend of several years, entered contests around Manhattan: at the Ritz, the Peppermint Lounge, Save the Robots. Wearing fashionable clothes they found while dumpster diving in SoHo, they would do spins and dips in sync to Blondie and Talking Heads. No matter how hard they tried, the pair always finished second. “Every little beat, every little intonation of a song, of a record—even if we’d never heard it before—he could hit that beat, he could hit that note,” Jackson said. “The music was just inside of him.” (She and Michael would watch Looney Tunes with contemporary music on, so the escapades of Bugs and Elmer Fudd would sync in funny ways.) To his friends, it was obvious that Michael loved music, but the pull of art had intensified in his life. By 1982, he was developing his own style, creating murals at street level and drawing on Polaroids that he would then glue to Manhattan subway walls—a sort of public installation. And he began entertaining visions of making art on a larger and larger scale, with the idea of blowing up photos and painting on them. Artists at the time considered New York as one colossal canvas. Michael, too, engaged in more traditional tagging in the subway stations. On at least a dozen occasions, after finishing work at the Pyramid, he and Arthur “Chino” Ludwig, who was in charge of the club’s security, went out on the town with cans of spray paint. Michael favored green, yellow, and black. “We would go all over the place,” Ludwig recalled. Union Square, Forty-Second Street, to Second Avenue and Eighteenth Street on the F line. Sometimes they’d venture as far as Fulton Street in Brooklyn. During these outings, while Michael worked, Ludwig stood guard. It was well known that police targeted taggers. Still, despite taking precautions, Michael and Ludwig had the occasional close call. One night, they went to 138th Street in the Bronx, not far fromwhere Ludwig’s mother lived in the projects. At Third Avenue, flashlight in hand, they walked along the tracks for about a quarter of a mile, until they reached an old station. It was lit up and covered with graffiti. Other taggers were there, too, and they knew Michael. All was well—until the police arrived. Everyone scattered. But not fast enough, and several of their number were arrested. On these nights, as Michael sprayed, he and Ludwig would talk about family, girls, the crazy Pyramid patrons, drugs, and their life aspirations. As Ludwig remembered it, “He wanted to go on and be real famous. He wanted to do giant murals across the country. He wanted to travel to Germany. He wanted to go to Prague. I mean, he spoke about the world and how he wanted to just travel and become famous and do that. That was his goal. He really wanted to be worldwide. “That was his end game.” If Michael wasn’t yet one of the Fab 500, he planned to be. ** September 14, 1983, a Wednesday, had been a typical day for Michael. That afternoon, he biked across the Brooklyn Bridge (clack clack clack). (That’s the recollection of Patricia Pesce. However, in a 1988 interview with an attorney, Millard Stewart said he last saw Michael at 8 p.m., which suggests that Michael would not have been in Manhattan so early in the day.) He spent time at the studio he rented. Later, he met up with his sometime girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk, for drinks at Lucky Strike. He was special to Mallouk, an intense twenty-three-year-old, stylish in her oversize clothes, with short dark hair and bangs clipped just above the eyes. She tended bar at the Berlin, where Michael visited her on many nights to play tic-tac-toe and eat olives and cherries fromthe bartenders’ supply. They had known each other for over a year, having met the summer before, at the Pyramid. At the time, Mallouk was broken up with Basquiat, who was just emerging into fame. Mallouk and the artist had had an on-again, off-again relationship, and after one of their breakups, she began to date Michael, even as she continued to have deep feelings for Basquiat. Mallouk thought Michael was handsome and caring, but mostly he reminded her of her younger brother. She had real affection for him, but she didn’t love him. Meanwhile, Michael adored her and wasawed by her proximity to Basquiat. The year before, when Mallouk had been hospitalized over the holidays for pelvic inflammatory disease and confined to bed with an antibiotic IV drip, Michael visited her every day. On New Year’s Eve, he kept her company in the hospital room, and the two rang in the New Year together. Michael had lived with Mallouk for a while in her apartment on the Lower East Side, but then she asked him to move out, as she realized that her love for Basquiat made it impossible for her to be “fully present” in their relationship. So, Michael left, moving back in with his parents in Brooklyn. But the two stayed close. That night at Lucky Strike, Suzanne apologized for how she kept flitting between the two men. “Yes, yes,” Michael had said, stroking her arm. He was understanding, unfussed. After leaving Lucky Strike, Michael had met up with George Condo, a visual artist, and a friend of Condo’s named Freddie. The trio tried to get into a party at Haring’s Broome Street loft, which had become something of a quasi nightclub in the neighborhood. Haring, known for his vibrant white-chalk-and-ink drawings of faceless people and barking dogs, was a big deal, having been anointed by Rene Ricard, pursued by Warhol, and exhibited at Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery, the new locus of the city’s contemporary art. The artist, acting as the evening’s doorman as well as its host, had bounded down from the third floor when they arrived. Haring knew Michael from around the Pyramid, and well enough for a greeting and a salutation hug. Condo and Haring eventually would become close, but at the time, they hardly knew each other. It was Freddie who was the real obstacle to the group’s gaining entry—he’d swindled Haring out of a thousand dollars, and the painter was still angry. Haring refused to let the group in. So, the three men had moved along to the Pyramid Club instead. When they arrived, Basquiat was standing outside. Condo asked if he could borrow some money, and with the painter’s ten dollars, Condo and the group went inside. Michael seemed to enjoy the show, listening to music and drinking with his friends. While he appeared relaxed, his financial situation at the time was fraught, and a source of anxiety. Two months earlier, he’d been fired from his thirty-five-dollar-a-night gig as a busboy at Pyramid. He had lacked the aggression necessary for one to ruthlessly wade through a crowd to empty a table or ferry a tub of glasses held high above his head. Michael had wept when he got the news. He liked his colleagues, after all. One coworker had brought him back to her house for home-cooked meals. Another partied with him at Danceteria. She had vivid memories of their trips home on the A Train and had been immensely bothered that, in a crowded subway car, Transit Authority police always, somehow, ended up standing next to Michael. “It’s all right,” he’d tell her. “Don’t worry about it.” And he’d been close also with the Pyramid’s regulars, with whom he would dance until daybreak. Sometimes he’d go straight home afterward, but sometimeshe’d head into the subway, can of spray paint in hand. In the two months since being fired, Michael had drifted. Still, despite his precarious finances, he expected brighter days ahead. Aside from modeling jobs, like the one he’d done for Dianne Brill, he was deejaying, too, and that might prove a source of steadyincome. Just a month before, he’d spun records at a party thrown by Maripol, who’d earned acclaim as a fashion designer and photographer—capturing intimate Polaroid portraits of Warhol, Grace Jones, and Basquiat. Michael had also deejayed occasionallyat the Pyramid, and as he told Pesce, he was set to play at Lucky Strike in a few days. Whatever pressures or optimism he may have felt, he’d stayed at the club long enough to watch the night’s featured performer, Tanya Ransom, a progenitor of punk drag. Afterward, in an unusually garrulous mood, Michael had sat talking with former coworkers. “He seemed to be all bubbling,” one of them later said. He’d then stopped by the dressing room to see Ransom. Michael may have had a few beers, but to the performer, he seemed “fairly lucid.” ___________________________________ From The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York by Elon Green. Copyright (c) 2025 by the authors and reprinted with permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. View the full article

In another lifetime, I interviewed celebrities for glossy luxury magazines and a few newspapers. This was before the Great Recession, the rise of internet advertising (and influencers), and venture capitalists cored out much of print publishing as an industry; thanks to full-page liquor ads and subscriptions, there was still enough editorial budget to send you cross-country a few times per quarter, all in a quest to pry something new out of famous people who’d been telling the same stories to the same venues for the past twenty years. This was a job subject to odd flukes. At one point, I was dispatched to L.A. to interview a comedian who, at the time, starred in big comedies and sold out Madison Square Garden. There was just one problem, which didn’t come to light until I checked into my hotel near LAX: the Bigshot Famous Comedian had recently returned from a USO tour in western Iraq, during which a tooth had become infected. While he was recovering from an extraction and high as a proverbial kite on painkillers, his handlers refused to let me near him, no matter how much my editor screamed at them from his desk in New York. I was expected to chill out—expenses paid, of course—until someone in the ether of PR, celebrity assistants, and magazine editors made a decisive move. I decided to do my best imitation of a Michael Mann character, cruising the nighttime freeways, ending up in dives that usually featured some combination of cheap drinks, mechanical bulls, Christmas lights, and fried food. Along the way, I collided with freelance writers and photographers on their own assignments, plus the movie and TV people who keep the creative firmament spinning, from personal assistants to the lighting guys. When I finally got my 30 minutes with the Bigshot Famous Comedian, we ended up lying on a tarmac at Van Nuys Airport, where the accompanying cover shoot was taking place, while he talked about his father. Some stars never lower their shields; others treat you as their psychiatrist. Just as long as I got enough good quotes to soothe my editor’s skyrocketing blood pressure, I didn’t care. That wasn’t the first or last time an assignment flew off the rails. But smooth or rough, they all shared something in common: people talked. Whether waiting with a photo crew for a celebrity chef to climb from a private jet, or sharing drinks with a couple of blasted-out junior PR reps after they wrangled a nightmare fashion shoot, the pauses between events would inevitably lead to folks offering up stories from their position in the celebrity orbit—and the more hilarious or heartbreaking, the better. Because I’m a writer, I later wrote down many of these tales in the Moleskine notebooks I used to always carry around, but I wasn’t really tempted to use many as narrative fuel until I started writing “Where the Bones Lie,” my mystery novel about a Hollywood fixer who teams up with the daughter of a famous smuggler to solve a long-dormant missing-person case. That fixer, Dash Fuller, is burned out from years of helping bury Hollywood’s worst secrets. He drinks too much, his nerves are shot, and when the book begins, he’s exhibiting that number-one sign of hitting bottom: he’s trying his hand at standup comedy. It’s always a delicate thing to weave real-life events into fiction. Sometimes you want the readers to recognize your allusion to whatever happened in the past. In other instances, you’re just using those experiences to give your writing an added boost of verisimilitude. Plus, there’s always the omnipresent fear that surfacing something controversial will get you into trouble—you start wondering whether that little disclaimer in the front matter of most novels, the one about any resemblance to real people being purely coincidental, would actually hold up under legal scrutiny. I feel like my fears of blowback are valid, considering an Oscar winner once threatened to break my legs if I ever revealed [redacted] in print. I bet he’d do it, too. He’s older at this point, but still stunningly strong. With all of that in mind, how many Hollywood stories did I weave into “Where the Bones Lie”? There’s just one, and no, it’s not the PR flak stealing a rapper’s Humvee and using it to crush a fleeing paparazzi whose camera is full of incriminating evidence. I heard a lot of tales, some more believable than others, but none involved a lot of murder and mayhem, so they didn’t really fit with the chaotic narrative I was assembling. However, I based quite a bit on the people who’d told those tales: high-strung publicists, avuncular but vaguely threatening lawyers, creepers who saw themselves as fixers, B-movie actors happy to be killed in horror movie after horror movie if it meant they still had a shot at a bigger role at some point. Their mannerisms, the compromises they made in their professional and personal lives, all ended up woven into the DNA of my characters. (Stephen King once wrote, “It is the tale, not he who tells it,” but there’s a bit of a contrapositive there: sometimes the person telling the tale, and the environment in which they’re telling it, is more valuable than the details of their story. Especially if you’re a writer trying to create a believable atmosphere.) If there’s one thing I ported directly from real life (whatever that term actually means) to fiction, it’s the locations. The magnificent house where a movie star is gunned down at the beginning of the book, the Santa Monica castle where a PR master lives in drunken exile, the winery where a whole bunch of evil skullduggery may have taken place—those are all transported without much change, because why not? The chances of you figuring out those addresses are slim. I imagine that writers of virtually every genre, from cop mystery to espionage thriller, wrestle with how to effectively convert reality into fiction. I’m thinking in this moment of authors like Alma Katsu and her spy novels, or Michael Connelly with his Bosch books. There’s no “right” answer, of course—both real life and fiction are messy, and the lines between them are usually blurred. *** View the full article