Demon Bound Special: Meljean Brook on Influences

With the upcoming release of Demon Bound (our review will be up tomorrow , with a giveaway!) , the latest installment in Meljean Brook’s Guardian series, we invited the author to talk about her influences and sources of inspiration for her novel.

Without further ado, we give the floor to Meljean Brook!

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” — T.S. Eliot

“Mediocre artists borrow; great artists steal.” — Pablo Picasso

“Dorks grab stuff from writers and artists they love and stick it into their romance novels.” — Meljean Brook

I’ve talked before about how I came up with the idea for the Guardian series — and about how I’ve been influenced by Milton and Wilde, Dante and Gaiman (not to mention Batman and Wonder Woman).

By the seventh book in a series, though, I’m guessing that readers are hoping for something a little different. It’s not as if the questions raised within, say, Milton’s essays on free will can ever be fully explored or resolved in a series like mine, but that once those conflicts have been established as the foundation of the series … well, at that point, it’s a lot more fun to talk about the new stuff I’m putting in there, the little details that add flavor to the current book. And, although each of these stories is mine, it doesn’t mean that I don’t owe a huge debt of gratitude to writers and storytellers who came before me (and who do it a lot better than me.)

When I first named areas within Caelum (which I don’t really reference before DEMON BOUND) I decided to go with mythology-based names. From Demon Bound:

“[The Black Widow] has a place?” Becca’s expression was blank. “I thought she just lived in the Archives.”

Jake stared at his cards. Not even a pair. He threw in more chips, anyway. “It’s in Odin’s Courtyard.”

Mackenzie looked up. “Odin’s?”

“There’s a big ash tree, like what Odin hung himself from—to gain wisdom,” Jake said. And it sounded like a hell of a painful way of getting smarter. He preferred the easy method: opening a book or turning on a computer—or fucking up and paying for it. “But it’s marble. Like everything else.”

(Jake doesn’t hang himself in a tree, but he doesn’t get the easy method, unfortunately.)

This is all thanks to Edith Hamilton and her book MYTHOLOGY, which I found in my elementary school library. It’s not the be-all and end-all mythology resource, but it was the first place I learned about Yggdrasil, the great ash tree that serves as the axis of the nine realms in Norse mythology.

I’d known about Loki, Thor, Freya, frost giants, but the short introduction she gave in this book (the focus is on Greek and Roman myths) got me looking for more sources — and so in its way, Hamilton’s book is the reason I wasn’t completely lost while I was reading Neil Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS (although I still had enough to look up there.)

Hamilton wasn’t my only resource for mythology, of course, but it was a fantastic jumping-off point. And since I’ve mentioned AMERICAN GODS, I should also give a nod to Gaiman.

His book wasn’t the first place I encountered the Zorya, but I couldn’t for the life of me recall what their names were (or how to spell them) in order to look them up until I had that “ah-ha!” moment, remembering that he’d included them in his book. Here’s the passage from DEMON BOUND, between Alice and a Guardian introduced in this book, Irena:

“And now you are quiet.” Irena did not look up as she disemboweled the deer. The grisly task was not so different from the one Alice had performed on the demon, only hours before. “You creep up on me like Zorya Polunochnaya, swathed in darkness. You only lack the white hair and hunched back.”

{…} Oh, dear. When had she last read about the Zorya? To the best of her recollection, they were three mythical goddesses watching over a sky hound chained to a constellation, and who would destroy the universe if he broke his bonds.

Alice considered that as Irena rolled the deer’s body onto its back. The heat of its blood and innards had melted the snow to pink slush.

Irena might have been the morning Zorya, Alice decided. The fierce young warrior. Neither of them would be the mother.

And Alice would rather the world not rely on her as their defense against annihilation by a godhound. Demons were quite enough. “If I must be a crone,” she said, “I would prefer to be Baba Yaga.”

Gaiman’s goddesses are each young (and the passages with Zorya Polunachnaya are amazingly beautiful) — but I went with the maiden/mother/crone interpretation of the goddesses. One reason is simply that I like the stages-of-life concept better; the other reason is that it’s just fun to set up Irena as the young maiden and Alice as the crone, even though Irena is actually sixteen centuries older than Alice.

But of course a series like mine is going to reference mythology — so what else is in there?

There’s a line early in the story (just after the passage with Irena above, actually) where Alice thinks:

She’d been thought insane when she’d made the bargain. How elegant that she would be reduced to insanity by it. “I shall spend eternity creeping around the room.”

If you’re familiar with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” that line of dialogue foreshadows a chunk of Alice’s backstory. (And as far as I’m concerned, Alice is deliberately referencing the story; Irena doesn’t recognize it, though, because she doesn’t read if she can help it.) And I wasn’t thinking of Gilman’s story when I began writing the book, but once I got into it and realized everything that had happened to Alice, the story popped into my head (or maybe it had been partially driving everything I’d been thinking about Alice in the first place.) I’m not sure, really — at times, writing a character is kind of like the chicken and the egg question. What came first: the direction Alice’s character going to a place that reminds me of a short story that I’ve read, or did I push Alice’s character in that direction because of the short story (along with other things, like Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Madwoman in the Attic” and some kind of accumulation of essays and information about the Victorian era)?

Don’t know, don’t know. There are aspects of Jake’s background, however, that I can point to more easily.

I knew from my first throwaway mention of Jake in WILD THING that he was a soldier who’d died in Vietnam (which probably made it inevitable that he’d end up a hero. My BFF points out that in a lineup, they’d look like the Village People: the knight, the vampire, the cowboy, the soldier…oh, and don’t forget the doctor, lawyer, and FBI Agent. Yeah.)

Outside of some conversations I’ve had with vets in college, in coffee shops — the two texts about Vietnam (including documentaries and fiction) that have stuck with me most vividly are Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” and the movie Apocalypse Now. And although my research had to go wider than those sources, I know that the imagery and stories they told were right there with me when I was asking myself, “What happened to Jake to make him the Guardian he is now?”

There aren’t really any Apocalypse Now nods in the book (the song from the opening of the movie — “The End” by the Doors — was on the soundtrack that I listened to in my car, however; finding a crazy person at the end of a journey was just a happy coincidence) but there is one scene that I call “Jake’s List” that is very, very much a grateful nod to/inspired by the Tim O’Brien story. (*Ana’s note : this scene is one of my favorites in the book –it is all kinds of awesome * )

Which… I suppose for someone who doesn’t get all crazy-excited about this kind of stuff, this is making the book seem all very serious and glum, when Jake and Alice’s story is anything but glum. So let’s do a quick segue into dorkery and geekery itself, as shown in the book:

[Alice] narrowed her eyes at Jake. My, wasn’t he so very comfortable down there, with his music and his computers. Here she sat, prickly and despondent, contemplating the terrible fate that awaited her, and he was…no longer tapping, but using a controller of some kind.

“Are you playing a game?”

“Yep. DemonSlayer. I’m almost—” He made a dismayed grunting noise. “Dead.”

Alice stared at him, and he flashed a grin at her over the top of his computer screen.

“Hey, it’s personal time. It’s either this or porn. And this takes my mind off…other things.”

“I see,” she said. She didn’t, though—and now she was trying to fit this into what she knew of him. “So you are a geek.”

His controller clattered to the table, then disappeared. So did his computers, giving her a clear view of his dumbfounded expression. “A what?”

“A geek. It means—”

“I know what it means. How do you know?”

She lifted her chin. “I’m not completely ignorant of contemporary culture.”

The most convenient locations to charge her computer batteries were human libraries—and even she found herself tempted by magazines and the Internet.

“Just mostly ignorant,” he countered, and she decided it wasn’t worth arguing. She’d lose. And it gave her some pleasure that he was looking disgruntled now. “Anyway, I’m not one. I’m not dedicated enough.”

She hadn’t known there was an element of commitment to it.

I think for many writers — and many readers — there is more than an element of commitment to our varied dorkeries and inspirations; there’s also a huge dose of passion. As I’m writing this, I’m finding it very surreal to list influences because a) by the time they get into the book they’ve been altered and are often no longer text but subtext or allusion or just a fun little Easter Eggs and b) there is no way to show the excitement behind their inclusion. Listed, they feel very academic (which is unfortunately associated with a lack of passion and dryness — but I suppose it’s hard to sound authoritative when you’re squeeing), and can’t convey at all the excitement and inspiration they offer an author … and in turn, breathe into a text.

I think that when we write reviews of books we really love, we suffer the same problem … how exactly do you convey the awesomeness of a text and the experience of reading it? “I love this book!!” hardly seems adequate sometimes, no matter how many exclamation points you use. And when an author writes a book, she can’t break in and say, “I love these characters/this topic/I had a blast researching this!” The only way it shows is in the writing itself — how much life and excitement can we pour into it without overwhelming characters or the story? — and how much of that will readers share?

Considering that I had a blast researching the spiders…I know not all readers will share all of it. 😀

And this is an awesome time to say: I had a blast writing this book. There is so much that was just pure fun. From researching Egyptian history, dusting off my archaeology texts, deciding which T-shirt Jake was going to wear,

tying in threads from previous books in the series, expanding the origin of the Guardians, creating Alice’s dress…

Yep, just fun.

But it’s also all background. Like I said earlier, it’s flavor. The real story is the relationship, the romance; it’s Jake growing up and Alice fighting for her life. There must be passion and commitment there, too … or all of the research and influences in the world won’t hold the book together.

So, I’m wondering — is there a reference or detail from a book that inspired you to go out and find out more about a topic? Is there a passion of yours that, when you see it referenced in a novel, makes you giddy?

And if you are a writer — or if you were a writer — is there something that you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from including in the text, in however small a way?