Five Very Compelling Reasons You Want WINGS in Your Life

I am the luckiest girl in the world, because I got a chance to devour Elizabeth Richards' latest Black City book before it came out, and let me tell you, the devouring was good.  After I'd sated my vampire-dystopia lust, I came up with a few reasons why you need to read Wings.

1. Ash

Yes, yes, other characters are all fine and good, but the dark-haired smoldering vampire is the one I desperately wanted to see make it to the end.  No spoilers here, but I will tell you that the smoldering level was far above adequate and that there were some very swoony moments between him and Natalie.

Here comes the smolder

2. The United Sentry States

The world of the Black City books is a world devastated by war, populated by humans, vampires, lupines and bastets, and divided into a handful of giant states.  Wings shows us even more of this vividly reimagined America, from copper and verdigris Gallium to glittering golden Centrum.

3. Explosions

Explosions!  Fire!  Mayhem!  Richards pulls no punches in the final installment and no character (or city) gets off easy.  Wings is at its heart an action story, a revolution story, and it never stops to catch its breath.

BOOM

4. Plot Twists

Apropos to the above reason--Wings is a twisty ride, packed full of shocking reveals, new information and terrible betrayals.  Every time I thought I had something or someone figured out, they would turn around and completely surprise me.  I loved every second of it.

5. Tragic Backstory

Wings ties two stories together--the story of Ash and Natalie in the present day and the story of a boy named Edmund thirty years ago, a boy whose life is impossibly tragic and heart-wrenching.  His story changed how I saw the entire trilogy and every character in it.  Mind. Blown.

WHAT EVEN JUST HAPPENED I CAN'T EVEN

WINGS.  You'll be making this face by the end:

Wings will be out Thursday, June 12th! 

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Let Me Google That for You

Since I imagine readers of this blog and/or League books probably enjoy thinking about words, I thought I'd highlight a nifty tool: the Google books Ngram Viewer.

As you'd expect, Google likes data. They're pretty much tracking everything that can possibly be tracked, which can be scary, but they also give their users a lot of access to that data. So what's an "Ngram"? Wikipedia defines it as:

In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application. The n-grams typically are collected from a text or speech corpus.

Basically, Google has provided us with a way to search for certain words or phrases that have appeared in books over a certain period of time, from about 1800 to 2008, then display the results on a graph to show their frequency of occurrence. The first things I plugged in when I discovered this a few years ago were topics related to the books I was writing. This is what the Google Ngram viewer displays for "parallel universe, alternate universe, multiple worlds":

That is awesome. See, physicist Hugh Everett III proposed his "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics — the idea that a parallel universe exists for every action and decision we make — in 1957. The theory was promptly ignored in the scientific community until around the late 1970s and early 1980s, though it had appeared in science fiction for decades before that and grown in popularity, particularly in television shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, and much later, Sliders. If you've been reading a lot of YA, you've probably noticed an increase in novels about alternate realities lately, and so has Google.

Let's try something even more popular. This is the search for "vampire":

This looks about right to me. Vampires have been around in folklore and fiction for a while before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897. But it sure looks like it really took off around 2005. Wonder what could account for that?

Okay, one more:

Whoa. Right?

I find this endlessly fascinating, almost as addictive as Wikipedia or TV Tropes (no links, you're welcome). What do you think of this tool? What sorts of terms are you interested in searching for?

My Kind of Horror

Okay. I’m going to seriously date myself with these next words.  I used to rush home after school to watch one thing:

Dun dun dun .... (Cue atmospheric music.)

Dark Shadows.

And, before you say it. No, I’m not that old.  I watched Dark Shadows in syndication in the mid-to-late 70’s.

Dark Shadows was a Gothic soap opera (how could you not love the concept?) that originally aired weekdays on ABC from 1966-71.  Even though it was dark and atmospheric (and vastly different from any other soap opera at the time), the first  year of the show was a little slow. Young governess goes to spooky New England mansion to work for rich eccentrics with a troubled son.  A touch of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.  Yet it was admittedly dull, which is probably why the first year wasn’t syndicated until the 1990’s.

Things really pick up, though, when Cousin Barnabas shows up at Collingwood (the Collins family mansion)—and turns out to be ...dun dun dun ...a vampire. At this point, the show became wildly popular, and next thing you know, ghosts, werewolves, monsters, witches, and every kind of paranormal being start popping up in the story lines.  The denizens of Collingsport, Maine even dabble in time travel and parallel universes.

My favorite part, though, was how the writers stole shamelessly from the classics. Story arcs were ripped right out FRANKENSTEIN, H. Rider Haggard’s SHE, Henry James’ TURN OF THE SCREW, Tennessee Williams’ THE MENAGERIE, and Oscar Wilde’s PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY.

Let me give you an example of a story arc. (This was one of my favorites.) In 1969, young David Collins is being harassed by the ghost of Quentin Collins. So, cousin Barnabas—temporarily cured of his vampirism--uses the I Ching to travel back to 1897, where he meets the very much living Quentin, who was cursed by gypsies—something to do with Count Petofi’s hand, I forget—and is now a werewolf.  Barnabas has a painter do a portrait of Quentin, which cures his lycanthropy ala the Picture of Dorian Gray.  The painting of Quentin turns into a wolf at the full moon. Incidentally, Quentin doesn’t age at all and therefore can’t become a ghost to haunt David in the future. Still following me? His work done, Barnabas I-Chings it back to 1969—only to find an ancient race of Lovecraftian beings waiting to nab him. Begin new story arc.

That’s my kind of horror. Camp. Literate. Byzantine. And just plain fun. (Did I mention the dreadful camera work and silent-screen-worthy acting?)

Here's a little taste:



You thought I kidding about the I Ching, didn't you? And did I forget to mention Barnabas goes back to being a vampire in 1897 because he was one back then.

I’m not the only one who still loves Dark Shadows.  (Actually there are lots of fans and conventions even now.) Earlier this year on BBC’s Jonathon Ross Show I saw two of my favorite collaborators announce what one of their next projects would be after Alice in Wonderland.  Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are working on… (dun dun dun)…a Dark Shadows movie.   (It should come out after Depp does Pirates 4.) Yes, that means Johnny Depp will play Barnabas Collins. The last I read, the screenplay will be written by Seth Graham-Smith of zombie book fame. How's that for a combination?

Any other Dark Shadows fans out there? How about the '90's revival starring Ben Cross? He was certainly a better looking Barnabas, but the remake just kind of missed the point of the original. Sometimes it's really good to be bad.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Just finished this last night and I have to say I think the hype is pretty much justified. I have some quibbles of course, but this is the rare book that works well as a horror/action/adventure story but is also smart and beautifully written with compelling characters.

The Passage is about a world overrun by vampire-like "Virals." The story spans a little over a hundred years from the inception of the plague that creates the Virals, to a time when Americas society as we know it is gone and the few remaining humans are just barely holding on.

The first third or so of the book largely follows Brad Wolgast, an FBI agent tasked with convincing death row inmates to be a part of a series of medical trials that eventually lead to the creation of the viral plague. Wolgast goes about his job, grimly resigned, until his military superiors instruct him bring in a young orphan named Amy to be a part of the project.

Cronin does an amazing job in this section of creating and rounding out the characters of Wolgast and Amy and developing a relationship between them that is very touching. What's most impressive to me though is how Cronin takes the time to even round out relatively minor characters like the inmates, the military workers, a briefly seen group of nuns. This is what sets this book apart from the pack for me. The characters and their relationships. Cronin goes into far more detail here than you would expect in what could easily be the literary equivalent of a big summer popcorn movie.

The second part of the book is set a hundred years later. Here we're introduced to a small band of survivors living in a crumbling holdout somewhere in California. Not long into their story, circumstances lead some of them to leave their camp and venture out into the wider world, hoping maybe they can make an impact on the post plague world. The majority of the book follows their journey across the country. (Despite the time jump Cronin does connect the first and second sections of the book satisfactorily, but I won't get into to how he does it cause it's nifty.)

This second section is the only place I had real problems with the book. It introduces us to a much larger cast of characters,  enough that I had trouble keeping them all straight at times, and I never felt as strongly about them, or felt I knew them as well, as the smaller cast of the first section. Where the first section runs deep, the second section is broad. I guess I preferred the deeper end of the pool

Other quibbles? There are some action movie moments that seem a bit over the top. He also leans on some stock situations and characters. A chosen one, a power mad and reckless military, a seemingly happy town with a dark secret. He handles these things well but they do seem pretty familiar. Oh, he's also not above the "Oh no! A main character is about to die! Oops just kidding!" fake out. It happens a couple times and rankled a bit.

All in all these are small things. I really enjoyed this. Cronin writes beautifully and poetically, the world and the societies in it are detailed and interesting, the monsters are scary (and sad too in a way) and the story moved a a good pace. I definitely look forward to the next book in the series.

Oh, as a heads up, this is 100% a novel for adults. I  figured with post-apocalyptic setting and the hype surrounding it it'd be a good one for folks like us to be aware of.

Any of you all read it yet? Plan to? Thoughts?