Christopher Farnsworth’s Procession of the Damned
When I read an advance copy of Blood Oath last Christmas, I described it on Twitter as being like “Robert Ludlum’s Hellboy,” which I’m here to tell you is a damned awesome thing to be like. (In a nutshell: America has a superspy, and he’s a vampire… and he’s stuck with a partner.) I especially dug how Christopher Farnsworth loaded up on backstory, dropping hints about how America’s vampire defender had shaped the nation’s history behind the scenes…and when I found out where he got the inspiration for this story, I realized that we had a mutual fondness for one of the truly great eccentrics of American literature, an author who created for himself one of the most distinctive voices of the 20th century.
“A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded… We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded.â€
I was 11 years old when I read those words for the first time. They were the opening lines of The Book of the Damned, quoted by Daniel Cohen. I was already a regular visitor to the 130 section of my public library. But that was when I first learned about Charles Hoy Fort.
No joke: he changed my life. And he continues to change it. Blood Oath, my first novel, is going to be published on May 18. It’s about a vampire who works for the President of the United States. It’s a combination of the spy thriller and the horror story, and includes many of the anomalous chunks that don’t fit in the regular American history books.
It wouldn’t exist without Fort.
28 April 2010 | guest authors |
Sam Munson Looks Back at His Second-Rate Home Town
Before the hate mail starts pouring in from our nation’s capital, this is probably as good a time as any to remind readers that the opinions expressed by Beatriceguest authors don’t necessarily reflect those of the site’s editor—that said, I didn’t grow up in Washington, D.C., so Sam Munson is in a greater position of authority to speak about his hometown than I am. New Yorkers can hear him read from his debut novel, The November Criminals, tonight at Brooklyn’s Melville House; he’ll be at Washington’s Politics & Prose in mid-June. (Oh, and I meant to note the cleverness of releasing a novel about a teenage pot dealer with an official pub date of April 20… if I hadn’t had a good reason to post something else yesterday, I would’ve played along with the gag!)
One of the two main reasons for the existence of The November Criminals: the fact that Washington, D.C., is a second-rate city. I mean this both pejoratively and as the most direct way of evoking its true character. You could argue that this was part of the intent of its founding—let’s build a city, the founders said, over this swamp, in political no-man’s land, to help defuse potential factional squabbles about state ownership of the Republic’s capital. Reasonable enough, then, that the resulting city would not be Paris or Rome (you can’t build Paris or Rome simply by willing it) but a place the likes of which I have yet to encounter outside of America.
The city with the most similar atmosphere—social stasis, an active and completely philistine attitude towards the arts, relative affluence, and a deep, uncomfortable silence about the past permeating everything—is Munich, the federal capital of Bavaria. D.C. is pretty, with copious greenery and flowers, a lot of sky, dainty Georgian and neoclassical architecture, mild weather (except for the summers, when its origins as a swamp become feverishly clear) and two rivers that—even in the worst days of their pollution—still meandered impressively among the buildings, bridges, and parkways of downtown.
D.C. is conspicuously not, however, beautiful.
21 April 2010 | guest authors |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
