A lot of times, my novels will be catch-alls for everything I find interesting about a particular topic. Burn Me Deadly, for example, deals with dragons, and Blood Groove with both vampires and 1970s culture. Usually by the time I finish, I’ve burned out my intense interest in a sort of positive exorcism that gets the obsession out of me … Read More
Across the same river with The Idylls of the Queen
Alice Walker wrote The Same River Twice about the process of turning her novel The Color Purple into a movie. The title itself is a paraphrase of the philosopher Heraclitus, and is more fully translated as, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” In 2011, I wrote Dark Jenny, the third in my Eddie … Read More
Some Thoughts on the Chosen One
There is a concept, a hidden implication, in the original Star Trek series that James T. Kirk might not be unique. He might be merely one of many Starfleet captains out there boldly going, having amazing adventures across the galaxy. After all, the Enterprise is one of a dozen identical starships, and the rest are certainly not sitting in space … Read More
The Next Big Thing blog tour
My friend from the Heroic Fiction League on Facebook, Violette Malan, graciously invited me to participate in The Next Big Thing blog series. Each author answers the same set of questions, and passes them on to five more authors, who post their answers the following week and pass them on to five more authors, and so forth. You’ll find Violette’s … Read More
The Betrayal of Arthur and the scent of disdain
About five years ago, when I was first thinking about the story that became Dark Jenny, I began looking for books that dealt in a critical and scholarly way with the meaning of Arthurian stories. I’d read the basic, classic fiction texts–Le Morte d’Arthur, The Alliterative Morte Arthure, The Once and Future King, The Mists of Avalon, The Wicked Day–but … Read More
The Wicked Day: the weight of legend
It’s no secret that my new Eddie LaCrosse novel Dark Jenny (which hits stores tomorrow, March 29) draws its inspiration from Arthurian sources. So on the eve of its release I’d like to write about the straight Arthurian novel that’s so good, I wish I’d written it: Mary Stewart’s The Wicked Day. Stewart’s first three Arthurian novels (The Crystal Cave, … Read More
Lancelot du Lac: hiding meaning in plain sight
Recently I blogged about how John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur awakened my love for Arthurian stories. And while I continue to adore that film, I’ve also grown to love its polar opposite, an Arthurian film so minimal, as stark as Excalibur is voluptuous, that it’s hard to believe they basically tell the same tale: Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du … Read More
Thirty years of Excalibur
Thirty years ago the Arthurian myth first grabbed hold of me when I saw Excalibur on its initial release. Prior to that, I’d encountered King Arthur only through the Disneyfied Sword in the Stone, or the bloodless Technicolor epic Knights of the Round Table. John Boorman’s 1981 film was different: limbs were hacked off, breasts were bared and there was … Read More
Brother Blue (1921-2009)
Brother Blue passed away earlier this month at age 88. If you know of him at all, it’s probably from the George A. Romero film Knightriders. In this Arthurian story of jousting motorcyclists, Brother Blue played Merlin, advisor to King William (Ed Harris). He was the troubled king’s lone confidante, and the one person who understood William’s desire to maintain … Read More
Of Kings and Nobel Laureates
King Arthur is the vampire of fantasy. By that I mean that everyone has written about him, and he’s come full circle from vicious Dark Ages battle leader to tragic romance hero to YA fantasy fixture. To write about King Arthur is to stand in a line that starts in 1136 with Geoffrey of Monmouth and shows no signs of … Read More