Yatterings

Orbit has just started publishing the Dante Valentine series of novels. If you’re looking for a series of fast-paced books centred the eponymous central character with som efun trips on various horror tropes, then check these books out. I got the opportunity to ask Lilith Saintcrow some questions.

What made you create the character of Dante Valentine?

Dante really showed up on her own. Sometimes characters are made, but more often they coalesce out of thin air for me. I was just staring at a blank laptop screen one night when she leaned over and whispered in my ear. Of course, I only had a faint idea of who she was when she started whispering. So a lot of the process was letting Dante grow inside my head, getting to know her. During that time I watched a lot of Kill Bill and other “revenge” movies, and oddly enough Roman Polanski’s Ninth Gate, a wonderful little movie based on a book by Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of the best writers alive today. Plus I was reading Jacques Cazotte’s Devil in Love, which added a whole new fillip to the idea of someone caught in this trap of having to work for the Devil. It was a very organic process.

Is there a difficulty in writing strong female horror characters in the wake of Buffy?

On the one hand, yes–because the strong female horror characters now are all expected to fall into the Buffy pattern. They’re supposed to be smart mouth and solitary, not to mention have a love interest and being the best in their field. So there’s this set of expectations you either have to flaunt or ascribe to. On the other hand, there’s so much more to work with now that these subjects –paranormal activity and female strength — have been opened up, so it’s tremendously liberating to have this playground, so to speak. You have various gadgets that are futuristic, or purport to be, within a contemporary setting. Is this a comment upon real life or was it trying to push the boundaries of genre. I just never thought psychic phenomena or powers would ever displace the march of technological progress. Fictional societies that are all hard high-tech or “magic-only” never really ring true to me — the human factor must be balanced with the technological factor. So I was forced to think about different aspects of technology, about the way the world seems to be tending, in order to express this vision of a society where psionic power and sorcery is just a technology like anything else. Plus, I’m married to a mechanical engineer. So I find out all sorts of interesting things about How Things Work, as well as having a golden opportunity to do research close to home, so to speak.

How important is genre, especially in the light of the experiments to break boundaries down?

Genre’s both important and unimportant. You have to have rules,otherwise it’s all just a mishmash and the book doesn’t get shelved where people can find it. Genre conventions are really there for a reason, just like a cliche becomes a cliche because there’s a germ of truth in it. I believe very strongly in knowing the rules of one’s genre, just like I believe very strongly in knowing the rules of language and grammar.I think genre is unimportant in some ways too. I think one has to know the rules mostly in order to know how to break them. I take joy in subverting conventions, standing them on their heads. The real challenge in being a writer is playing the game in new ways, finding the loopholes and exploiting the rules to create something new.

Which writers do you read and what are your influences?

My absolute favorite writer is Tanith Lee, I comb used bookstores for her titles so I can give them to fellow readers. I am also constantly reading Gibbons’ Decline and Fall. My current reading is Philip Kerr, Marguerite Duras, and Noam Chomsky; plus I’m on a string of Napoleon biographies. I’m looking forward to the new biography of Talleyrand, too. I am fascinated by the Roman and Byzantine empires and by the French and Russian Revolutions, as well as military history and true crime. I also read a lot of noir and fantasy, science fiction, you name it. I’m an omnivorous reader, there’s not much printed matter I won’t try. I think all knowledge is useful, and it all informs the writer in me.

How did you deal with writing about archetypes and tropes, such as the Devil’s bargain, demons and necromancers? Do you feel trapped by the weight of writing or excited by it?

Tremendously excited! I wanted to subvert a lot of tropes and play with archetypes. I liked writing a character who has these phenomenal powers,but she has a mortgage to pay, problems just like everyone else. I intended the book to hew a lot closer to convention than it ended up doing–once I got to a certain point the characters just took over and ended up breaking a lot more rules than I was really comfortable with. I’m glad I’d reached a point in my writing where I could trust in the process, even if it was uncomfortable. There’s such a huge electrical charge to some of these issues–a bargain with someone you know is going to lie to you, the demon who falls in love, the ex-boyfriend with a heart of gold, the power of friendship and the cost of revenge. That charge is fuel for a writer. But at the end of the day, even writers of the fantastic are telling very simple stories at bottom. Every adult has made a bargain, or did something because they had to even though it wasn’t a rational choice. Everyone has friends they need to deal with, and things in their past they have to face. Everyone has wanted revenge in one form or another, at one point or another. All the archetypes and the tropes really boil down to very basic human stories.

How did you construct your world and its laws and events, such as the Awakening?

I actually cheat a great deal. The characters take care of all the heavy lifting, and I just have to write down what I see. I suppose that’s one of the benefits of reading so much history, I already had a framework for how events could be explained in a historical context. From there it just became a matter of what to explain, and how to stop the book from becoming a massive info-dump. The concept of the Awakening is something that rubs through in a lot of my writing. I am fascinated with the hundredth-monkey theory and the idea of a certain critical mass of a species kick-starting the whole species up a few evolutionary notches. So when I had to explain the Awakening in the context of Dante Valentine’s world, it all fell into place with the materials I had on hand.

What can we expect from Dante in future books?

Lots of action. I always knew this was a five-book series, and I knew the last three books involved Lucifer sticking his elegant nose into Dante’s life again. The chain of events that started with Santino escaping Hell did not end at the close of Working For The Devil, or even at the end of the second book. I actually hurried through the writing of the first two books a bit, so I could get to what I thought was the meat of the series–what happens when a human woman becomes the key to ruling Hell, what happens when the Devil makes a bargain that he can’t control the consequences of. We can also look forward to some secondary characters taking a bigger place in the limelight, in particular Lucas Villalobos. And there’s a certain little girl who’s all grown up and ready to start causing trouble. But I don’t want to give too much away.