David Dubrow

Author

Swords and Sorceries Volume 4

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My short story The Green Wood is featured in the new anthology Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 4.

Set in a fantasy version of ancient Rome, The Green Wood is an old-school swords-and-sorcery tale filled with action, intrigue, and black magic. It’s a real honor to have my name alongside tremendous talents like Adrian Cole, whose short story collection Tough Guys was one of my all-time favorite reads.

Here’s an excerpt of The Green Wood:

Grimacing at the ache in his shoulder, a pain so fierce that he feared a plague quill had pierced his lorica armor, Lior swung his spatha in a downward cut. The long, broad-bladed sword splintered the shaft of the pike that thrust at his side, and the dirt-grimed pikeman took the edge across his jaw, severing it. Shrieking, adding to the battle din, the man staggered back, clutching the crimson ruin of his face. Lior spurred his horse to trample him into the mire of blood and dirt.

Sweat streamed into Lior’s eyes, narrowed to slits against the glare of the sun. Byzantium’s 9th Cohort had struggled and strained and fought for every yard of earth since dawn, and now, at long last, he spied the crest of the hill past ranks of armored Gauls. If Byzantium reached the high ground, the battle would be all but won.

Renewed by the possibility of victory, Lior flicked the reins to charge forward. His exhausted horse reared, and its iron-shod hooves shattered the skulls of the enemy on its way down.

“Sticking our necks out a bit, aren’t we, sir?” shouted a voice behind him.

Lior grinned. “Perhaps a hair.”

Optio Albian rode up to his left. Not as tall as Lior, but twice as broad, with skin the color of brick and a jaw that jutted aggressively past his helm’s cheek-guards. “We’re too far ahead!”

“They’ll catch up!” Panting, Lior leaned cross-body to drive his sword’s point into the upper chest of a pikeman fumbling after a missed thrust.

“D’you see anyone else?” Albian hacked arms and heads with the workmanlike chops of a butcher. His entire right side was bathed in dust-caked blood from shoulder to sandal, and the horse beneath him rolled its battle-mad eyes, barely controlled by the pressure of his knees.

“When we reach the hilltop they’ll flock to us.”

“Not if we—“ Albian paused. “DOWN!”

Without hesitation, Lior threw himself forward, along the neck of his horse.

For the rest of the story, click here to get a copy of Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 4.

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Thomas Covenant: The First Two Trilogies

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A few weeks ago I plunged into a blast from the past: Lord Foul’s Bane, the first novel in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series by Stephen R. Donaldson. Between now and then I re-read the entire series. All ten books. I’ll admit that my interest flagged a bit by the last novel, but I enjoyed the experience and probably won’t repeat it any time soon.

Donaldson has characterized the series as a Jungian tale of swords and sorcery: first you defeat your enemy, then your enemy defeats you, then you become him. In the first trilogy, Thomas Covenant, the least-likely protagonist in fantasy fiction, defeats Lord Foul the Despiser because of his leprosy: there’s no horror that Foul can inflict on him that he hasn’t already experienced, no amount of loathing the Despiser can heap on him that he hasn’t already inflicted on himself. His numbness, impotence, and self-hatred became his armor, and his wedding ring, which he still wore despite his wife’s divorcing him for being a leper, became a talisman of incredible power. In the final pages of The Power That Preserves, the third book in the trilogy, Donaldson ends the question of whether or not Covenant has imagined his experiences by having the Land’s Creator save his life in the so-called “real” world. Covenant has conquered his demons, saved something larger than himself, and developed some integrity along the way. He learned how to forgive and accept forgiveness. Cowardice is no longer an option in his life. Alienation isn’t something he has to embrace. His travails, one would assume, are over. He’s defeated his enemy.

Except he hasn’t. Not really. In The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Covenant is stabbed in the real world to save his estranged wife’s life and, instants later, returns to the Land with a companion: an emotionally-damaged doctor named Linden Avery, who becomes a co-protagonist in the series. In the first book, The Wounded Land, we learn that Lord Foul has recovered from the injury done to him by Covenant, and has altered the Land in horrific ways. Instead of the natural cycle of the seasons, the Land goes through rapid successions of drought, pestilence, torrential rain, and accelerated fecundity. If the Land’s independent existence was proven in the first trilogy, in this second trilogy we learn, however obliquely, that the Land’s fate and condition nevertheless hinge upon the subconscious of people like Covenant and Linden. The Land’s plight is an echo of Linden’s injured psyche. The second book, The One Tree, is arguably the best in the series, not least because it takes us far away from the Land to see other cultures, other strange beings. Here, Linden finds that, like all of us, she’s capable of both terrible evil and selfless acts of healing, which sets her on the road to becoming a whole person. The plot reverses the standard fantasy trope of a quest to save the world, because in the end they fail (or think that they failed), and everything turns out wrong. By the time they return to the Land in the third book, White Gold Wielder, Covenant has a plan, and executes it. What makes this interesting in a meta-sense is that the conflict in the book doesn’t arise from Covenant’s plan failing, or even coming close to failure: it’s that Linden is afraid of what will happen if he succeeds. Pleasantly for everyone involved, Covenant does succeed, and even though Foul kills him, Foul is subsequently defeated and Linden heals both herself and the Land. Linden’s tragic, awful history doesn’t have to define her. She can love and accept love, she can be vulnerable without being killed.

I’ll wrap up this analysis of the Thomas Covenant series another time, and will address the Last Chronicles then.

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Going Home Again 2: Lord Foul’s Bane

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Some time ago I talked about rereading Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, or at least the first seven books of it. Today I’m going back to the well to discuss my reread of Lord Foul’s Bane, the first book in Stephen R. Donaldson’s series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

Though published in the 1970’s, the Thomas Covenant series still holds up as a classic of heroic fantasy, in large part because it reversed the common tropes of swords and sorcery novels by creating a horribly unlikable, impotent anti-hero as the protagonist. In this way Donaldson went further than Moorcock, who at least portrayed his anti-hero Elric as a powerful magician; by contrast, Thomas Covenant is a profoundly weak man who only uses power when physically forced to by others or, at the end of his physical and spiritual rope, to save a place that he himself considers imaginary.

As a protagonist, Covenant is as flawed as he is original. Before the events of Lord Foul’s Bane he contracts leprosy and as a result loses two fingers from his right hand. His wife divorces him, taking their infant son. His home town ostracizes him, terrified of the disease. Leprosy has become the single most important factor of his life, because if he gets injured, the injury may reawaken the leprosy in his bloodstream and cause him to quite literally rot away. Blindness, gangrene, loss of limbs: it’s horrible. And, at the time of the novels, incurable.

During a defiant trip to town he is knocked unconscious and awakens in a fantasy world called The Land where he’s considered the second coming of The Land’s greatest hero, Berek Halfhand. His wedding ring, which he stubbornly refused to take off after the divorce, is a talisman of powerful magic in this new realm. Everyone he meets is prepared to honor if not worship him. The Land’s greatest enemy, Lord Foul, gives him a message to take to the Lords of Revelstone, The Land’s leaders, warning them that he, Lord Foul, has returned after thousands of years to destroy everything.

Covenant rejects all of it. He doesn’t believe in The Land. He thinks it’s all a dream. And when he’s cured of his leprosy by a magic substance called hurtloam, he can’t handle the feeling of his nerves, once dead from leprosy, becoming reawakened. He rapes the young girl taking care of him and reluctantly goes to deliver Foul’s message to the Lords, guided by the mother of the girl he raped.

So we’re already in very strange territory: a leper rapist protagonist. He’s deliberately unlikable, cowardly, and weak. And yet we can’t help but understand him. He’s not a good man, but he’s not evil, either. We see incredible things through his eyes, but he’s almost never moved to take action. Can he save The Land? Can he save himself?

As fascinating as the book is, it’s not perfect. Reams have been written about the author’s use of terms like hebetude, desuetude, roynish, cymar, and hundreds of other words that most of us have never heard of. While many of Donaldson’s archaic and/or otherwise obscure terms can be divined through context, they take the reader out of the book. Much is made of Covenant’s “self-despite,” and the book’s main protagonist, Lord Foul, is called The Despiser. The problem is that a term like self-despite doesn’t have the same punch as “self-hatred”, which is what the author means. We’ve all experienced moments of self-hatred, usually after polishing off an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s. But we don’t suffer from self-despite. It’s not even a case of elevated diction: it’s wrong word choices, and the entire series suffers from it.

But not too much. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are too good not to read. Or reread. I myself have read it a half-dozen times since picking the series up in the mid-1980’s. Covenant’s personal quest, his weakness, the characters he meets, the places he goes: they’re all unforgettable, and the first book in the series, Lord Foul’s Bane, is the best. Donaldson introduces us to the semi-animist concept of Earthpower and then goes to show us how it can be used to do both great and awful things. Creatures like ur-viles, Waynhim, and Cavewights are vivid and disturbing, and the secondary characters are drawn in realistic terms, even if they speak in stilted, archaic English.

Lord Foul’s Bane is a gigantic book in both scope and ideas, and it deserves better than a surface discussion. It’s very much a polarizing work with many detractors. If you want to have a sad laugh, check out the Goodreads reviews of it; you’ll find many, many people who find the book…problematic. We’re not invited to love or even like Thomas Covenant. That’s not why he’s there. He’s an icon of human weakness, both a victim and a victimizer, and his adventures reflect the parts of us that we wish weren’t there. As both a teenager angry at the world and an adult who tries to practice gratitude every day I can still find much to love about this book. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but you should give it a try if you haven’t already.

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Going Home Again: The Elric Series

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Despite all the television I watched, I did manage to read some books over the last month or so. Well, that’s not quite true. I re-read a bunch of books. Sometimes you just want some comfort food, not the healthy stuff.

My love of reading began with fantasy novels: The Chronicles of Narnia. Unsurprisingly, I moved to The Lord of the Rings after that, but then things took a strange turn: I discovered a thick paperback book called The Swords Trilogy by Michael Moorcock. The cover had a barbarian-looking figure on the front with the tagline, It is the time of the conjunction of the Million Spheres, and all things are possible. I opened it to the first page and fell completely inside. I don’t know that I’ve actually come out again.

As a born completist, I devoured everything I could of Moorcock’s work, including the incomprehensible Jerry Cornelius novels and the less-exciting Bastable books. After my recent illness I decided to give Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels another read, now that I’m no longer young and fancy myself some kind of a writer. In the Going Home Again posts I’ll start with the Elric series, move to Hawkmoon, and end with Corum. When I first read them decades ago, I’d done Corum first, then Elric, then Hawkmoon. I still own all of my Michael Moorcock paperbacks, despite two cross-country moves. Some of them are over 35 years old.

Reams have been written about how subversive and anti-establishment the Elric stories were when they first came out in the early 1960’s. Moorcock created the character as a kind of Conan in reverse: while Robert E. Howard’s Conan was a huge, muscled warrior who steals riches, kills sorcerers, and seeks to claim a kingdom for himself, Elric was a weak albino who uses drugs to stay alive, invokes horrifying sorceries, and throws away a kingdom. In many respects the Elric stories serve as a metaphor for drug addiction: Elric’s dreadful sword Stormbringer keeps him strong, but it eats the souls of whoever it cuts and eventually kills everyone he ever loved, including Elric himself. Heavy stuff.

  • Book 1: Elric of Melnibone – This novel begins in dreamlike fashion, which is fitting because it takes place in a place called Imrryr, The Dreaming City. The first chapter is told in present tense, which adds to the ephemeral quality of the narrative. Elric, the emperor of the evil, decadent Melnibonean Empire, is the first ruler of his inhuman people to experience such things as conscience, which puts him at odds with both his subjects and, more importantly, his malevolent cousin Yyrkoon, who schemes to overthrow him and take Melnibone’s Ruby Throne for himself. It’s an exciting beginning to the series: Elric meets a sea deity of sorts; travels to a dark plane of existence where he meets the hero Rackhir, a former warrior-priest; and defeats his cousin with the help of the black sword Stormbringer. Then he does something completely incomprehensible: he abdicates his throne, sets the evil Yyrkoon on it as regent, and heads off to see the world, figuring he’d find himself and pick up his empire when he returns. The rest of the series could only move forward because Elric makes such a bizarre, foolish decision.
  • Book 2: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate – Probably the most fun book of the saga. Elric is marooned on a desert island and gets picked up by a ship sent specifically for him. On board the ship are other incarnations of the Eternal Champion: Corum, Erekose, and Hawkmoon, among many others. They go on a quest to repair the multiverse, so to speak, and Elric learns a bit about his destiny. From there, he meets Smiorgan Baldhead, a kind of pirate leader who becomes his friend, and with him, goes to acquire riches in the jungle. It’s got all the stuff you’d want in a fantasy novel, plus some trippy, bizarre bits you won’t find anywhere else.
  • Book 3: The Weird of the White Wolf – The first half of the saga comes to an end with this novel. Elric is now declared an enemy of Melnibone by his cousin Yyrkoon, who is naturally unsatisfied being merely a regent. So Elric goes to raid his former kingdom with a fleet of ships and rescue his lover Cymoril, Yyrkoon’s sister. Things don’t go as planned, despite Yyrkoon’s deserved end. Cymoril dies on the point of Stormbringer and Elric betrays everyone, including Smiorgan Baldhead. Melnibone is destroyed, her people scattered to the four winds. From there, he meets Moonglum, who becomes his friend throughout the remainder of the series, and clashes with the sorcerer Theleb K’aarna, who becomes a long-time enemy.
  • Book 4: The Vanishing Tower – Much of this book is taken up with Elric’s feud with Theleb K’aarna, who seeks to kill Elric out of spite and jealousy. Here, Elric’s always on the defensive. He travels to Tanelorn, a kind of holy city where weary heroes can find peace, only to learn that the city is in danger from Theleb’s horrible sorceries. Elric ends up meeting Corum and Erekose again in the Vanishing Tower, and saves Tanelorn, even though he knows he’ll never find the peace the city promises.
  • Book 5: The Bane of the Black Sword – This book’s a bit more scattered, but it sets things up for the end of the world. Elric has his final battle with Theleb K’aarna, reconciles with his Melnibonean people (who have taken up employment as mercenaries), and tries to settle down with his wife, a girl named Zarozinia. Then he must take up arms to save his new hometown, which will be overrun by a gigantic, terrible mercenary army led by an imprisoned sorcerer. We learn more about the forces of Chaos and how they plan to destroy the world. The best part of the book is the last story, which tells of Rackhir the Red Archer’s quest to save Tanelorn once again.
  • Book 6: Stormbringer – Here, everything comes to a close. Elric, who used to worship the Lords of Chaos, switches sides to fight on the side of Law. A new evil sorcerer rises as Elric’s opposite number: Jagreen Lern. It would’ve been better for Elric not to have killed Theleb K’aarna in the previous book so we could conclude the feud in this book; Theleb K’aarna and Jagreen Lern are pretty much the same person. Elric’s world is doomed. It can’t be saved. But if he defeats the forces of Chaos for the side of Law, the new world that will be created can be good and just. By the end of the book Elric has killed all of his friends and family, and is in turn slain by Stormbringer, who laughs and says, “Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!”

I know there are a number of other Elric novels, and I’ve read some of them: The Fortress of the Pearl, The Revenge of the Rose, The Dreamthief’s Daughter, etc. But I couldn’t get into them. Once the hero dies in the story, it’s not as much fun to read his prequels and such, especially those written long after the original tales. I did enjoy Elric at the End of Time, though, and the Michael Whelan cover illustration is, as all of his work tends to be, awesome.

I don’t know if my son will ever become the avid reader that I was, but if he does, I’ll steer him toward the Elric saga when he’s ready. It’s fun, angst-ridden fantasy that broke all the rules and set the stage for the many hundreds of books from hundreds of authors that came after.

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2017 in Review: Top Five Books

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Despite my writing proclivities I read across genres, and not just because I occasionally intend to review what I read. Most of what I’ve read this year I haven’t reviewed. Pleasantly, this year I’ve mostly figured out the trick of being a book author and a book reviewer: it’s reviewing the stuff you like and not reviewing the stuff you don’t like. Make no promises and you’ll alienate no one. Win-win.

Here are the top five books I’ve read this year.

  • 5: Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons and Dragons by Gary Witwer: One of the most transformative moments of my younger days was joining the high school’s D&D club and playing the RPGs I’d collected since age ten. There will always be a special place in my heart for Dungeons and Dragons, and this biography of Gary Gygax, D&D’s creator, unveils so much I didn’t know about the early days of the game. It gets a bit silly in parts with the dramatizations of moments in Gygax’s life, but overall it’s a must-read for D&D fans.
  • 4: The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild: Not dissimilar to Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian and Gary Jennings’s Aztec, Guild’s two novels about the life and times of Tiglath Ashur are riveting reading. Published in 1987, they’re as relevant today as when they were written, focusing on universal themes and unforgettable characters.
  • 3: My Tired Shadow by Joseph Hirsch: What can I say about this book that I haven’t already said in my review? The rise and fall and further descent of Ritchie “Redrum” Abruzzi is a classic story, well told. Full of brutal ugliness and intense pathos, it’s the kind of book you don’t see coming, like a shovel hook to the liver.
  • 2: Night of the Furies by David Angsten: The sequel to Angsten’s amazing Dark Gold, it continues the adventures of Jack Duran, who is once again plunged into terrifying adventures by his scholarly but irresponsible brother Dan. This time the action moves to the Greek isles, where the old gods are still in charge. Once I got to the last third, the titular Night, I could not put the book down. Fast-reading and mind-ripping, it rekindled that sense of Hellenic magic and danger I remember from Mary Renault’s The King Must Die.
  • 1: Tough Guys by Adrian Cole: I wasn’t half-finished reading Tough Guys when I knew that it was likely going to be my favorite book of the year. In every story in the collection the writing is sharp, the plotting is tight, and every scene builds on the next, tightening the nerves until the conclusion. Characters like Oil-Gun Eddy and Razorjack echo in the imagination long after the book’s done. I can only compare Cole’s work to writers like Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock with the highest respect and admiration. If you read nothing else this or any other year, read Tough Guys. I can’t believe Cole isn’t a household name in every fantasy/horror fan’s lexicon.

Only one horror book in the favorites pack this year, though it was the top one. What surprises does 2018 have in store?

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Interview With R.M. Huffman

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I very much enjoyed R.M. Huffman’s novel Leviathan: Book One of the Antediluvian Legacy, and it was an honor to have the opportunity to ask Dr. Huffman some questions about his life, his work, and his faith, all of which figure prominently in his writing.

You’re a practicing physician, writer, illustrator, husband, and father of four small children. How do you find time to create?

I started writing the book that became Leviathan when I was an intern. Every few days I’d be post-call, which means I’d have most of the day off after spending the night at the hospital, and – this is the key part – I can’t take naps. I’ve just never been able to do it. Writing turned out to be a relaxing sort of thing I could do while resting on the couch, sometimes with a baby sleeping on me, and at some point during my residency I had done enough of it that I had an entire manuscript. These days, the writing is a bit lower on the priority list and gets done a couple hundred words at a time, early in the morning or late at night or if I have a long break between cases. It’s slow going, but it goes, and I’ve written 75K+ words in the sequel (and about 10K in book 3). The cliched-but-true moral of this story: if I can do this, anybody can.

RMHuffmanYou’ve mentioned C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as influences on your world-building. Who are some of your other favorite fantasy authors?

My favorite current (urban) fantasy series is The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. His world-building is top-notch, and he’s kept it consistently entertaining for fourteen or fifteen books now. Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories probably have the most “pre-flood world” flavor of any well-known fantasy setting, but my favorite character of his is Solomon Kane, whose somber, no-nonsense Puritanical attitude and wandering monster-killing ways probably seeped into Noah’s characterization, especially in book 2.

If there’s anything philosophical or theological you’d like readers to take away from Leviathan, what would it be?

That the plain text of Genesis 2 through 6 is completely fascinating and deserving of more interest and study than it gets now, which is virtually nil. Also, half-angel giants riding dinosaurs is almost certainly a thing that really happened.

How far do you plan to take The Antediluvian Legacy series? To the building of the Ark?  The Flood and beyond? 

The series is planned to be a trilogy, and book 3 will include the building of the ark, the flood, and the immediate aftermath. The last third or so of the book will be the “Noah’s ark” narrative that’s familiar to most people, but hopefully with an emotional and historical context that will make it more harrowing and compelling than the typical smiling, white-bearded-man-with-happy-giraffes Sunday School version of the story.

You’ve made many of the Naphil characters in Leviathan decent, moral people, but the Lord sends the Flood, in part, to clear the world of Nephilim.  How can the modern reader square God’s erasing of the Nephilim from the Earth with the idea that the Nephilim are not responsible for their parentage?  Doesn’t that seem unjust?

The Nephilim are described as “heroes of old, men of renown,” so I felt like it was reasonable, at least initially, to depict them as such. Now, because of the worldwide judgment of the flood, we know that they eventually become irredeemably evil, but so did everyone else. I get into this in the books, but I do think that there were probably a great many pre-flood folks, Nephilim included, who clung faithfully to a God-fearing morality and were killed for it, much like Christians under Nero or Jews in the Holocaust or [pick another of many awful examples throughout history]. Anyway, I don’t believe that the Nephilim were necessarily condemned by their parentage (at least, the text of Genesis doesn’t state such a thing). It does seem that a driving motivation for Joshua-era Israel’s mandate to destroy the inhabitants of the promised land could have been that many of them were of the “…and also afterwards” Nephilim ilk (Rephaim, Emim, Zamzummin, Anakim – see Deuteronomy chapter 2), but Leviathaneven then, cultural depravity was likely the main (or only) factor. However it ultimately went down, I know that 1) God is perfectly just, 2) Genesis 6 gives very little specific information about either the Nephilim or the global depravity that demanded that a just God destroy the earth, which means that 3) despite any semblance of unfairness, if we had complete information about the societal milieu and individual behaviors of the antediluvian world immediately preceding the flood, we would have no doubt that destroying the world was a just God’s only option. In fact, that’s going to be the challenge in the third book: how does one depict a world that becomes so bad that the reader feels a sense of massive relief and cathartic satisfaction when the flood judgment finally does come? Hint: it’ll be a bit worse than “Noah’s neighbors make fun of him while he’s building the ark.”

Many people consider Creationism to be anti-science.  How do you reconcile being a practicing anesthesiologist and a Creationist?

This deserves a 10,000 word answer that encompasses epistemology, the original text of Genesis, the nature of “macro-” versus “micro-” evolution, and the history of scientific philosophy beginning with James Hutton and uniformitarianism, but I’ll just hit the high points. An “evolutionary biologist” is a scientist in the sense that someone fluent in Orcish or Klingon is a philologist, and the works of Richard Dawkins are comparable to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. It’s worth noting the difference between empirical science (experimental, measurable, repeatable, responsible for antibiotics and airplanes) and historical science (data is interpreted within an axiomatic paradigm). Whether one is a creationist or a Darwinist depends not on evidence, but interpretation of the evidence, which becomes a philosophical matter, not a scientific one. As a Christian, my axiom is “the Bible is authoritative in every respect,” and its explanatory power as relates to everything from natural history to human behavior is immensely satisfactory. As far as Biblical creation being an idea that’s “anti-science,” the following people would disagree: Newton, Kepler, Mendel, Pasteur, Pascal, Cuvier, Faraday, Kelvin, Boyle, Linnaeus, and Francis Bacon, who came up with the concept of the modern scientific method in the first place. Anesthesiology is a pragmatic medical specialty (for example, do you know how modern volatile anesthetic gas works? Neither does anybody else, but it does! Hooray for the Manhattan project, where its chemistry was developed!) and not particularly beholden to belief about origins, but as a physician, I’ll say this: the idea that the self-replicating, self-healing, autoregulating, sentient machine that is the human body is a product of chance mutations of a spontaneously-arising functional DNA/protein interface is scientific nonsense. Mutations cause trisomies and cancer, and the number of known mutations that have been found to be both beneficial to survival and additive to a genome is exactly zero. A Creator with intelligence beyond our capacity to comprehend is the only reasonable conclusion; in fact, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, strongly rejected belief in God but had such a problem with the materialistic origin of life that he ended up espousing panspermia, the idea that life on earth was seeded by aliens.

So, that was only like a 5,000 word answer. Even shorter: it isn’t hard, and those people are silly.

What were the hardest parts of the novel to write?  The easiest?

Hardest: romantic stuff. Easiest: violent encounters between prehistoric beasts and people with cool weapons.

Tell us about your Sweet Tooth series.  Are you more comfortable writing that sort of lighthearted humor than the serious material in Leviathan?Sweettooth

Sweet Tooth originated from the (hilarious!) idea that the glucose-laden blood of an uncontrolled diabetic would be like candy to a vampire. I wrote the story, I was highly entertained by doing so, and I did five more with the same character. They’re sort of urban fantasy/horror with, yes, lighthearted humor, each one with a different holiday theme. I did find them easier to write, actually. With these, I didn’t have to worry about anachronisms or avoiding modern idioms or creating a fantasy setting, and with a protagonist who’s a sarcastic vampire doctor and myself being two out of three of those, I pretty much just used my own voice. I’m biased, of course, but I have to say, I think most people would like them and find them to be subversively clever.

When Noah speaks, do you imagine him having the voice of John Huston in The Bible: In the Beginning… or Russell Crowe in Noah? 

Great question. I’m honestly not sure, but I figure I’ll find out when Mel Gibson, bringing his Braveheart/Passion of the Christ/Apocalypto directorial sensibilities and playing the part of Methuselah, casts the Antediluvian Legacy movies (filmed back-to-back-to-back, of course).

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