Court of Twilight is, for all intents and purposes, a a story of a girl who goes looking for her missing flatmate - and ends up finding an entire society of hidden beings living in Dublin, under the unsuspecting noses of most of the city’s inhabitants. It’s a story about isolation, friendship and family, and whether being a hero is still a good thing to be if you’re risking yourself for someone you don’t know all that well. Ideas that ended up in Court of Twilight came from all over the map. (It was written all over the map as well - the idea that became the novel started in New Zealand, the first draft was written almost two years later in North Carolina and West Virginia, and was finished and revised in Alaska. And some of the editing was done in the linen storage locker of a boat in Mexico.)
One idea I had for this blog was to briefly touch on a few of the elements that went into the novel - where the idea came from, why I thought it was appealing, and how I incorporated it into the story. In as non-spoilerey a way as possible, hopefully. And for the first topic -well, let’s say there is a reason why two of the three characters pictured on Court of Twilight’s front cover are translucent.
I’ve heard writing described as writers are fashioning the books that they themselves want to read - or would have wanted to read as children, if they’re writing for a younger crowd. Writers are our own book’s first audience. If we want to write something that’s meaningful to other people, it first has to be meaningful to us. I also think this applies to writers who are trying to add scary or unsettling elements into their books. If a writer is going to write something unsettling - it has to be unsettling to the writer, first.
I have been frightened by invisible thing since I was a kid. It didn’t matter what it was, I was always much less frightened of monsters that I could see and give a name to than to anything that remained unseen and undefinable. The best example is in the TV shows that scared the daylights out of me as a kid. One was the classic Star Trek episode Devil in the Dark. In the episode, Kirk and Spock are trapped in a mine, trying to evade an apparently murderous alien life form made of rock, and also trying to repair a sabotaged nuclear reactor that’s only hours away from exploding. Perhaps, compared to current CGI monsters, the rock alien the Horta looks more comical than dangerous. But at seven years old it sure scared the dickens out of me. I remember being afraid to go to sleep because I was certain that the alien (who actually turns out to be a sympathetic character by the end of the episode) was going to tunnel through my bedroom wall and eat me. Hidden in the rock, it could travel anywhere - and you wouldn’t know until it was too late.
I also watched a lot of old-school Doctor Who - mostly the Tom Baker years - back when the only way to get ahold of such things was through battered VHS tapes ordered from obscure branches of the county library system. One of my favorite episodes was the Pyramids of Mars. The episode features mind control, killer robots disguised as mummies, and trapped evil alien entities posing as Egyptian Gods. But to me, the scariest thing I remember about the episode was actually a force field.
Just that. Not the mummies or the explosions, the villainous Sutek or the archaeologist he’s possessed. The force field. Because traditional monsters, you can run from those. You can fight them, or outwit them, or negotiate with them, or any of the other things that Doctor Who and his companions did so well on screen. But it’s hard to do any of that when you can’t even see what it is you’re supposed to be fighting. It’s less like fighting an enemy, and more like a force of nature. Something you can’t see, or hear, or touch. Something that constrains your options, locks you in, and isn’t interested in having any sort of gloating conversations while your hero is stalling for time. It just is. You can’t fight it, you can only withstand it or work around it. And it’s an idea that I think has popped up in many of the characters - good and bad - that populate Court of Twilight.
Sound intriguing? I hope so. I'll be posting a little more about some of other elements that ended up in the novel - from Irish and Scottish folklore, to psychological theories about what we pay attention to and why - in the coming weeks.
