Black Gate

Epic fantasy has been and I think always will be a mainstay of the fantasy genre as a whole and it is for this which I am of course well-known thanks not only to my Dragonrealm saga, but also such shared worlds as Dragonlance, World of Warcraft, Pathfinder, Iron Kingdoms, and more. I certainly enjoy epic fantasy as well, naturally having read among so many others the Lord of the Rings. Still, as with most readers, I also enjoy a variety of other offerings in fantasy, especially urban fantasy… which leads me to Black City Saint.

I have delved a bit into urban fantasy in the past, most notably Frostwing. Still, although I utilized Chicago as the background in that novel and two others, never before Black City Saint has the city, its history, and the characters been so entwined. It’s far simpler to merely set a story in a modern setting that everyone knows and put in those touches that remind the reader where they are. More complex — and at the same time more exciting for me as the author — is to turn to a time period that, although not all that long ago, remains sharply different from that in which we live. Having grown up around the Chicago area, I had heard many of the names, many of the stories, concerning the prohibition era. Always a fan of the mystery genre, I assumed that I might use those stories in that way, but the notion of Nick Medea entered and changed everything.

I love the mixing of genres. Some of my favorite novels include mysteries with magic. It was therefore not at all surprising to me that I took a few steps farther than I had with my previous excursions into urban fantasy and introduced into Roaring Twenties Chicago possibly the least likely protagonist — St. George of dragon fame.

And, yes, the dragon came with him.

Adding a character such as St. George into the mix meant making certain that the world he lived in had even more depth. With his lengthy life, that meant research had to go back beyond the Roaring 20s, which in turn brought into the story new elements that not only helped cement character development, but added to the depth of the city itself. The actual history of Chicago became a character of its own, molding the story and the protagonists in the process.

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“One might not think of our city as a muse,” began a recent review of my first YA horror novel The Midnight Games in a Hamilton magazine. But if you ask me, good horror novels, because they assume that monstrous secrets lurk behind the facades of everyday life, always convey a strong sense of place: I’m thinking of the New York City of Whitley Streiber’s The Wolfen, the Los Angeles of Robert McCammon’s They Thirst, or even the east coast gothic of Tim Wynne-Jones’ Odd’s End (which is an archetypical Canadian production — a horror novel about real estate).

In any case, Hamilton, Ontario, just southwest of Toronto, is a grimy little city that, like a lot of its relatives in the USA, dearly misses the great days of its industries (in this case, steel); days that have passed and that will not return again. One result of this is a working class culture, deeply depressed, that tends towards the nostalgic, and by nature I am a relentless optimist who regards nostalgia with a distaste approaching revulsion. For all that, I’ve lived in Hamilton since 2002 and the city has been good to me in many ways; let’s just say it’s enabled me to write a lot of books.

One day a local Hamilton publisher, Noelle Allen, put out a Facebook call for Hamilton-based books on behalf of her company, Wolsak & Wynn. I replied, “What we need is a horror novel, set in Hamilton, that people will read on the bus.” I volunteered to write such a novel.

Like it or not, for the past twelve years my family and I have lived a couple of blocks from Ivor Wynne, the local football stadium, and we hear all the noise from the Tiger Cats games. So I began a novel in which my protagonist hears a racket from the stadium at night, which he thinks of as “midnight games.” However, they are not games at all, but the cruel ceremonies of a local cult which is trying to summon to earth the Great Old Ones of the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos; trying with what turns out to be a fair degree of success.

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