John Wright, Utter Geekiness, and the Baptized Imagination

Guh. As a commentator observed:

I’d think you were joking if you hadn’t written a book where King Arthur was reincarnated as Batman.

No, seriously. If you've never read a John Wright novel, you've denied yourself a brain-sucking, universe-bending, magnificent mashup of the classical Western canon, sci-fi, and fantasy.

I mean--LOOK at it!

...I had also been toying with the idea of writing an Anti-Dan Brown novel, one where the Roman Catholic Church, through the Knights Templar, had indeed been engaged in a two-millennium-old secret war against Harvard Symbolists and other servants of Satan to save the world from vampires and werewolves and mummies and giants and astrologers. I envisioned the Church as secretly funding and organizing the Knights Templar like the special ops vampire hunters in VAN HELSING starring Kate Beckinsale.

The two ideas came together when I struck on the happy thought of having the millennium-old secret known to the Church, but not to the world, to be the existence of parallel timelines, where biblical history had gone differently.

By “Biblical history” I mean that the secret history of the world is what is written in the Bible, and in the parallel timelines history went differently: the giants come from a world where the Flood of Noah never happened, so they were not wiped out; vampires come from a world where Christ was never crucified; evil astrologers rule a world where the Tower of Babel was never smitten with the confusion of tongues; mummies rule the world where Moses never freed the Hebrews from Egyptian bondage; werewolves rule a world where Nebuchadnezzar never repented of his lycanthropy, but instead spread the affliction; immortals come from a world where Fallen Eve stole the fruit from the tree of life; and so on.

I also wanted to write a novel where the witchcraft is bad for a change. Compare the way witchcraft is treated in the characters, for example, of Willow Rosenberg from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and Serafina Pekkala from THE GOLDEN COMPASS and the Halliwell Sisters from CHARMED on the one hand versus the way witchcraft is treated in Samantha Stevens from BEWITCHED and Gillian Holroyd from BELL BOOK AND CANDLE and Eglantine Price from BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS on the other… Ditto for vampires and werewolves. I wanted to write a book where the monsters were, you now, bad. And one where the Christians were good. This is not because I am bigoted against monsters or particularly fond of Christians (all the ones I know are sinners), but just because I am weary of the stereotypes.

What genre does this fall under?

I have no idea...

And then he summarizes (ha!):

...What is the one-sentence synopsis of the book?

“After my boss, Professor Anthrope, Harvard Symbologist, escaped from the insane asylum, he send me a secret message revealing that his beautiful daughter, Verity, had broken into the basement of the Haunted Museum and found the Moebius Coil he had constructed there from plans transmitted to Earth from across the Sea of Uncreation during the CERN disaster, and he begged me to find her and stop her, before the Dark Tower of the Ur race cast its twilight shadow across our helpless globe; and so, borrowing my father the Templar exorcist’s switchblade crucifix relict and my grandfather’s antique Japanese sword, not to mention my squirrel gun, I rushed in to save the girl but managed to get myself yanked headfirst into this interdimensional bathtub drain; and then things started getting weird…”

That is almost one sentence...

He has a wife, you know.