A little interlude. Sometimes I’m a victim of my whims. In this case I’m well out of my usual area of interest, but I’m also drawn to large, interconnected projects, even when that interconnectedness is just a thin excuse. Where typically most people would recoil, because time is precious, I react in the opposite way and I’m drawn in. The discovery of yet another giant “hobby” that makes a world by itself.
So here I causally stumble onto another writer I’ve never heard about before, that would not generally be very interesting to me, as a writer of mostly thrillers blended with some horror vibes. Thrillers in general aren’t my thing, and horror was more meaningful when I was a kid, even then always the more conceptual side, like Lovecraft, or the artsy-gritty, like Tobe Hooper. Or Hellraiser, or Society, by Brian Yuzna. For me horror was always either aesthetic or concept. The reason I stumble on this other writer is because the concept of one of his series is actually cool: a fantasy setting with Lovecraft’s horror blended in. Not even some monsters in that style, but actual Cthulhu Mythos explicitly referenced. I guess not having copyright helps with that type of adoption.
Looking up the author I found a largish amount of other publications, split in different series. Stuff like action-thrillers, and YA series with zombies. Nothing especially noteworthy. But in one of the comments on the already mentioned fantasy trilogy I read that, as you move between the first and second volume, you realize, if you are familiar with the author, that there are a number of semi-hidden references to the other main series he wrote: “Joe Ledger”. Until those references become rather explicit. But, you see, Joe Ledger is a detective in the modern world, dealing with espionage, conspiracies… those sort of things. How do you link THAT with a fantasy series, especially one where Cthulhu casually walks around? The answer, directly from an interview with the author, is that the fantasy setting FOLLOWS the Joe Ledger modern-time series. It happens some 40k years later, after the world “ended” because of a “successful” zombie apocalypse, followed by a long ice age that reset the life on the planet, until humans appear again and then jumpstart the premise for this “upcoming” fantasy world.
But then the writer wasn’t satisfied, so started writing AT THE SAME TIME also a sci-fi trilogy with spaceships. Fighting once again against Cthulhu. Sadly, at this time only the first (relatively short) novel is out, and in this case there do not seem to be any actual references to THIS one book being in any way connected to the rest. I wonder… because it would be quite an exception.
The more I looked into this, the more I found out how EVERYTHING is connected. I thought at first it was just that silly 40k years connection between Joe Ledger and the fantasy trilogy. Looking at the wikipedia, “Kagen the Damned” is the fantasy trilogy (already completed, the wiki is outdated), the Joe Ledger series has 10 main books, then got an official spin-off “Joe Ledger – Rogue Team International”, as you can see the wiki lists three of them but a fourth comes out in a few days (early March), while the writer is instead writing the fifth… (by the way, remember the already mentioned sci-fi trilogy whose 1st book only is available? The writer is also currently writing… the third. Because the second comes out in May.)
I’m writing all this out of happenstance. I was casually watching this video, until it got to the part where another of Maberry’s book is mentioned, Glimpse. I was watching and thinking… wait, isn’t that name one of those writers I looked up recently? Maybe not, but instead it was. I had done this type of “research” on Maberry weeks ago, to figure out all of this, but this book specifically was left out of the picture because it’s clearly labeled as stand-alone. This time I type in google “maberry glimpse connected” and find a link to this interview: “My other doorway into writing this is the character of Monk Addison. He is a kind of private investigator who carries strange tattoos on his skin. I wrote four short stories about him, and then used him as a supporting character in my novel, Glimpse.” This referring to another standalone, Ink. But if THAT is related to everything else, then it means this one is TOO…
This book, Glimpse (that I continue to mistype as Glister), also has a very interesting first chapter, that I paste here in its entirety:
It’s like that sometimes.
It starts weird and in the wrong place.
This did.
Rain Thomas went to bed on Thursday and woke up on Saturday. She had no idea at all that someone had stolen a whole day from her until she arrived twenty-three hours and forty-eight minutes late for a job interview.
The interview did not go well.
Here we are. What follows is an unedited section of my notes about wordcounts of all the main novels part of this giant tapestry. Again, the connections here don’t really matter, but I like that type of flavor. It’s what gets my attention. Wordcounts here are quick and rough. I usually edit the files because, just as an example, some writers love using “. . .” and using those a lot can actually bloat the wordcount, along with other artifacts, excerpts of other novels at the end of the book, introductions, notes, appendices and so on. The numbers here are instead more roughly eyeballed, but generally still accurate enough. I approximated to -2k words as an estimation. The whole thing comes at over four million words. Not bad.
(as a note, one of the writers in a similar area I tracked was Greg Iles. This is also generally “thriller” but without supernatural or fantasy elements. Just bad men doing bad things. Ends up at seven volumes, the last three more interconnected than the previous, forming an internal trilogy. The last one being a massive 380k words and getting political…)
maberry
ledger
140
158
148
145
145
158
152
165
165
148
= 1.524
152
164
162
dead of
125
120
rot&ruin
110
115
100
112
–
110
95
= 1.365
pine
142
162
175
118 glimpse
122 ink
= 719
kagen
172
210
175
= 557
= 2800
= 4165
