Urbantasm Book Three The Darkest Road by Connor Coyne - General Fiction / Young Adult - Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the third book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan. It will be published in September, 2021.
Interview with Connor Coyne
Tell us about your
newest book.
The Darkest Road is
the third book in the Urbantasm
series, which follows John Bridge and his young friends as they tangle with
magical drugs, threatening strangers, and youthful romance against the backdrop
of a decaying industrial city. The first
book, The Dying City, begins when
John steals a pair of strange blue sunglasses on the first day of junior high,
plunging him into conflict with a mysterious man with a knife.
As grim as the first two books get, however, the third book
is even more defined by its darknesses and shadowy spaces. The protagonists are
in high school now. Their earlier innocent loves have been replaced by tangles
with real emotional stakes. The dangers pursuing them have taken on an edge of
real menace and violence. The city is
disintegrating around them, with factory closures, serial killers, spree
arsonists, and a contaminated water supply. In the background, a nameless
figure appears to be pulling all of the strings. For the first time, it seems
that death is on the table.
Writing isn’t easy.
What was the most difficult thing you dealt with when writing your newest book?
I started writing the Urbantasm
series in 1996 at the age of 17, and I have been developing it ever since. Over
the course of 25 years, a project can take on a lot of baggage, logistical and
emotional. Moreover, the market is
always trying to steer you toward writing that is trendy, while your own
impulses are to never compromise. If you give into the first temptation, you
lose the soul of your story, but if you give into the second, you produce a lot
of bad writing that people don’t want to read.
The trick is in balancing the urgency of the story you need to tell and
the story your readers crave to read. This isn’t cut-and-dried; it involves a
thousand little judgment calls you have to make every time you sit down to edit
or revise. Keeping my focus on that important goal over so long was the most
challenging thing as I brought Urbantasm
to publication.
Tell us a little bit
about your writing career.
I started writing in 1987-ish, when my father bought an
IBM-286 computer with a word processor.
I got serious about it in high school, when I started writing plays for
local theater groups and poetry for student publications. I started Urbantasm early on, but it wasn’t until
after college that I realized that my real passion was for writing fiction.
In 2005, I went to the New School in New York to earn my MFA
in Creative Writing, and I got to work with extraordinary writers like Jeffery
Renard Allen and Mark Bibbins during my time there. In 2010, I published my first novel Hungry Rats, a second-person noir,
followed by Shattering Glass, a
psychedelic romp through a haunted college. I also put out Atlas, a collection of short stories. My nonfiction about my
hometown (and current home) of Flint, Michigan has been published by Vox.com, Belt Magazine, and elsewhere.
They say Hind-sight
is 20/20. If you could give advice to the writer you were the first time you
sat down to write, what would it be?
Don’t take yourself too seriously. Read the work of living
writers, and then get in touch with them. Don’t become too focused on writer
superstars; there are geniuses living a mile down the road. But I wouldn’t have listened to me; I thought
I had it all figured out.
What was your most
difficult scene to write?
I don’t want to give away the scenes where this has come
into play, but I think readers are able to recognize when a scene is written
from the heart and the gut.
My fiction isn’t autobiographical, but it is directly
inspired by my own experiences, and those of people close to me. When a writer writes about a complicated or
traumatic event, fiction overlaps with an act of witnessing: you’re essentially
saying this happened, and asking the
question: how do we act in a world where
this happens? It opens up a very
serious set of questions about authenticity, representation, social change,
history, and narrative. This is in
addition to the typical writerly questions -- “is this compelling dialogue?”
“does the action make sense?” “is this scene pushing the story forward?” --
which never go away. The challenges seem
insurmountable sometimes.
Are themes a big part
of your stories, or not so much?
Themes are a starting point for me. In Urbantasm, for example, two of the central themes are being young
and full-of-life in a place that is essentially dying, and the fact that all
living things are in a state of change and flux for their entire existence.
Once I had determined these themes, I started to discover the characters who
were going to explore them, then the actions they would take, and finally the
story they would create together.
What are you working
on now?
Until the fourth and final Urbantasm book is published, it is taking up a lot of my time and
energy.
However, I am also starting some sword-and-sorcery short
stories. They are set in an alternate
universe where the land of Lichigan is corrupted and contaminated by an
eldritch accountant. The main character is a woman named Shalm who has come
down out of the North with a fear of being discovered. There is a lot I’m still
figuring out, but I want it to be the same kind of glorious pulp I read when I
was younger, by the likes of Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber.
Is there a release
date planned?
Urbantasm, Book Four:
The Spring Storm will be published in May 2022.
I am going to submit the Lichigan stories to some sci-fi and
fantasy presses once they’re finished. If they pass on it, I’ll probably
self-publish sometime next year.
Who is your favorite
character from your own stories, and why?
Do you ever get the sense that certain characters aren’t
ever really created, but are discovered? That they exist in your imagination,
and in a weird way in reality, and that you can either write them right, or
write them wrong, but there’s very little you can take credit for in their
rendering except in perhaps recognizing and articulating their specialness.
There is a character introduced in Urbantasm, Book Three: The Darkest Road (although she has a cameo
in Book One) named May who is very dear to me.
She is deeply flawed, as are all of the characters in Urbantasm, but there is something in the
sincerity and clarity of her understanding of her world, and in her
understanding of kindness that I find very rare in the real world, and very
admirable. I often find myself trying to emulate May as I try to emulate real
people who I know and respect.
Most writers were
readers as children. What was your favorite book in grade school?
The Lord of the Rings
and Madeleine L’Engles Time Quartet
are the answers that have best stood the test of time. But I also read a billion Dragonlance paperbacks that haven’t held
up nearly as well.
What are your plans
for future projects?
Urbantasm has been
such a behemoth undertaking that I’m reluctant to take on anything huuuuuuge
for a while. But I’ve devoted the last
twenty years to writing literary fiction, and I’d like to spend more time
writing the sci-fi and fantasy that inspired me as a young reader. I like the idea of taking an experimental
literary approach to these genres, something that has been brilliantly realized
by the Octavia Butlers, Ursula LeGuins, and Patrick Rothfusses of the world. I’d kinda like to write an epic French Revolution-themed
fantasy with dinosaurs and giant squirrels.
Is there anything you
would like to add before we finish?
For 99.9% of writers, the work is not lucrative, and is
often isolating and unrecognized. So if
you read something and like it, please let the writer know. They will appreciate it more than you know.
Good luck with your
newest release, and thank you for being with us today.
Thank you!
Excerpt Book 3:
The summer dusk gave way to interstitial twilight. There was no sense in riding an hour back home in the dark just to turn around and come back the next morning. Instead, my friends and I bummed our way back to Camp Jellystone, where we got to camp in tents on the gravel and weeds off of the RV lot for five dollars a night. We sat around a fire and drank pop while the older actors – our mentors – went through six-packs of beer and homilized on their atheist Bibles. They quoted SNL routines, Monty Python, GURPS, Cthulhu, and the Digital Underground until we were all too tired to see straight. We all said goodnight and made our way back to our tents. But my tent had flooded during the week, and inside I found dead earwigs floating in slow circles.
I didn’t mind.
I was glad that this had happened.
I gathered up my sleeping bag, which Eddie had dropped off in the morning before heading back to Akawe, and stumbled back through the purple dark to Omara’s tent.
“Knock knock,” I said.
I heard her sigh. “You got your own tent, John.”
“Not tonight,” I said. “It’s flooded. Will you let me stay here?”
“Fine,” she said. “If this ever gets back to my dad, he’ll murder you.”
“I don’t think he will. I don’t think he’d murder a fly.”
She didn’t argue. She knew that I was right. She unzipped the tent and beckoned me inside.
In more than a year of going out, Omara and I hadn’t had sex. We hadn’t even been naked together. The driving thirst and curiosity that I had felt in seventh grade had been quenched by my confusing tumbles with Crystal. By my guilty nescience with Lucy. Still, here I was, sleeping bag in hand, stooped under the slope of the tent roof, wearing soccer shorts and a too-small t-shirt, and Omara stood before me, more stooped because she was taller than I was, her white panties and tank top bright against her dark skin. We unzipped our sleeping bags, made a bed between them, and lay down. Omara turned away from me, and I pressed into her back. I put my arm around her waist with my palm against her bare stomach. I could feel her shapes against mine, though there was still cloth between us.
“It was a long day today,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“We’d better get some sleep. It’s gonna be a long weekend. We got two more days to go. Then school. You know I got that job at the Olan Farm? It’s gonna be almost like this. I mean, I guess I’ll dress up like a milkmaid, like The Little House on the Prairie or something. But it’ll be acting, you know?”
I sighed.
“I’m not tired,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said. And then, in a burst: “I can’t stop thinking about that woman on your block. Who murdered her baby.”
I pushed myself against her. I held my breath. I said, “I can’t think about that. I mean. There’s nothing I can do about that. It makes me sick, but what does that even accomplish?”
“But doesn’t it just stick with you? The idea of it? How awful it –”
“I don’t want it to, okay? Anyway, it’s far away. We’re here now. Let’s stay here.”
“We can’t stay here.” I felt the tenseness in Omara’s back.
“Yeah. But someday, we’ll leave Akawe for good. And anyway. We aren’t there now.”
“Aren’t you afraid your dad’s gonna lose his job?”
“My father? Yeah. He’s already driving two hours each day ever since they transferred him to Canton. Ever since that strike ended last year, it seems like X is closing everything fast as they can. You know? I mean, they closed the Benedict Main. Most of the Old Benedict. Probably RAN, too. ‘Course, my aunt says they were going to close them all anyway.”
Omara laughed. A slight untensing. “Sounds like you have thought about it.”
“I think about lots of things a lot. Some things I don’t want to think about and some things I do. I mean, I think about you a lot.”
I was trying to move toward her. In, you know, ways. But she wasn’t taking the bait.
“Aren’t you afraid they won’t be able to pay for college?”
She’d finally succeeded. Omara’s fears had become my fears.
“No,” I said. “I mean, my mother is working at that new job at XAI. And even if my father gets laid off, he’s got options. Right? Transfer to other plants. Stuff like that. What about you? Why are you worried? Didn’t your grandparents get you a savings bond or something?”
“Yeah. But I keep thinking someone’s gonna open a trapdoor beneath me or something. I guess ... I guess I keep thinking I’ll believe in college when I get there. And not before. It just seems a bad idea to get my hopes up, you know?”
“You don’t have to worry about it for a while. It’s still years off. I mean, we just have to keep working, don’t we? It’ll happen. We just need to be patient or some shit, you know?”
The wind buffeted the tent over our heads. I could hear low talking outside. Low chuckles. Through the tent wall, I could see the embers of the fire flickering faintly. Some of the older actors would be slouching in their folding chairs until the sky started to gray with dawn. That was still several hours away. I listened to it for a long, slow minute.
“I do worry,” I confided. “I worry that something will happen that I don’t expect, and I’ll get stuck. That I’ll fail a class, fail a test I need to pass ... and I won’t get into college in Chicago, or I won’t get into college anywhere. I worry that my parents are lying about everything, and they can’t pay for shit. I worry that I’m just being set up to fail. I even worry ...” I caught my breath. Saying this all out loud was hard. Trusting a human being was hard. But at least I wasn’t looking into her eyes. At least the darkness of a September tent wrapped us and kept our secrets from everyone else.
“I worry,” I whispered, “that you’ll go away to college in Chicago, and I’ll be stuck in Akawe, and I’ll never get out.”
I heard a deep breath from Omara. I felt her belly raise beneath my cupped palm. She had fallen asleep, and I was grateful.
John Bridge is only two months into junior high and his previously boring life has already been turned upside-down. His best friend has gone missing, his father has been laid-off from the factory, and John keeps looking over his shoulder for a mysterious adversary: a man with a knife and some perfect blue sunglasses.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, John must now confront his complicated feelings for a classmate who has helped him out of one scrape after another, although he knows little about who she is and what she wants. What does it mean to want somebody? How can you want them if you don’t understand them? Does anybody understand anyone, ever? These are hard questions made harder in the struggling city of Akawe, where the factories are closing, the schools are closing, the schools are crumbling, and even the streetlights can’t be kept on all night.
John and his friends are only thirteen, but they are fighting for their lives and futures. Will they save Akawe, will they escape, or are they doomed? They might find their answers in an empty room… in a city with ten thousand abandoned houses, there will be plenty to choose from.
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin,
John doesn’t understand why the sunglasses are such a big deal, but everything, it seems, is on the table. Perhaps he accidentally offended the Chalks, a white supremacist gang trying to expand across the city. Maybe the feud involves his friend Selby, whose father died under mysterious circumstances. It could even have something to do with O-Sugar, a homegrown drug with the seeming ability to distort space. On the night before school began, a group of teenagers took O-Sugar and leapt to their deaths from an abandoned hospital.
John struggles to untangle these mysteries while adjusting to his new school, even as his parents confront looming unemployment and as his city fractures and burns.
About the Author:
Connor Coyne is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan.
His serial novel Urbantasm is winner of numerous awards. Hugo- and Nebula-nominee William Shunn has praised Urbantasm as “a novel of wonder and horror.”
Connor has also authored two other celebrated novels, Hungry Rats and Shattering Glass, as well as Atlas, a collection of short stories.
Connor’s essay “Bathtime” was included in the Picador anthology Voices from the Rust Belt. His work has been published by Vox.com, Belt Magazine, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere.
Connor is Director of Gothic Funk Press. He has served on the planning committee for the Flint Festival of Writers and represented Flint’s 7th Ward as its artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town grant. In 2007, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School.
Connor lives in Flint, Michigan less than a mile from the house where he grew up.
Urbantasm: http://urbantasm.com
Author Website: http://connorcoyne.com
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Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4218298.Connor_Coyne
nice cover
ReplyDeleteThank you! All of my covers are designed by Sam Perkins-Harbin of Forge22.com; he does beautiful work, specializing in steampunk and vaporwave designs.
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