Eventually, it just becomes part of life, because you can’t lock yourself away in the basement with canned food forever. It’s no wonder people went nuts for a while.īut as time went by, we all got used to the fear, the same way we got used to the fear of nuclear holocaust in the 80’s, or got used to the coming of night.
Every time you tried to calm down and just make dinner, the government raised the color alert code, or there was a special news report on bioterrorism or dirty bombs. I think it’s part of our genetic code to make up ominous shapes in the darkness.īut I was going for something a little more than that, using darkness and demons as a metaphor for the way I and many of my fellow New Yorkers (not to mention countless people worldwide) felt after September 11.Įverywhere you turned, there was someone telling you to be afraid, that nothing and nowhere was safe. The concept of night being the time when the monsters come out is something addressed in most every culture’s folklore and mythology, as anyone who’s ever heard a vampire or werewolf story can tell you. Overcoming darkness has spurred countless inventions and advancements throughout human history, and yet even now we can’t do some things at night, and a simple power outage quickly reminds us that humans were meant to be diurnal.
We’re vulnerable in the dark, and we don’t care for that feeling one bit. I think on the purest level, mankind has been at war with the dark since the beginning of time. Where did the concept of an eternal battle at night come from, and how did just putting it out there free you as a writer? You immediately tell us that at least on the surface what the cause of conflict is on your world, and even just remove it as a conflict and make it merely everyday life. I want to welcome Peter as we talk terror, Shogun, an overdue CS Friedman shout out, and I even snuck in the Postman!! The Warded Man is the first of three books that Brett has on tap for us (the next being The Desert Spear), and one that I really enjoyed and will get into a bit in a future column. It was released in the UK last year as the Painted Man. Peter Brett’s debut, The Warded Man, is scheduled to hit U.S shelves tomorrow and is published by Del Rey.
0 kommentar(er)
