#mina and basically every fucking vampire MUSE

[percentstardust]

my laptop died as i was working on abigail’s doc. i was just getting to her arc where she and her father ruin everyone’s lives in victorian england.

[rassilon-imprimatur]

A Guide to “A Bloody (and Public) Domaine,” my contribution to Faction Paradox: The Book of the Enemy

Faction Paradox: The Book of the Enemy was released by Obverse Books in January 2018 (already over a year ago, sheesh), and it included my first published short story, A Bloody (and Public) Domaine. Last March, Andrew Hickey published  a list of all the references to other stories (Faction, Doctor Who, or otherwise) in his Book of the Enemy story on his blog. Fellow Book of the Enemy contributor and good egg Nate Bumber followed suit with a rundown of references in his wonderful story, and the powerhouse that is Niki Haringsma has done the same with The Book of the Peace. 

I’ve had a fairly rough year beside really struggling to find any merit in my Book of the Enemy and Book of the Peace stories (a writer really is his own worst critic), but finally felt the gumption to dive in! This is a mix of some (not all) of the references in my story, as well as just some general commentary. I’ll be making a similar post for my Book of the Peace and connecting Dossier material next! 

Obviously, spoilers ahead. You should probably have read the story first. If you haven’t and still read through this, please purchase the book, available on the Obverse site! I’m not going through everything, just giving a little bit of commentary.

But first let me say, I will be forever grateful to the book’s editor Simon Bucher-Jones (@thebrakespearevoyage-blog), for taking such a big chance on me with this story, dealing with a rookie like me, and letting me play in his sandbox. An absolute gem of a human being. 

Enjoy!

“The black lessens, crumbles, an Empire sky of temporal red focuses.” A nod to the Eleven-Day Empire and my own assertion of the typical “look” of a Faction alter-time realm, the sky color taken from the Empire’s appearance in the Faction Paradox comic. 

“EXT: THE SHADOW SPIRE... (very Dr. Caligari meets Trying Too Hard).” I’m going to save most of what Auteur and his home Shadow Spire are references to for my Book of the Peace post, but, as a hint, basically picture a crumbling lighthouse as pencilled by the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip legend John Ridgeway... nudge nudge, wink wink. 

Gideon exists as little more than the audience of Auteur’s madness (and to die at the end), but I had fun sketching out this character. He’s a member of the Faction who doesn’t care that he is, a renegade Homeworlder that just had nowhere else to go. I think of all the possible characterizations of various Faction members, the idea of a member of the Houses rushing into the ideology they don’t believe in, embracing the aesthetic because they have no choice, is my favorite. Gideon has more recently received something of a second life in White Canvas by James Wylder. 

This story is set definitively before the Eleven-Day Empire’s destruction in The Faction Paradox Protocols. I felt this was the safer choice given the scope of the full anthology. I went the “definitely after the Eleven-Day Empire’s death” route in my Book of the Peace story.  

“A few Loa, smears of age as twisted as the Spire, swarm the peak like vultures.” Key to Faction Paradox lore and a rather damning example of the Faction’s appropriation of Haitian voodoo, the term “loa” (spirits) refer to the alter-time structures and temporal processes the Faction claim to worship. I have always interpreted them as the familiar gobbledygook we’d hear as “time orbits” or “temporal loops” from the Doct-AHEM-a certain time traveler, but from the Faction’s POV, very much alive. Which POV is accurate? That’s up to you. 

“A phonograph, straight out of Hammer, operating diligently on a shard of glittering sapphire.” Hammer Film Productions’ “Hammer Horror,” naturally. 

“Godfather Morlock’s Personal Record, kept on Phonograph.” Morlock is a major character in Faction lore, appearing in The Book of the War and the BBV Faction Paradox Protocols. He comes across as something of a creepy Victorian taxidermist and scientist, with unknown plans for the Faction and the War. Recording his musings on a phonograph is a reference to Dr. Jack Seward from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. 

Morlock’s account of Vlad the Impaler and the Celestis is all from The Book of the War, an earlier Faction Paradox use of the historic figure that rather interestingly asserts he can’t be Dracula. Believe it or not based on this story, I actually hate when modern Dracula adaptations or remakes try to make him Vlad directly. 

Mention of the Impaler’s “history tangling with the Incremental Effect,” is a reference to the Iris Wildthyme novella The Found World, published in Iris Wildthyme and Friends Investigate, one of my favorite Iris collections. You’ll actually see a lot of crossing with Miss Wildthyme in my stories. I’ve always felt the two series shared a fascinating relationship and rather love what wonderful recontextualization can happen when you view them as partners in crime as opposed to rivals or strangers. 

The “woman in a black dress and porcelain skin” is Lilith, and is, perhaps obviously, Lolita, the true villain of the series. More on her later. 

The timeline Morlock describes, a “What If Dracula Won?” scenario, starts as a soft reference to Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels before literally launching into space to become a reference to Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D series. 

“They embraced the flesh and blood and were proudly organic, with none of the clinical and pristine mathematics of the Ships of the Great Houses.” A lot of detail is often given to how the Great Houses despise their organic nature, and we know that the enemy have timeships of some fashion if we take Lolita’s word in Lawrence Miles’ Interference-interlude Toy Story as gospel. 

The stuttered “Ghost Point” is the period in the early 21st century where mankind’s limitless potential ground to a halt, effectively killing the advanced civilization humanity should have been. An interestingly important part of the series lore.

“Plus, Morlock can baise lui-même on a candlelit evening.” He can fuck himself. My dear friend Liria has very happily and comfortably let me know that my French is absolutely atrocious. I merely look to The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and hold my head high for maintaining a Faction Paradox tradition. 

I don’t know why the VHS tapes are “crumbling like mouldering Metsovone” because I swear I wrote that they were “crumbling like mortar” when sending my draft in. Either a) Simon has hidden a secret message throughout the entire book, b) I’m losing my mind, changed it and forgot it, or c) I’ve been infected by the either the enemy or the Houses in an attempt to replace my account of things with Grecian dairy. It is a more creative metaphor. 

The “Homeworlder Observer Effect” is just a term given to the Faction Paradox assertion in The Book of the War and The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic that the Great Houses literally force potential into reality by merely observing (while I’m taking cues and terminology from the loose concept scattered throughout the works of Lance Parkin, Kate Orman, and Jon Blum, most notably the unwritten novel Mentor, where an insane Time Lord could literally observe his own will and madness into reality). This plays a major part in my Book of the Peace story as well, so I’ll talk a bit about it there. 

I was a very late addition to the Book of the Enemy’s team, so literally any perceived intelligence and coalescence with my story’s metafictional take on Dracula and the rest of the book’s metafictional take on nearly every example of global literature and imagination is all Simon’s brilliance and the genius of the other contributors. I’ve probably shared a total of three words with anyone else in the book other than Nate. Simon turned all of this into a wonderful, organic unit, and it makes me absolutely proud to be a part, even if I’m still rather embarrassed by my contribution. Give them all the credit! 

“Mina Harker,” the inarguable and objective hero of Stoker’s Dracula. Van Helsing who?

“Brides of Dracula.” Hammer made exactly three good Dracula movies, and this is one of them, despite not actually having Dracula in it. It’s pretty much a feature length “Look How Badass Peter Cushing Is As Van Helsing, Guys.” 

“God’s gaze was nowhere near Bedfordshire that night.” As seen in The Book of the War’s superb take on Dronid (an element of the infamous serial Shada), things that remain unobserved by the Great Houses, either by choice or design, tend to become rather unhappy and miserable places (to put it lightly).

“Not quite the discrete puncture marks of legend” is a line said by Alan Moore’s take on Mina in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I then realized her crimson scarf could be seen as a reference to the comic as well, but I was actually intending to give a nod to the definitive Edward Gorey illustration. 

“Something cruel, built by invaders of metal and spite, digging too deeply and too greedily into Earth’s crust.” An absolutely subtle and completely obscure reference to another Peter Cushing film. 

“A History wrapped tightly into a coil of absence, locked in the rock and dark of the planet.” No comment other than a friendly reminder that the caldera, the lodestone of the structure of History, is described as an “absence” in The Book of the War, later clarified to be a “singularity” in Lawrence Burton’s Against Nature, invoking familiar thoughts of the mythic Eye of Harmony... 

“The aliens were rejected by that History, blown to smithereens, left to die in the streets and in their echoing control rooms.”

“Because he’s fucking Dracula. He’s not some evil god, or conquering demon. He’s a parasite, torn between trying to leech off society’s elite and building a goddamn harem.” Dracula is absolutely one of the greatest villains in all English literature but he is also absolutely abhorrent and literally every attempt to romanticize or “Badass” him into anything other than a diseased and rotting rapist need to show themselves out. 

“Lilith” again. A terrifying revelation in the Faction Paradox series is that the War between the enemy and the Great Houses is a distraction from the real threat to the universe. Her. This has, naturally, spurred theorizing and discussion over the years about whether or not Lolita created the enemy. That’s naturally what this story is implying, but this story is also a stapled together mess crafted by a mad Homeworlder. Lolita seemed very concerned about the enemy in her first appearance in Toy Story...

My interpretation of my story (and The Book of the Enemy as a whole) is that the enemy has so many identities and timelines and possibilities and metafictional infections that it has nonsense like this written around it as a sort of defense mechanism. Auteur’s bizarre narrative is an identity and story to be used as a drifting shield, a history the Houses could nuke to nothing and still leave the enemy happy and safe to continue Warring.

The “Very Fabric” is a cheeky nod to the “Very Fabric of Time and Space” from the Iris Wildthyme side of the universe, first seen in Paul Magrs’ Mad Dogs and Englishmen. 

“’Yssgaroth,’ she hissed, her tongue sliding through her razor teeth behind her mask, ‘the Taint which boils within you.’” The Yssgaroth first appeared in The Pit and were always meant to be a retcon and redefinition of the vague history and lore of the Vampires seen in 1980′s State of Decay. This approach was massively improved by Interference and The Book of the War (though I still assert Philip Purser-Hallard’s Predating the Predators is probably the definitive take on the bastards). 

“Queen Charlotte” was Lolita’s disguise and historical role in the Faction Paradox Protocols. The audios and other stories such as Hickey’s Head of State (and, I suppose, this one right here) show that Lolita takes on these “acting roles” throughout history. “Lady Waki” at first glance may, understandably, be seen as a misspelling of her role of Lady Wakai from The Book of the War, but “Waki” is actually the term for the antagonist/villain performance in Japanese “Noh” musical theatre. 

The blood of the Earth is the same “green pus” from Inferno, later implied to be the Yssgaroth taint in Interference’s assertion that Earth is built around an Yssgaroth bolthole. So what, is the Earth somehow a link to the centre of History, or an Yssgaroth bolthole? Can it possibly be both? 

Yes. 

“A new kind of History.” The literal definition of the enemy in The Book of the War and Lolita in BBV Faction audios. 

“Not like he has a copyright.” Hence the “Public Domaine” of the title. You are reading the work of a comedic genius. Though, the spelling of “Domaine” was Simon’s idea and I like it much better. 

Biodata looking like silver threads pops up a lot in what I write and I completely blame Kate Orman and Jon Blum’s seminal Unnatural History. That book changes a man. 

And there you have it! I’m still convinced that Simon Bucher-Jones is a wizard, as The Book of the Enemy somehow becoming centered on the idea of the enemy as a meta-fictional infection with dozens upon dozens of cobbled together narratives of myth and fact improves this mess of a story rather drastically, I think.