Burning Effigies—Kendare Blake
Q: Secret crushes play a huge role in this book and in your chapter. Is this just a continued exploration of the theme of secrets, and masks, and hidden pain, or are the crushes communicating something else?
A: Yes. Burning Effigies was all about the anger. The hatred that Kirby created in his wake even in people who were disconnected from the act, and might not seem like they would or should be affected.
I can’t speak to the motives of the other girl having sex in the book, but I can tell you that for Alice, she does it because she wants it to be damaging. She’s angry and heartbroken. She isn’t even truly present while it’s happening; she’s thinking of Tyler, lying in his grave, and she’s left behind and in a way feels just as dead.
Before the shooting, Alice was a relatively good kid. Now she breaks into homes, and wants to do violence. Now she’s reckless with her body. She won’t really see the connection between these things of course. She isn’t doing it to make a point. But her life is the after-effect of Kirby’s actions. It is part of the havoc he has wreaked in lives that he never even thought about.
As for the theme of secrets, it is certainly a theme, but I didn’t realize that while writing. Alice’s secret crush was just good motivation. An unexpressed hope that will never get to be expressed.
Shaun speaks again: Courtney Summers was not able to participate in this interview, but I am intrigued by her chapter and how the “psychopath in training,” Nate may actually have been the only one who saw Kirby’s pathology. Is this a “takes one to know one” or is there just a difference between being mean and obnoxious and being truly sick and dangerous?
I wish I could answer this one, but I can’t speak for Courtney. You mentioned the theme of “everyone wears masks” earlier. Another theme I often explore is the idea that there’s no such thing as a villain. Very few people are ever totally evil, even the ones who believe they are. Maybe Nate recognized something of himself in Kirby, something he didn’t want to admit. Maybe Nate knew if their circumstances had been different, he could have been the shooter and Kirby the bully.
It’s an interesting question, but one I don’t think there’s a definitive answer for.
Shaun: could you also comment on the chapter from the gun’s point of view. Such a break in style from the other chapters. Why, as the editor, did you want to include this? Does this give us insight into Kirby, without Kirby have to tell us?
When Neal and Brendan proposed the idea of writing from the gun’s point of view, I was a little nervous. Something like that could be amazing or a disaster. But I’m a huge fan of Neal’s work, and I trusted he and Brendan could pull it off. And they did. I just love their story.
One of the criticisms I see from readers is that they were hoping for a story from Kirby’s point of view. I have a lot of reasons for not including such a story, though I did consider it, but the main reason was that nothing Kirby wrote would have been or could have been true. By the time he made the decision to kill his classmates, the way he viewed himself would have been so warped that he wouldn’t have been capable of honest self-examination. He might have seen himself as a villain, but as the other stories show, he wasn’t a villain so much as a screwed up human being who committed a horrific and unjustifiable crime.
The gun, however, is probably the closest we get to a story from Kirby’s POV. It senses his emotions, directly and without a filter. The gun can’t lie, it can’t embellish, it doesn’t know hyperbole. And if you look at the way Neal and Brendan created this story, I think the gun tells us a great deal about Kirby. The gun is created with a single purpose. Its drive is to fulfill that purpose. It is a gun. Guns are made to be fired. An unfired gun is a gun that has failed the one purpose for which it was created. I think it says a lot about what the gun senses from Kirby that the gun would rather its life’s purpose http://www.amazon.com/Violent-Ends-Shaun-David-Hutchinson-ebook/dp/B00TBKYIX0/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1447638221&sr=1-1&keywords=violent+endsremain unfulfilled than for Kirby to follow through with his plan.
THANK YOU TO ALL OF THE AUTHORS for participating.
