I’m not the first writer or artist to be inspired by my region of the country. Anne Rice lived in New Orleans and set her vampire novels there. Charlaine Harris, whose Southern Vampire novels formed the basis for HBO’s True Blood series lived in Magnolia, Arkansas, the same small college town where I’ve lived and taught these past few years, until a fairly short time ago. The locales of her stories are familiar to me. Walt Disney was apparently quite fond of New Orleans. The part of Disneyland that serves as the home for the iconic Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean rides is called New Orleans Square. New Orleans was one of the locations Disney considered for Disney World. The Princess Frog was produced long after Disney’s death, but the stylized vision of New Orleans presented there is vintage Disney. Stephen King’s The Green Mile is set in a fictitious Louisiana parish. (Louisiana has parishes, not counties.) I told you last week about Mike Casey’s Chinchuba novel with its own depiction of New Orleans and the surrounding environs. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that so many of the novels set in my region of the world are horror novels or, (as in the case of The Green Mile) supernatural novels at least. I can understand some of the reasons for that. We have some colorful places.
The summer before I wrote that second draft of Intrepid Force, I went to New Orleans on a church youth trip. I was seventeen at the time. The French Quarter, especially, struck me as a place of history and legend. The architecture, with its ironwork, gas lamps, and shutters, looked more European than American. It had ancient oaks bearded with Spanish moss and palm trees. Some of the buildings had courtyards with fountains. The city had a seamier side. I saw strip clubs, voodoo shops, and men in drag. Because of the high water table, cemeteries had above-ground crypts. Bones, I was told, were sometimes stolen from them for use in voodoo rituals. One of my friends told me he had gone through a Halloween haunted house in New Orleans once and had been chased by a man with a real, fully operational chainsaw. I can neither verify nor deny his account. For some reason, the idea of locating a science fiction novel in that kind of place didn’t seem odd to me. It anchored my futuristic world to the real world and added a gothic science fiction flavor (a la Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes) to my story.
P.S. Intrepid Force is available at https://www.amazon.com/Intrepid-Force-Timothy-D-Wise/dp/0972554904/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509361367&sr=1-5.