Black Womb | Behind the Books

Of all of my books, Black Womb has been consistently the hardest to pin down and say “this is why I wrote this” or “this was the inspiration for this.” Later books I can do that no problem, especially after I became a full-time writer. There’s something about being a full-time writer that makes your brain work differently: when an idea comes to me that I could work into a novel, a series of checks and levers get pulled and prodded in my brain. The idea goes through the loops of the Story Circle and Four-Corner Opposition and Theme and what it will say and how that statement will fit into my larger body of work.

In other words, later novels I can point to something and say “that, right there, is where I got the idea for this” because those ideas came from a much more concrete inspiration point.

Black Womb on the other hand, feels like this confluence of events that all conspired in just the right way and in just the right form in order to produce itself. So it’s hard to know where to start. Every other book I’ve written comes from an idea, but this came about as a novel in search of an idea. I’ll try to explain.

When I was a kid in the late ‘90s I loved reading. I loved reading books, I loved reading comics, I loved reading anything I could get my hands on. And like a lot of kids who grew up with parents liberal enough to let them read comics, I dreamed of someday getting to write my own and create my own characters. Maybe as a part of a larger universe like the Marvel Universe, or maybe on my own, like the people who started Image.

I filled notebooks with character sketches and story ideas and thoughts for what plots I could write. All of them were simple, and all of them were quite bad. They were all standard superhero fare that, had it ever been made, would have been wholly unoriginal, but in my head it formed this vast mythology I was crafting, a chronology and a universe onto itself. There was a huge league of heroes in this tale, all a part of a multi-faceted team called Infinity, a name that I would later use when co-authoring a series with my wife-to-be Ellen Curtis. The team had factions and dynamics and personal tensions that made them rich and real to me, like the soap-opera inspired dynamics of the X-Men I grew up reading and watching.

At the same time as this was happening, something was changing in comics, and I wonder if these changes had been happening at any other point in my life if things would have turned out differently. It was breaching into the year 2001, and several things were happening. Smallville was a big hit on television, detailing the origins of a young Superman in high school. Paul Jenkins was releasing Origin, the telling of the origin of the X-Men’s Wolverine character. And Brian Michael Bendis was re-launching Spider-Man as a kid in high school with smart, realistic writing and dialog in Ultimate Spider-Man.

It was all leading me to one conclusion: origins were in. Smart, well-written and especially well-dialoged origins showing the read life struggles and grounded conflicts of characters that would later become superheroes was the way to go, suddenly. And, inspired by this, I looked through my cast of characters to find one that might be applicable, and landed on a shadowy character who was always on the outskirts of the team, conflicting with them. A character named for two books on my bookshelf that had been next to each other: “The Xander Files” and “Nancy Drew”: Xander Drew, the Black Womb.

So I wanted a tragic origin for this character. As an “adult” they were very much a shape-shifter that, if pushed too far, would lose control of themselves in a Hulk-or-Wolverine-like fashion. His look was based on nightmares I’d had as a child, nightmares where this black mass of shadowy flesh in the shape of a man would walk towards me. In imagining the character into my stories and making it my own, I took control of whatever part of my imagination was making that thing. I turned the nightmare into a thing of my invention, a thing I controlled. But those nightmare visions solidified the horror nature of the character, and the namesake of Nancy Drew brought with it the idea that these would be mysteries. Horror Mysteries starring a young person with powers.

See what I mean when I say it’s hard to pin down the exact origins of this novel?

I knew I wanted to origin to be tragic. Origin by Paul Jenkins was immensely sad and tragic, with very little superhero fare, and it was all the better for it. That really set the order of the day. And at the time, there was a lot of violence in my world that must have influenced me. Shootings at schools were just starting to become a thing, and 9/11 was either happening while I wrote the book or had just happened. In my memory I started writing Black Womb before Columbine, but looking at the dates, it must have happened mid-way through the writing of it. I remember being intensely effected by it, of being horrified.

So if the story of Black Womb was going to be high-school set like Smallville and Ultimate Spider-Man, and a tragedy like Origin, and a horror-mystery… throw in that Scream came out a few years prior and I think we have a pretty good venn-diagram of my influences for the story. It would be a murder mystery involving a killer that preyed upon the youth in a local school, the friends of young Xander Drew, only for it to be revealed (spoilers) that these were his powers first manifesting in a Jekyl-and-Hyde-type manner.

That was… solid. That makes sense, and would be a stark enough blow to motivate the character moving forward, and horrible enough that he would want to keep it secret. “Character with horrible secret in his past” was a trope I very much dug-on when I was that age. As a concept, that would work.

A few things are weird about this that I can’t explain. The first was what made me think to sit down and write it as a novel. To this point, all of my “story ideas” were just that: ideas. They were outlines, some detailed and some not, but all of them just scribbled on paper. None of them were actually written, but for some reason something about this story made me actually commit pen to paper and write it. Write it from the beginning, and keep writing it until the end. Something about this character, this concept, at this point in time made me take the leap from dealing with the characters as merely a thought exercise and now as a reality. I don’t know what did that, what made me decide that this, of all things, I would write. And not just write, to write as a novel, because that wasn’t how I’d envisioned these stories originally, remember. Inspired by comics, I’d imagined them as comics.

The other thing that’s weird is: this was supposed to be a one-off story. An origin that took place in the character’s past before jumping forward to the “main action” of his exploits as an adult… but the time skip never happened. I liked these characters too much this way, and I quickly realized, this was the story, not whatever nonsense I’d envisioned originally.

So that’s how the book came to be, and that’s a solid foundation. As a concept, that works. But what about the book itself? Does it hold up when I use the tools on it that I currently use to judge the works of my writing students, or the works that come through the doors during Engen’s submissions period?

Looking back at this book objectively is hard. Everyone wants to read your first book, everyone wants to start at the beginning, but what you’ll come to realize is that, by definition, your first book is the one you’ll look back on the hardest. By definition, you will have written your first book when you were the most inexperienced. Couple that with the fact that this is the first book in an ongoing narrative of books that is now at thirty-plus novels, and you’re compounded the issue: now in order for people to read book thirty, in which your writing has gotten quite good, they have to get through book one. Woof.

That said, I am often too hard on this book. It has some structure that works. Greatly inspired by the work of Brian Michael Bendis I wanted the dialog to sounds smart and real, and that still works. I like to say to this day that good dialog will paper over a lot of flaws in a narrative. If your character react to the weird twists and turns in your narrative in a realistic way, that helps sell that weirdness a lot.

Having been a reader all my life and someone who has always enjoyed digesting and understanding story, I came to even my first book with an innate knowledge of how story was supposed to function, even if I didn’t have the names for the tools at the time. Every scene ends on a point, every scene becomes important to the ongoing narration, even if they don’t start that way. Characters mill about aimlessly because it’s a book written about teenagers by a teenager… teenagers, at least back then, didn’t do much. We roamed around like wild dogs, looking for something to do and rarely ever finding it. We lacked agency and we were pained about it, and as such the characters in this book often start scenes lacking agency, only for the dialog to drive them into the direction of the plot. While the former listlessness is structurally bad, the fact that each scene goes from things that don’t matter to things that matter is good. Scenes should behave this way. An argument about the dishes should turn into an argument about who we are as people. It should start with the mundane and then reveal its point as it goes.

This novel nails its Four-Corner Opposition, and I would love to say I knew that going into it, but I just didn’t. It was by chance, a lucky accident that thankfully carried over into subsequent novels as a function of the cast carrying over. Xander was the main character and in his shoulders on every issue were Cathy Kennessy and Mike Harris, each of them forming part of a tug-of-war on his choices: Mike always pulling him towards action, Cathy always pulling him towards inaction and the nurturing of his well being and home life. Cathy in turn would always see the moral nuance of Xander’s Jekyl-and-Hyde situation, while Mike would not, coming to loathe Xander in many instances and always keeping the two friends at odds with one another, complicated by the fact that Xander shared Mike’s point-of-view on those matters.

The fourth slot in the Four-Corner Opposition would always change depending on the novel, that was a key element to it that kept it fresh. In that first novel it was Sara Johnson, and in some ways the remainder of the Coral Beach Casefiles series is the remaining trio struggling to fill that gap in their dynamic created by her loss. (Spoilers for this almost 20-year old novel).

Where does this book fumble? It fumbles in its Story Circle, and as someone who very much believes in it as an adult, it is what makes me look back the most harshly on this text. In this books – and in my own – defense though, it comes by these flaws naturally as a result of its genre.

One of the main criticisms of the Horror genre is that its characters lack agency. This is actually a problem, and a difficult hurdle to overcome. In a Story Circle, the character is living their normal lives and wants something to change, and they take steps (Enter Unfamiliar Situations) to achieve those goals. But in the Horror genre, especially the Slasher genre, characters don’t have the opportunity to do that. Characters in Slasher narratives want to stay in their normal lives, and some external force enters them to change their lives unwillingly, or even end them. This is why it is often criticized that in Horror narratives – especially franchises with many sequels – it is the killer who has all of the agency.

Because for the majority of the narrative Xander, Mike, Cathy and Sara are all cast in the roles of victims to an unseen killer, they never get to have their own wants and needs that they get to act upon, not until they start to learn the truth and the novel is well over three-quarters done. Once they start to learn the truth of Xander’s duel-personalities and the consequences and origins of it, then they have a solid base formed from which they can have a driving want. As a result, this novel has a three act structure but rather than the first act taking up, say, 10% of the book (which would be normal), it instead takes up 90% of the book. It’s only at this shift that the novel reveals its true colours, not as just a Slasher horror mystery but as a superpowered fantasy as well, as Xander aims his newfound abilities at those who chose to manipulate him into violence.

Too-long first acts can kill a narrative. There aren’t many valid critiques of The Lord of the Rings (movies or films), but one constant and valid one is how long Act 1 is. Remember, for Act 1 to end, the main character must “make a choice they feel they can’t come back from” (Enters Unfamiliar Situation). Until the Council of Rivendale, Frodo has not made choices, he has been led along by the nose by Gandalf and by fate. It’s only when he says “I will take the Ring to Mordor” that we leave the first act of the story. That’s several hundred pages into the books and at least ninety minutes into the movie, the length of some entire films.

That is a maddeningly long first act, but it works.

Batman v Superman has the same problem of an Act 1 that lasts too long, into the three hour mark of a three-and-a-half hour movie, or roughly 85% of the way through the film. And that does not work.

Where does Black Womb land in this continuum of too-long first-acts that work-or-don’t-work? … Somewhere in the middle, but much more to the side of the bad than the good. The too-long setup combined with the switch in genre and the unloading of information is something the book never really recovers from, but thankfully there isn’t much book left by the time it happens.

Every few years I’ll get it in my head to re-write this book. Maybe from shifting perspectives, a trick that hadn’t occurred to me at the time, or maybe through the lens of narration from a future Xander with a voice-of-knowledge about the events and their significance. Every few years I want to “fix” this, like George Lucas tinkering with the Star Wars movies, but thankfully my wife stops me. She reminds me, helpfully, that our company still has money from the success of this novel. That flawed as it is, thousands of people have enjoyed it and continue to enjoy it, and that it sprouted all that has come after it.

And that’s a good point and she’d good for making it.

But also, for the life of me, I cannot think how I would solve that central problem of Act One being too long. As much as I look back on it and blame the book for that violation of structure, to this day I haven’t been able to come up with a way I would have written myself out of it. Maybe some narrative problems can’t be fixed and all you can do is paper over them with good dialog and solid conflict with concise scenes? I shudder to think.

Now that really is scary.