In recent years, paranormal fantasy has been almost completely redefined by a new generation of brilliantly talented young writers: Adrian Phoenix, Kat Richardson, Richelle Mead, Caitlin Kittredge, Seanan McGuire, Marcus Pelegrimas, Nicole Peeler, Jaye Wells, J.F. Lewis, and Keith Melton, to name just a few.
Orson Scott Card said a few years ago during a visit to BarnesandNoble.com’s Fantasy/Science Fiction forum that science fiction is “no longer a cutting-edge genre – the edge is now in fantasy.”
I’ll take that thought one step further: science fiction is no longer a cutting-edge genre – the edge is now in paranormal fantasy. Granted, there are some amazing new voices in both science fiction (Paolo Bacigalupi, David Louis Edelman, etc.) and fantasy (Brandon Sanderson, Ken Scholes, etc.) but the quality – and quantity – of paranormal fantasy being released now from new authors is absolutely astonishing.
Take Skyler White’s recently released debut novel and Falling, Fly: it’s an intensely passionate, sublimely poetic, soul-rending work of art. The entire novel – which revolves around the relationship between a vampiric fallen angel named Olivia (with “sin-black hair and virginal skin”) and Dominic, a neuroscientist with a “bizarre” affliction – reads like dark ethereal poetry. Here are a few examples:
“Pandemonium is crammed with the meat of sex, the bone and blood of human hunger. It pulses with the endlessly throbbing, indifferent drone of every nightclub in every city. The smell of blood and desire rub against my spine, vibrating with the painless, rageless music. Beautiful bodies flow around the bar in delicious bloody excess, pumping dance and talk. They stand in clots, or bind one to another in corpuscular pairs and trios, men and women, men and men, homocytes and heterocytes. I slip into the stream like nicotine…”
“…as I throw my sleek leg over the black body of the Harley and gun it, stiletto and latex seem just right, tight and cold. I ride the bike like the pale horse it has replaced, out from Hell’s underground garage at full speed. And the Reborn keeps up. He matches me turn for turn, skid for skid. So I fall in beside him, losing my vampire biker bitch in the steady, muzzled percussion of our harmonizing engines. We ride together into the lilacs and the rain...”
“His lips are an adoring rage on mine, demanding and giving beauty and terrible hunger. I would choke on my cruel teeth to keep from hurting him, but I cry out when his fingers find the wingscars on my back. The tips of my warming breasts rake against his chest. Drenched in sensation, I wring a pure smile from the mouth that claims mine. It fills me. The soft curve of his beautiful lips cradles the soaring sense of myself expanding, swelling to fill the pure white ballroom, shining back in the ocean of mirrors, everything reflected back, and back again. Breaking in waves over us standing, holding to each other’s body, each other’s lips. Angels before the fall, love without sin, completion, perfection, joy.”
Fans of Adrian Phoenix’s The Maker’s Song novels (A Rush of Wings, In the Blood, and Beneath the Skin) will particularly love this novel, which has a similar edgy tone – rock stars, fallen angels, tattoos, piercings, absinthe, drugs, goth subculture, etc. The novel opens, fittingly, in a sleazy tattoo parlor: “The angel of desire is damned. At least that’s what my tattoo says...”
Olivia is a fallen angel – and a vampire – who feeds on human desire and fear. Trapped in a body that feels no pleasure or pain, Olivia’s centuries’ old dream is to somehow find the “loophole” that will free her from her Undead existence and let her ascend once again into Heaven. Dominic is a scientist plagued by horrific dreams of countless past lives – women he has loved and lost, children he has raised and seen die, etc. – who is obsessed with somehow removing the memories from his Reborn mind so that he can live a normal life. Both are drawn to an underground asylum in Ireland – the Hotel of the Damned – where they literally enter a myth-laden underworld populated by a shocking diversity of inhabitants. But in this insane, wondrous, nightmarish place, Olivia and Dominic finally understand that which could set them free could also damn them both forever...
When reviewing novels, I always ask myself two questions: “Will I remember specifics from this book six months from now?” and “Did this novel ‘move’ me, either emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually?” The answer is “yes,” I will definitely remember and Flying, Fall six months from now – I’ll remember this book for the rest of my life. And “yes,” this novel did move me. I found myself immersed in the cool, hypnotic narrative and deeply affected by White’s subtle (and not-so-subtle!) symbolism and social allegory throughout.
Skyler White’s extraordinary debut is so much more than a paranormal fantasy – it’s literary fiction, it’s otherworldly poetry, it’s dark philosophy that will change the way you see the world if you let it…
After all, “we’re all part vampire in the end.”
Tune in tomorrow for my interview with Skyler White where she explains why writing sex scenes "feels like tipping that first brick after you’ve spent hours lining up the Dominos."
