Pack Light

I don’t get a chance to talk about this a lot, but fantasy maps are extremely important to me. I can still conjure the memory of the map in the front of that old edition of The Hobbit that my father read to me and my lil bro when we were small. That style, that imagery, the deep shadows of the more dangerous haunted reaches of the world transported me entirely Elsewhere. About nine months ago, I summoned my courage and wrote to my editor Nivia Evans that I wanted to include a map in the front of The Ballad of Perilous Graves. She immediately responded that this was a great idea and asked me to send her something to give to the map maker.

I agonized over it. I’m not much of a visual artist, and I’m even less of a cartographer, so I pulled up some maps of New Orleans, printed them out, and marked them up, trying to approximate the locations of landmarks from the novel. As I labored with pencil and ballpoint I knew there must be some easier way to go about this, but finally I had a few ugly-ass marked-up documents that I thought a decent mapmaker might be able to use to compose something that made sense. I set them in weeks after out conversation and tried to just forget about it.

As with the cover art, the first rough version of the map was nothing like I imagined, but it was nearly perfect. When I teach speculative fiction, I often use Ozzy Osbourne as an example. In an interview—God only knows which interview, where—Ozzy explained that when he was young, what he wanted more than anything was to be a Beatle. He revered the Beatles, loved their music and wanted nothing more than to be one of them. So he put together his own band, which matured into Black Sabbath and created some foundational works of Heavy Metal. Then he kept making music into his old age. That is the sort of imitation that works best for me. When I dearly love some comic book, film, short story, novel, to the degree that I wish I’d been the one to create it, the best way I can find to honor it is to let it inspire me to create something completely different and hope that it compels others the way that original piece compels me.

There is an awful lot of that in The Ballad of Perilous Graves. I drew on cherished work by authors from Astrid Lindgren to Terry McMillan to China Mieville to Walter Mosely and Samuel R. Delany. Music from Little Richard to The Beatles, to KRS One, to Black Star, to Son House, George Clinton and Nina Simone. Comic strips and comic books from Krazy Kat to Little Orphan Annie, to Little Nemo to Calvin and Hobbes, to Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, to Pogo and Popeye, to Kyle Baker’s Plastic Man and Gary Larson’s The Far Side—believe it or not, there’s even a little Family Circus in there. My sister, Lisa, is in that shit! So are my dad, my brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins, in one form or another. My old neighborhood Uptown, and a bit of my new neighborhood here in Mid City, too.

I suppose all fiction writing is map-making, really. Surveying and sketching an imagined geography. I still remember the first time I saw the sky of Tatooine—years before I journeyed to Tunisia and saw the very foreign sky above the real-life Tatooine. That’s the feeling I was going for. That fluttering in your chest, when, in a dream, you step through an impossible door and find yourself not in Narnia, not in Middle Earth, but somewhere else entirely. Somewhere both alien and achingly familiar.

And it’s not just fantasy maps, either. I remember my father bringing a large map of Africa home from his State Department office and how my brother and I spent countless hours poring over it, enraptured by names like Burundi, Burkina Faso, and Western Sahara.

Pack light: we’ll be traveling fast.