The Dead Won't Stay Dead: Revisiting Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags
By Thomas L. Vaultonburg
There's something peculiar about returning to a novel you've already written. The characters are still there, doing the same terrible things they were doing when you left them. The dead are still dead, more or less. The guilty are still making excuses. And the people who know what happened are still pretending they don't.
Yesterday I spent the better part of the day revising my novel Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags, a supernatural dark comedy set in the fictional city of Rookford, Illinois. The book was already finished and published, so this wasn't an attempt to write another novel. It was an opportunity to revisit the one I'd written, polish the language, strengthen some of the characterizations, and reconsider how I wanted to introduce it to readers.
One of the things I discovered was that I still liked the book. That's not necessarily a foregone conclusion when a writer returns to older work. Sometimes you discover that the person who wrote something you once believed in has become a stranger. Sometimes you find passages that make you wonder what the hell you were thinking. But sometimes you discover that the original impulse was sound, even if the execution could benefit from another round of attention.
Welcome Back to Rookford
Rookford is fictional, although readers familiar with northern Illinois might recognize certain characteristics. It's a city with an active arts community, charitable organizations, cultural institutions, political ambitions, and a remarkable capacity for looking the other way when looking directly at something might prove inconvenient.
At the center of the novel are people who understand how to manipulate the appearance of virtue. Juniper Michaels has mastered the transformation of charitable work into public sainthood. Nancy McConaughey understands that protecting an institution can sometimes mean protecting the people who threaten to destroy its credibility. Kitten Killswitch arrives from Chicago's industrial music scene carrying a past she'd prefer to leave behind.
Meanwhile, Elias Mort and Janelle Montclair move through a city where the official explanations rarely account for what actually happened. Belial has his own ideas about how things ought to proceed, and the dead are considerably less cooperative than anyone would like.
The supernatural elements give me permission to exaggerate certain things, although I've occasionally wondered whether the supernatural aspects of the story are really any more improbable than the ordinary human behavior.
The Silence Is Deafening
One of the themes that became clearer to me during the revision was the peculiar way communities protect themselves from uncomfortable information. Not necessarily through elaborate conspiracies, but through something much more ordinary: silence.
People have jobs to protect. Reputations to maintain. Grants to secure. Friendships to preserve. Institutions to defend. Sometimes everyone involved understands that something is wrong, but acknowledging it would require someone to do something inconvenient.
So nothing happens.
The people responsible continue collecting accolades. The people harmed are encouraged to move on. And eventually the absence of public discussion becomes evidence that there was never anything worth discussing in the first place.
I find that mechanism fascinating, particularly in smaller cities where the boundaries between the arts, philanthropy, business, and local politics can become remarkably porous.
Of course, Rookford isn't Rockford. Fictional cities have the advantage of allowing their creators to rearrange geography, invent institutions, and populate them with characters who serve the needs of the story rather than the demands of documentary accuracy. But fiction also allows writers to explore truths that don't always fit comfortably into a newspaper article.
Necromancy and Other Administrative Problems
Despite all this talk about institutional corruption, I should probably emphasize that Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags is also intended to be funny.
I have always been attracted to the absurdity of supernatural fiction, particularly when the supernatural collides with the dreary machinery of everyday life. There's something inherently comic about imagining that death doesn't necessarily free a person from bureaucracy, petty grievances, professional incompetence, or the consequences of other people's stupidity.
The dead in my fictional universe aren't always wise. The living aren't always particularly alive. And the forces of darkness don't necessarily possess better organizational skills than the local arts council.
I like stories in which horror and comedy coexist because I think that's a reasonably accurate description of the human condition. Terrible things happen, ridiculous things happen, and quite frequently they're the same things.
Returned / Unresolved
The revision gave me an opportunity to make the novel more closely resemble the book I intended to write. We tightened language, reconsidered how characters were presented, and sharpened the relationship between the supernatural plot and the social world in which it unfolds.
What we didn't do was attempt to make the novel respectable.
I have no particular interest in removing its eccentricities, sanding away its unpleasantness, or apologizing for its sense of humor. A novel about necromancers, corruption, death, and institutional hypocrisy probably ought to be a little unruly.
The revised and expanded edition of Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags is now available on Amazon. If you enjoy supernatural mysteries, dark comedy, morally compromised characters, and fictional Midwestern cities with entirely too many secrets, you might find something to appreciate in it.
And if you're wondering whether justice eventually arrives in Rookford, I can only say that justice and resolution aren't necessarily the same thing.
Some things refuse to stay buried.
And sometimes the silence is deafening.
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