Guilty Pleasures

"I picked this book up in about ’93 or ’94. There were three or four books in the series out at the time – there were more books out later. And I was just delighted because this was everything that I wanted in a story. Well, not absolutely everything, but almost everything that I wanted in a story was in the Anita Blake books! Blake is a professional animator, which means her job is to go out and animate zombies. That’s just part of life. You have professionals who can do that for a number of reasons: maybe you need to yell at your mom, because she was terrible to you and your therapist thinks you should confront her – so you can animate her zombie and do that. Or maybe there’s some court thing that needs to be decided, so you hire an animator to get testimony. There’s a number of good reasons to go out and animate the dead – and Anita Blake gets hired to do this sort of thing. As a result, she has contact with the supernatural world in general, particularly with vampires. So when there’s a problem, she often gets asked to look into it, and she evolves from her initial job as an animator into a PI character. This world is full of vampires and werewolves and all these different things that go bump in the night, and they replace the standard cast of your typical PI novel: the stoolies and thugs and gangsters. These books are full of action and intrigue and sex, and all the things that make us want to keep turning the pages to see what happens next. I just love that! A year and a half after I got into these books I found Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV, which was a very similar vibe. The original Buffy , the motion picture, had been out a couple of years before, and I thought that had fallen short of what it could have been. So when I found Guilty Pleasures , with a more fleshed-out story world, I was thinking, “Ooh I’m into this.” And then the Buffy TV show came out and I thought, “I’m really into this”. But there was still more that I wanted that I couldn’t find anywhere – and, eventually, that was one of the things that made me write my own books. We’ve got these great PI characters and these great vampire slayer characters, but I want Gandalf doing this stuff! A young American Gandalf. That was where I started when I was putting my own stuff together. It’s very parallel to the way organised crime works in our world. You’re aware of it, you know that it exists, but you don’t really know the details – you don’t really know people who are into it. Maybe you know somebody who knows somebody who hangs out with vampires, but you’ve probably never seen one yourself, unless it was maybe on a talk show or there was a movie about it. So they inhabit this shadowy grey space where you intellectually know that they’re real, but you don’t really run across them on a daily basis. That was always a great deal of fun for me: that world exists, and that world will pretty much leave you alone, unless you choose to involve yourself somehow, or unless business just runs over you in some way. You happen to live in the wrong place at the wrong time, or you happen to take an alternate route home from work and see something you shouldn’t have seen, that sort of thing. The idea of that world either drawing you in, or you investigating and finding out too much – it’s very Alice in Wonderland, because once you’ve been there, you’ll see your own world differently whenever you come back to it. And that was always something that I really appreciated about Laurell’s book. Harry Dresden is a professional wizard. He’s in the phonebook under ‘wizards’. He’s the only one there: ‘wizards’, one guy. Whether or not you liked the television show of Dresden in comparison to the books doesn’t really matter, this part they did just right – they had a tagline for it: ‘When you need help, call the police; when you need a miracle, call Harry Dresden’. He does a lot of basic private eye stuff, that a basic private eye could probably do. But he can do a few things that regular guys can’t – things like ‘I lost my wedding ring in Lake Michigan’, he can help you with that. Also, he is a guy who stands between the predators of the supernatural world and regular folks – who either are aware of that world but don’t have the kind of power they need to protect themselves, or who are innocent of that world. And that world is coming to get them. Dresden is the guy who gets in the way, the supernatural sheriff of Chicago – if you’re one of the supernatural types, and you’re starting to get uppity and out of line and starting to hurt people, you’re going to have to deal with Dresden. He likes to be able to make a living while he’s doing it, although that’s not always possible. For a lot of the series, he’s just trying to make ends meet. Mark Twain has a rule for writing fantasy: for every fantastic element you have in your books, you need two down-to-earth elements to keep it grounded. That’s what I wanted to do with Harry Dresden: yes, he’s a wizard with phenomenal cosmic power, but he also has to make his rent every month and he worries about that. He constantly has car trouble. We all get what that’s like, so even though he’s done all this magical stuff, what I wanted to show more was Harry doing just real world stuff, everyday stuff that people would understand. As the series has gone on, it’s gotten wilder, and more involved in the supernatural world. One of the challenges has been to keep Dresden grounded. Yes, that was the goal. That was the beginning place: what if we do live in that world? What if all the people who’ve seen Bigfoot are just telling us the absolute truth? And all of us that are hanging out in cities and not out in the country, we’re the weird dumb ones. Because that could totally be true, we wouldn’t know. So I wanted to start Dresden in our world, and see what happens."