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Chuck Wendig on the Twisted Power of Miriam Black in The Raptor and the Wren
Miriam Black has a superpower that tortures her: She knows how each person she meets will die. Filled with horror, mystery, and nonstop action, Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black series is a wild ride.
The series’ penultimate novel, The Raptor and the Wren, opens with Miriam’s attempt to break with her past and the people she cares for. But past and future are destined to collide, and Miriam is forced to confront them both.
I caught up with Chuck Wendig to talk about his inspiration for the series, the source of its dark heart, and Miriam Black’s destiny.
The character of Miriam Black feels like an icon, someone who has always existed. Where did she come from?
People I knew started dying? (Wait, that sounds like I’m a serial killer who really likes the passive voice.) I mean, people were dying by the normal grim accord of the universe—both my grandmothers passed away from old age, my father died from cancer, and of course you have to come to terms with your own mortality then, too. No more YOUNG PERSON LIVING, what with all that DRINKING COCA-COLA and EATING POP-ROCKS AT THE SAME TIME.
So, in my mind, I was grappling with a character who was kind of a twisted power fantasy—someone who could see death, could see people’s ultimate fate, but didn’t yet know how to stop it.
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The series is classified as urban fantasy but seems just as much thriller and noir-ish mystery. What are your inspirations?
The Miriam Black series is proof positive that genre is a thing we just… made up. It sold as something closer to horror-crime, then its first publisher put it under urban fantasy, and now with Saga Press they (more accurately, I think) categorize it as “supernatural thriller?”
Inspirations—well, I grew up reading a lot of horror and crime, and this slots into that. I think if any one author made an impression on the book’s pacing, its rhythm, and so forth, it would be Charles Grant.
The Raptor and the Wren is dark. Can you talk about your decision to go very dark in this book with the character and plot?
It is dark, yeah—though, all the books are pretty grim stuff, though usually I like to temper that darkness and desperation with humor and heart. In this book, the darkness is what necessitates and takes us to the final book. It’s important to get her to a place in her arc, and that isn’t necessarily an, erm, happy place.
Miriam Black goes through a lot of messed up awful stuff. Do you ever feel bad for torturing the character so much?
Kinda? But also, it’s sorta what we do as storytellers, I think, though obviously to a matter of differing degree. A story isn’t interesting if a character wants a sandwich and then goes to get the sandwich and then gets it successfully.
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A story is interesting when the character goes to get the sandwich and then is confronted at the deli counter by an estranged father, or a vengeful lover, or, I dunno, three baby dragons in a trenchcoat. Conflict is the food that feeds the reader, and… well, with Miriam, the conflict is all about death, and fate, and that leads her (and us) down some pretty dark paths.
How does the experience of writing the Miriam Black series compare to work on your other novels (Invasive, Zeroes)? Does it do something for you, writing-wise, to go back and forth between very different projects?
The weirdest narrative whiplash was going from the Miriam Black series to Star Wars and back again. My other books tend to be dark thrillers, so there’s not a serious gear change in doing that—but going from PYOO PYOO LASER SWORDS to HEY DID THAT BIRD JUST EAT A GUY’S TONGUE OUT OF HIS SCREAMING HEAD, yeah, that’s maybe a little jarring.
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Between your original fiction that spans several genres, and your Star Wars tie-in novels, you are known for a variety of things. Is there a common theme that you can identify?
Going back to the conversation about genre, I like to think that at the end of the day, no matter the subject, my books all cleave to a single genre: the Chuck Wendig genre. They’re in my voice, they speak to things I’m interested in or afraid of, and I want them to feel abstractly together in continuity even when they are wildly different books.
The Raptor and the Wren ends with an electrifying plot twist. What are your plans for the Miriam Black series?
Just one more book to go! Vultures is written (well, first draft), and comes out next January. It is the end of the line for Miriam Black, and it’s a doozy. Beyond that, who knows?