Si Spurrier on Folklore, Sexuality, Politics, and Werewolves in Cry Havoc

Cry Havoc: Mything in Action, from writer Si Spurrier (X-Force, Doctor Who) and artist Ryan Kelly (Local, Lucifer), tells the story of Lou, an unwilling shapeshifter who finds herself on a special ops team in Afghanistan before becoming the prisoner (sort of) of the very monsters that she’s been hunting. It’s a story told across three very important moments in Lou’s life, and also ties in to her relationships and her sense of herself as something monstrous. It’s not an easy book to pin down, but it is a deeply personal story that just happens to involve werewolves and military monster hunts. We had the good fortune to chat with the very thoughtful Mr. Spurrier about the series.
Particularly with something like Cry Havoc, which defies easy description (I know, since I’ve had to try to describe it a couple of times already)…I always like to get the pitch from the creators. So, Si: what’s Cry Havoc about, in your mind?
Oh god, you’ve come to the wrong person to ask that!
Frankly I have such an antagonistic relationship with capital-G “Genre” that I’ve given up trying to describe my books along those lines (“folkloric rom-com metaphysical creature-feature war story” doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue). As a result we’ve gone through various iterations of an elevator pitch for this book, from the fully functional (“It’s about a woman who’s been caught-up in an occult nightmare, who travels with a group of monstrous mercenaries through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in an unlikely bid to fix herself”) to the reductive (“It’s Jarhead meets Pan’s Labyrinth“) to the problematically glib (“It’s not about a lesbian werewolf who goes to war… except it sort of is”).
Somewhere in between all these attempts lies a wildly unusual story about one woman trying to work out who the hell she really is, against a backdrop of folklore and military machinations.
In your background, there’s a pretty good mix of styles and types of books. I’m thinking particularly about the difference between things like X-Force versus something creator-focused like the current series. Do you enjoy working on one or the other more? Or are there pros and cons to each type?
It’s absolutely a game of pros and cons, yeah. There can be a wonderful sense of freedom in working on a licensed property—especially if it’s one you yourself are fond of—since you enter the storytelling contract with a foundation of shared knowledge with the reader. Plus there’s the logistical benefit of working with a publisher/editor who has a vested interest in the lisence: you can expect to have an awful lot of the administrative and marketing duties taken out of your hands.
On the flip-side there’s nothing more wonderful for a storyteller than closing the loop on a tale which is 100% scratch-built. All the world-building, character-creating, rules-establishing, mood-setting, yadda yadda: it makes a creator infinitely more invested in the success (or failure!) of the yarn than otherwise. And yet you’re also exposing yourself financially, and quite probably having to sweat blood over things you never really expected would be part of your career as a comics creator: PR, project-managing, scheduling, publishing plans, file management, blah blah blah.
With Cry Havoc it’s been a horribly steep learning curve—I think I spent at least as much time doing press and outreach as I did actually writing the book—but of course the more effort goes in, the greater the satisfaction comes out. We couldn’t be prouder of our book.
The characters in the book are largely comprised of shape-shifters representing various cultures. What were the inspirations for that?
I mean, beyond the obvious (who doesn’t love monsters?) I’ve always been a massive geek for folklore, and could cheerfully rant for hours about the sophisticated mental technologies and (unfairly) obsolete moral roles represented by all the fairies, bogies, kappas and mermaids of yesteryear. They’re 100% part of the same continuum that brings us organised religion at one end and precedent-fixated secular law at the other, and yet we have a tendency to sneer at the credulity of anyone dumb enough to take “don’t do x or the y will get you” stories seriously.
On a more thematic level, I’ve spent the past few years gradually becoming convinced there are some very solid linkages between a lot of crises happening in the world today—cultural, military and social, right down to the level of identity politics—and the sort of transformative monster stories of the past. Our circles of society increasingly adhere to extremes, whether fanatically religious or obsessively empirical, and both edges of that knife manifest the same way: in a tendency to take the world literally.
I started wondering how it might feel to actually be one of those excellent and creative meldings of metaphor and mystery which we call myths—how one might react to having no place in the modern world—and realised that experience would share a lot of emotional territory with other forms of dispossession and prejudice we hear on the news every day.
Ultimately every story is a story about metamorphosis. In the case of our heroine Lou the quest to overcome her own inner-demons is mirrored by a very overt attempt to overcome the literal monster which has taken root in her flesh.
…Which is the long-winded way of reassuring new readers that there’s a perfectly plausible reason for a london-based street musician, who thinks she’s been mauled by a werewolf, to drop everything and bugger off to a warzone.
We move around in time in the book, looking at Lou during three critical points. That can be a tricky thing to pull off. At what point did you decide to go that route, rather than a more straightforward narrative? How tough was that to structure?
It sort of took care of itself, honestly. It certainly insisted on that structure itself.
Originally Cry Havoc was to focus on Lou’s journey across Afghanistan—the “middle” phase—but I quickly realised the flashbacks to the origins of her dilemma were at least as important, and the third act resolution was jumping up and down and demanding equal attention. When I accidentally laid them down side by side, rather than one after another, there was a really lovely bit of unexpected synergy. The climax beats all corresponded, the conflict beats juxtaposed in interesting ways. I realised the tale made more sense as a series of parallel oscillations in Lou’s life – she’s literally zigzagging between chaos and control throughout her whole story – than a standard series of things happening one after another. All of which brings the added benefit of an addictive mystery: as the story begins we know Lou somehow switches from a domestic life in London to a violent journey in the Middle East, but the connective tissue—the “how” and the “why”—becomes part of the payoff.
The biggest problem wasn’t keeping a handle on the narrative threads, but making sure the reader didn’t feel overwhelmed by the experimental way of doing things. In that I’m disgustingly lucky to have two inimitable ace-cards: first Ryan’s artwork, which has the wonderful knack for making the most dense and nuanced scene feel spacious and clear; and second the trio of superstar colourists we brought aboard—one per time phase—who not only made each section of Lou’s story feel distinct and easily differentiated from the others, but also shone a much-needed spotlight onto just how much of an impact colourists can have on the tone and vibe of a comic.
Lou’s relationship strikes me as not entirely healthy, even before she has to deal with her transformation. Often when I see gay relationships in comics, they’re presented with a well-intentioned blandness. As though everything’s fine all the time. Did a lot of thought go into Lou’s sexuality, or is it something that’s intended to be more incidental? It certainly feels like a metaphor.
I touched on this briefly above, in the sense that Lou’s whole story is a quest for confidence and comfort in wearing her own identity on her sleeve. Coming from a non-cis background is just a small piece of that puzzle.
The toughest scenes in the whole book to write involved a sequence in which Lou’s life has become utterly toxic and unbearably claustrophobic, in which she’s so determined to self-destruct that she betrays her own girlfriend with a fellow monstrous entity. One which is, abstractly at least, male. Now… it’s been established that Lou’s had hetero-relationships before, and there’s an awful lot of occult mamajamma going on too, but still. Heavy.
It’s actually not a million miles away from something that happened to some people I know (minus the occulty bit, anyway). There’s no manifestation of self-destruction more pitiable than the desire to drive away the people who love and support you, and in a world of (rightly) sensitive identity labels, one can do far worse than merely betraying one’s monogamous partner. Very, very bleak.
(An aside: I do rather regret using the glib PR logline I mentioned—”it’s not about a lesbian werewolf going to war, except it kind of is”—because of course Lou’s actions demonstrate her sexuality’s not as clear-cut as all that. To go right back to your first question about trying to distill CH for the new reader, it’s a story with a very fluid approach to identity—sexual and otherwise—and frankly I just wasn’t ready for the sorts of reductive language a PR operation needs. Lesson learned.)
At any rate, the metaphors muddled up in all this stuff aren’t so much to do with defining Lou’s sexual identity, as they’re to do with the conflict between needing to be clearly defined versus a more chaotic, continuum approach to self image. The monstrous aspects of Lou, and all her fellow shapeshifters, are simply analogues for the things which make them grate against the nice tidy vanilla lives we’re all supposed to want to lead.
For Lou the monster represents an escape from all the neat little boxes she finds herself squashed into—cages are a recurrent motif throughout CH—and her relationship with her partner is just one out of many of those.
If you watch enough news, it certainly begins to feel like the world is poised on the brink of order and chaos, which is a big theme of the book. Especially given the backdrop in Afghanistan, how much of this is meant to reflect the current state of the world?
It’s the central metaphor, so: entirely.
I’ve already ranted above about the strange correspondence between different extremes of order, and I happen to believe an awful lot of what we (as hahaha “civilised” Westerners) tend to decry as savage or barbaric is actually just a different version of the same control we’re busily trying to impose on the world. On the other hand Mere Chaos isn’t an answer in its own right either, no matter how seductive it may seem. We’re gregarious social animals; we don’t get to do whatever we like whenever we like without expecting to be disadvantaged (or destroyed) when others do the same.
The infuriating truth is that we, as a species, are inexorably drawn to extreme positions, while the only reasonable way to survive en masse is to accept a hodgepodge of shades of grey and flexible behaviour doctrines. We are each caught in an eternal tug of war between the desire for order and the desire for chaos. Every war, every power-struggle, every argument and every breakdown is simply the result of different people staking their flags at different points along that continuum.
Cry Havoc makes it all a little more visible. The stringent forces of order, striding manfully towards beige loveless progress and a tidy world—as represented by the slimy toerags of the InHand Org—versus the old, forgotten, bloody chaos of obsolete folklore, as represented by Lynn Odell’s violent sanctuary for monsters.
Lou, like all of us, is trapped between the two, wrestling to find where she truly belongs.
Cry Havoc is available now.