One of Bookburners’ authors, Brian Francis Slattery, reveals which television shows most inspired this unique book.
About ‘Bookburners’
Magic is real, and hungry. It’s trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, and only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. She joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad–Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum–and together they stand between humanity and the magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.
Supernatural meets The Da Vinci Code in a fast-paced, kickass character driven novel chock-full of magic, mystery, and mayhem, written collaboratively by a team of some of the best writers working in fantasy.
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Top 7 cult classic TV shows that helped inspire ‘Bookburners’ — by Brian Francis Slattery
Bookburners, out now from Saga Press, may be an experiment in serialized fiction, but in another sense, it’s also perfectly normal. When it comes down to it, Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, and I really just wrote a text version of a TV show. One of us, Margaret, even has a lot of experience writing for TV (big thanks to her for teaching us how to run our meetings). And when it came time to write our individual “episodes”–yes, we’ve even fallen into the habit of calling them that–we all hearkened back to the TV that we love best. Here are seven of my favorites.
‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’
The gang of misfits, each with their own abilities. The complicated, ever-shifting interpersonal relationships. The line-by-line jokiness. The horrific adventures. The blueprint was there from pretty much the get-go on Buffy and really hit its stride by season 2, producing a dynamic that creator Joss Whedon and his excellent team of writers mined for comedy, scares, and tragedy for years. This was the show that I was most afraid of ripping off when I first started writing my chapters of Bookburners, and one that I keep drawing inspiration from now.
‘Twin Peaks’
It’s my humble belief that Twin Peaks, created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, left its mark on the imaginations of a lot of people of a certain age. As if its quirky combination of police procedural and small-town soap opera weren’t enough, David Lynch added a layer of supernatural horror to the story and produced what I think are still some of the scariest sequences committed to film. I have a pet theory that this isn’t despite the content standards of network TV at the time, but because of them. Lynch couldn’t use gore, or even foul language, so he relied on lighting, sound design, editing, and slow motion–and in doing so, found new and maybe unique ways to terrify us.
‘The X-Files’
By the first three entries in this list, you can probably guess my age within three years. But so what? As in Buffy and Twin Peaks, creator Chris Carter and his writing team found their own way to combine comedy and horror on The X-Files, and the deepening relationship between FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder (before they kind of messed it up) is a model to follow for setting up a very, very slow burn. Scully’s and Mulder’s fractious relationship with the FBI’s bureaucracy, and the show’s digging into the organization’s politics without making it boring, are also things I found myself … okay, maybe cribbing just a little bit for Bookburners.
‘Pushing Daisies’
Just in case you were wondering if I stopped watching TV at the turn of the century, I’m happy to report I did not. I mourned the passing of Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies, a show that died a seriously untimely death. From its luscious sets to its swoony musical score, Pushing Daisies taught me how attention to detail–lots of details–can really add up to a sumptuous world. Chi McBride’s portrayal of the private investigator Emerson Cod is in the DNA of the prevailing sarcasm that drives the team in Bookburners. We also might owe a little debt to Pushing Daisies for its idea of using magic to create a permanent poignancy between its two leads–Lee Pace as Ned and Anna Friel as Chuck, two lovers who can’t touch on pain of death.
‘Arrested Development’
You’d think that maybe this absurd comedy about a messed up family wouldn’t have much to do with something like Bookburners. You’d be wrong. I’m a writer who likes to make everything go haywire in the stuff I write, if it’s warranted, and Arrested Development at its best, with creator Mitchell Hurwitz at the helm, could make things go haywire like few other things could. When the kid in the jetpack fought the mole monster for dominion of a model real estate development–and it all made perfect sense–I was in awe.
‘Atlanta’
Coming full circle on this list (see how I did that?), creator Donald Glover apparently pitched Atlanta as Twin Peaks with rappers. He’s not giving himself quite enough credit for how unique–and inspiring–Atlanta is. I’ve only finished it recently, but its combination of cringy comedy, conversations that turn on a dime and spiral out of control, and fearless subject matter is something that will come in handy as we forge on ahead into the Bookburners story. Never be afraid to make moves you can’t take back.
‘The Good Place’
This is my current favorite TV show, at least until they make another season of Atlanta (or if the Twin Peaks reboot lives up to the original). High concept. Screwball humor. Romance. Intrigue. With creator Michael Schur in the driver’s seat, The Good Place sets up and immediately starts dismantling its premise, then upends the whole thing just in time for the season to end. It’s television writing at its best, showing how fun it can be when a show doesn’t sit for long on any of its secrets–except maybe one or two of the biggest ones.
Which is the closest I can get to telling you what’s going on with Bookburners these days–Saga is publishing our first season, but we’re just finishing up the third–without giving it all away. Stay tuned.
About the author
Brian Francis Slattery is the author of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, Lost Everything, and The Family Hightower. Lost Everything won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2012. He’s the arts and culture editor for the New Haven Independent, an editor for the New Haven Review, and a freelance editor for a few not-so-secret public policy think tanks. He also plays music constantly with a few different groups in a bunch of different genres. He has settled with his family just outside of New Haven and admits that elevation above sea level was one of the factors he took into account. For one week out of every year, he enjoys living completely without electricity. Bookburners, which he wrote with Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, and Mur Lafferty, is available from Saga Press in February.