The Quartet: From First to Final Movement

The Quartet: From First to Final Movement

by Michael Willliams

So the good people at Seventh Star asked me the following:

Compare and contrast the vision you had at the outset for the City Quartet and when you completed it. Any major surprises or changes during the process? Did it achieve or surpass your initial concept, looking in hindsight?

Nothing I’ve ever written comes out like I thought it would. It’s why I’ve never understood the “Plotter vs. Pantser” debate (aside from the fact that I think “pantser” is one of the most dreadful terms ever invented). I can’t imagine what it would be like to stick to an initial concept at the expense of new developments, new options and opportunities.

The initial concept of the City Quartet, then, came about after I had written half of it.

Two of the books in the Quartet—Trajan’s Arch and Vine: An Urban Legend—were first published in slightly different form by Blackwyrm Press. It was after finishing the early version of Vine that hindsight played a factor in foresight, that I began to realize how the books were connected by place and visionary undercurrents: the Louisville I had imagined in both books, based on historical and factual Louisville but opening into magical potentiality, mythic prospects.

The next novel I was writing, Dominic’s Ghosts, was set in the same city, and this time characters from the earlier books patrolled the outskirts of town, wanting to enter the story. And it seemed as though they belonged there, so the idea gradually dawned that the connections between this book and its predecessors were no more promising than the connections between the first two books themselves. Connection became a theme of Dominic’s Ghosts, and I decided to revisit Trajan’s Arch and Vine, with an idea of recasting parts of them so the books would weave together. When I completed the manuscript, I sent it to Seventh Star, and broached the matter of bringing all three together, along with a proposed fourth book, in the Quartet you see today.

From the beginning I steered away from a sequential series: the first two books didn’t lend themselves to cause/effect order, and it seemed better to consider another way to tie together the books. Since connection was a theme in the most recent novel, I thought that form should reflect idea, and the books became an odd arrangement of intersecting stories: you can start with any one of them, and you can read them in any order. What links them are specific characters, ideas of place, and a kind of conceptual connection, as each story takes as its primary meaning the kind of things that are secondary in the other works. I had hoped it would be like turning a prism in your hand, how the light makes for different colors depending on how you hold the glass.

It was at this stage, midway through the writing of Dominic’s Ghosts, that I was sure at last where the project was headed. It involved moderate but not overwhelming revisions of the first two books, but the changes in Dominic’s Ghosts could be made in manuscripts, and the fourth novel, Tattered Men, was underway, and I could keep the newly shaped vision in mind as I wrote the first draft.

So did the project change from initial vision? Depends on when you think the initial vision started. It might have changed moderately, or it might have changed profoundly. And the question regarding whether I achieved or surpassed my initial concept is tricky as well: I came up with something different, is all.

At best, the finished Quartet makes me think of the layman’s definition of synergy as “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The City Quartet is four stand-alone novels that make for a larger, more intricate and interconnected story when you take them all together. I hope you enjoy them, and I’m grateful to Seventh Star for the opportunity to propose the project and to see it through.

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About the author: Over the past 25 years, Michael Williams has written a number of strange novels, from the early “Weasel’s Luck” and “Galen Beknighted” in the best-selling DRAGONLANCE series to the more recent lyrical and experimental “Arcady”, singled out for praise by Locus and Asimov’s magazines.

Williams’ highly anticipated City Quartet was completed by the publication of Tattered Men in October 2019. The four volumes may be read in any order–four stories that intertwine, centered in the same city, where minor characters in one novel become central in another:

“Vine: An Urban Legend” is the story of an amateur stage production In Louisville’s Central Park, gone darkly and divinely wrong.

“Dominic’s Ghosts” takes up the story of a son in search of his father in the midst of a murky conspiracy involving a suspicious scholar, a Himalayan legend, and subliminal clues from a silent film festival.

“Tattered Men” is the account of a disheveled biographer, writing the life story of a homeless man who may have been more than he ever seemed.

And “Trajan’s Arch” is a coming-of-age story replete with ghosts, a testimony to hauntings both natural and supernatural.

Williams was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and spent much of his childhood in the south central part of the state, the red-dirt gothic home of Appalachian foothills and stories of Confederate guerrillas. Through good luck and a roundabout journey, he made his way through New England, New York, Wisconsin, Britain and Ireland, and has ended up less than thirty miles from where he began. He has a Ph.D. in Humanities, and teaches at the University of Louisville, where he focuses on the Modern Fantastic in fiction and film. He is married and has two grown sons.

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Book Synopsis for Dominic’s Ghosts: Dominic’s Ghosts is a mythic novel set in the contemporary Midwest. Returning to the hometown of his missing father on a search for his own origins, Dominic Rackett is swept up in a murky conspiracy involving a suspicious scholar, a Himalayan legend, and subliminal clues from a silent film festival. As those around him fall prey to rising fear and shrill fanaticism, he follows the branching trails of cinema monsters and figures from a very real past, as phantoms invade the streets of his once-familiar city and one of them, glimpsed in distorted shadows of alleys and urban parks, begins to look uncannily familiar.

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Synopsis of Vine – An Urban Legend: Amateur theatre director Stephen Thorne plots a sensational production of a Greek tragedy in order to ruffle feathers in the small city where he lives. Accompanied by an eccentric and fly-by-night cast and crew, he prepares for opening night, unaware that as he unleashes the play, he has drawn the attention of ancient and powerful forces.

Michael Williams’ VINE: AN URBAN LEGEND weds Greek Tragedy and urban legend with dangerous intoxication, as the drama rushes to its dark and inevitable conclusion.

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Synopsis of Trajan’s Arch: Gabriel Rackett stands at the threshold of middle age. He lives north of Chicago and teaches at a small community college. He has written one novel and has no prospects of writing another, his powers stagnated by drink and loss. Into his possession comes a manuscript, written by a childhood friend and neighbor, which ignites his memory and takes him back to his mysterious mentor and the ghosts that haunted his own coming of age. Now, at the ebb of his resources, Gabriel returns to his old haunts through a series of fantastic stories spilling dangerously off the page–tales that will preoccupy and pursue him back to their dark and secret sources.

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Synopsis of Tattered Men: When a body washes ashore downstream from the city, the discovery saddens the small neighborhood south of Broadway. A homeless man, T. Tommy Briscoe, whose life had intertwined with a bookstore, a bar, and the city’s outdoor theater had touched many lives at an angle. One was that of Mickey Walsh, a fly-by-night academic and historian, who becomes fascinated with the circumstances surrounding the drowning.

From the beginning there seems to be foul play regarding Briscoe’s death, and, goaded on by his own curiosity and the urging of two old friends, Walsh begins to examine the case when the police give it up. His journey will take him into the long biography of a man who might have turned out otherwise and glorious, but instead fell into and through the underside of history, finding harsh magic and an even harsher world. Despite the story of Tommy’s sad and shortened life, Walsh begins to discover curious patterns, ancient and mythic, in its events—patterns that lead him to secrets surrounding the life and death of Tommy Briscoe and reveal his own mysteries in the searching.

Tattered Men is one of the novels of the City Quartet, an interrelated group of novels that can be read in any order that also includes Dominic’s Ghosts, Trajan’s Arch, and Vine: An Urban Legend.

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Author Links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Mythical-Realism-The-Michael-Williams-Page-128713900543978/

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