San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Writer David Liss’ Victorian occult tale.
In general, readers should not expect to find famous figures of the past popping up in San Antonio writer David Liss’ historical fiction.
“I always try to avoid it,” said Liss, whose novels include the Edgar Award-winning “A Conspiracy of Paper” and its sequel, “A Spectacle of Corruption.” “I kind of hate the historical novel where you’re in ancient Greece and somebody says, ‘Oh, this is a problem, let me ask my good friend Aristotle,’ where you just go on a guided tour of everything you already know.”
He found he had to make an exception in his latest page-turner, “The Peculiarities” (Tachyon, $17.95).
The book, which will be released Tuesday, is set in a Victorian London where all sorts of bizarre things are happening. Women give birth to rabbits, violent fogs drift into buildings, and some people are mutating, taking on characteristics of wolves, birds, fish and trees that gradually obliterate most of their human traits.
The main character, a young man named Thomas Thresher who has started spouting leaves all over his body, seeks answers at the secretive Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The real-life society, which was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was steeped in the occult and the paranormal. One of its bestknown members was occultist and writer Aleister Crowley.
Not including Crowley would have made no sense, Liss said, “because he loomed so large in that world.”
“So I knew I had to include him,” he said. “I wasn’t really enthusiastic about it, but it was one of those things where he was such a fun character to write that he ended up playing a bigger role than I originally intended.”
Another big name also briefly appears in the book. (Those who want to avoid spoilers should skip to the paragraph after next.) On his first visit to the Golden Dawn, Thomas encounters Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The famous writer meets a shocking end shortly thereafter.
“That was really there just to signal to the reader that the novel basically takes place in our world as it really existed until about 10 years before the novel starts,”
Liss said. “And so, that was just a way of signaling to the reader that we are off the rails now, we’ve diverged in timeline from what really happened.”
There’s an Easter egg aspect to Doyle’s appearance, as well.
“It was also sort of an inside joke for about 11 people in the world, because Arthur Conan Doyle is one of those figures often cited as a member of the Golden Dawn who actually never was,” Liss said. “There are definitely a few famous writers who are often said to have been members, who, as near as we can tell historically, never actually were. So I thought it would be fun to use him in that way.”
“The Peculiarities” also allowed Liss to write about a couple of things that have long intrigued him.
“I’ve always been interested in historical magic, by which I mean, magic as it was practiced by real people who lived and who believed that what they were doing was working in some way,” he said. “So to that end, for as long as I’ve been a writer, I’d always had somewhere in the back of my mind writing something about the Golden Dawn, which I’d been reading about and interested in generally for decades. That kind of stuff has always fascinated me.”
He also had wanted to write about some other real-life weirdness.
“My background is as an 18th centuryist, and there was a famous hoax in early 18th century England of this woman named Mary Toft who claimed to be giving birth to rabbits, and medical science was at such a state at that point that lot of doctors said, ‘Yeah, sure, it’s possible. Who knows how these things work?’ ” he said. “And that was something I’d always wanted to play around with.”
Liss has sometimes moved outside historical fiction — he has written comic books, his middle school trilogy “Randoms” is set in space, and his 2006 novel “The Ethical Assassin” is a contemporary thriller. But he has always returned to the past.
“I like the limitations that historical fiction imposes,” he said. “I like working within a structured world that’s not the same as the world I live in, and historical fiction definitely allows me to do that. I like the process of doing research and learning what this world is that I can play with and building a world around it. I guess I like guardrails, in some ways.”
Liss already has finished the manuscript for his next book. And he is working on the one after that: “I don’t like to not be writing.”
He could talk about what the book slated to follow “The Peculiarities” is about, he said, but he won’t.
“There’s no value in me talking about a project that hasn’t been sold and, if it is, is a year and a half away from anyone being able to get their hands on it,” he said. “I don’t want anybody saying, ‘Oh, this other book sounds even better, I’ll wait for that.’ ”