Scott's Place

One Halloween, when I was very young, I watched an adaptation of Dracula, followed by a made-for-TV movie, The Night Stalker ... if you've never seen it, the premise is that an investigative journalist discovers a "real, live, vampire", living in modern Las Vegas. I enjoyed the movie, but my budding literary sensibilities had been offended in some subtle, hard to define way. In particular, I scoffed at the idea that vampires or werewolves or wizards could exist in a world where science had so thoroughly explained everything.

 

It was 1972, I was 12, and pretty darned well-read for my age. I'd read Tolkien. I'd read Heinlein, Clark, Asimov. I'd read Sylvia Plath, and Eudora Welty, and Jules Vern, and Dumas Pere. I'd read Silverberg and Frost and Bradbury. I'd even read Zane Gray, and Ian Fleming, and Arthur Conan Doyle.  I'd read Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley, and William Peter Blatty's The Excorcist, before it was made into the movie that scared the hell out of people. I had a good feeling for the styles and forms of fiction, and felt I had a handle on the conventions of literature. As near as I could tell Westerns stayed in the west, SciFi stayed in the future, or out in space, sword and sorcery stayed in places like Middle-Earth, or Narnia, spies mostly stayed in Europe – and magic and monsters stayed in or before the 19th century! (The soap opera Dark Shadows was an exception: soap operas so commonly feature such ridiculous plot-lines, that vampires and werewolves could hardly keep up!)

 

The Night Stalker bothered me. It broke the rules:  it put the plot of a Gothic Horror novel in the 20th century – right where a Cop story should be! I was still far too young and innocent to realize that a lot of  stories stood out from all the rest precisely because they did break the rules!  

 

In the early 70's, everything the country had been going through for a decade seemed to be coming to a head. Kennedy had been assassinated long before, but the conspiracy theories were really getting spun up by this time – stories of a gunman on the grassy knoll, and who he might have worked for ... the mafia? Castro? The government?  Bobby Kennedy, too, had been gunned down, and plenty of people doubted openly that it had been by the hand of a single whacko. The Pentagon Papers were in the news: proof that the Johnson administration had lied to everyone about the Viet-Nam War. Watergate had begun, and Nixon's aides were already scrambling to claim he'd known nothing about it. The Church Committee was uncovering evidence of vast illegalities committed by the CIA, NSA, and FBI. Timothy Leary was telling everyone everything would be fine if they took more acid. Huge numbers of Americans were fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft. Anti-war protests were happening daily, all over the country – and were often enough turning to riots. My dad, a Marine, seemed to spend his life livid about these things, and saw to it that the whole family heard about every bit of it.

 

Then one night, as one awful secret after another was pried out of the Government on the evening news – every bit of it raved over by my dad – I was stupid enough to ask why it was all so important.

 

He stared at me, as if I'd just confessed to murdering a kitten. "Why???" he spluttered, "Because if they've hidden all of this,  who knows what else they might be hiding!!!"

 

It clicked in my head. The X-Files were a good 20 years away, but the idea was there:  what if the government knew about monsters? Vampires? Werewolves? Secret experiments gone wrong? People with magical powers?

 

I was a child, and my story-sense was immature:  eventually I realized that it would be better if the cops and the government had no knowledge of such things. They'd always be there to prevent anyone from openly taking action – but another group should exist: a secret group. They'd be  dedicated to defending mankind from the monsters, or from the ambitions of dark wizards – which, of course, led to the next evolution:  if there were dark wizards, there should be light ones, too! 

 

I began building the world of my stories in earnest, then. I imagined the victorians who'd chased down Dracula coming home and deciding if there was one vampire out there there could be others. I imagined them making a 'Society' – which was the just and proper course for any victorian Brit who'd discovered something worthy that needed doing. A society back then needed a motto, or a solemn oath:  my guys swore to hunt down monsters – and escort them to the gates of hell!  The Hell's Gate Society was born. I imagined them recruiting soldiers, and wizards – and then I wondered why those two need be separate:  couldn't people learn magic and combat both? The teen-age concept of skinny know-it-alls, with glasses, who shunned sports, was pretty strong with me (I was the embodiment of that, after all) – but why couldn't someone be both studious and athletic???

 

Kung Fu premiered that year.

 

A mystical martial artist! A wizard-Warrior! That was what I needed! The Knights of the Hell's Gate Society would dominate my story worlds forever after. Best of all, thinking about monsters, I realized that one way to kill something that healed almost at once was to behead it. My knights would need swords as well as guns – and that was just beyond cool!

 

The mythos came together over the years, each piece being crafted as the fix to a nagging question, and eventually it was all reworked. That process is still not finished – not really even close – and may not be for some time. At the end of it all will be Daniel Elder, A Knight of Hell's Gate.

 

Which is what I'll call the book.