[Book Review] TERRIBLE FALL OF ANGELS
Confession - as much as I read large amounts of urban fantasy, particularly those with some sort of Investigator main character, I haven't really gotten into Hamilton's earlier works. I gave Anita the college try, working through a handful of books, but while I respected her work I never grew invested in the series.
But, Guilty Pleasures came out in 1993. Thirty years is a long time for someone to hone and refine their craft, and Hamilton's body of work and impact on the genre speaks volumes to her skill. So a brand new series made me sit up and pay attention. I wanted to see where this went, and I was not let down in the slightest. Laurell K. Hamilton also took some time to answer some questions about the series, themes, setting, and horror!
A Terrible Fall of Angels gives us a new setting, one where faith and belief can shape your magic, one where children can be taken and taught to act as a conduit for angelic voices. Zaniel was an Angel Speaker, until he left his calling and started his life over. He still works on the side of the angels, for where there are angels there are demons, but he's learning things aren't quite as he was taught and there are more allies than just those of the celestial chorus standing against the darkness.
I'd recommend this book to fans of Hamilton's earlier works, as well as fans of series such as Tad William's Bobby Dollar or Paul Cornell's London Falling.
Q&A with Laurell K. Hamilton:
First off, I just wanted to say thank you for your time, I know it's high in demand.
Thank you for having me.
So, from Vampires to Fae and now Angels as a central theme of a series. Was this series a long brewing idea, and how does launching into it differ from Anita or Merry?
It was very different from either Anita or Merry. Usually when a single line comes to me it’s a short story, or just an idea. Out of the blue one day a line came into my head, “There were angel feathers in the dead woman’s bed.” I wrote it down on a sticky note and put it with the notes that don’t belong to either of my other two series. I walked past that note for almost ten years. I thought it would be the beginning of a short story perhaps. One day I heard the main character’s voice in my head telling me he was ready, because it was a male main character from the beginning. I didn’t know his name or anything about the world, but when the muse strikes I know enough to sit down and write. I got almost a first chapter done and then inspiration was done. I put it in a file called Angel book because now I knew it was going to be a book. That unfinished chapter started the world building introducing the College of Angels, that my main character was a police detective with a metaphysical unit, and that he was an angel speaker, whatever that was, and could communicate with angels.
The opening sat in a file for a few more years, then I thought I was ready to write it in 2013-2014, but in the end I wrote A Shiver of Light, the ninth Merry Gentry novel. I think if I’d written A Terrible Fall of Angels back then it would have been a much darker, harsher book. Zaniel wasn’t ready to tell his story, and I wasn’t ready to finish the world building he and I both needed. Fast forward to 2020 and I don’t have to tell anyone that’s reading this what happened. We’re all living it. I’d started making notes for the tenth Merry Gentry novel, but she wasn’t ready and suddenly I knew that it was time to write the angel book. Most of the first chapter is still the chapter I wrote around 2014, but beyond that everything changed. Zaniel Havelock was not what I first expected him to be as a character. Like all my first-person narrations he had to find his voice so I could follow him around in this new world. Once we had his voice solid, him solid, then the secondary cast coalesced around him. That’s actually how I know when the main character’s voice is right, because other great characters suddenly appear to interact with them. Zaniel was ready to be written when the world needed more hope, more angels, more white knights to fight the demons. I love his voice and his goodness, and his survivor’s guilt which shapes so much of him.
How did you develop the series' mythologies, and can you expand on the differentiation in the series between demons vs fallen angels?
Research is always part of my world building. I think I now own every book on angels in print, or that’s how it feels. Most of the books on angels that have a great bibliography and draw from ancient texts list angels and the Fallen side by side. In fact, different sources list different angels among the Fallen, so that in one tome they are in the Heavenly hierarchy and in the next they are part of the rulership of Hell. One thing is clear from my research: the Fallen are still angels, but they are stripped of their powers the way that most fiction depicts. Again, most of the books on angels list demons among the Fallen as if there is no difference. I even found some sources that listed what we consider evil or harmful fey as Fallen angels or demons. (I was actually irritated by that because it showed Christian bias that anything that’s not part of that faith is painted as evil.) There was a great deal of conflicting information to wade through. In Zaniel’s world, Fallen angels are not demons or devils, but they can be in Hell and that changes them and their powers as we will see in later books. Demons are not Fallen angels and never have been. They have always been in Hell and never saw Heaven.
Can you talk about the process of creating an organization that is framed by the outside world as a cult, and what it's like to write someone who's left it (even if he doesn't view it as a cult himself)? Did you look into experiences of folks who have left cults themselves and how that shaped their interactions with the world at large?
There are lots of great documentaries on cults and people who have escaped them. I’ve watched them for years, but honestly I didn’t see The College of Angels as a cult, because Zaniel didn’t see it that way. He’s my first-person narrator, my eyes and ears to everything in the world. I’m in his head, so what he believes, I believe. It was only when other characters began calling the College a cult that Zaniel and I both began to see it differently. It wasn’t until we thought about the College of Angels being the subject of one of those cult documentaries that we both went, “huh?”
Jamie/Levi's arc prompted this question; what is horror for you and your writing? His experiences and journey through trauma and healing, especially experiencing the constant bombardments of pleas for help while everyone around him just heard celestial music, had some very realistic details and for me was possibly the most striking horror of the story.
Thank you, and I totally agree. I’ve always thought that one of the worst horrors is not being able to trust your own mind and senses. I learned about people with schizophrenia as a teenager. The thought that someone suffering from it literally can experience any of their senses lying to them. We rely on our sight, touch, hearing, etc. to tell us about the world around us and about ourselves and our bodies, but what if the messages coming from your mind were inaccurate, or even outright delusional? How would you tell the difference? I’ve researched various mental illnesses over the years and even various syndromes where your experience of your sensory experience is switched like people that see sound as color, or sound as smells. I’ve been fascinated and horrified by it since I was in my teens, so I have a lot of information to draw from.
Jamie stepped full born onto the paper as I was writing his first scenes. As a practicing witch I’ve often wondered how many people are pumped full of drugs and put in asylums that are actually psychically gifted? I mean how do you tell the difference between hearing voices that are just your brain chemistry backfiring and the voice of Deity? I researched the lives of saints for this book, and a lot of what proved to others that they could hear the voice of God or see the Virgin Mary sounded identical to the symptoms for schizophrenia. How would you tell the difference in a modern world that doesn’t believe in miracles anymore? If you are truly telepathic and can hear other people’s thoughts, but no one around you can, then would they believe you or think you were crazy?
Laurell K. Hamilton is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series and the Merry Gentry, Fey Detective series. With more than 40 novels published and 20 million books sold, Laurell continues to create groundbreaking fiction inspired by her lifelong love of monster movies, ghost stories, mythology, folklore, and things that go bump in the night. She lives in St. Louis with her family. In her free time, Laurell trains in Filipino martial arts with a specialization in blade work. Learn more online at laurellkhamilton.com, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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