Do you Believe In Magic?
I have always loved fairy tales.
I love stories sculpted out of ancient prophecy and malicious curses, magic healing tears, and quests to recapture jewel-encrusted chalices. The problem is that I always wanted to believe in these stories, but I had a hard time letting go of reality and explanations. What activates the spells? How does a 900-pound unicorn fly through the sky on such delicate, prissy wings? How exactly do you make the jewel-encrusted chalice so that it doesn’t it leak out its magic during 600 years of sitting in a cave?
Many authors (and filmmakers) shrug their shoulders and say, “It’s magic. Get over it.”
I’ve read a few authors who manage to pull it off – they build a carefully constructed world where magic has consequences and phenomena get explained. And while I still enjoy a good romp with enchanted jewels and riddle-telling elves, ultimately I think what I always yearned for was a fairy tale that I could believe was happening in our world. Maybe I haven’t outgrown the childhood notion that magic is possible in this technology-driven, over-plasticized “real world” of ours.
What if there’s magic around?
What if we forgot to notice?
In the first book I published, King Perry, I decided to blur the boundaries between our ordinary world and magic. I had help. Cover artist Anne Cain created a masterpiece in which Perry greets the sunrise wearing a gold-spangled shirt. Looking at that cover, it’s not clear whether the sparkles are created by the sun gleaming off his shirt, light captured by the dissipating morning mist, or perhaps Perry himself radiates some mystical power all his own?
Hard to say, really. Which is exactly what I wanted.
To build a magical world for readers in a disbelieving culture, I decided I needed to focus on four things: mystical settings, a rich mythology, Cinderfella-like transformations, and (of course) a deep-rooted curse.
I chose San Francisco as the setting for that first book because it’s one of the most mystical locations I know. At once golden and green, sunny yet deliciously chilly, the bay area is nothing short of a fantasy landscape. Spooky, haunted Alcatraz appears suddenly from many unexpected angles throughout the city, like the uninvited, brooding witch at Prince Charming and Snow White’s wedding. I tried to infuse this magic into my descriptions of The City by the Bay.
Of the Golden Gate Bridge, narrator Vin Vanbly says:
When driving back from Sausalito, I love that first glimpse of the deep orange towers striking the rolling, lush hills, legs battered by the white-crested surf. Only a surrealist painter could juxtapose shapeless foam against steel pylons that will outlast all of us, man’s rare architectural improvement to a gorgeous landscape. On those days when shadow and mist rule the earth, I love driving across, straining to see the high-reaching cables, invisible while I’m directly underneath. Golden Gate’s power remains even when masked by magician’s fog, hidden only by our limited ability to recognize strength.
I make myself drunk off infusing magical allusions and love right into the physical descriptions, revealing the power and grace that certain locations already possess. I’m not shy about stealing language right from fairy tales to insert into settings. Several paragraphs later, Vin says:
We head down the Pacific Highway, everything around us suggesting gingerbread homes, hills ripe for castles, and trees ready for enchantment.
Magic might exist in our physical landscape if we allow ourselves to see with the eyes of a believer.
Of course, every fairy tale must have a mythology and the world of The Lost and Founds is no different. While on the ferry from the mainland to Alcatraz, Vin begins weaving a surreal (and borderline ordinary) tale about the kingdom of kings…
Once there was a tribe of men, a tribe populated entirely of kings. Odd, you may think, and wonder how any work got done in such a society with everyone making rules. But these were not those kinds of kings. They required no throne rooms, no jewels, no gold crowns. They chose to king as they went about the business of living. The gardeners, the blacksmiths, even the tax collectors, were fair and just kings. In this tribe, all brothers were rightful owners of the kingdom. You might come across King Ryan the Protector or King Galen the Courier, on your way to visit The Sculptor King. They loved freely with open hearts, some lying with other kings and some seeking women as their queens.
As the entire series evolves (now in the fourth book), the reader must decide, “how much of this is true?” Vin indicates that some of the king names represent real people…but which ones? Some of the kings mentioned in King Perry show up in the second, third, and fourth books. Some of the ridiculous details hinted at in King Perry, are later proven to be historical events in Vin’s life.
When I’m lost in a book, whether about vampires, sixteenth-century peasants, or a detective whose sidekick is a talking pencil, I want to believe in the mythology, to be unable to answer the question “Is this real or not?” Whether I’ve achieved this outcome in The Lost and Founds is debatable, but that was my world-building goal.
The magical glimmers in the first book become stronger hints in the second, King Mai. In the latest book, King John, Vin and his title character debate the nature of magic:
At last, he asks, “Is this magic?”
“Is what?”
“Your King Weekends. You’re a Lost King, but you wield some sort of magic, right?”
I snort. “No. No magic.”
Despite Vin’s derision—and later insistence that magic isn’t real—could he be wrong? Could the narrator swearing there’s no such thing as magic be…wrong? It certainly seems possible, especially when the only thing that will wake Vin from an impossible sleep is a kiss from a man who loves him.
One of my favorite parts of any fairy tale is the transformation – the sudden appearance of a mysterious, glittering princess at the masquerade ball, the stable boy who discovers he’s actually the missing prince. When I see the stable boy discover his inner king, I believe. When Cinderella is dressed in rags again, yet carries herself with the grace of someone who knows she has a fairy godmother, I soar. While magic may have helped, that kind of transformation comes from within.
The growth of each man from inner king to outer king mirrors Joseph Campbell’s beautifully articulated hero’s journey: the reluctant acceptance of adventure, the first descent into darkness, the dark night of the soul, the healing balms of unanticipated help along the way, and ultimately, the darkest dark, which brings the hero into contact with his own fierce limitations. A true hero responds by transcending those limitations, utilizing a power from within that leaves the rest of us slack-jawed with wonder.
Ultimately, this is the real magic –people who can transcend their lifelong restrictions to find new power, new grace, and a new self who remembers the old story, but no longer needs to sweep out the fireplace. That part of life is over.
Finally, building a world of magical kings and powerful healing requires a dark counterpart — an ancient curse not easily undone. Again, I do not wish to reveal too much plot, but I must at least explain that the focus of the curse is our narrator, Vin Vanbly. King Perry introduced the curse; the next book expands upon it, and helps us understand the curse’s impact on Vin’s life.
A short internal monologue from the second book in The Lost and Founds series, King Mai, illustrates this. Vin ponders to himself…
Our chase through this cornfield exhilarates me, a rat who has hidden always in the maze of life, trying to navigate its tricky relationships. I don’t have friends because while I understand people very well, at some point they all end up thinking I’m creepy.
I grew tired of those suspicious looks, the dark wonderings if I have disturbing psychic powers or some ability to force their vulnerability. I don’t think so, but it’s possible, I guess. I have heard it in many flavors: How can you know what you know? Why are you this way? A friend should have the right to come to you and say, “I need tell you something” and not get in response, “I think I already know.” So, I quit trying to make friends.
In each subsequent book, we learn more about the depth and power of Vin’s curse. In the third book, The Butterfly King, we discover that Vin has yearned for freedom from this curse since he was twenty-four. In the fourth book, King John, readers see the cumulative effect on the cursed narrator—how his fractured mind is slowly unraveling under the burden of what he must do in the world. When will Vin’s curse end? Will he ever know happiness?
Yes.
Soon.
And to me, this is the real magic: we care about an imaginary world.
I love writers who build unique and fascinating new worlds, worlds I can’t help but immerse myself in—absolutely breathless—trying to absorb each nuance and every fascinating detail. I have believed in zombies, aliens, true love, family redemption, and small miracles. I have gasped through wedding proposals, hurricanes, evil murders, and men who fall in love with other men.
I guess there really is magic in our real world: books.
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Edmond Manning is the author of the romance series, The Lost and Founds. The books in this series include King Perry, King Mai (a 2014 Lambda Literary finalist), The Butterfly King, and King John. King John takes place at Burning Man.
