Penny Ponders On The Wages Of Dying
Yes, it’s Vampires — and No, it’s not what you expect
The Wages of Dying by Meghan Purvis is a book of surprises. The author is an accomplished and award-winning writer, but this is her first novel. It’s hugely well researched and engulfs you in the world of the story. But don’t expect a standard vampire tale. As one reviewer noted:
Yes, it IS a story involving vampires, but it’s also about mobsters and booze traffickers and above all about PEOPLE.
Meghan Purvis herself took the road trip that her heroine, Ruby Davis, is forced to take — New York to New Orleans. Reading the book, it feels as though it must have been written by someone who was there, and I found myself working out her likely age on the assumption that she was a teenager in the 1920s. Turns out she’d be approaching her 120th birthday which I deemed unlikely, even before I discovered that she is considerably younger than I am. She’s just an exceptionally good writer.
Quoting again from that same review:
It’s written with the assurance, control and sheer skill of a much more experienced author and the quality of language is impressive. The settings are vivid, the characterisations excellent and the narrative pace brisk but perfectly regulated.
A quarter of the way into the novel I was thinking, ‘Wow, this ought to sell! What a cracking piece of writing!’
Just scene-setting
I’m doing a bit of scene-setting here because this isn’t a book review as such. I’m writing about it because I’m diving into the spotlight books for Fantastic Books Publishing’s
If you want to read a detailed review, here’s the one that I’ve quoted above, from author Mark P Henderson:
In researching the story behind this story, all sorts of interesting snippets cropped up. One, in particular, was that Meghan originally intended to write a contemporary tale, but found herself struggling not to drown her opening chapters in backstory until it occurred to her that it was the backstory that was the real story. So that’s the one she wrote.
I was also intrigued by the road trip. I’m aware from interviews I’ve seen with Meghan that she has family connections that intersected with the route that her heroine took which made it a special trip for a lot of different reasons.
Where did real life meet fiction?
Here’s what I asked Meghan:
When you took your road trip, was it before or after you’d planned Ruby’s, and are there any particular parts of those trips where the story met real life?
Meghan replied:
I did my research trip after I’d planned Ruby’s — the Arts Council funded my proposal to help me flesh out those parts of the novel, and I’m so glad they did, as there were all kinds of details and ideas I only got by going there! New York and New Orleans (and London for that matter, where I now live) always seem like palimpsests to me, where layers of the city that was are crammed up against the city that is and the construction of a city that will be. Being in both of those cities helped me get the feel of each place, but it also helped the overall story to experience how timeless they are. Seeing traces of the past integrated with the present makes you realise how briefly we’re here, when it comes down to it — and consequently, how a potentially immortal being like a vampire would start to regard humans as a resource to be exploited!
There are tons of small details from my trip that made it into the book, but my favourite is probably the little lizards that are all over New Orleans. I wandered around the Garden District a lot when I was there — it’s an old neighbourhood with gorgeous houses — and I was actually outside a house Anne Rice owned for years the first time I encountered them. You can’t really write anything about vampires in New Orleans without acknowledging her influence, so while my writing and hers are very different, those lizards are a little tip of my hat to her. And I still look for them every time I visit.
Wow, doesn’t that reinforce the impression that the whole book was meant to be? And was anyone else diving for the dictionary to double check palimpsests, or was it just me? I’ve not heard that word since the days an art history academic used sometimes to join us at lunch and hold us enthralled with stories of the worlds she was uncovering in her work.
Palimpsests: a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.
MABLE
Both The Wages of Dying and Meghan Purvis are in the spotlight during this autumn’s online MABLE event that will run during September and October. Do sign up. It’s free and you’ll have the chance to chat with the authors.
