Five true things from the Simon Canderous series that don't seem true

My Simon Canderous urban fantasy series is chock full of the bizarre.  Homicidal bookcases, chupacabra, zombies, vampires, statues that come to life, all set against my home for fifteen years, New York City.  I thought it might interest my readers to know that much of what I write about actually does exist in Manhattan, only I’ve given those things a slight paranormal twist.  I thought it would be keen to share some of those things with you today.

 The Lovecraft Café

The front operation for the Department of Extraordinary Affairs is, of course, the east village coffee shop/movie theater known as the Lovecraft Café.  While the name itself is a nod to good ole H.P. himself and his Cthulhu mythos, the place itself did exist.  Back in the mid-90s I lived over in the East Village and used to frequent this coffee shop called Cinema Classics, located on E. 11th as it is in my books.  Coffeehouse out front, and beyond a hanging velvet curtain in the back you’d find an awesome little cinema area that played lots of great stuff I had always wanted to see on the big screen.  9 times out of 10 the movies I have playing in the Lovecraft Café version of it are clues to the plot of the book.  Sadly, the café closed even before Dead To Me came out, and lives on through my work.

 

Cleopatra’s Needle

In Deader Still, Simon comes across a strange monolith sitting in Central Park.  Carved with hieroglyphics, it’s just standing there behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  This is a real thing, and one of the many fun discoveries I came across in my many adventures in the park.  Somewhere I have a recording of me blocking out certain scenes from the book, running to and fro around it.  Simon and Connor are being chased by ghost-possessed crab statues (sounds silly, I know) and I was working out the logistics of it all in the park one afternoon.  Funny story about that… at first I had read about the Needle online, and it said it had these heavy bronze crab statues at it’s base, so I had envisioned like one giant human-sized statue, menacing in scale.  When I first went to the Needle, however, I realized my sense of scale was off.  There were four crabs, each about the size of a toaster oven.  Not quite menacing in the same way, but I figure they’d be scary because it was late at night, and there were four of them low and hiding in the dark.  And let’s face it… squirrels aren’t all that terrifying either, but if 80 attacked you at once, well…

 

The Gibson-Case Center

The Gibson- Case Center is the home to some very special residents in Dead Matter.  Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?  However, it’s based on the several things I love.  As an old school Shadowrun RPG-er, I used to love the idea of arcologies… these building city-states that were self contained communities.  The building itself is where the Time Warner Center stands in Manhattan on Columbus Circle and is pretty much a giant self contained city state of a building.  I recommend visiting it if you’re in NYC.  The name is a tribute to one of my favorite authors William Gibson and his character Case from Neuromancer.

 

Bryant Park

I’m always looking for new and interesting venues when writing about the city I love, and New York never seems to disappoint.  Take, for example, I knew I wanted a big brawl and I knew a necromancer was behind much of what was going on in Deader Still, but I needed a location that would work for a scenario.  The idea of staging it during Fashion Week kind of struck me funny (I write while watching America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway.. don’t judge!). And they usually used to set up at Bryant Park, so I researched that area, only to discover that Bryant Park had once been a potter’s field, a mass grave for the poor.  Gee, what could a necromancer do with a big pile of corpses underneath the Fashion Week tents?  Ding!  We had a winner!

 

Hell Gate Bridge

In Dead Waters, I wanted to explore the history of some of the characters people have come to know and love in the series.  One of them is Simon’s mentor and boss, Inspectre Argyle Quimbley.  I wanted to explore what it meant to get old in a world of fighting supernatural horrors.  Longevity doesn’t seem to fit well in the great struggle between good versus evil, if I base it on my Call of Cthulu RPG loss of Sanity Points for all the characters I played. While exploring who the Inspectre used to be as a young man, I started to thing of historical locations around the city that might have dark histories as well, and while perusing maps, there it was:  the Hell Gate Bridge.  I mean, c’mon people, how was I supposed to resist that, just by name alone?  And upon further research, there’s been so much tragedy associated with that location over the years, well… for me, those elements of real life details really help to ground my work.  I’ve always liked to have a real world feel where fantastical things happen, instead of a fantastical world with real elements.  It seems to be what people come to my work for, so I must be doing something right.

 

I wonder what will strike my fancy next from the real world, but in a city like New York, there’s always something inspiring and waiting to be twisted around every corner. Let’s get twisted together, shall we?