It's a scorcher of a week in my neck of the woods. Grabbing some ice tea so I can have a chat with author Robert Gainey. Welcome, Robert!
SC:Tell me a little bit about your main character of this book.
RG: Deep down, Diane Morris has a soft, gentle heart. It’s just surrounded by eight years of ossified layers built up during her time as a field agent for the Department of Intangible Assets. After nearly a decade of service fighting off supernatural threats, occult horrors, and budgetary cuts, Diane has learned to shield herself with sarcasm and an obscure arsenal of specialized tools. Like a lot of underappreciated government workers, she lives in a house that’s too small, drives a car that’s a little too old, and has to buy office supplies on her own dime. Sometimes this means printer paper, sometimes it’s thrice-blessed Dead Sea Salt to ward off encroaching poltergeists.
What Diane really wants is a transfer. Out of field work, where she’s lucky to see the end of the fiscal year, let alone retirement. The nice, boring world of Logistics calls to her, but as long as actual sirens are luring fishermen to their deaths on Lake Okeechobee, it doesn’t look like there’s much chance of a reprieve any time soon. Diane might want out of the field, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t dedicated to her work. She’s a public servant through and through and until the day she can park herself behind a desk, she’ll do whatever it takes to do her job.
SC: We like anyone who takes on supernatural threats around here. Do you believe in the paranormal and if so, do you have an experience you can share?
RG: I don’t think it matters much what I believe, because it doesn’t change what people experience or what the truth of the world is. I have seen some weird stuff, things that fall outside the normal bell curve of probable into what one might call anomalous. When I was a volunteer firefighter for City of Midway, Florida, we had a pretty intense house fire. I remember it vividly because it was the first real fire I’d ever been in, and we fought that son of a bitch as hard as we could. There was a big fish tank on a table just as we went through the living room, heading to the seat of the fire in the back of the house. This was a fifty gallon tank, maybe a little bigger, and it had all kinds of fish inside. I remember seeing them as I went past, before the smoke banked down too far. The fire ended up overwhelming us, pushing me and the other firefighter out with its intensity. We fought it from the outside, but it ended up burning pretty much the whole house to the ground.
When we went back in to salvage and overhaul, that damn fish tank was on the floor. The table it had been sitting on was nothing but ash and yet, somehow, the tank was still intact. Not only that, but the fish inside were still swimming around as if nothing at all had happened. It must have fallen three feet without breaking. To this day, ten years later, I still haven’t seen anything like it. It may not quite be divine intervention or even paranormal activity of the classic sort, but it remains one of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen. An immortal fish tank surrounded by charred ruins.
SC: We'll take surreal for $500. What titles are you working on now that you can tell us about?
RG: I’m finishing up the final draft for a sequel to Dragon(e) Baby Gone, continuing to follow the Department of Intangible Assets in its underfunded mission to safeguard the world from anomalous dangers. In the second book, Witches Get Stitches, Diane is sent to investigate the disappearance of her fellow agents from a sleepy little Georgia town called Wickston, where things aren’t quite as idyllic as they seem. Without a firm timeline in place, I can’t be sure when it may be available, but I hope to see it set loose sometime in 2022.
SC: Thanks for much for chatting with us today. Let's take a look at your novel now.
Excerpt
I guess there’s always been a Department of Intangible Assets, in some way or another, since humanity first banded together against the dark. Ancient orders of knights, sects of religions, monasteries and their like had been the first real organizations determined to hold off the things that bled into our world from other realities. Great and epic individuals did a lot of work in the past, though more often than not mere pawns as one ultra-powerful being played against another. Gilgamesh. Solomon. Miyamoto Musashi for a while even worked as a kind of Japanese defender against the supernatural. Things must have been easier back then. If somebody had a problem with a corpse rising from the ground and eating people, or with creatures slinking out of the mountains and taking children, they could talk openly about it, and people would fit it neatly into whatever cultural narrative they had. No press releases concerning carbon monoxide leaks, no awkward local police trying to stutter their way through an ogre rampage by blaming gang violence and drugs. If you were a 17th Century farmer in the Tajima Province of Japan and tengu started picking off your village one by one, Musashi would come by one day, cut down all those dark spirits, and then leave. You’d replant your fields, mourn your losses, and tell warning stories about warding off evil. And, probably, pay him whatever he wanted.
Modern times gave way to a general idea that reason and logic were enough to stop something from dragging you into the sewers and wearing your skin to protect itself from daylight. It’s easy to see why: it doesn’t happen to a lot of people, therefore it must not happen. I see it all the time, people who say things like “I’ve never seen a ghost, so they must not exist.”
Oh yeah? Because if spirits did exist, they’d all be tripping over their ghost dicks to haunt you? Do you understand the preternatural forces that conspire, the circumstances that line up, to create any kind of ghost? Let alone one that shows up in your room at night and moans about revenge or betrayal or rattles some chains and teaches you a valuable lesson about being selfish?“Well, there’s no such thing as Bigfoot. All those pictures are super blurry and grainy,” they say, their voices nasally and snobby, like all the knowledge of the world is pumped directly into their tiny brains through their tiny phones. I don’t care to get into whether or not any of the literally thousands of kinds of entities that flit in and out of forests would like to be called “Bigfoot,” but just because you haven’t left your couch in twenty years doesn’t mean there’s not something out there you don’t understand. Go stand out in a remote Colorado forest one night.
Turn off your phone, open your eyes and ears, and wait. When you feel those eyes watching, and when you know, deep in that primitive monkey brain, way, way down inside, that there’s more than just the animals you have names for sharing that clearing with you, then you can call me to tell me that there’s no such thing as Bigfoot.
That is, if you live to turn your phone back on again.
Thanks so much for having me here today. Loved the questions, and its so much fun to be a part of your blog.
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