G
abriel Squailia is joining us today with his novel Dead Boys. Here’s the publisher’s description.
A decade dead, Jacob Campbell is a preservationist, providing a kind of taxidermy to keep his clients looking lifelike for as long as the forces of entropy will allow. But in the Land of the Dead, where the currency is time itself and there is little for corpses to do but drink, thieve, and gamble eternity away, Jacob abandons his home and his fortune for an opportunity to meet the man who cheated the rules of life and death entirely.
According to legend, the Living Man is the only adventurer to ever cross into the underworld without dying first. It’s rumored he met his end somewhere in the labyrinth of pubs beneath Dead City’s streets, disappearing without a trace. Now Jacob’s vow to find the Living Man and follow him back to the land of the living sends him on a perilous journey through an underworld where the only certainty is decay.
Accompanying him are the boy Remington, an innocent with mysterious powers over the bones of the dead, and the hanged man Leopold l’Eclair, a flamboyant rogue whose criminal ambitions spark the undesired attention of the shadowy ruler known as the Magnate.
An ambitious debut that mingles the fantastic with the philosophical, Dead Boys twists the well-worn epic quest into a compelling, one-of-a-kind work of weird fiction that transcends genre, recalling the novels of China Miéville and Neil Gaiman.
What’s Gabriel’s favorite bit?
GABRIEL SQUAILIA
Have you ever met someone who makes your life easier just by existing? Whose faith fits your doubt as if the two were cut from a single piece of wood? Who solves your thorniest problems just by showing up?
I have, or I wouldn’t be asking all these leading questions. And so, by the end of his quest, has the hero of Dead Boys, the fastidious corpse known as Jacob Campbell.
Jacob has enough drive to get his quest through the underworld started, but he is, if anything, too detail-oriented to pull off his plans alone. It’s a conundrum I’m familiar with: I’d been working on my first book for almost a decade before I met my wife, and while I could build cities, societies, and backstories with endless enthusiasm, I couldn’t seem to build up the steam I needed to get to the end of a hundred pages, let alone an entire novel. But my wife and I had a long, epistolary courtship, and as soon as we started talking about my process, something clicked. I decided to send her the chapters of the book as I finished them, like it was a serial with an audience of one.
Just like that, after years of preparation, I was on my way. And the shape of that transformation slid neatly into the book itself: a long, private struggle leading to an interpersonal connection that made everything possible.
In Dead Boys, it’s not a romance, because these are corpses, and that would be gross. The book takes place in an underworld where the departed float into the muck on the banks of the River Lethe and learn, over the course of days, to move with their minds instead of their muscles. The process is known as quickening, and some never master it, floating downriver instead of entering the afterlife. But those who manage to stagger into Dead City learn that they’ll be rotting, in slow motion, for the rest of eternity.
It’s a cheerless scenario, which is why Jacob has decided to make a better story for himself. Inspired by urban myths of the Living Man, an Orphic figure who came to the Land of the Dead while he was still alive, Jacob is determined to find his way back to the land of the living, or fall to bits trying.
It’s a classic quest full of trials and setbacks, and while it’s made easier, in a way, by the nature of these characters’ bodies — they can’t feel pain, or die again — they’re also struggling against their own substance. Every step they take is hampered by the grip of rotting muscle on bone. In an early chase scene, the Boys notice they’re not gaining any speed by trying to outrun their pursuers, since haste only causes them to jostle and stumble against one another.
It’s a light-hearted scenario, but while I built my characters out of imaginary plasticine, like their spiritual brethren in A Nightmare Before Christmas, I also strove to make every step of their journey a struggle. In setting up the tale, I was careful in my descriptions of motion and the passage of time. I wanted the reader, by and by, to take moving with painstaking deliberation for granted, to assume that every minute passed differently in death than it would in life. My aim was to build a cage of time and space for Jacob and his compatriots — then invite Siham in to smash it.
I can’t tell you much about her, because I hear spoilers are a thing. I can tell you that she took on some of my wife’s history. That I smiled through every scene she graced. That she’s one of very few characters in this crowded cast who arrived with her voice fully formed.
That’s because I’d been waiting so long to bring her in.
My favorite bit in Dead Boys is when Siham arrives.
After all that shambling, she spins. After all that staggering, she laughs. After all that struggle, she gives Jacob a weapon he didn’t know he needed.
Siham takes the stage — and dances.
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BIO:
Gabriel Squailia is a professional DJ from Rochester, NY. An alumnus of the Friends World Program, he studied storytelling and literature in India, Europe, and the Middle East before settling in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
