'A Murder of Crows': Art as Vengeance

And here we have bratty novel number two. Luxembourg is an unusual country to choose as the setting for the novel because it's never on anyone's radar, mine included. For this final novel in the Arcana Europa collection, I wanted to use a country I haven't touched on before. Especially since I've written books set in largely four nations I'm far more familiar with time and time again: England, France, Germany, and Italy (primarily Venice). My first attempt at branching out was with The Amaranth Maze (Sweden), and then I decided to challenge myself with yet another location I knew nothing about.

It was a deep dive into Luxembourg's history, in that case, and I was pleasantly surprised to see patterns of migration into the country. 

In case you didn't know, Rembrandt van Rijn tops my list of favorite artists. And with the idea of regional magic being at the core of the Arcana Europa books, I decided to have Dutch magic be in paint. Mathieu's inscriptive magic is something more like minor magic, if you will, as it's a rare talent but very useful in education. As he's from France, which I've already covered in The Flowers of St. Aloysius, I decided not to rehash nature magic that was already explored in that book though it does enjoy a cameo in the end. 

And so this novel is peopled with immigrants who've all settled down nicely in Luxembourg.

a still from the BBC adaptation of Le Fanu's ghost story

Two other things greatly inspired this book's plot: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter" (one of my all-time favorite ghost stories) and Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and divine justice in Greek mythology. 

The former, of course, involves also one of my favorite horror tropes of the demon lover, but its presence in the book is a lot subtler than it was in The Amaranth Maze. However, the dark, brooding atmosphere of the story and the visuals I ran across online from the TV adaptation from 1979 worked perfectly for my inspiration. Rembrandt's portraits were also mined for mood and atmosphere.

"Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime" by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon

Nemesis is something of a staple in my books, and in this case her presence is closely tied with what I call Dutch magic. Paint and art in this instance aren't only used to capture beauty and emotion, but also to exact vengeance depending on the artist's intent. It was an idea that first came to me when I wrote Ambrose, but it finds full expression in A Murder of Crows. 

A Murder of Crows is now 50% off in e-book format through the end of September. To get your copy, go here for a list of online bookstores.