A warm welcome to Love Bytes to author Amy Lane joining us today to talk about the release of Familiar Demon, book 2 in the Familiar Love series.
So, Hell, huh? By Amy Lane
I love angels and demons. I love the dichotomy, the jadedness of angels, the innocence of demons, and the idea that, as Alexander Pope put it, “Man: the isthmus of the world” connects the alien good and the sordid bad in what is hopefully a balanced way.
And while Heaven can be an amorphous place, where people run around and efficiently get their orders from a higher power, writing Hell seems to need… more grit, I guess.
I mean, what makes up a Hell universe anyway?
Sartre said “Hell is other people.” Well, okay, but if you’re using paranormal demons with magical powers, demons are thick in the air and people are thin on the ground. I probably need to build a more detailed world than that.
So what do people think hell is?
Well, there’s usually fire and brimstone—which makes things unpleasant all around, but I’m also a big fan of Lucifer, and Lucifer seems to think that hell is people being punished for the bad things they did on earth in a karmically appropriate way.
So I think some more, and oddly enough, I remember the week I once temped at a bank.
One week. Mate insists it was longer. But you were locked into really boring tasks and not allowed to talk and people would give you a long list—not written down—of things to be copied in a specific way and then yell at you for getting it wrong. “You idiot! The Scombulous Trasitonic Calperone paper was supposed to be done twice in legal format and once sideways and formatted like origami!”
*cringe * “Okay, okay master! Let me try it again!”
“No, scum! That’s fifty whacks with a giant stapler—if you take them without screaming I may pull the staples out when I’m done!”
And BOOM! I had my Hell universe.
Mullins spends his time transcribing the rules of hell. They’re complicated, unnecessary and very often talk in spirals of circular reasoning. He and 665 other scribes are supposed to sit in same room (the same awful room) every day and work on this transcription that has no meaning and no goal. Asking any clarifying questions results in torture, and so does wondering about your purpose in hell.
The tortures are, appropriately, hellific.
Mullins gets out of it a lot, of course. He works really hard to hide in his lone cell, with human sheets on the bed and blood dripping from the walls, and get all his work done in quiet. Mullins is in Hell because of a badly made bargain—but he’s determined to keep his word.
The question is, when offered a way out of hell, can Mullins learn from the mistake that got him sent there in the first place?
Mullins’s hell—that of regret and wishing he’d found better decisions to make while alive—is the real hell here. Sometimes, I think Sartre was way off base—hell isn’t other people. Hell is us, the tortured chambers of our own heart that need absolution and a chance for atonement.
Or at least in Mullins’s case it was. And hopefully you’ll tune in to Familiar Demon to watch him make good!
For over a century, Edward Youngblood has been the logical one in a family of temperamental magical beings. But reason has not made him immune to passion, and Edward’s passion for Mullins, the family’s demon instructor, has only grown.
Mullins was lured into hell through desperation—and a fatal mistake. He’s done his best to hang onto his soul in the twisted realm of the underworld, and serving the Youngblood family when summoned has been his only joy. Edward concocts a plan to spring Mullins by collecting a series of items to perform an ancient ritual—an idea that terrifies Mullins. He can’t bear the thought of losing Edward and his brothers to a dangerous quest.
But every item in their collection is an adventure in brotherhood and magic, and as Mullins watches from the sidelines, he becomes more and more hopeful that they will succeed. When the time comes for Mullins to join the mission, can he find enough faith and hope to redeem himself and allow himself happiness in the arms of a man who would literally go to hell and back—and beyond—to have Mullins by his side?
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Amy Lane lives in a crumbling crapmansion with a couple of growing children, a passel of furbabies, and a bemused spouse. She’s been nominated for a RITA, has won honorable mention for an Indiefab, and has a couple of Rainbow Awards to her name. She also has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action-adventure movies, and a need to know that somewhere in all the pain is a story of Wuv, Twu Wuv, which she continues to believe in to this day! She writes fantasy, urban fantasy, and gay romance–and if you accidentally make eye contact, she’ll bore you to tears with why those three genres go together. She’ll also tell you that sacrifices, large and small, are worth the urge to write.
