Last night, Blood of Ambrose 
author James Enge participated via phone call with the Inner Worlds Sci-Fi/Fantasy Reading and Discussion Group. Enge talked via phone to a group of about 11 folks, who meet once a month in Barnes & Noble. While there, he spilled some beans about the direction his novel-in-progress The Wolf Age is taking:
"It's getting a little dark. I thought it would be a lighthearted romp--Morlock, werewolves, ghost-powered zeppelins--how could you lose? And I think it will be. Well, I don't want to go into too many details because I'm still in the thick of it, but there are some very dark passages in that book so far."
This lead to a discussion about authors who can be funny and horrific in the same context (as he can):
"I was thinking of Dorothy L. Sayers just the other day. She does that in the Lord Peter Wimsey books. They are about murder--she takes murder as a moral act very seriously; some of those sections about the murders are really grim--but its awfully laugh out loud funny. It's like PG Wodehouse sometimes, and Raymond Chandler, I think, is the same way in the US though. In the middle of this dark case where everything is evil and everyone is bad and Philip Marlowe just got beat up again, he makes some wisecrack that just makes you laugh out loud. Detective novels are good at that sometimes."
From there they went on to discuss crows as Enge's favorite bird.
"They are the only bird that will talk back to me. I can imitate a crow pretty well, and they'll talk back to me. I don't know what they are saying, of course."
Good time had by all.
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