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It’s been twenty-five years since I first saw Hackers, and not a week goes by where I don’t find myself tempted to start an email with “Ola, Boys and Girls,” in an attempt to find my people.
Filmmakers really should have done more with Matthew Lillard.
Yesterday, after uploading all the files for Exile, my partner and I ate fish & chips and settled in to binge watch two seasons of Shrill back-to-back. I loved the entire show, but owe it a particular thanks for ending season two with PJ Harvey’s 50 Ft. Queenie running over the end credits.
A very big nostalgia music moment for me, flashing back to 1994 and my final year of high school.
Which is appropriate, in a lot of ways, because Exile is very much a novel about nostalgia music. Keith Murphy returns home after sixteen years, somewhat against his wishes. The opening chapter is titled Paradise City and drops multiple Guns’n’Roses references. I wrote the book listening to the Gunners, but also multiple 80s and 90s rock albums like Slippery When Wet from Bon Jovi and Van Halen’s 1984.
The first location in the novel is the Hard Rock Cafe Surfers Paradise (albeit a version of the cafe that no longer exists, given that it downsized a few years back).
All of that’s by intent, because Exile and the books that follow it have always been about a man frozen in time by his mistakes, only to find himself forced to confront him by the circumstances of his present. It’s a book about nostalgia and moving on, cunningly disguised as an urban fantasy thriller about demons, necromancers, and trapped souls.
The most bewildering comment I’ve ever gotten on social media, from an old family friend: “Who knew you were carrying around so much anger?”
To me, the answer seemed obvious: “Anyone who was paying attention.”
But it wasn’t the anger that caught them off-guard, it was the decision to do something with it. To use anger as an impetus, not just a feeling. To speak about the anger, and why it existed, rater than staying politely silent.
They reacted to the use of anger as a spur to look at the state of the world and say this is not good enough, rather than a flagellum turned against the self to diminish your expectations.
Do not diminish the anger. Use it to get shit done.