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.
I’ve ended up taking a short, unscheduled break from writing newsletters over the last fourteen days. Regular GenrePunk Ninja transmissions will resume
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Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter, especially if they’re
