The Killing Moon

Acknowledgments

My thanks here are mostly for resources rather than people, but only because the list of people to thank would be another book in itself.

The list of helpful resources would be, too, but I’ll single out a few for particular note. First is Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopedia by Richard Cavendish, a coffee-table book that attempted the impossible—a survey of all the world’s myth systems. It had some notable problems of cultural bias and the usual problems of any broad survey, but it was helpful in one way: when I first read it, I began to see the common structure underlying most human cosmogonies. I used this common structure, as I did in the Inheritance Trilogy, to create the gods of Kisua and Gujaareh.

Also, On Dreams by Sigmund Freud, and The Red Book, by Carl Gustav Jung. The latter I was able to see “in person” at last thanks to a lovely exhibit at the Rubin Museum in New York. Early psychoanalysts got a lot of things wrong in their studies of human nature, but in their partly spiritual, partly intellectual quest to understand their fellow human beings, I got a sense of how a faith can be born. To some degree, Gujaareh’s founder Inunru—er, sans mass murder and megalomania—is inspired by them.

Also, the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian and Nubian collection. The British Museum’s collection is much bigger and more impressive, but I don’t live in London, and that museum was too crowded and anxiously guarded to allow the hours of close study I needed. No quick visit can give you a real sense of the day-to-day life of ancient city-dwellers: how they combed their hair, how they cleaned their teeth, how they traveled from home to work, how they gossiped about that guy down the street who looked at them crosswise and didja hear he worships that god? In Brooklyn nobody cares if you sit in one place and stare at something for hours, as long as you don’t then get up and shoot somebody.

Oh, and I’ll allow myself one bit of people-thanks: to my first writing group, the BRAWLers, who were the Boston Area Writers’ Group until we decided we needed better branding. You guys tore this book apart and put it back together better, and you loved it and cheered for it before anyone else. (No, Jennifer, they did not have sex.) Thank you.