The Urbantasm series will conclude on May 1st with the publication of Book Four: The Spring Storm.
I hired Bewitching Book Tours to organize a blog tour for me, and the attached questionnaire included a field for me to share a tagline. Urbantasm hasn’t ever had a tagline, but I couldn’t help thinking of a line from Book Four: “Eventually, everything comes to an end. Even endings.”
I like that line, because it engages up front with our very paradoxical relationship to time.
From a human perspective, time is the most merciless and unyielding of beasts, devouring all and not caring one iota for our passions and priorities. And yet, that experience of time is uniquely specific to sentient beings: our brain has to burn energy — to create entropy — in order to generate thought, and since the measure of time is really a measure of entropy, its whole trajectory is something only experienced by creatures who can think. At least that’s the way some pop-science book I’ve long since forgotten (and thus cannot cite) put it. But it’s an explanation that makes sense to me, and it’s comforting, though severe.
Another quote about time, that I can recite with greater precision, comes from William Faulkner’s troubling opus The Sound and the Fury: “Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” The quote is expressed at the beginning of a terrible and deadly day in the life of Quentin Compson. At the beginning of the chapter, he smashes his watch in order to tame time, but instead it runs wild, refusing to unloose him from the past, even while he himself is always asking what hour, what minute has arrived, to reassert control, to master the past.
In the Urbantasm quote, some characters are wrestling for their own hopes for time — for a truly permanent “happy ending” — but an ally warns them that “nothing lasts forever.” The implied rebuttal is that if everything comes to an end, and if an “ending” is part of “everything,” then endings must therefore come to an end as well. But I hope it is also implied that words and language — and concepts like “everything” and “endings” — are human inventions, and both time and the universe are infinitely more vast and strange than we have the ability to comprehend. Ultimately, I think the saner characters in my story resolve themselves to battles that they know full well will yield only provisional victories. But the work is worthy, and thus worth undertaking. A happy ending will be happy, even if it is not permanent.
This is a possibly long-winded way of saying that I, too, have run out of time with Urbantasm. Things that always seemed like they were in the future are now in the present for me. Soon they will be in the past. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the busy, weird, out-of-control months that led me to start writing this novel in 1996. One friend got severely beaten in a dark hallway of his school. Another friend’s father tried to murder her mother. People were reckless with guns and drugs. We were all falling in and out of love, we were upset and angry about broken promises, and in the springtime, the whole world felt very cold and wet, and shot with gray and green light. Each day was an epic story filled with epiphanies and breakdowns that didn’t last long enough to process, just to experience. The Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” was on the radio all the time. I was seventeen.
It was easy, under such circumstances, to make brash promises: “I will love you forever.” “I will stay in Flint until it is healthy and whole.” “I will finish this book.” But first loves often do not pan out, and the Flint I knew was already evolving into something unfamiliar, and that left me with the book.
But I could, at least, finish the book.
It was insane and long — an intentional updating and magification of Hugo’s Les Misérables, but it was also a ghost story, a murder mystery, a tale of the redeeming power of love, and a meditation on the problem of evil. It was an extremely arrogant undertaking, and I was utterly blind to what it would demand of me. Because of all this, its completion was always far — years, decades — in the future. Until now. Now its completion is in the present, and I am asking myself what comes next.
I don’t know the answer to that, but I know a bit about what comes now.
I want to have fun this spring and summer as I send the final Urbantasm book out into the world. I’m not worried about selling a ton of copies or gathering great reviews; I want to delight the people who have been with me on this journey. I want the last moments of this project to make some good memories.
There’s some great stuff coming up. I really hope you’ll join us. It’s all free, and I think we’ll have a blast!
If you have a good internet connection, please join us for the digital launch (via Zoom) on Thursday, May 5th, at 8 pm. It will be moderated by my dear friend and literary mentor Jan Worth-Nelson. We’ll have an absinthe toast, I’ll do a reading, and we’ll have a conversation about the books. Email me at connor@connorcoyne.com to request an invitation.
If you live in or near Detroit, 27th Letter Books will be hosting an event on Friday, May 13th, 7 – 8:30 pm, moderated by another dear friend, incandescent writer, and editor for Books 3 and 4, Kelsey Ronan.
Finally, here in Flint, Comma Bookstore will be hosting a reception on Friday, June 10th, 6 – 9 pm. The details for that event are still coming together, but there will be light refreshments, music by Flint’s own accordion prodigy Dr. Quincy Dobbs, and an Urbantasm-style nightwalk afterwards.
We’re still working out some of the details for these events, and a few more may be in the works (if I get a good offer from dear, grumpy Chicago, I’m so there), but this is a lovely, bittersweet moment for me, and I’d love to savor it with my friends and family.
Eventually, everything comes to an end.
Even endings.