Welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview – today I’m chatting to Marie Brennan about her upcoming novel The Night Parade of 100 Demons, the third in Aconyte Books’ new series of Legend of the Five Rings novels. If you fancy a characterful, investigative mystery story full of supernatural creatures and elemental magic then this is definitely worth checking out, and I asked Marie for a few more details of what to expect and where she drew her influences from for this fantastic book. It’s due out as a global ebook and US paperback on the 2nd February, with the UK paperback coming a little bit later on the 15th April.
Without further ado, let’s get on with the interview.
Track of Words: To start things off, how would you describe your new novel The Night Parade of 100 Demons?
Marie Brennan: It’s a supernatural investigation adventure! Strange creatures have been attacking a remote mining village on the nights of the full moon; the two main characters are there to discover the cause and hopefully prevent future outbreaks.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
MB: One, Ryōtora, is a shugenja – a sort of priestly magician who’s able to commune with the elemental kami and persuade them to do things for him. The other, Sekken, is a scholarly courtier from another clan, with a head full of esoteric knowledge and very little practical experience of the world. Ryōtora is in the village because of his duty to his clan, but Sekken has his own, hidden reasons for being there…
ToW: For anyone not familiar with the world of Legend of the Five Rings (L5R), how would you describe the setting and your particular take on it?
MB: As the names above suggest, the setting is heavily based on historical Japan – several periods of it, actually, because it benefits the game to be able to combine the courtly society of the Heian Era with the warfare of the Sengoku period and so forth. The empire of Rokugan is divided into seven Great Clans and a number of Minor Clans, and because my interest usually tends toward the spiritual and mystical end of things, I particularly favor the Dragon and Phoenix Clans. (Ryōtora is a Dragon, and Sekken is a Phoenix.)
ToW: You’ve written for L5R before, for Fantasy Flight before working with Aconyte. What is it about this setting that keeps you coming back to tell more stories for it?
MB: I’ve been interested in Japan for over twenty years now, studying the history, the language, the folklore, and so forth, which meant that the setting of Rokugan appealed to me right out of the gate. And it’s really nicely designed with an eye toward providing footholds for many kinds of story. Each of the Great Clans has a distinct flavor – so if you like honorable warriors on the field of battle, here’s the Lion Clan for you, whereas if you prefer your warfare to be a gritty, bloody struggle against demonic forces, you might be more interested in the Crab. If elegance and refinement and art is your cup of (literal) tea, you might be drawn to the Crane, while if you want Machiavellian intrigue and espionage, the Scorpion are ready and waiting. It’s the kind of setting where there’s always room for new and interesting tales.
“Hyakki Yagyō” by Kawanabe Kyōsai
ToW: Of all the L5R stories you might have written, what made you want to write this sort of supernatural, investigative mystery story?
MB: It’s right there in the title! ‘The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons’ (Hyakki Yagyou) is a concept out of Japanese folklore, and to my surprise, it’s never been used before in L5R. (Many of the writers for L5R have been thoroughgoing nerds, so there are a lot of references to real things from Japanese history.) I was dying to write something about it. Mind you, that means the title is also a spoiler for any reader who’s heard of the Night Parade: it’s an outbreak of supernatural creatures that rampage through town, causing chaos. Gee, might that be the source of the problems in Seibo Mura?
But within the story, there are reasons why the characters don’t immediately realize that’s the cause. I was much more interested in writing about their investigation and how that leads them into the tangled world of this village than just making it a constant rolling battle against monsters from page one to the end.
ToW: Can you talk a bit about what inspired the characters of Ryōtora and Sekken, and the (wonderful) dynamic between them? Were you influenced by anything or anyone in particular while writing them?
MB: I shamelessly leaned into the ‘wunza’ approach: “One’s a straight-laced shugenja, and one’s a layabout courtier!” That’s a great engine for a dual-protagonist setup, building the two leads up to be contrasts with each other, so that their differences and disagreements help drive the story.
Because Seibo Mura is a Dragon village, I wanted Ryōtora to have a personal connection to the place, and his backstory means he’s fanatical about trying to be honorable in everything he does. Sekken comes from a rich and influential lineage, to contrast with Ryōtora being from a very minor and low-ranking family, and because of that privilege, he’s pretty lazy in comparison. But he’s also a scholar and very knowledgeable about the creatures that have been showing up in Seibo Mura, so he has his own ways of contributing to the plot. (The first time I played L5R, I almost made my PC an Asako Scholar, which is the courtier tradition Sekken is trained in. It was fun to explore them a bit here.)
Midnight Never Come, the first book in Marie’s Onyx Court series
ToW: There are all sorts of fantastic spirits and monsters featured here, and as a folklorist I imagine it’s a lot of fun playing with these in the context of storytelling. How do you find working with yokai and other elements of Japanese folklore, compared to other mythological traditions?
MB: Back when I wrote the Onyx Court series, I put a lot of effort into researching English faerie folklore, so the impulse was very familiar – I’m indebted to Matthew Meyer of yokai.com for his excellent series of books on the topic, which greatly aided my research! I tried to be particularly scrupulous here, because I’m not Japanese, and that makes it even more important that the author not just wing things. There was one point where I really wanted to have some kind of subterranean yōkai, because this is a mining village…but I couldn’t find anything that fit the bill, so I scrapped the idea. It didn’t feel right to make something up when everything around it is real.
The one place I did have to invent a bit is around a type of witchcraft called tsukimono-suji. There’s very little written about it in English, in terms of how one becomes that type of witch and so forth, and it needed to be adapted anyway to fit into the cosmology of Rokugan. So what I say about it in the novel is not quite as grounded in research as the yōkai elements, though I certainly tried to make it congruent with the underlying principles.
ToW: I particularly enjoyed the way you balanced the supernatural elements with more grounded, human themes like the divide between peasants and samurai in Rokugani culture. Do you see that idea of caste inequality as an integral part of telling L5R stories, or was it something that came specifically from these characters and this story?
MB: That inequality is absolutely built into the setting of L5R, but to be honest, the stories rarely deal with it. The game is designed to be about samurai, whether members of the clans or outcast rōnin; peasants are mostly background material. But I wanted this novel to be the story of two samurai working in an isolated village with no army they can call in for backup when things go wrong – which means the vast majority of the characters around them are peasants. Ryōtora is used to dealing with them because his duties take him to a lot of villages around Dragon lands, but Sekken…wee lamb. He’s never been to a place like Seibo Mura, and he has no idea how to interact with any of the people there. He isn’t malicious, but he is thoroughly clueless, and that’s part of the conflict he winds up having with Ryōtora.
ToW: For readers who enjoy The Night Parade, and have maybe already read the other Aconyte L5R novels, can you suggest what to try next, to dig further into this setting?
MB: Fantasy Flight Games is putting out a line of novellas that each focus on one of the Great Clans, so they’re an excellent way to get a taste of different parts of the setting. There are five so far: The Sword and the Spirits (Phoenix), Whispers of Shadow and Steel (Scorpion), Across the Burning Sands (Unicorn), Trail of Shadows (Crab), and my own The Eternal Knot (Dragon, and the PC I wound up playing in lieu of an Asako Scholar was a tattooed monk of the kind this novella focuses on). There’s also an ongoing storyline for the LCG, and there are resources to help you know where to start in that, but at this point it’s quite a daunting pile! The novellas make it easier to dip your toes in.
ToW: Do you have any plans to revisit Ryōtora and Sekken for more stories in future?
MB: I do have a concept for a sequel, if I get a chance to write one! Your hint is: “the game of a hundred candles.”
ToW: Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on with Aconyte for future release, or anything else you’ve got in the pipeline?
MB: If I swap hats to the one that says M.A. Carrick, I’ve got a novel called The Mask of Mirrors: a decadent, intrigue-stuffed tale of a con artist infiltrating the nobility while a hooded vigilante fights against their corruption. That’s the first book of the Rook and Rose trilogy, co-written with my friend Alyc Helms (hence the joint pen name), and it came out on January 19th!
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Many thanks to Marie for taking the time to answer these questions, and talk more about this fantastic book. I’ve read The Night Parade of 100 Demons and can confirm that it’s fantastic! Keep an eye out for a review coming soon…
See also: my review of Aconyte’s previous Legend of the Five Rings novels – David Annandale’s Curse of Honor and Josh Reynolds’ Poison River.
If you’re in the UK and would like to support local independent bookshops, you can pre-order The Night Parade of 100 Demons from my store on Bookshop.org*
Alternatively, order The Night Parade of 100 Demons from Amazon*
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