Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(2)

The bones of the monomyth endure because the story resonates within some special part of our brain that is hardwired for legends. And there are endless ways to put flesh upon those bones; just as every human has a skeleton that looks similar, but an entirely different-looking exterior, the monomyth provides a framework for stories that, when completed, could not be more different. I had only two goals when I set out to write a monomyth story: that it not be terrible (fingers crossed!) and that it center around a female heroine, instead of a male hero.

The characteristics of heroes—recklessness, bravery, dedication to a cause, willingness to self-sacrifice, a certain heedlessness—are often characteristics we identify with boys. It was a great deal of fun to give them to a girl. Clary jumps first and asks questions later; Jace, who serves as a secondary hero, is often the one counseling caution. When Jace is the one counseling caution, you know you’re in trouble; that, hopefully, is part of the fun.

And fun is what these books have been for me, for the past seven years, since City of Bones was published and as eight more Shadowhunter books have come out. An enormous amount of fun. Though I have invented new worlds since, the world of the Shadowhunters will always be dear to me because it was my first. It’s been almost ten years since I stood in that tattoo shop in the East Village and thought about magical warriors; this collection of intelligent, articulate essays has brought me back to that moment and to the enjoyment of creating this world. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.





KATE MILFORD

When I moved to New York City, I realized I had to write about the place. Between the hustle and bustle, I saw the possibility of another world opening up, just beyond our vision. Once I could see it, the Shadowhunter world appeared everywhere I looked. Whether it was vampires loitering outside nightclubs or fey peering from the foliage in the park, the city grabbed my imagination and ran with it.

It’s hard to say something clever about Kate Milford’s love letter, addressed to New York City and to the uncanny ability of place to open up mysteries we never imagined we’d find. So I’ll just say this: Right on, Kate.





UNHOMELY PLACES


There is the world you know, the world you have always known; and then you blink, and there is a place you never had any inkling of, and it spreads out across your eyescape. And then, most shockingly of all: There is the realization that these two places are one and the same. It turns out you never really knew the world around you at all. This is often the moment at which the adventure begins: Your street has gone feral and has carried your house and all of your neighbors’ homes to another part of your city; your child is a changeling; your wardrobe is a doorway to a pine forest where it is always winter but never Christmas. Or you witness something that could not have happened: a murder, perhaps, in which three kids your own age kill a fourth, none of whom anyone but you can see.

Much fantasy and science fiction is built on the idea of stumbling through a portal of some sort and discovering oneself lost in a place that is wholly other. I confess that I have developed a preference for tales in which the already-existing world itself is revealed to be wholly other; in which, perhaps, the experience of jamais vu, or derealization, reveals a whole new reality. Some of this preference has to do with the kind of fantasy I write; some of it has to do with my love of places, of cities and towns and the oddities that make each place unique. Some of it—maybe most of it—has to do with my own belief that the world is much stranger than most of us are brought up to believe. History is stranger. Mathematics is stranger. Science is stranger—but you’d never know any of this if you didn’t venture beyond the textbooks. Every place—small town, big city, you name it—is stranger. So I have a hard time passing up speculative fiction that begins with the premise that our own world is somehow not the place we’ve taken it for.

But the experience of suddenly finding that something familiar has become strange—or, possibly, has simply made known its strangeness for the first time—isn’t limited to books. I recall that as a kid I was certain for a long time that my parents and basically everyone in my family had been replaced by look-alikes, a fear—in extreme circumstances, a psychological disorder—that’s probably at least in part responsible for changeling lore and all those fairy tales in which loved ones are changed into animals or objects and can be brought back to their original shapes only if the hero or heroine can identify them. Heck, stare at a familiar word long enough, for instance, or write it over and over enough times and it will start to look strange too: misspelled, unfamiliar, even oddly devoid of meaning.

Really, though, “strange” isn’t the right word for the effect I’m talking about. The sense of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar in an eerie and uncomfortable fashion belongs more properly to the world of the uncanny.

The uncanny is such a bizarre realm of human psychology and experience that Freud wrote three very involved (and very strange, and arguably very conflicted) essays on the subject, collected together in a collection titled (appropriately) The Uncanny. It’s been discussed at length by philosophers, psychologists, and theorists around the world. When you read about the uncanny, certain motifs repeat themselves, and certain experiences appear to be common triggers of this feeling of unease and unfamiliarity. Ernst Jentsch, one of the early writers on the subject, attributed the sense of the uncanny at least in part to an intellectual uncertainty—the idea that one can’t know precisely what one is seeing or experiencing, or can’t know whether one’s interpretation of the thing or experience is correct. In “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” written in 1906, Jentsch argued that the discomfort associated with the uncanny stems from a desire for certainty about one’s understanding of the world and that this desire itself stems from a human need to feel at home or at least capable of survival in a world that may otherwise seem essentially unknowable, even potentially hostile: