Featuring...

Don DeBrandt 'Shakedown' in Quaketown

Whether he’s writing Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, or of Superheroes, Don DeBrandt has earned himself awards in both the Year's Best SF and the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. A true Canadian who hails from Vancouver, British Columbia, Don has created quite a following from every corner of the bookcase as these synopses prove. In his recent novel, V.I., Mike Blink is the galaxy's best-known pilot and the only witness to an other dimensional explosion that cripples him and may lead to the destruction of hyperspace itself. The Quicksilver Screen, IRTV (Infinite Range Television) has allowed researchers of the 21st century to pick up transmissions from alternate realities. The planet Shinnkaria is the galaxy's only source of korala wood trees in Timberjak, vital to interstellar flight technology and the Indigo Wild, the lethal blue jungle where man and machines go crazy. Now in his original Angel novel, 'Shakedown', he proves his talents in the Joss-verse are again praise worthy! As Angel gets involved with some very well-off demons called the Serpentene. "They're not really evil, they're just yuppies," writes Don, Angel discovers their exclusive underground co-op finds itself under attack by earthquake demons called Tremblors, but the evil has just begun! Angel finds a rocky road ahead in this underground horror. Don stands proud among a select few who can boast what he can, as he tells CoA how he first come across Joss Whedon and got involved in his amazing world of demons and vampires. “I can honestly say that I have been a fan of Buffy [the Vampire Slayer] from day one. I actually watched the very first episode. My girlfriend at the time," he recalls, "was a big, big vampire fan so I sat down, watched the first episode and said to myself, ‘Wow! This is really good.’ The writing is really sharp and I am one of the few people I know that can honestly that say I’ve never missed an episode of Buffy or Angel," he states proudly. It so rarely happens that someone will catch it right from the very start, most people attach themselves somewhere in the middle typically but Don considers himself lucky. "And smart enough to stick with it and see how good it was. In Vancouver, we were one of the very, very few cities in North America that got the full two-part Mayor’s ascendancy episodes." Buffy's season finale from Season Three which was pre-empted in the US due to the Colimbine tragidy several weeks prior. "It wasn’t supposed to be broadcast and it was. I was at a Science Fiction convention at the time, but I took a break and I sat down and I watched it and I was so glad afterwards,” he enthuses, “because all of my friends that had it set up to tape, their machines screwed up and of course they didn’t broadcast it again for a long time. So I, once again, managed to catch every episode." There are a few Canadian friends of my own that I had to pledge my first-born demon spawn to because they sent me their tapes. Laughing, Don admitted, “Yeah, we had a few calls from people saying, ‘Do you have it on tape?’" Joss is very heavily into metaphors in the series, as most viewers well know, and Shakedown is just as heavy with the metaphors, which I especially enjoyed. Don has typically written with this style in a majority of his novels. "Actually when I’m approaching a writing project I really like to break it down to its conceptual level first, figure out how things are moving underneath and who represents what. Then build a plot up from that, so there does tend to be a lot of that, sort of, metaphorical underpinnings to my work. It’s one of the reasons I like Joss’s stuff so much.” He explains how he broke the story idea for Shakedown and came up with the concept and desicions of how to lay out the plot. “I was told that for the Angel books they really wanted to take a west coast, Californian approach to things. So I sat down and thought about a couple different concepts that were very west coast and I decided that earthquakes where probably one that I could really deal with. Angel being a vampire," he said, "the whole underground thing, there seemed to be a lot of resonance there. "Then I started looking around for powerful emotional connections that I could give such an event for him. And basically came up with the idea of him having gone through an earthquake a long time ago, what he did during that quake and how all those guilt feelings are coming back on him now." Don hit the reseach books and discovered that there was an immense earthquake in Portugal around two years after Angel had been turned into a vampire, conveniently enough. "That seemed to fit into the continuity really well and when I ran it past the editors they agreed with me. I was worried that Joss had plans for that period of time, that’s always the problem when you’re doing somebody’s past, but fortunately that area was clear. You can’t actually sit down and ask [Joss] beforehand where you can and can not go," he explains, "because a lot of that is very secret and not fully formed. I’m sure he has all kinds of ideas he doesn’t know how he’s going to develop. But you know, us writers toiling on the second level here we just have to make due,” he adds with a laugh. "It was an unconscious collaboration. It makes you feel, as a writer, like you’re tapped into something beyond yourself." Because Don follows the series as tightly as he does, you wonder if he allows anything that happens in the show to dictate what he writes about in his novels and he told us that he tries not to rely too much on the history. "I don’t refer a lot to past episodes and things because I really want the novel to stand on its own as well as possible. Plus, anytime you start referring back to other characters and histories you run into the risk of contradicting something that they might say later in the series, so I sort of stick to the basics and try to develop it from there.” In the beginning of Shakedown's flashbacks of Angel to Lisbon and Portugal in 1755, the parishioners are under the floor boards of a burnt down church and Angelus is having his fun. And when Angelus is teasing his victim Maria, Don has Darla say, "Tell her you’re the Pope." I asked Don if he was aware of the irony of that line in relationship to the series. Let's recap ~ In the beginning of Season One, in the episode Lonely Hearts, when Angel is introduced to Detective Kate Lockley, he has only one name. And she goes, “A detective with one name? Only rock stars and Popes have one name.” And Angel replies, “You got me, I’m the Pope.” Later, mid-way through the season in Somnambulist when Angel his protégée from his past, Penn, starts marking a cross on his victims faces (which was one of Angelus’s MO’s) the newspapers dub the killings as being by 'The Pope'. Writer and executive producer, Tim Minear had told me that was a total coincidence, although many fans thought Joss had set that up earlier just so Kate would believe Angel was the serial killer when she went to researched his past and discovered that he must be the Pope. When I read that, if Don hadn't done that with intention, I thought it was brilliant! "We just look like we’re brilliant. You know it’s funny because I didn’t do that intentionally either,” he states with a laugh. “There’s an odd thing that happens when you have writers working in a shared universe, sometimes it’s almost like the story has a life of its own. Different threads will tie themselves together in ways that the writers are not conscience of at the time." He offers an interesting example of a long story arc in Marvel Comics years ago. "They were trying to figure out who the parents of the Scarlet Witch in Quicksilver were. The writer did all this research and found out that over a period of like ten years all these different writers, completely unconnected, had planted clues that all tied together which pointed out the only parents that it could be. It was an unconscious collaboration and when that happens it’s really cool. It makes you feel, as a writer, like you’re tapped into something beyond yourself.” If you think The Pope was a great coincidance, Don has another that almost made it in the book. “There was something actually, when I was cutting the novel for length and I wrote it before it popped up in the Angel series. I had Angel talking to Darla in a dream and Darla saying, ‘Who knows where vampires go when they die, maybe they can find a way to bring me back.’ It was a week or two after I cut the scene, Darla showed up,” he laughs, “and I went, ‘Oh! Wow, cool!’ If I had left that in the book I’d look like a genius!” The character of Baasalt goes through quite an ordeal with a pick axe in his head, which was an interesting visual. Then Angel has the first of a series of flashbacks where he finds himself in a shopping mall faced against, of all characters, Angelus. Now this is something that I don’t think has been approached in any of the novels so far, but for the first time Angel really faces Angelus. I don’t even think it’s been picked up in the comic series at this point, but this is something that fans have been wanting to see for some time. Joss has previously stated that we probably won’t see it in the series because Angel faces Angelus every day, he doesn’t need to look at him face to face as another physical being. But although it was limited in Shakedown I thought Don did a great job with it. “I think I was actually the first person to do it thus far," offered Don, "and well, that’s the way my mind works. I figured that would be an epic confrontation. But it’s funny, I didn’t really plan it out, it just sort of evolved along with the plot. It was fairly organic but then so was the pickaxe in Baasalt’s skull. I didn’t plan that either, it just happened and then for some reason,” he continued laughing, “I just thought, ‘Well, just leave it there and see what happens.’ And it wound up taking the plot in interesting directions.” I think Don also captured Doyle’s quirky sense of humor rather well. Especially when he did this mirrored narrative, where Doyle’s trying to deduce how one character, Fisco, was abducted while at the same time you’re having Baasalt do the actual events of the abduction of Sarah and it’s the total opposite of what Doyle figures the way it must have happened. The humor here is excellent! “I’m glad you thought that worked." Don said, "I though it was a lot of fun to write at the time. So many times you always get that ‘reconstruction of the crime scene’ in a book and I thought it would be a lot of fun to just play with that and say, well what if you just got it completely wrong?” "I think the season is really kicking some ass. Very dark, very powerful, a lot going on." Although Doyle has been gone for almost a year now on the series, his character still lives on in the novels. Is it still fun writing his character for Don? “It is," he admits. "I like Doyle, actually, the most fun to write was Cordelia. Which I didn’t really expect, but I seem to do Cordelia-speak really well. Other writers have said -- actually I think Joss Whedon has said, that, ‘The key to Cordelia is she just has absolutely no tact.’ She says whatever’s on her mind and that’s what makes her so much fun to write. Anytime I have Cordelia start speaking, I don’t have to make up any of her dialogue it just comes right our, it just flows.” Angelus has that reputation of being the 'Scourge of All Europe' and the way Don depicts the torture scenes of Maria is probably the most evil creation I’ll ever imagined in print, it is pretty graphic. I asked Don if Pocket Books ever limits him on where he can go with such things. “Well, there was one thing that they actually clipped out," he recalls, "or told me to remove just because they thought it was disgusting. And rather than having disgusting they wanted to just concentrate on more scary so I went, ‘Okay, I can see that.’ Let’s just say the first time when he feeds her the water? Well the first time is wasn’t water." Okay, so my imagination isn't as dark as I believe because I actually thought that typical to Angelus's nature it would be blood and having her not realizing it until after she’s tasted it, this would have been disgusting . . . right? “I hate to tell you this," Don confessed, "but it wasn’t blood. You can probably see why they cut it!” he states with a laugh.” "Okay, quite the imagination there Don!" “Yes," he replied, "I’m not really evil, I just play somebody evil on TV.” The similarities between many of the writers such as Mel Odom, Chris Golden, and Tom Sniegoski where Horror and Fantasy naturally led into comic book fare because they all seem to have similar backgrounds of interests and what they get to write in. "I’m a huge comic book fan" Don admits, "and I’m just trying to break into comics. I sold a few things to Marvel Comics a number of years ago that unfortunately never made it into print. But yeah, I think we all do have a comic book background and I’m not sure why that is. It’s sort of fantasy, horror, science fiction all seems to be melded together in comics and maybe that’s why it’s attracted to us. I don’t like to restrict myself to just horror or just science fiction or just comedy. I like to blend them all together and in comic books I think you can probably to that better than most other genres." He also offers that, "Although Angel is also a terrific genre in letting you do both action and comedy and horror and a fair bit of characterization too. A lot deeper than maybe an action oriented book would be so I don’t know. Maybe it’s just we’re all sort of bent that same peculiar way.” DeBrandt’s latest Sci-fi novel takes us into hyperspace to save the galaxy! Given the opportunity, would Don rather write a novel for Angel or would he like to write scripts, an episode version of his books. The answer may not suprise you! “What I would really love to do is write some Angel comics." But he is quick to add, "I would really love to write some Angel scripts. I’m actually just in the process of finishing up an Angel script right now which I’m hoping to get somebody’s attention. I find it very easy to write dialogue and I find that Angel dialogue flows very well for me. A lot of the concerns and themes that run through the show are things that I just naturally come to by myself. So I have to admit I would love to take a shot at actually writing some episodes.” What does Don think of the season so far? “I think the season is really kicking some ass,” he states with a laugh. “I like the first season but I think it’s really taken off. Some of the episodes with Darla, especially the episode where Drusilla shows up was just terrific! It’s one of those great television moments, you know, when she just floats in in slo-motion like that. It was just great." Don had just finished watching tonight’s episode, Reprise, "It was one of those episodes, very dark, very powerful, a lot going on. Angelus is an interesting character because like Cordelia," he explains, "he gets to do and say things that other people think of but never actually would perform He doesn’t have any of those moral boundaries. He does whatever he wants to do. Which probably if you actually asked David Boreanaz, I’m sure he would tell you that Angelus is a lot more fun to play.” There plenty in the future for Angel fans from the wonderful imagination of Don DeBrandt. “I actually have another Angel book proposal in front of the editor at the moment," he's pleased to announce. "People seemed to like Shakedown a lot. Out of all the reviews I’ve seen on the site, many people are rating it the best. I don’t want to blow my own horn," he says, "but they’re blowing it for me. So I’m really hoping to get a chance to do another Angel book. I’m hoping to do some scripts and hey, if those people at Dark Horse Comics ever want me to do a mini-series I’ve got plenty of ideas there too!” With his amazing imaginative talent to keep the fans eager for more of his unique writing style and keen insight to this magnetic world of demons, vampires and metaphor, Don will find a loyal following for his Angel readers as well as the other works he dares to venture into. Take a ride with this wonderful accomplished author and you’ll never return to the safety of the dark shadows in your own 21st Century. Unless of course you like it in the dark . . . just beware, Don might be hiding there! Written by: Kristy Bratton CoA Head Writer CityofAngel.com would like to thank Don DeBrandt for granting us time within his busy schedule and sharing his Angelness with the fans! Check out all that Don has in the works on his own Web Site at: Don DeBrandt If you have any comments for CityofAngel.com regarding this 'In The City Spotlight' feature, we would love to hear from you. Just email us at: comments@CityofAngel.com

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