Where Perdition's Teeth Came From
A lot of writers have difficulty articulating where their ideas come from, but I recall exactly how Perdition's Teeth came to be. I thought I would lay that story out preemptively.
I've long been a fan of weird fiction, because it seems to me that you shouldn't be able to use the names of genres as an easy shorthand for anything but the deeper structure of it -- I dislike saying "fantasy" to describe a story, and immediately having people think of something out of Dungeons and Dragons (don't get me wrong -- I have both played and run more than my fair share of D&D, I just don't think it should be the default.) And one of the things that I always thought would work is a marriage of the common quest narrative to the distinctly American setting of the Dust Bowl. I never really did much with the idea, because Edgar had a manuscript they toyed with every now and then that did just that, and I figured that Edgar could do it better than I could, especially after having read some of it.
So I never sat down and worked these ideas out, but they stuck with me. Blame it on how much I enjoyed The Grapes of Wrath when I was in high school.
But when one of my gaming groups hit a lull in early 2016, I began to toy with a number of ideas. One of them derived from Pacific Northwestern gothic, one of them is an early form of a project that I'm going to present at some point, called, at the moment Numinous Trespass, and the last was an idea that came to me while showering. Thanks to Edgar's influence I had begun to listen to music on my phone while showering, but I tended to put my Spotify on shuffle, because I'm an absolute mess when it comes to picking music to listen to.
While in the shower, I misheard a lyric from "That Old Dustbowl" by The Dustbowl Revival as "then the crops go bad, and you lose your soul" and everything came together. I presented this last idea to the group, and I began telling stories about the characters -- a fortune teller, an gangster on the run, and an ex-preacher traveling west, hounded by a man in a black phaeton.
That was the very first version of Perdition's Teeth. I ran it using the Nemesis system, a variant on the One Roll Engine designed to run Lovecraftian Horror (I did nothing Lovecraftian in the game -- I'd had enough of tentacles and archaic spelling by this point.)
A few months later, when I was listening to a number of amateur-run podcasts during a break between seasons on some of my favorite series, I realized that Edgar and I knew enough people to get one started. I mentioned it in an offhand fashion on social media, and less than a week later, five-sixths of the core team were sitting in Joseph's dining room talking about possible project ideas and how we would go about doing it.
I mentioned two ideas I had, with the working titles Planetfall (which would have to change, but it was all I had,) a hard science-fiction story about three groups settling an alien world and the politics of ownership, and Babylon, Missouri, a supernatural murder story set on the banks of the Missouri river that I had tried to write as a novel but backed off from because I felt I had made several serious missteps in my composition and needed time to think on it.
After we had discussed both ideas at length, I mentioned that we could move on to new ideas after we had finished the first one, and I used Perdition's Teeth as an example, thinking that this would be an anthology series. We put it to vote which one we would do.
My potted description of Perdition's Teeth ended up winning, and Edgar and I began writing shortly afterward, but that's how it came to be.