In Episode 8 of Perdition’s Teeth, the characters veer from the highway and into the home of Cassandra, a mountain-dwelling fortune teller. In many ways, this episode was my baby (and, again, props to Moe A. Barria, who did a phenomenal job of bringing Cassandra to life), and not least of those was the way it finally foreground people actually doing magic, instead of finding only its remains, or worse, having it done to them.
Read MoreThe Stranger, the ghostly figure who picks up Seeger and delivers him back to Malpais in episode seven, is an echo or a remix of several figures throughout literary and holy texts. He is, possibly, the most folkloric figure within Perdition's Teeth: more rooted in the American -- and, admittedly, some older -- legends than many of the other characters.
Read MoreSo, I’m a teacher who just went through finals week, Edgar recently got full time at their job, and Alex has a full time job and just went through a major life change that I’ll let him reveal at his own pace. The point is that, while we all believe in — and are dedicate to — Broken Hands Media, we have other things going on and sometimes a week just sucker-punches you right in the teeth.
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Perdition’s Teeth borrows from many sources — it is consciously formatted as an epic, it draws from Hardboiled and Road Fiction (most obviously Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and — indirectly, Whose Names are Unknown, by Sanora Babb, the woman who did all of the research for both novels.) The one well that Edgar and I kept coming back to is that of regional American Gothic.
North America is a vast continent, spanning thousands of miles — the tag line comes from the distance between Oklahoma City (where the second episode begins, at the chronological beginning of the series) and Goldfield, where the first episode begins in media res. Between these two places, the heroes meet dangers both mundane and fantastic, and it is in this borderland that the gothic thrives — the tension between two poles, and the irreconcilable conflict between them.
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