Jesse Bullington is the contributor for this week’s Take Five, a regular series where we ask authors to share five facts about their latest books. His book, The Enterprise of Death, will be available for purchase on March 24:
As the witch-pyres of the Spanish Inquisition blanket Renaissance Europe in a moral haze, a young African slave finds herself the unwilling apprentice of an ancient necromancer. Unfortunately, quitting his company proves even more hazardous than remaining his pupil when she is afflicted with a terrible curse. Yet salvation may lie in a mysterious tome her tutor has hidden somewhere on the war-torn continent.
She sets out on a seemingly impossible journey to find the book, never suspecting her fate is tied to three strangers: the artist Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, the alchemist Dr. Paracelsus, and a gun-slinging Dutch mercenary. As Manuel paints her macabre story on canvas, plank, and church wall, the young apprentice becomes increasingly aware that death might be the least of her concerns.
Jesse Bullington:
1. The cover art for The Enterprise of Death is a painting by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch usually titled, unimaginatively, “Death and the Maiden.” The title for the novel was inspired by an alternate title I found for the Deutsch panel–”Enterprising Death.”
2. The novel was originally going to be set a century earlier, but very early on in the planning stage I stumbled across the aforementioned piece by Deutsch, which perfectly captured the ambiance I was after. Being previously unfamiliar with him or his work, I researched Deutsch a bit and was so taken with his life that I decided to place the novel in the early 16th century instead of the 15th just so I could incorporate him as a minor character. Transplanting even a rough idea a hundred years into the future has massive repercussions on the development of a story, and before very long Deutsch was a major character, the Inquisition became involved in the plot, and the infamous alchemist Dr. Paracelsus had crashed the party.
3. I try to have a solid idea of the time and setting where a story is going to take place before developing characters, as people are so much a product of their environment. Altering the dates of the novel by a hundred years led to my scrapping most of the planned cast and having new characters arise and step to the forefront, such as Deutsch and Paracelsus, but my protagonist remained more or less as I had originally envisioned her. I was able to do this since she was always going to be an outsider to the European setting of the novel, and one who was raised in a place of cultural isolation to boot.
4. As I wrote The Enterprise of Death, I realized I was in many ways going for the opposite of everything I’d done with my first novel, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart. That novel was about straight white men who hate witches going from Europe to Africa; this novel is about a gay black woman, who is a witch, coming from Africa to Europe. Beyond these very basic contrasts of plot, the books serve to off-set one another in a variety of ways, some of them more subtle than others. The Enterprise of Death is less comedic, a more serious project…which of course means I run the risk of coming off as a pretentious jackass, but to me good fiction is all about taking chances, and there’s still an edge of dark humor in there.
5. For all the differences between The Enterprise of Death and The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, they both come from a place of wanting to see more marginalized, underrepresented sorts of characters in fiction. On top of that, I’m more interested in complex, flawed individuals than I am in one-dimensional caricatures who embody some virtue or vice, but all the same I think readers who had a hard time identifying who to root for in The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart will have an easier time with this one.
