To catch a killer who is aware of her secrets and techniques, magician Lucy Moon should carry out essentially the most harmful trick of her life—discovering who she actually is.
A murdered girl inside a magic field. A black rose in her mouth. And a secret that gained’t keep buried.
Lucy Moon performs nightly at a crumbling Atlantic Metropolis theater, a gifted younger magician hiding a previous she’s by no means advised anybody. When she discovers her greatest buddy’s physique throughout the notorious Zigzag Woman phantasm — staged to reflect an unsolved killing from a long time in the past — Lucy is drawn into an internet of deception that reaches from the city’s felony underworld to the mist-shrouded Pine Barrens.
With a killer who is aware of her secrets and techniques closing in, Lucy turns to the one individuals she will belief: a fierce band of feminine magicians and mystics with powers that blur the road between stage craft and one thing older. However because the suspects multiply and the murders echo ahead from the Nineteen Forties, Lucy faces essentially the most harmful efficiency of her life — unmasking the reality about who she actually is, whereas protecting her distance from the enigmatic man on the middle of the investigation. A person who could also be a killer. Or the one one who can save her.
1: I obtained locked in an actual straitjacket for this ebook…
Image this: a basement in Philadelphia, thirty male magicians watching, and me—the one girl—strapped right into a regulation Posey straitjacket, the sort used to restrain the sufferers in a psychological hospital. Canvas so thick it looks like punishment, collar choking my throat, arms pinned crucifixion-style, and the last word insult: a crotch strap. No gimmicks, no methods. The true factor.
I’ve been sawed in half, after which sawed in thirds, however the first time I really felt terror was once I was strapped, buckled, and locked inside this straitjacket. I’d absorbed a couple of imprecise clues from watching magic, however as I stood underneath shiny lights going through the viewers, I couldn’t bear in mind a single one. Attending to this secret magicians-only Escape Workshop was a wild journey; getting out can be one other, one for which I had no expertise, instruments, props, or map. All I knew was that a method or one other, I needed to break away.
Nobody had advised me a straitjacket was so sizzling, its tough canvas an insult to the flesh, and the neck so goddamn tight. I itched in all places. I needed to go dwelling. I needed to cry.
“Inform me what to do,” I whispered to the magician who’d organized this workshop.
He shook his head. “It’s a three-dimensional puzzle, and you might be a part of the puzzle.” He added softly, “The one fascinating half is the story. Discover the story and act it out.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. The story. Why was I right here? Why did magic fascinate me to the purpose of obsession? Why had I spent the previous three years learning magic? Teller—the silent half of Penn & Teller—mentioned, “I like wallowing in magic.” Yeah, so do I. However why? And what was my story?
As soon as upon a time a bit lady dreamed of changing into a author as a result of each time she opened a ebook she entered an enchanted backyard the place something was doable…. and years later, when she studied magic she discovered herself again in that enchanted backyard, and lo and behold, the whole lot was doable. As a magician assured her, “When you can think about it, we are able to make it occur.”
2: Atlantic Metropolis Is the Good Place to Disguise a Physique (and a Soul)…
Writing Zigzag Woman taught me that Atlantic Metropolis offers the right backdrop for a narrative about magic, thriller, and homicide. However I grew up taking place the Jersey shore, and I watched Atlantic Metropolis rework herself 12 months after 12 months. Atlantic Metropolis has a previous.
Really, many pasts, and none of them are previous.
One way or the other all of them dwell within the shadows of the current. The indicators are painted over, however traces of the originals stay. The shadows underneath the boardwalk all the time made me imagine one other world existed beneath the rafters, a parallel world.
In Zigzag Woman, I traveled again to WWII, when Atlantic Metropolis was taken over by the US Military and turned in Camp Boardwalk. It was an incredible interval of hazard and desperation, of heroism and glory—and virtually nobody is aware of about it! My characters within the current are haunted by secrets and techniques from that period that had been by no means resolved. In Atlantic Metropolis, previous and current stumble upon one another on the legendary boardwalk that stretches between glittering casinos and the detached Atlantic Ocean—a liminal house the place something may occur. It’s a city that exists within the house between desires and disappointment. She’s been battered by bankruptcies and hurricanes, but each daybreak the Atlantic nonetheless crashes in opposition to her pilings, and the wheel nonetheless spins at Metal Pier. She’s a dame who’s been knocked down within the ring too many occasions to depend.
However as Jinx, my 90+ 12 months previous journalist says, “A dame picks herself up, places on Carmine Purple lipstick, and will get again within the ring.”
Atlantic Metropolis is the form of city the place individuals come to reinvent themselves, to flee their previous, to imagine in the potential of transformation. Naturally, it’s additionally the place they arrive to kill and be killed.
3: Jersey Magic runs on Aqua Internet and angle…
So… a city like Atlantic Metropolis wants a distinct form of magic, the sort that’s each seedy and grand, and that perches between Woowoo and Fuggedaboutit, between the religious and the streetwise. My protagonist Lucy Moon creates illusions utilizing Aqua Internet hairspray—the purple can, as a result of she’s obtained requirements. She performs card methods with press-on nails that might double as weapons, makes cannolis from the Italian bakery on Arctic Avenue disappear (into her mouth, normally). Her magic smells like espresso and seems like Springsteen. It’s the form of magic that claims, “Yeah, I simply made that quarter vanish. You bought an issue with that?”
After which there’s Elvis Jones, the mysterious fowl whisperer who does wonderful magic along with his seagull (skilled, not tamed), magic so highly effective it spills from the stage to the road (or boardwalk), and makes Lucy virtually—not fairly, however virtually—neglect that he’s a primary suspect in her buddy’s homicide.
Lucy’s “Jersey magic” is her armor, her origin story, her approach of controlling chaos. Creating illusions for Lucy, her buddy Stormie Climate, and Elvis Jones set me free from bins I hadn’t even realized I’d locked myself into. However that’s what magic does—it reveals us that our imaginations set us free.
4: Love is essentially the most harmful magic of all…
Homicide exposes the lies society tells itself; love exposes the lies we inform ourselves. I’ve all the time been fascinated by the dance of pissed off need between two robust, flawed characters. When Lucy finds herself falling for Elvis Jones, the prime suspect within the homicide investigation, sparks fly and hazard erupts.
The dance of need throughout mysteries, secrets and techniques, threat—my therapist has notes, however I like studying it, and I like writing it. Ardour, need, love—they lead us to do issues we by no means thought we’d do. It’s the one factor we are able to’t predict or drive; the spark is there or it’s not. And it’s there in Zigzag Woman, the place the hazard a lady faces when she trusts a person is heightened by the suspicion that he is perhaps the assassin. These sparks—they’re life, however they will additionally result in loss of life. Some methods you may’t rehearse. Some escapes you survive solely as soon as.
That tightrope, that second when a person and a lady face one another throughout a gulf of distrust, suspicion, worry, and need… Will she take an opportunity and leap throughout that gulf? And what’s going to she discover if she does? The vulnerability required to like in a world already filled with hazard.
That second.
I dwell for that second.
5: To Write Darkish, First Discover the Mild…
To write down darkish, first discover the sunshine—that glint shining within the distance, a streetlight beckoning from a nook, the glimmer of a lady’s smile, a baby’s eyes raised in hope. Writing darkish doesn’t imply erasing tenderness, love, and humor.
Consider black humor, gallows humor. Each Jewish vacation in three sentences: They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat. Identical rule for homicide mysteries: somebody tried to kill us, we survived, go the cannoli.
The shadows are actual, however the punch line insists on peculiar life persevering with anyway. As a result of life does go on. Folks fall in love, work, stick with it with the enterprise of being a human on this planet.
I additionally return to the nice existentialists, Camus and Sartre. Sure, the world is absurd. That’s a given. But when that’s the case, then why write? As a result of we should. It’s Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, attending to the highest, and for an on the spot reveling in his success, after which watching it fall again right down to the underside. And there he’s pushing it again up the hill once more. Is he a idiot? Are all of us fools? Or can we all carry the faint hope that this time shall be completely different?
I think about the model the place Sisyphus will get to the highest, stands within the solar for one excellent second, then walks again down whistling. As a result of life—like Atlantic Metropolis—retains dealing one other hand.
Bonus Factor: The Story That Lastly Set Me Free…
The magician in cost refused to inform me how one can escape the straitjacket, however he confirmed me. He jerked one shoulder; I jerked my shoulder. He slid and wriggled; I slid and wriggled. I squirmed contained in the jacket and tried to push my approach out however my head was utterly submerged. I choked on stale air, and I felt sudden terror: I might suffocate to loss of life contained in the canvas jail and nobody would know—they’d suppose I used to be “telling a narrative,” the way in which he had instructed. In uncooked desperation I tugged the jacket, squirmed and stretched, and magically, miraculously, tore that mom off.
I gulped air. It had taken me ten minutes. With a battle whoop, I tossed the jacket to the ground. The magicians cheered and whistled, and I beamed, proud as a child driving a two-wheeler for the primary time.
It wasn’t until later that I spotted: that is my story. The lady who dreamed of an enchanted backyard, who wrote at age 9 in her first diary: “I need to be a author,” who grew up and wrote and traveled, and labored, and lived… and have become the girl who by no means gave up, who retains releasing herself from seen and invisible chains, and who’s nonetheless writing.
Zigzag Woman is proof: no lock, no chain, no jacket can maintain us if we bear in mind the story and refuse to cease struggling.
Thanks for studying. Now go placed on Carmine Purple lipstick and deal your self again into the sport.
Born in Morocco and raised on tales of marvel, Ruth Knafo Setton is the creator of the novels, The Street to Fez, and Zigzag Woman—which is a finalist for the Worldwide Thriller Writers Award for Greatest Standalone Ebook of the 12 months. Zigzag Woman additionally gained Grand Prize within the ScreenCraft Cinematic Ebook Competitors and First Place within the Daphne du Maurier Awards. Her TV pilot for Zigzag Woman gained First Prize on the LA Crime and Horror Movie Competition, and her screenplays have been acknowledged by Austin Movie Competition, Sundance, and CineStory. A multi-genre creator, her award-winning fiction, poetry, and artistic nonfiction seem in lots of journals and anthologies. An NEA fellow, she has taught Artistic Writing at Lehigh College and with Semester at Sea.
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Zigzag Woman: S&S | Bookshop.org | Amazon
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