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The city of Paris is one of the most important characters in Floats
the Dark Shadow, and Paris has many worlds within its boundaries.
Cops, criminals, and courtesans all invite the reader into their
realms, along with the painters and the poets.
My heroine, Theo Faraday, is taking lessons at the Académie Julien,
studying the old masters and the new innovators. Women and foreign
students usually studied at such famous academies. Women were charged
double for the privilege of attending the classes. Until the year of
my novel, they had no other option than the academies, as they had not
been permitted to enter the hallowed halls of the École des Beaux
Arts, the world's most famous art school. When they did enter, the
male students rioted and threw them out in the street. Theo is there,
of course, protesting, as one of her friends had been promised
admittance.
Theo illustrates poems for her cousin, one of the Revenants, a group
of Symbolist poets, so Floats the Dark Shadow visits the literary
world as well. The poems of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine are
interwoven into their café conversation. Oscar Wilde's Salome is
evoked and Oscar himself almost – but not quite – appears, having been
newly released from hard labor. W.B. Yeats does appear, though in his
role of a master of the occult more than as a rising poet. For the
occult world was thriving in Paris, with leaders of the Golden Dawn
embarking on new ventures, and Parisian sorcerers staging bizarre
duels. Ectoplasm was no more miraculous than electricity, so there
were many famous frauds as well, including the great hoaxer Leo Taxil,
who'd convinced the Vatican he had the ear of a High Priestess of the
Masonic Order, secretly sword to the worship of Lucifer, now repentant
and eager to confess her sins.
And then there is the mystery of the murders that haunt the city,
murders that the killer considers to be exquisitely depraved
masterpieces of evil.