THE CONJURATION and THE RELEASE: The background for these images is the "Formal Reception Room from the Hotel de Tesse," in Paris (built 1768-72), now in New York. There are several European rooms that were dismantled, brought to the New World and reassembled in a wing of the Met, then furnished with if not original-to-the-room pieces, then at least furniture that was contemporary with the rooms' original construction- and usage dates.
ROESVILLE: The background, the row of houses, is from a photograph of "Officers Row" at Fort Hancock, located on the extreme end of Sandy Hook in New Jersey. Many of the old post buildings there have been repurposed in the last few years since the grounds of the Fort and Proving Ground were taken in to the National Park Service. Some of these old officers' duplexes are occupied, though most, I believe, are not. Which is sad, because they have a wonderful view of the sunset over Sandy Hook Bay and the Atlantic Highlands.
UPDATE: 2012 - POST SUPERSTORM SANDY: Fort Hancock, along with the majority of the Gateway National Recreation Area was swamped by the storm surge of the so-called SuperStorm named Sandy, and the Nor'Easter that followed a few days later. The Park Service is still assessing the condition of buildings, infrastructure, and sweeping the beaches for unexploded ordnance.
As to the name and what I imagine of the town of Roesville, I was thinking of a place in the Watchung Mountains of New Jersey called Feltville. A hundred years ago it was a small but fairly thriving mill town, making textiles (hence the name). Changing economies and demographics and transportation have long since rendered Feltville something of a ghost-town. A few disintegrating houses (which are for sale) and a couple of "homesteading" new owners that have gone to some lengths in rehabing their structures are all that remain on the historic site.
: I took a page from that group of special effects artisans that would become known to the world as Industrial Light and Magic. Which is to say that I "kit-bashed" the 500LA: starting with a model of a 1934 Mercedes 5ooK, I added parts from a pick-up truck, a tank, some metal tubing that was in the shop, and a lot of "filler," to build a vehicle that I could then photograph.
: The background architecture is derived from photographs taken at The Cloisters, the branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) that collects, restores, and displays art from medieval Eurpoe. Another shot at The Cloisters appears behind Keegan and Riordan in the back-cover photograph on the jacket.
HAMISH RIORDAN'S AND AINSLEY KEEGAN'S : The pistols that these two carry are wooden; they were crafted by my grandfather over 25 years ago, scaled from photographs, and cut and finished in his garage. The blaster rifle that Keegan carries on her first three book covers I assembled from miscellaneous parts "grafted" on to what had been a .22 calibre rifle. For more on that former .22, click here: The Mark IX.
: The view of water and bridge, plus the decaying bulwarks and posts, are from photos taken along the Hackensack River, New Jersey. On a site that had seen, over several decades, an infamously nasty jail, a so-called "sanatorium," and a quarry, there is now a county park, with boat ramp and ball fields. The barrel was built as a scenic element for the play Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, produced at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Michael Schweikardt designer.
: The building that the Operative is standing in is an old train shed. On the grounds of New Jersey's Liberty State Park, just south of Jersey City and across the Hudson from lower Manhattan, remain the terminal and shed of the Central Rail Road of New Jersey. The terminal has been adapted for several functions, including holding the ticket window for transit to Liberty Island. The shed, however, has been fenced off and left to become an inadvertant greenhouse. In summer, you can't see through one side to the other for the greenery that grows there, and it grows to the skylights.
: I don't know Greg Murray, he was just one of the thousands of people who were down at Ground Zero on the 11th of September, 2010, where Engine Co. 10 and Ladder Co. 10 have their firehouse. Across the street from the immense bronze plaque on that firehouse was a banner: superimposed over the American flag were the names of the 3000+ people who perished that day. Visitors would approach, search, and sometimes circle a name, or two, or three, in recognition of friends and family that were killed. I asked Mr. Murray's name, because I didn't want him to be nameless on this site.
: Sculpted by Emma Stebbins and presented to New York City in 1873 on the fountain in Bethesda Terrace, Central Park. This figure has been called an American angel, both in praise and disdain, as early critics believed that she embodied the form and spirit of the women of the New World, rather than the Old.
: The Moon in this illustration was a photograph I took when I got a new camera. I wanted to see if a mid-price digital could get a decent shot, and it did, much to my happy surprise.
: Those waters are the Great Falls of the Passaic River, Passaic, New Jersey. They are among some of the taller waterfalls in the world.
: The Sandy Hook Channel is just, and I do mean just, off the tip-end of New Jersey's Sandy Hook, a small elbow cape that defines the southern side of the entrance to Lower New York Bay. The channel is about 300 feet from the beach, give or take a few, and when a really large ship slides by, it is pretty impressive.
For example: the .
: South Orange Station on New Jersey Transit's Morris and Essex Line. A couple of years ago, New Jersey Transit started running these polished double-deck passenger cars; many of the stations were built early in the last century, or before, when the Morris and Essex Line was a private concern conveying freight and commuters going and coming from Manhattan. The new-and-old is almost straight from the Firefly production design handbook. Shiny!
(illustration)/ (book cover) really are set in an old fortress, though most people had shortened the term to just fort by the time this one was built. Behind the magical goings-on here can be seen part of what was once a gun emplacement. Back to Sandy Hook here: in addition to being the site of one of the largest proving grounds for artillery from the 1860's to 1919, it is also where Fort Hancock was built to defend the lower approach to New York Bay. One of the battery emplacements was for large calibre mortars, four of which were set in deep earth- and concrete works, which is where this environment was photographed.
For more on Sandy Hook, start here: http://www.nps.gov/gate/index.htm Also: see the UPDATE 2012 under the Roesville heading concerning Sandy Hook - the unexploded ordnance are surfacing in the beaches because of Fort Hancock's past as proving ground.
The stonework that the unforunate woman is chained to is part of the permanent Egyptian collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Met houses a substantial array of artifacts from ancient Egypt, including excavated pieces from old temple complexes. The dark hallway in the back is from the mortar battery described in the entry on The Calling above.
: This was one of those "classic" midwestern fronts, the kind that inexorably sweeps out of the western sky, building in to the clear blue until the sun suddenly disappears and the rain comes down. This is also a photo-composite of two shots - a single frame just didn't do it justice.
For the details on the hotel room click .
ALIEN SKY: Referring to the paint deck that was the basis of the "space" in the background, what I'm talking about is a construction that is, as far as I know, fairly exclusive to the shops where theatrical scenery is constructed and painted. A large percentage of scenic artists (they execute the design, they are usually not designers) prefer to do their work "down;" that is: the scenery is laying horizontally on a paint deck. The deck can be built a couple different ways, but ultimately has a surface that is not the cement floor of the larger shop; instead it's plywood or Homosote. This is especially important if the design includes a drop, as the fabric that the drop is constructed from is best laid out and stapled in place prior to painting. The paint deck is also a convenient demarcation from the rest of the shop as being the place where the artist is in control of the scenery. ANYway, paint decks sometimes have multiple layers of paint across their surfaces from different shows being worked on, leaving a strage, inadvertant patterning that is an odd crossing of Jackson Pollack's spattering and the delineation of the Cubists. Framed in a camera lens, the myriad colors and apparent textures abstract somewhat more, and are ripe for manipulation in a program like Photoshop, for making something like an alien sky.
Concerning Sheppard's Ghosts:
and : These exterior views of New York are indeed from adjascent points of viewing, on Church Street in the vicinity of the Walker Street intersection. Whether there are actually apartments on those upper floors is beyond my knowing; but within a block or so of that building a look uptown will give you that view of the Empire State Building, with Canal Street in the middle distance.
The Arsenal Building in Central Park - home of New York's Department of Parks and Recreation. A brief history of this building can be found on the website of the Central Park Conservancy (http://www.centralparknyc.org/visit/things-to-see/south-end/arsenal.html )
Their site would be a good place to start if you're going to be visiting the Park for the first time, or you just want to know more about one of our premier green places.
This structure is part of what used to be the home of the Pittsburgh Brewing Company, makes of
Iron City Beer. Due to financial problems, they had to find new digs, but the area was open over a long weekend in 2010 while an Art All Night (www.artallnight.org ) was going on in one of the old shipping warehouses.
That apartment building really is across from the Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre on
47th Street; a corner of the Theatre facade can be seen on to the left behind Sheppard. I also have a of the Haunted House: the original photograph and the image in the novel.
(Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre: http://www.prtt.org/ producing programs in Spanish and English.)
