Contemporary Authors

• The City of Lost Fortunes ( novel) John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2018

1. The city of lost fortunes LCCN 2017045346 Type of material Book Personal name Camp, Bryan, author. Main title The city of lost fortunes / Bryan Camp. Published/Produced Boston : John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Projected pub date 1804 Description pages ; cm. ISBN 9781328810793 (hardcover)

• Bryan Camp Home Page - https://www.bryancamp.com/about-me/

  Bryan Camp is a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and the University of New Orleans’ Low-Residency MFA program. He started his first novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, in the backseat of his parents’ car as they evacuated for Hurricane Katrina. He has been, at various points in his life: a security guard at a stockcar race track, a printer in a flag factory, an office worker in an oil refinery, and a high school English teacher. He can be found on twitter @bryancamp and at bryancamp.com. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and their three cats, one of whom is named after a superhero.

• BookPage - https://bookpage.com/interviews/22630-bryan-camp#.Wv3blkiUs2w

  Web Exclusive – May 01, 2018

  BRYAN CAMP
  “I considered magic to be simply an imposition of one’s will upon the world. The world just listens to some people more than others.”
  BookPage interview by Matthew Jackson

  Bryan Camp’s stunning, spellbinding debut novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, is a tale set in a post-Katrina New Orleans full of gods, monsters and magic. We asked Camp about the book’s inspiration, his thoughts on magic and what’s in store for its sequel.

  You’ve said this book began as you and your family were evacuating before Hurricane Katrina hit. What was the initial seed of the idea? Was it an image? A wish? Something you lost that you were hoping could be magically found?
  The initial seed for this book was a homework assignment, actually. I was in my last semester of undergrad at Southeastern Louisiana University, taking a fiction workshop with Bev Marshall. As a class exercise, she had us describe a room, and as we wrote, she called out senses to focus on, aspects of the room to incorporate. Since I was also taking a detective fiction class at the time, what came to my mind was a seedy backroom poker game, smoke in the air and the snap-shuffle of cards and a bunch of crooks. The last thing she said was to add something that didn’t belong, so I made one of the players a literal angel.

  Our homework assignment was to take those few paragraphs of description and incorporate them into a short story. Mine was due the next week, and the storm hit that weekend. Having grown up in Louisiana, I figured Katrina would be like all the other storms I’d experienced: Since we were fortunate enough to have the means to do so, we’d evacuate, be gone for a few days, and then come home. And since my story would be due when we came back, that’s what I was working on in the backseat of my parents’ car as we drove to stay with my aunt and uncle in Florida.

  That card-room description stayed exactly the same through every draft and revision of the novel except the last one, when it got rearranged. But the core idea and the wording is basically the same as what I wrote in a feverish 10-minute writing exercise all the way back in 2005.

  New Orleans is a city that’s already been heavily mythologized in fantasy fiction of all kinds. In creating your version of it, what did you learn about this beloved American city that you cherish most when you look back on the book?
  I don’t think New Orleans is only a myth in fantasy fiction, I think it’s a myth in the popular imagination as well. From the reasoning behind placing a city in this particular crescent-shaped bend in the river, to the “French” Quarter (which burned down and was rebuilt by the Spanish), to the lies Iberville told the English at English Turn, to the narrative that slavery was somehow “better” here, to the images of brass bands and gumbo and Mardi Gras, everything about New Orleans is some kind of myth, be it a story or a con or a full-on lie. Sometimes for good and sometimes for ill.

  And that’s what I love most about this place, that I am—just like everyone else who lives here, who visits here, who reads about it in a book—constantly creating my own version of this city, one that’s simultaneously “the real” New Orleans and also nothing like the one you picture in your head when you think of it.

  What aspects of New Orleans, whether real or fantasy, were you most excited to introduce to readers that you felt other writers hadn’t highlighted?
  There’s a scene in [the TV show] “Treme” where one of the characters runs into a handful of tourists who have obviously been drinking all night in the Quarter, and he tells them that if they go a couple of blocks over, they’ll find the Clover Grill, this really great greasy spoon kind of diner. As they walk off, thanking him, he mutters, “Well [expletive deleted] now where am I gonna have breakfast?”

  That’s such a quintessentially New Orleanian moment, because the things you want to show people when they come here are usually not the things they came here for, and then once you share them, you almost wish you’d kept them to yourself. Everywhere my characters eat and drink, for instance, isn’t just a real place, it’s a real place where you might run into me if the timing was right.

  I’m certainly not the first writer to try to capture this side of New Orleans, but it was important to me to show parts of the city that weren’t just the Quarter and the cemetery and the mansions on St. Charles.

  Jude is a fascinating character, simultaneously embodying certain aspects of the reluctant fantasy hero and subverting other aspects. Was the book always so firmly rooted in his journey through this world he thought he’d left behind, or did he take the story over in the writing of it?
  The book was definitely always centered on a demigod with the magical ability to find lost things, but the core of the character shifted and changed throughout the various drafts of the book. That was partly me growing as a writer, but mostly me becoming more aware as a person. I still struggle to overcome the toxic aspects of my masculinity, and the earliest versions of the character, written in my 20s, were filtered through the lens of aggression and misogyny through which I saw the world. It took me a while to realize that not only was that not the way I really wanted to interact with the world, it also wasn’t the kind of hero I wanted to embody in my fiction.

  Jude’s still a bastard, in every sense of the word, but those subversions you mention are deliberate, my way of actively turning my back on the kinds of violent, impervious, morally superior “heroes” I was taught by popular culture that I ought to emulate.

  The particular assemblage of gods at the poker game that jump-starts the novel is an intriguing and somewhat surprising group, though their individual reasons for being at the table become clear as the novel progresses. Was there ever a version of that game featuring other various deities? Did another Egyptian god sit in Thoth’s seat at any point, for example?
  Well, without getting into the spoiler territory of explaining why this particular group of gods is at a game like this, I can say with certainty that no, Thoth was always Thoth from the very beginning. It could only have been him.

  In terms of different characters inhabiting chairs at the game meant for other deities, the seat filled by the Fortune God of New Orleans, Dodge, was once occupied by Coyote from the folklore of various Native traditions. I don’t think I even made it through the first draft before I swapped him and Dodge, though. For one, I was finding it difficult to separate my first attempt at this novel from the work of Charles de Lint, whose work loomed large in my mind, and who wrote Coyote better than I ever could. Mostly, though, I moved away from using that figure because I simply didn’t know enough about the traditions—the active faith of living people—to feel comfortable that I wouldn’t cause harm. I’ve read the stories, but that’s not the same thing as knowing the culture, and to just take something I didn’t feel like I understood is basically the definition of appropriation, which I did my best to avoid.

  Also, there was once another player at the table, a faerie, who was removed and not replaced.

  You wrote a fantasy novel set in New Orleans and made one of your major characters a vampire. Vampire stories set in New Orleans have been dominated for decades by the work of Anne Rice. Was that ever something you worried about, and what in particular did you find fascinating about your portrayal of this powerful New Orleans blood-drinker?
  Yeah, to be completely honest, I originally wanted to write a novel without vampires at all, and because it was New Orleans I just couldn’t do it. Remember, a lot of the foundational thought for this book happened in 2005, so it wasn’t just Anne Rice I was up against, mentally, but also Stephenie Meyer and Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. All those brooding, glittering, sex-god vampires. I don’t say that in a derogatory sense, just in a sense that there was a well-trodden path that I hoped to avoid.

  And yet, I kept coming up against the folklore of New Orleans. The Casket Girls. Jacque St. Germain. All those stories that inspired Anne Rice to create Lestat in the first place. As much as I didn’t want to write the popular-culture vampire, I couldn’t ignore that the myth was woven into the larger myth of the city.

  So I turned to the folklore. I wrote the monstrous, demonic avatars of hunger and lust that humans of every culture have imagined through their fears of death and their own vulnerability. I think the fascinating thing about Umberto Scarpelli is that he absolutely loves being what he is. There’s no remorse, no hesitation. He’s a monster who likes to play with his food. It was the only way for me to address the well-deserved shadow that Anne Rice casts over New Orleans fantasy fiction without pretending I didn’t notice it.

  In your world, particularly as Jude explains it, magic is a somewhat mutable force, and magical texts are often viewed as guidelines rather than rigid systems, while much of fantasy fiction is dominated by extremely structured frameworks for the use of magic. What inspirations did you draw from in crafting the magic in your novel, and what, in your mind, is the secret to effectively and believably using magic in fiction?
  This is a hard question for me to answer succinctly. I think that what you consider “magic” says a whole lot about you as a person, about where you come from and how you see the world. I was raised Catholic, for example. I was taught that in the middle of the mass, the bread and wine on the altar are literally transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of a man who died 2,000 years ago. When you’re kneeling in the pews, that’s a matter of faith. But to someone not raised in that tradition, that sounds like magic. And then you look at things like quantum entanglement or the fact that time works differently depending on gravity, and those things sound like magic to me, too.

  So when I was thinking about gods and myth and the way we interact with our world, instead of making magic a kind of science the way some fantasy writers (myself included, in other settings) do, I considered magic to be simply an imposition of one’s will upon the world. The world just listens to some people more than others.

  In terms of having magic be believable, whether it’s a structured, pseudo-scientific magical “system,” or just “he snapped his fingers and the door opened,” the trick is to always be consistent. What I mean by that is that magic should never solve your problems as a writer. If you’ve established a world where magic is on about the level of our current technology, say, and you realize that you’ve written yourself into a corner where you need a character at point A to be at point B, you can’t just say, “oh, well, there are teleportation spells now.” That’s violating the contract you’ve made with your reader to solve your own problem. Fantasy readers are great—they’ll follow you down any road you want to go down, so long as you play the game straight from the beginning.

  You’re already at work on a second novel in the same “Crescent City” universe. What can you tell us about that, and what inspirations are you drawing from the second time around that you didn’t the first time?
  Well, I’m still waiting to hear back from my editor on it, so I can’t go into too much detail, but it follows one of the characters from The City of Lost Fortunes. She’s a psychopomp (one of the spirits who guides the recently dead through the Underworld) who shows up to collect a soul only to find that he’s not there. She pretty quickly learns that he’s not just missing, but is part of a bigger plot that involves storm deities and destruction gods, the guardians of the seven gates of the Underworld, and the delicate balance between the living and the dead. Searching for this lost soul leads her to the depths of the Underworld and then to the worlds of the Afterlife beyond.

• Pop Matters - https://www.popmatters.com/lost-city-fortunes-camp-interview-2561595086.html

  'The City of Lost Fortunes' and How Writing Goes from the "Goo in a Cocoon" Stage to a Fully-Realized Tale
  DEBORAH KRIEGER 24 Apr 2018
  BRYAN CAMP READ ACADEMIC WORKS, SELF-PUBLISHED OCCULT-Y STUFF, AND PRIMARY SOURCES TO HELP CRAFT HIS BEAUTIFULLY-REALIZED TALE OF A NEW ORLEANS IN WHICH "THE FANTASTICAL IS POSSIBLE."

  THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES
  BRYAN CAMP
  John Joseph Adams, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Apr 2018

  AMAZON
  OTHER
  The City of Lost Fortunes, as Saturday Night Live's Stefon would say, "has everything": bewitched poker games, trickster gods, sinister vampires, magic powers, elaborate spell-casting rituals, sexual tension, intertwined mythologies, dramatic betrayals, and a good dash of humor, all wrapped up in the mystery of the city of New Orleans. The short summary goes like this: street magician (and reluctant former sorcerer) Jude Dubuisson is invited to a poker game and gets much more than he could have bargained for (or gambled away), leading him on a madcap adventure to solve a murder and learn the truth about his past.

  And yet there's more to Bryan Camp's charismatic debut than an entertaining urban fantasy yarn: the specter of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina hangs over the narrative with heavy, painful purpose, ultimately imbuing Jude's story with a sharp poignancy. While the monsters and magic in The City of Lost Fortunes are hiding just out of view, the imbalance of society's scales are all too real. I caught up with Camp over email, and picked his brain about developing the story, the relationship between luck and fate, and who would play the characters in a Hollywood adaption.

  This conversation contains spoilers.

  The City of Lost Fortunes is as much about the city of New Orleans and its character as it is about Jude and his journey. What's your relationship to the city, and how did you make it come to life in the story? (I've never been to New Orleans, but the specific way you described the streets and geography and people made it feel familiar.)

  My relationship with the city, simply put, is that it's the only place I really know. I've lived in the area my whole life. I grew up in the suburbs just across Lake Pontchartrain, which to anyone anywhere but here is the same as New Orleans, but to people who grew up in the city proper, the Northshore might as well be in another state. I've lived in the city itself for the past ten years, first in an apartment in Uptown, then a tiny condo in the Warehouse District, and now in a house in Lakeview, so I've lived all over the city.

  If I succeeded at all in making the city come to life, I did so by treating the place more like a character than a setting. People are complicated and messy and contradictory and somewhat unknowable. Settings are represented as concrete, distinct, and often only as extremes. A poor neighborhood is only squalor and despair and crime, while a wealthy one is only shallow and corrupt and petty. Or it's viewed through rose-colored glasses, a magnificent example of culture and history and charm.

  But the truth is that places, cities especially, are full of contradictions. The French Quarter is a wonderful, evocative place, but it also smells like piss more often than not. You and your family can have a wonderful, relaxing, joyous memory of walking down a street where, 200 years ago, slaves were sold. When you want to create a clear image of a place, it's tempting to focus in on one element, but with New Orleans I embraced the contradictions, and allowed it to be somewhat undefined at times.

  How did you develop the plot and characters of the novel? I especially loved the dynamic between Jude and Regal, and when Sal came into the mix I was pretty much giggling at every other page. (Upon reading The City of Lost Fortunes a second time, I appreciated the small bits of foreshadowing about Regal's true identity.)

  There were three completely different versions of this book before the final draft, so the plot is such a written and rewritten and rewritten thing that I can't really accurately pinpoint any aspects of that process. It started with the poker room scene, a writing exercise in an undergraduate fiction class. That led me to writing a supernatural murder mystery, which gave me a list of suspects.

  From there, I developed a structure where I would start with one suspect, who would lead the main character to another one, and so on. When I got to the last suspect, revelation after revelation would lead backwards through the list. I thought it was pretty clever, until I learned that my idea wasn't so much unique as cringingly artificial. So I abandoned that structure and just started moving things around until things felt right.

  There were huge changes between drafts, too. At one point, there was another player at the card game, another suspect for Jude (and the reader) to keep track of. At one point, the fact that Jude's father was a god was a mid-book revelation, instead of something the reader knows about the character right on page one. So yeah, it's safe to say the plot "developed". Kind of like the way a caterpillar develops into a butterfly: by wrapping itself in a cocoon and turning into incoherent goo for a while.

  I'm glad the Jude and Regal dynamic worked for you! That was one of the things that just felt right the first time I imagined them, and they stayed pretty much the same from the beginning. Regal was originally two separate characters that got combined into one, but I can't really talk about that without dropping some major spoilers, I'm afraid.

  Sal's easy to explain. He's total authorial intrusion. In the same way that I bet Tyrion Lannister is just a way for George R. R. Martin to slap his own characters around and tell them they're idiots, Sal is the way I tell my characters when they've really screwed up. Just like me, he's happy to let 'em screw up anyway.

  What's your writing process, both in general and for this book specifically? Did you decide on the themes you wanted to address first, and then craft a narrative and characters, or did the plot and characters come first? What was the hardest part to get right?

  I'm a fairly linear writer. I really only need a few things to get started: a beginning, a character, and an ending. Once I've got those, I try to get the character from the beginning to the end in a way that feels satisfying. I used to figure it all out in the writing, but I've got real deadlines now, so I've become more of an outline kind of writer. Which mostly just means I write out my "ooo, but what if ..." kind of thoughts ahead of time, to see if it all fits together instead of writing myself into a corner because it seems cool and then spending weeks trying to figure out a way out.

  For me, theme grows out of the characters and the conflicts. Subconsciously, I'm sure, it's all there at the beginning. The stuff I'm angry about or frustrated about or confused about or geeking out over, those things inform the kinds of characters that spring to mind and the sorts of conflicts that I drop down on their heads, but it's definitely not something I start out from. I will say, though, that if I don't know what the story is "about" by the middle, it starts to feel like the wheels are coming off. I only got halfway through the very first version of this novel before I had to scrap it, because I knew that I was writing the wrong story.

  That first attempt was set in the months before the storm with all this ominous foreshadowing stuff leading up to some deity plotting to destroy the city by summoning a storm that would be narrowly averted. In hindsight, that sounds awful to even say now, but you have to remember that for my whole life up until Katrina, the line "it always turns at the last minute" was part of the vernacular. It was a joke, a superstition. So the story I envisioned, the one I began as we were evacuating for a storm that I had every reason to believe would turn away from the city like every other storm I could remember, that story wasn't as horribly insensitive and callous and exploitive as the one that I was writing in the aftermath. I was trying to write about a city that didn't exist anymore, and I just couldn't do it, both intellectually and morally.

  That, really, was the hardest part to get right in this book, just figuring out what it was about. Even though he changed pretty significantly between drafts, I had a fairly good grasp of Jude as a character in each iteration of him. I also found that the plot of a murdered Fortune God at a poker game was flexible enough to stretch into whatever kinds of stories I wanted to tell without too much fighting. But figuring out how to write about this new version of New Orleans, and what story was mine to tell, that took a number of failures before I, hopefully, got it right.

  How much of the mythos in The City of Lost Fortunes—the gods, the angels, the loa, and how they are translated and repurposed by different cultures and societies—is your own creation versus adaptations of other mythologies? What kind of research did you do with regards to world-building and establishing the rules and rituals of the magic used in the story? Were you inspired in any way by urban fantasy/sci-fi works like American Gods or Good Omens? (The irreverent aspects of the tone also made me think of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series, albeit in a more adult-oriented way.)

  In terms of figures from myth, I think the only real change I made was to take the actual phenomenon of syncretic myth and apply it to all mythology everywhere. To say, essentially, that if practitioners of voodoo could knowingly venerate St. Peter and Papa Legba as the same being, then Baron Samedi might also be Anubis, just without our knowledge. Some characters are my own creation, like the vampire named Scarpelli, for instance, but I did my best to have those characters adhere to the "rules" taken from folklore, instead of making up my own or using the ones from popular culture. A vampire that rises at noon and sleeps at midnight, for instance, rather than one who is burned by daylight or turns to ash when stabbed with a stake. Even the idea of objects having four qualities of being is taken from (admittedly, poorly understood) modern philosophy. If any of the characters don't jive with the actual myths, in other words, it's probably a mistake, not an intentional twisting. I'm not a mythology scholar, after all. Just a nerd.

  Which brings me to the research, which I've basically been doing all my life. I read all the Greco-Roman and Norse books in my elementary school library in about a month, and since then I've basically tried to read it all. One of the books that really guided my thoughts toward The City of Lost Fortunes was Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World. That connected the ideas of Trickster and syncretic myth in a way that opened things up for me. In terms of some of the magic and rituals I looked at everything from academic works breaking down the symbolism or the historical influences, to self-published occult-y stuff that sometimes reads like those late-night psychic hotline commercials, to primary sources like The Key of Solomon and The Egyptian Book of the Dead. None of this was deliberate, guided research, for the record. One thing leads to another and the next thing you know you're asking some poor bookstore clerk if they really don't have anything on Quetzlcoatl in this place.

  I've certainly read a lot of urban fantasy through the years I was writing this book, everything from the first few Laurell K. Hamilton Anita Blake books to Daniel Jose Older's Bone Street Rumba series. Ben Aaronvitch's Rivers of London books. The Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey. Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift novels. I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, too, so of course I've read American Gods and as large as it looms in the field, I certainly knew The City of Lost Fortunes would draw comparisons to it, but I swear, I had the idea for all these mythological beings existing simultaneously before I read it. (In fact, when I did read it, it was the closest I came to giving up on this book, since it was so close to what I had envisioned.)

  Before I started writing my own urban fantasy, in fact, just about everything I'd read in the genre had either created its own supernatural beings or drawn mostly from one source. The only thing I'd read that drew on a bunch of different cultures and myths was Esther Freisner's Gnome Man's Land, so I thought my own take of scrambling all these myths together was pretty unique. Turns out I just hadn't read enough of the genre yet. But it was enough to get the story lodged firmly enough in my head that I had to let it out. (Don't make an Athena joke, don't make an Athena joke ...)

  Photo of Bryan Camp by Zack Smith (courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

  One of the aspects of The City of Lost Fortunes that intrigued me was the degree to which elements like luck and fate were negotiated over the course of the narrative. But I did want to ask: how do systemic racism and discrimination, and the treatment of New Orleans (especially post-Katrina), fit into the world-building of The City of Lost Fortunes, which seems more grounded in magic and myth? Jude largely attributes the direction his life has taken to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but how does the larger history of racism in New Orleans (and the country at large) factor into his choice to essentially go into hiding before the novel starts?

  In fact, I kind of got the impression that Jude's realization that the poker game (and the larger game of the gods) was rigged as an acknowledgment that for people of color (like Jude), the system is indeed rigged for them to fail. How do you personally see the balance among luck, fate, and larger societal forces as they work in people's lives, and how did you aim to portray that balance in the novel?

  The most significant way the issues you've named impacted the world-building, honestly, is the simple fact that I didn't start out with a fantasy world that looks like New Orleans, but a New Orleans in which the fantastical is possible. Which means that all the systemic oppression and discrimination that exists in the real world exists in the New Orleans of my novel. That said, I'm wary of claiming any kind of expertise on these issues. As I was writing, I tried to be aware of how privilege (especially my own) and inequality and the violence done to people of color in this city and this country would affect my characters, but I also tried to avoid writing a story centered on those concerns. Not because they're invalid, but because they're not my story to tell. Those issues come up naturally in my novel because New Orleans is an ethnically diverse city, and I wrote it in a way that reflects that reality. To depict it any other way would be its own kind of statement.

  That said, I'm definitely qualified to talk about privilege, since I've got just about every kind of it a person can have. Personally, I think that luck and fate are basically the same thing. They're an energy source. Your ability to impact the world around you. Magic, if you will. Sometimes things happen unexpectedly. You get the job even though you were sure you fumbled the interview. You find cash in a coat pocket on the very day you needed it. A routine checkup reveals a health issue that saves your life. If you grew up poor, or even on the paycheck-to-paycheck edge of middle class, or if you lost your job and found yourself financially desperate, or had one of any number of experiences that forced you to examine the imbalances of power in the world around you, it's pretty easy to see these things as pure luck. Nothing you deserved or earned, just the chaos of the world lifting you up instead of slapping you down.

  The ease of some people's lives can fool them, though. It's easier to get the job when your uncle owns the company, when the person doing the hiring doesn't think you're so attractive that you're going to be sexually harassed. Easier to lose cash in the first place when twenty bucks isn't a substantial amount of money. Easier to have routine checkups when you've got health insurance, when your ailments aren't minimized because you're fat, or black, or a woman. Or all three. When good things happen to you more often than not, it's easier to see these things as being your right. Something you deserve. Not luck, but destiny.

  I don't see it as a balance at all. One bad break isn't going to destroy a privileged person's life, just like one good day won't change the trajectory of someone whose family has been systematically oppressed for generations. It's not about effort or merit or character or culture or anything else. Some of us walk through life with gold coins spilling out of our pockets, and some of us only ever get one coin to spend. That imbalance is at the core of everything evil and wrong and broken in the world.

  One of the roles that Trickster plays in myth is to correct this imbalance. So I guess if I had any aim in portraying this imbalance, it was hoping to inspire people to be a little bit more like Trickster in that respect. To see luck and not destiny, to share their good fortune with those who have less.

  Since I also write a lot about film and television, I have to ask: have you ever cast the cinematic adaption of The City of Lost Fortunes in your head (even as a joke)? I actually did think it would be a very interesting limited series in the vein of American Gods…

  Oh, no. Not at all. The nerve to even suggest such a thing. I'm engaged in serious literary pursuits. I don't have time to make a list where Wentworth Miller plays Jude, John Goodman is Dodge, and Leslie Odom, Jr. plays Mourning and ... I .. I certainly didn't put it all in an Evernote file just in case I was ever stuck in an elevator with a David Simon and Eric Overmeyer, the creators of Treme. Next question.

  What are you currently working on? What are your plans for your next novel? (Based on the cover, which says "A Crescent City Novel", are there plans for a direct sequel or follow-up in this particular universe?)

  The next book is indeed another Crescent City novel, though not a true sequel, as it's focused on one of the side characters who shows up in the first book. The main character of this next one, (we haven't quite settled on a title) is a psychopomp—one of the spirits who guides the recently deceased through the Underworld—who goes to her appointed collection, only to find that the soul she's there to collect is missing, body and soul. It's full of death and storm and destruction gods, some familiar faces and some new ones, and it's all written, but I'm in the revision stage now.

  The thing that's still in a first draft place is something new, full of pirates and spies and betrayal and revolution set in a version of French and Spanish colonial New Orleans, on the northern edge of a magically advanced, centuries old Mayan empire.

• My Life My Books My Escape - https://mylifemybooksmyescape.wordpress.com/2018/04/17/author-interview-bryan-camp/

  AUTHOR INTERVIEW: BRYAN CAMP
  2D298CE8-99D3-4442-A5A8-4BB47EBA9309

  Today I am interviewing Bryan Camp, author of the new fantasy novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, which has earned starred reviews in Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal.
  DJ: Hi Bryan! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview!
  For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?
  Bryan Camp: Sure! I’ve lived in and around New Orleans my whole life, and for most of those thirty-mumble years, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I studied creative writing in undergrad, earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and was a member of the Clarion West class of 2012. I’m married to a lovely high school math teacher without whom I would have accomplished approximately zero of the goals life goals I just mentioned. For the six years before I sold my novel I was a high school English teacher, and before that I taught community college, worked in an office in an oil refinery, and once, for a single weird, desperate week, was a parcel delivery driver in Alabama.

  DJ: What is The City of Lost Fortunes about?
  DE55A354-AA6D-4F0F-979F-42AE2FD96B9C

  Bryan: It’s a murder mystery set in a post-Katrina New Orleans where the gods, magics, and monsters of various world mythologies exist. The story follows Jude Dubuisson, who is a demi-god, though he doesn’t know which deity is his father. He gets pulled into a tarot card based poker game along with Thoth, the Egyptian god of scribes, Legba, the voodoo loa of the crossroads, a vampire, an angel, and Dodge, the Fortune God of New Orleans. When Dodge is murdered immediately after the game, Jude must discover who killed him, and why.

  DJ: What were some of your influences for The City of Lost Fortunes?
  Bryan: Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World was a major influence on this novel. It’s scholarly study of the roles Trickster figures play in the cultures where their stories are still shared. He argues that they’re far more than mere stories, that they influence the psyche of the cultures that tell them. His work wasn’t my introduction to Trickster stories or to syncretic myth, but the way Hyde tied it all together in a tight, compelling package really helped me get my head around some of the themes at the center of the book.

  DJ: Could you briefly tell us a little about your main characters? Do they have any cool quirks or habits, or any reason why readers with sympathize with them?
  Bryan: As a demigod, Jude Dubuisson had a pretty strange childhood, aware of the magical figures and forces that are the foundation of our world, defined by his own talent for finding lost things. This is a deeper ability than merely knowing where a misplaced object has ended up, he can also feel where you lost your innocence, your passion, your faith. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when everyone in the city lost something (and many lost everything) he was overwhelmed by his own magic, the birthright from a father he’s never known, and a power he’s never really understood.

  DJ: What is the world and setting of The City of Lost Fortunes like?
  Bryan: It’s basically our world, specifically New Orleans in 2011, just with gods of various cultures and myths–some of whom slip from one pantheon to the next when they need a change of scenery–existing behind the scenes, answering prayers or meddling or ignoring the lives of mortals as they see fit.

  DJ: What was your favorite part about writing The City of Lost Fortunes?
  Bryan: My favorite part of writing this book was my favorite part of writing in general, which is when those magical connections happen when I’m deep in writing mode and have been for days, and I think to myself, “if only this could happen, it would make so much sense,” and then I look, and to my utter amazement, the thing that just randomly occured to me isn’t impossible at all. Sometimes it’s a stray line of dialog that you wrote thirty pages earlier suddenly becoming relevant. Or a bit of research that kept circling in the back of your mind slipping right into place. It’s a rare and a wonderful feeling, and it’s as close as I get to being a magician.

  DJ: What do you think readers will be talking about most once they finish it?
  Bryan: Hopefully how much they’re looking forward to my next book! This book and the next one coming from HMH aren’t set up to be a series in the traditional sense, but there’s definitely more stories to tell in the Crescent City once the first book is done.

  DJ: Did you have a particular goal when you began writing The City of Lost Fortunes? Was there a particular message or meaning you are hoping to get across when readers finish it? Or is there perhaps a certain theme to the story?
  Bryan: At its core, this is a novel about loss and recovery. It’s certainly not the book I intended to write when I started it the weekend before Katrina hit. Immediately after the storm, I tried to write a book set before the storm, but that didn’t feel right. And since I’d evacuated, writing something about the immediate aftermath didn’t feel like my story to tell. But the years-long struggle of the city to recover from the devastation, that was something I’d seen enough of to grapple with.

  DJ: Now that The City of Lost Fortunes is released, what is next for you?
  Bryan: I’ve just turned in a draft of the next Crescent City book, about a psychopomp–one of the guides who lead the recently deceased into the underworld–who shows up to collect a soul only to find that he’s somehow escaped his moment of his death. I’ve been rummaging around my idea notes for the next thing, superheroes and houses that are whole worlds unto themselves and steampunk-ed versions of colonial New Orleans. Spoiled for choice, really!

  DJ: Where can readers find out more about you?
  Twitter: @bryancamp

  Facebook: @BryanCampNovelist

  Website: www.bryancamp.com (blog and newsletter sign-up)

  Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17039838.Bryan_Camp

  Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B074ZMLMGR

  DJ: Before we go, what is that one thing you’d like readers to know about The City of Lost Fortunes that we haven’t talked about yet?
  Bryan: By drawing on many of the noir sources that urban fantasy is rooted in, I made a real effort to not also pull in some of the uglier, harmful tropes that can become entangled in the genre. I’m sure I stumbled at least as often as I succeeded, but it’s important to me to try to move the genre forward as best I can.

  DJ: Is there anything else you would like add?
  Bryan: I think you’ve hit all the high notes! Thanks for having me!

  DJ: My pleasure! Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to answer my questions!
  ◊ ◊ ◊

  *** The City of Lost Fortunes is published by John Joseph Adams/ Houghtin Mifflin and is available TODAY!!! ***
  Buy the Book:
  Amazon | Barnes & Nobel | Goodreads | Kobo
  ◊ ◊ ◊

  F089387B-E068-40F0-89FD-A875D5496301About the Book:
  The fate of New Orleans rests in the hands of a wayward grifter in this novel of gods, games, and monsters.

  The post–Katrina New Orleans of The City of Lost Fortunes is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane’s destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known—a father who just happens to be more than human.

  Jude has been lying low since the storm, which caused so many things to be lost that it played havoc with his magic, and he is hiding from his own power, his divine former employer, and a debt owed to the Fortune god of New Orleans. But his six-year retirement ends abruptly when the Fortune god is murdered and Jude is drawn back into the world he tried so desperately to leave behind. A world full of magic, monsters, and miracles. A world where he must find out who is responsible for the Fortune god’s death, uncover the plot that threatens the city’s soul, and discover what his talent for lost things has always been trying to show him: what it means to be his father’s son.

  2D298CE8-99D3-4442-A5A8-4BB47EBA9309

  About the Author:
  BRYAN CAMP is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. He started his first novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, in the back seat of his parents’ car as they evacuated the Crescent City during Hurricane Katrina.

5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526586219470 1/4
Print Marked Items
Camp, Bryan: THE CITY OF LOST
FORTUNES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Camp, Bryan THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Fiction) $24.00 4, 17
ISBN: 978-1-328-81079-3
A phantasmagoric murder mystery that wails, chants, laments, and changes shape as audaciously as the
mythical beings populating its narrative.
It's six years after Hurricane Katrina, and, though floodwaters have receded, New Orleans, as depicted in
this boisterously ingenious debut novel, is neck-deep in malaise, its surviving citizens struggling to recover
their collective mojo. Among these is a Creole busker named Jude Dubuisson, who, as the book begins, is
glumly content to collect spare change from credulous tourists through his supernatural gifts for locating
missing objects. The hurricane and its aftermath compelled Jude to hide his true powers under the
proverbial bushel until he's beckoned to take part in a secret card game featuring some of the city's most
powerful and dangerous demigods, including the treacherous vampire Scarpelli, a fallen angel known as
"Wings," and the voodoo high priest Papa Legba. The game takes a turn when Jude goes unconscious after
being dealt a hand of five blank cards. When he awakens, Jude finds that one of the game's participants has
been murdered. Soon, everybody else taking part in the game is either murdered or about to be; other
potential victims include a beguiling young hoodoo apprentice, a zombie jazz trumpeter--and Jude himself.
For a first-time novelist, Camp shows adroitness in weaving the real-life exoticism of present-day New
Orleans with his macabre alternate universe that's almost--what's the word--supernatural. (Among the
unique characters attending a burial service for one of the murder victims: a centaur, a hairy giant, and "a
fat, brown-skinned man with the head of an elephant.") Things only get weirder and more intense from
there, but the engaging style, facility with folklore, and, above all, impassioned love for the city its
characters call home keeps you enraptured by the book's most chilling and outrageous plot twists.
One hopes for more of Camp's dangerous visions to spring from a city that, as he writes, "is a great place to
find yourself, and a terrible place to get lost."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Camp, Bryan: THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9f651e75.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526586219470 2/4
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248242
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526586219470 3/4
The City of Lost Fortunes
Frances Moritz
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The City of Lost Fortunes. By Bryan Camp. Apr. 2018.384p. HMH/John Joseph Adams, $24
(9781328810793).
Camp fashions a supernatural world barely hidden on the fringe of society in this debut novel. Six years
after Hurricane Katrina, Jude Dubuisson is still struggling to control his magical ability to find lost things--
it went haywire when the hurricane hit. His power was inherited from his father, who was somehow more
than human; unfortunately, that's all Jude knows about him. Having worked with the supernatural crowd
before the hurricane, Jude is dragged back into that world by a debt owed to Dodge, the Fortune god of New
Orleans, where he finds himself playing a poker game with rules and (tarot) cards he doesn't understand.
The situation is aggravated by Dodge's murder, which Jude is forced to investigate to avoid becoming the
primary suspect. He's fairly sure he didn't do it and hopes that his search will clue him in to the stakes of the
ongoing poker game--assuming the dark presence stalking him doesn't kill him first. There isn't a dull page
as Jude determines who his real friends are. Anne Rice fans will enjoy this fresh view of supernatural life in
New Orleans, while fans of Kim Harrison's urban fantasy will have a new author to watch.--Frances Moritz
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Moritz, Frances. "The City of Lost Fortunes." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 37. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771868/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7a575c48.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771868
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526586219470 4/4
The City of Lost Fortunes
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p40+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The City of Lost Fortunes
Bryan Camp. HMH/Adams, $24 (384p)
ISBN 978-1-328-81079-3
Debut author Camp transforms his native New Orleans into a realm of magic and gods that's still deeply
wounded from Hurricane Katrina. Street magician and demigod Jude Dubuisson used to magically locate
lost objects and people, but he quit after Katrina overwhelmed the city with loss. The slaying of the god of
fortune forces Jude into a maelstrom as he learns that he is inextricably bound with the murder, other
murders that follow, and the lives of everyone in New Orleans. Camp's fantasy reads like jazz, with multiple
chaotic-seeming threads of deities, mortals, and destiny playing in harmony. This game of souls and fate is
full of snarky dialogue, taut suspense, and characters whose glitter hides sharp fangs. Jude is an engaging,
once-cheerful trickster turned hermit and reluctant hero; if his destiny is bleak, he decides he might as well
go all-out to save whomever he can and the city he refuses to abandon. Any reader who likes fantasy with a
dash of the bizarre will enjoy this trip to the Crescent City. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The City of Lost Fortunes." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 40+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575653/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8e9c6289.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575653

"Camp, Bryan: THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 May 2018. Moritz, Frances. "The City of Lost Fortunes." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771868/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 May 2018. "The City of Lost Fortunes." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 40+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575653/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 May 2018.

• BookPage
  http://bookpage.com/features/22611-dash-dollop-sprinkling-magic#.Wv3bxUiUs2z
  Word count: 306

  May 2018

  A DASH, A DOLLOP, A SPRINKLING OF MAGIC
  BookPage feature by Matthew Jackson

  At its best, fantasy fiction is transportive, taking us away from the world we know. Sometimes that journey sends us to alien and mythic realms, but sometimes—as in this trio of powerful new novels—magic can be found in a strange and wondrous reflection of a world we already recognize.

  In his stunning debut, The City of Lost Fortunes, Bryan Camp crafts a spellbinding vision of one of America’s most magical cities. In a post-Katrina New Orleans, magician and grifter Jude Dubuisson is adrift, hiding from his exciting former life and keeping quiet about his gift for locating lost items. All that changes when a sudden invitation catapults him back into a world of gods, vampires, angels and tremendous power.

  What begins as an enticing introduction to a mythic version of the Crescent City and its characters quickly deepens as Camp weaves through strange haunts and schemes. Indeed, magic is woven into every page with such mesmeric precision that the reader has no idea what to expect next and can’t risk turning away for a moment. Camp takes us through his world with the self-assuredness of a seasoned novelist, leaving no word wasted and no moment of exposition without a little spell twisted into it.

  The novel journeys deeper still, beyond its own imagined mysteries and into the unanswered questions of the American experience. The cultural melting pot of New Orleans becomes enchanted, as ritual chalk circles lead to doors, doors lead to hidden rooms, and hidden rooms lead to other realms. As Jude rediscovers a world he left behind, we discover a magical and uncharted landscape that perhaps has always existed before our very eyes.

Word Count