Author’s Notes: The Werewolf’s Curse

Our trip through the 20th Century now brings us to the 1970s, and to my hometown of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.

I unabashedly love the City of Lakes. It’s one of my favorite places in the world, and the place I’ve called home for the last 15 years.

Of the four books, this one took the longest to write because we were getting closer to the holidays and one of the uncomfortable truths of the time right before the holidays is that writers’ schedules take a beating. But also because I wanted to make sure I was doing the city and the Fair justice.

And I got to play with Fiona and her roller skates, and that’s always a bonus to me. Fiona is the character of the five that I had the greatest amount of creative input into: Like me, she practically lives in her roller skates. Because of the relatively constrained page count I didn’t get to show her outside of the context of the Hunters, but Fiona (as we saw in Vampire and the Lost Locket) plays roller derby with her local juniors team, the Derby Devils, and I have to imagine they’re pretty good.

The Minnesota State Fair is an absolute behemoth of an event. It lasts for twelve days, has only been canceled six times in its history (including this year, 2020), and it’s also the largest annual music festival in the entire United States. In 1972, the year that story took place, the headliner was Sonny & Cher - promoting their new TV show, they did three dates at the Minnesota State Fair. Though I didn’t have the specific dates (the State Fair Foundation’s records didn’t include them), I used artistic license to put the first date at the very beginning of the fair because that first day of the Fair had the most interesting weather: An extremely unseasonable cold snap happened during that week, sending temperatures (normally in the high 70s to low 80s Fahrenheit) plunging into the 50s and 60s for several days. The rest of the days of the Fair were normally pleasant for Minnesota, but that first day… BRRR! The cultural details of the State Fair were as real as I could make them, given the restrictions of page count.

Examining werewolf lore in this one was a bit tricky, and it took a few passes to both get the final confrontation right (I wanted to show our heroes savoring a reward in enjoying the show - if you too believe that they deserved it, feel free to mentally insert the appropriate songs by Sonny & Cher in between the end of the fight scene and the warp home. I won’t fight. ;)