On Pages Like Black Wings: ‘The Crow’ in Fiction | Part 2
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During the late 1990s and early 2000s, The Crow joined the world of licensed property novels. In part one, we discussed the first three books in the series.
Chet Williamson, the writer behind the third book in The Crow series, authored the 1996 novelization of The Crow: City of Angels and has a story in the December 1998-released anthology Shattered Lives and Broken Dreams. City of Angels gets its proper scope within the paperback novelization. While the basics are the same, the feel is grittier. The plot is the same as the movie (read Michael Crosby’s discussion of the films here), but there is more depth and nuance. There’s still a gang, and Curve (played by Iggy Pop who has a poem in the anthology) still gets his tattoo that transforms from two demons fighting into a crow. And there is Día de los Muertos. While other books forgo Halloween as a necessity, City of Angels comes alive in the marigold blasts of Los Angeles’s Day of the Dead celebrations.
While the City of Angels novelization may have kicked off The Crow’s life in prose, its center is Shattered Lives and Broken Dreams, the anthology edited by James O’Barr and Ed Kramer. Williamson has his third appearance in the universe here; others with more than one chance to play in this sandbox are S.P. Somtow, A.A. Attanasio, and John Shirley who wrote the screenplay for the first film in The Crow franchise.
Shirley’s piece is titled “Wings Burnt Black” and is essentially a retelling of that first story. Editor and creator O’Barr does the same in his story “Spooky, Codeine, and the Dead Man.” O’Barr also included two original poems and a handful of illustrations for the book.
While the settings for the stories are often more vague than they are in the novels, one story goes beyond place. “Carrion Crows” by Jane Yolen and Robert Harris takes the legend of The Crow into medieval times and shows that the wrath of black wings is not a modern invention.
Traversing the earthly even more is A.A. Attanasio’s short “Hellbent” in which the main character is not even the one given the power of The Crow and is not even human. Instead, we mostly follow the demon Dren who is sick of living in Hell and seeks to defy Satan himself.
Attanasio was then allowed to expand this story into Hellbound, the sixth and final novel in the series, released in July 2001. Dren teams with the human Michael who dies and is brought back by The Crow and together they fight a New York City gang and the legions of Hell. It is the slimmest of the volumes and is in a way a bit of a letdown having already read a good portion of it in the anthology. But Attanasio’s visions of Hell and New York City work to weave an infernal view of humanity and the demon pit.
Satanists had another go around with the chosen of The Crow in Norman Partridge’s Wicked Prayer. As with City of Angels, Michael Crosby gives the best sketch of the plot, but unlike City of Angels, the book came first this time. Hitting shelves in November of 2000, a full year after its predecessor — S.P. Somtow’s Temple of Night — Wicked Prayer is unique in its road trip narrative. From the Arizona desert into the bright lights of Las Vegas, we follow Dan Cody, bent on avenging the murder of his Native American girlfriend and himself. One piece of connective tissue in this novel is the idea that one person can steal the eyes of another and use them for prophecy. Here it is the eyes of Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin stolen by Kyra Damon. In the original movie The Crow, the character Myca steals the eyes of a dead prostitute and uses them for some undefined magic.
And there’s a talking shrunken head named Raymondo. Wicked Prayer is definitely the most bizarre book in the set, pushing the boundaries of what The Crow can be.
Released a year prior, S.P. Somtow’s Temple of Night has some of the most unique qualities in the series. Set in Bangkok, we get some of the usual wrong-place-wrong-time-young-couple-murdered aspects, but Somtow lets the nature of Bangkok direct the story. Much like Brite’s The Lazarus Heart, sex work and alternative lifestyles are treated with dignity by the primary characters and despised by the villains of the story. And while protagonist Stephen might seem like a cookie-cutter hero, he gets an unusual avatar: a statuesque, alabaster crow. The appearance helps maintain the integrated cultural philosophies of Thailand: the older Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation and the newer, colonial beliefs of Catholicism. Nothing is ever what it seems, and even when we think we know what we are looking at, it is never so simple.
Vengeance and pain are both simple and complex. As each character encounters the evils of their cities, we get to see hope and love on display. Every writer brings their own voice — and often poetic influences such as Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” in Clash by Night — to the world of The Crow. The novels help O’Barr’s creation live on in new ways for new audiences to discover. The beauty is that we can all find ourselves somewhere in the books and be more open to expressing our own grief without letting it destroy who we are. 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published the novella Cry Down Dark and the collections Asleep in the Nightmare Room and The Private Lives of Nightmares with Blysster Press and Tell No Man, a novella with Last Days Books. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp in 2017. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on Twitter @TJ_Tranchell.
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