The book is done.

There’s no avoiding cliché here, so let’s get it all out of the way. I am a different person than I was when I began writing this novel. If I were starting it today, I don’t think this is the sort of thing I would choose to write about. Big projects are strange like that. It’s as if you’re watching your own life with a tape delay.

A part of me is prouder of this book than of anything I have ever done. Another part wants to lock it in an iron box and cast it out to sea never to be opened or seen. I’ll get to that later.

Let me first stop and talk about the book itself. Cart, horse, etc.

The Downcast Wolves is the story of Erich Fiehler, an eleven-year-old boy who has seen almost nothing outside of life in Hitler’s Germany. Shipped from his hometown to an elite school in the Austrian Alps, he thrives on a diet of potent magic and Nazi propaganda. For a time.

But as the other student’s grow more powerful, Erich weakens. His power, what they call patronage, drains away.

On the hunt for answers, he finds Heinrich, a fugitive being sheltered by Erich’s best friend. He plans to turn him in, but the closer Erich draws to Heinrich the more his patronage returns. As Erich uncovers the dark underpinnings of both school and Reich, he must decide if he is willing to let his ill-gotten patronage go or if he will stain his conscience to get it back.

I had three goals for The Downcast Wolves:

First, I wanted to use the unifying fantasy of my generation (that letter from Hogwarts) as a way of understanding the fantasy—delusion, really—that brought together the Hitler Youth generation.  Both promise that you are different, that you are unique in a way neither parents nor peers can understand. You are special, and by implication, superior. As much as the message is one of tolerance, how many named muggle characters are there in the Harry Potter series?

“In this blood was a future. It was the trumpets and the drums and the joined song of a thousand boys just like him. It was the voice that called down from above to say, you are my favorite; you are my chosen. It was a paradox—specialness and community at the same time.”

Second, I wanted to invert the way supernatural power is so often used as a metaphor for oppression. As the canonical example, take the plight of X-Men’s mutants, usually thought of as representative of either the struggles of queer people or the American civil rights movement. But why, then, are the mutants the ones with the dangerous and easily-abused powers. Should it not be their oppressors? 1 In Downcast, it’s Erich who has the power, along with all its potential for abuse. The moral choice for him would be to relinquish it, but he struggles to do what’s right. He can’t let go.

“The gift from below the mountain no longer felt at all like something that had been bestowed on him. Rather it seemed as if it had grown from within. He couldn’t remember what it was like before he had it. Integral and identifying, his patronage had swelled until it could no longer be separated from his person. There was no Erich Fiehler without it. To lose it would be to die.”

Lastly, I was tired of seeing so many genre books, movies, and television episodes about Nazis that deliberately sidestep nuance and complexity. See Marvel’s Hydra for this one. The imagery of Nazism is plundered as a shorthand for evil, but there’s no willingness to confront the scariest thing about them: that they were human beings.

I say this not to absolve Nazis, but to implicate myself. The thing that made so many people subscribe to this odious worldview was not their cartoonish evil, but rather the very human flaws that are present in so many of us. Racism and xenophobia, of course. But also fear of losing privilege, the desire to help oneself or one’s family over others, and commonplace, everyday greed. I wrote Erich as a representation of the things I hate in myself, but he is, like me, human. You will feel for him.

“He imagined that if he stayed on the platform long enough another train would arrive. It would chug to a stop and out would come a fresh crop of nervous boys with callouses on their necks. Erich could hide among them. He could start over, make new friends, and discover Rouhhenberg like it were his first time, unburdened and unashamed.”

Years ago, when I started this book, I had a theory: creators who want to tackle Nazism in fantasy should either go deep or steer clear entirely. I went deep. Now, I’m not sure what I believe. I’m very proud of what I’ve written. I think it’s polished, engaging, and nuanced. I really doubt you’ll regret reading it. But I don’t know about my original theory. I don’t know if all those positives are enough to outweigh the danger and hurt of dredging up that kind of story. Or if I—a gay, but not Jewish man—have the right to tell it.

Either way, it’s done now. I’ve decided not to pack it in an iron box and push it out into the waves. Instead, I put on Amazon, which is more or less the same thing. I don’t expect I will write anything like this again. But at least on a personal level, I’m glad that I did. I learned more than I ever expected to, even if one thing I learned was to maybe steer clear next time.

So please, go, read it. Try the sample. Figure out what you think for yourself. Then let me know.

1 To refute myself here: “hasn’t enough been written about them“.

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