The second book to make the list from 2007 was Jenna Black’s debut novel, The Devil Inside. Not only did this novel introduce the world to Morgan Kingsley, it really helped establish Spectra (at this point with a roster that included superstars Kelley Armstrong and Keri Arthur) as a force in the urban fantasy/paranormal romance world.
But the story itself is what I love so much. Besides the irony of Morgan being an exorcist who is also hosting a demon inside her (which is delicious, delicious irony), Jenna just happens to write fun, sexy thrillers, and who doesn’t enjoy that?
Below, Jenna and her editor, Anne Groell, discuss The Devil Inside.
“Writing the Morgan Kingsley series was a unique challenge for me, because Morgan is such a study in contradiction. Tough, but vulnerable. Confident, yet insecure. Outwardly arrogant, but inwardly doubting her own self-worth. All great fodder for any writer’s imagination (and evil scheming), but everything about Morgan was made just a little trickier because I wrote her series in first person.
There’s a strange alchemy that occurs when I write in first person. In one way, I become the character I’m writing about–I am, after all, writing “I” all the time. But I am also the author, looking at her character from the outside and seeing the contradictions. And I want very much for my readers to see them, too, rather than taking Morgan’s word at face value. For instance, here are some of the things Morgan says about herself in The Devil Inside:
- I guess I’m not a good, nice person.
- I’m not a hero, and I never will be.
- Maybe that makes me shallow and selfish . . . but I can’t change who I am.
- I was pond scum.
- As far as I could tell, I hadn’t done a single thing right since the moment I’d realized I was possessed.
- I’d practically peed my pants in terror, and I’d screamed my lungs out. Not exactly my ideal of courage.
Certainly, if you believe her own description of herself, she’s pretty poor heroine material. But part of the fun of writing first person is presenting the reader with the narrator’s point of view, and then showing that not everything the narrator says is true. Morgan thinks of herself as selfish and cowardly, and yet her actions throughout the book and throughout the rest of the series prove that she doesn’t see herself clearly.
I don’t always agree with the decisions Morgan makes, especially earlier in the series when she still has a lot of growing up to do. That’s one of the special challenges of writing first person: having your character make decisions that you (and, often, your readers) feel are wrong, while keeping your character’s motivation for those decisions clear and logical. All made even more challenging by the fact that you keep writing about what “I” did, when you would never do any such thing yourself.
Morgan’s character is full of contradictions, and so is my writing of her character. On the one hand, I feel like I know her as well as I know myself. I understand her, and know what she’s going to do in any given situation. Writing her is almost second nature to me. On the other hand, Morgan is not me, nor is she really anything like me. She’s so much more reckless and outspoken than I am that I sometimes wonder how I can understand her at all.
That is the great magic of writing: that I can create this character who is so unlike myself and who lives in a world that is very different from my own, and make her feel real enough that I can think like she does and, at least for the span of a few hundred pages, become someone else entirely.”
–Jenna Black, July 2010
“Jenna was my third paranormal buy for Spectra–which was not to say that I was not getting a million paranormals on submission, because I was. I was just choosing very carefully: not only stuff I loved, but stuff that I felt would not crowd what was already becoming a very glutted market–even back in 2007! I had witches, werewolves and necromancers from Kelley; I had a dhampire from Keri. And then I found this great demon book–all new fertile ground for my burgeoning paranormal list.
Or at least, that was the rationale. The truth was, I just fell hard for Morgan’s voice. Jenna has already talked about how she created this spiky, wounded exorcist. But from the readers’ perspective…it just worked. (Plus, I loved the idea of the possessed exorcist.) Morgan has a very appealing vulnerability–even as she is tearing your head off and spitting down your neck!
But my favorite moment editing these books was when Jenna accidentally–and gruesomely!–killed my husband in her fourth book. There I was, reading along quite happily when suddenly my husband’s name leaps out at me from the page, as a minor character. Cool, I think–because it is not exactly a common name, so clearly it must be a tribute. Several scenes later, he dies a gruesome, horrible death. Jenna may remember my exact words better, but I think I scrawled something in the margin of the manuscript like: “Dude, what have you got against my husband?” And then e-mailed her to ask.
As it happens, the guy she had a grudge against was her dentist. He and my husband just happened to share the same not-so-common name. We all had a good laugh about it at the time–and, in fact, for several years afterward. Although, to spare her poor editor’s sensibilities, Jenna changed the name in the finished novel–and thus, the dastardly dentist in question will never know quite how much she hated him!”
–Anne Groell, Senior Editor, Spectra
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