Fire Season

An Introduction to Fire Season

“A pleasant day, in spite of the heat and the rot in the air. She walked through town at a leisurely pace. No one noticed her. Just as no one had ever noticed her. Why should they?” (page 114)
 
Roslyn Beck is a “certain kind of woman.” Ever since she was young, she has had a mysterious ability to see into the future—tragedies mostly, turning her days into reels of despair she can neither prevent from happening nor stop herself from seeing. Having long relied on alcohol to cope, she works as a prostitute in Spokane Falls, a frontier town in Washington Territory. But when a fire originating at her place of work spreads through the city, destroying everything in its wake, she has two options: stick around and risk being charged with arson, or set out in search of new meaning.
 
Barton Heydale, manager of the only bank in Spokane Falls and one of Roslyn’s most loyal clients, happens to be with her at Wolfe’s Hotel on the day of the fire. He had been contemplating suicide, but the fire makes him reconsider. He has been doing it all wrong, he realizes; the chaos of the fire is his chance to embark on schemes of fraud, forgery, and kidnapping—his chance to finally become the kind of powerful frontier man that garners respect in the American West.
 
Quake Auchenbaucher, a career con man masquerading as an arson inspector, has gained a reputation for solving crimes and serving justice. Hired to find the arsonist behind the fire in Spokane Falls, he is dismayed when the situation proves to be trickier than anything from his previous ploys. With Washington Territory appealing for statehood, the once-anarchic town has embraced a new spirit of law and order. Suddenly Quake’s methods are in question, the ways of his life no longer viable.
 
As their lives intersect—Barton and Quake both falling madly in love with Roslyn—all three must confront their need for power and control, their motivations, and their responsibility to one another. Krow’s ingenious, genre-bending page-turner reimagines the American West to tell a distinctly and delightfully modern story about power, land, corruption, capitalism, and the imagination required to live a meaningful life in a spoiled social order.


Q&A with Leyna Krow

You live in the Pacific Northwest. How has this geography and culture influenced your writing? What most excites you about this region? How do you think this place shapes the characters in Fire Season, and did you do any special research to inform your writing?

LK: Well, not to split hairs, but I actually live in the Inland Northwest. Spokane is on the eastern edge of Washington State. I did live on the west side, in Seattle, when I was in my twenties. But Spokane has been my home for the last decade, and it is a different culture and geography over here. Spokane is a great place to write about. It is unapologetically, unselfconsciously strange. Many of the weirdest details in Fire Season are true things that I found in my research and wanted to include in the story just because they were so delightful. But also, Spokane is kind of this underdog city that people either have never heard of or have a bad impression of. I like underdogs. I like this weird, friendly, earnest city. It feels like the sort of place where anything could happen, and that makes it an ideal setting for stories that are a little fantastical.

The characters in Fire Season are absolutely shaped by the setting. In the novel, Spokane Falls (which was the city’s name at the time; the “Falls” was dropped in 1891) is almost a character itself in the ways its influence pushes against the protagonists. The men, Barton and Quake, are constantly struggling with the place—its very culture seems to stand in the way of their ambitions. Roslyn, on the other hand, likes Spokane Falls and moves through it easily, at times almost as if she is a part of it.

I did have to do a lot of research for this book. I was originally drawn to the story of the 1889 fire, but beyond that, I didn’t know very much about the city’s history before I started. I was just compelled by this particular event and all its coincidences and oddities, and so I wanted to write about it.
 
Did you always know you would write about the American West? What were some of the challenges? Are there any writers or depictions of this region that have made you think differently about how to tell these stories?

LK: I’ve lived on the West Coast my whole life, and in Washington State since I was twenty-two. I’m not particularly well traveled. So, I’m not sure what other locations I would write about. That said, it can be nerve-racking to write about a real place, particularly the place where you live. I’m certain there are people in Spokane who know its history better than I do, and who will find fault in my portrayal. I definitely look up to other local writers who have set books in this region—particularly Sharma Shields and Jess Walter. They both have a way of capturing this place with honesty, but with an inherent kindness too. I’m also very keen on the work of writers who have reimagined Westerns in a fantastical way. Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary and Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay are two books I thought about a lot while working on Fire Season—the way they worked within that genre to do something unexpected.

This is your first novel, but you’ve also written a collection of short stories. How do you determine which form is the best fit for a particular story?

LK: I really do consider myself a short story writer. My first collection, I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking, was published in 2016, and I feel a lot of my identity as an author is connected to that book. Novelist is not a word I’ve used for myself yet. Fire Season was the first story I’ve come up with where I felt that it had the potential to be a whole novel. But it did start as a shorter piece. It was originally focused on just one character who used the fire in Spokane Falls to better his own situation. The story wasn’t very satisfying though, so I started to think about what other perspectives I could bring in, and that opened up the possibility of it being novel length. I loved the process and writing it, but it is also such a tremendous commitment to say, “Okay, I’m going to spend years on this one story. I hope it’s good.”
 
Fire Season is magical, historical, romantic, and suspenseful. Do you consider genre when you are writing? How do you see your work, genre-wise?

LK: I like the term fabulist. It’s kind of a mash-up of elements from magical realism, sci-fi, and horror, but always with one foot in the real world as well. I like the term weird too. Stories that have weird stuff, fantastical stuff in them—they’re fun. It opens the door for a lot of humor, and I like to be funny. But weirdness also can give new ways of accessing old stories and new avenues for empathy. For example, with Fire Season, writing a character who is a prostitute in the Wild West is a cliché. Every reader already has an image of that character. But if she’s magical, what then? You don’t know her like you thought you did. That gives me an entryway to say something new. I never would have thought to write traditional historical fiction. That seems daunting. I needed to stay in the genre I knew, even if that meant working outside the bounds of a lot of people’s expectation for historical writing.

What else are you working on? What’s next?

LK: I’m very excited to have another book forthcoming from Viking. It is a collection of short stories exploring women’s relationships to power (or a lack thereof) in a variety of contexts. Almost all the stories contain fabulist elements—alternate dimensions, time travel, ghosts, made-up animals, etc. I think they are funny too, but also sometimes gruesome and a little mean. None of them have anything to do with fires or the 1800s, so that’s been a nice change.

 
Questions for Discussion

1.     Would you consider Fire Season a Western? How does the novel fit into the genre, and how do you think it challenges it?
 
2.     What was your experience reading the Interludes and illusory Events? What do you think these magical stories add to the novel? Did they change the way you understood Barton, Quake, and Roslyn?
 
3.     In the prologue, set fourteen years before the fire that destroys Spokane Falls, a “naturalist, inventor, and statesman” named Chase gives a lecture about criminality. What did you make of Chase and the three archetypal criminals he lays out? What relation do you think these types have to the main characters in the novel?
 
4.     The novel is set in 1889, but fires and record heat waves are modern realities of climate change. Discuss the relationship between the behaviors and attitudes toward nature in Fire Season and our age of climate change. What do you think the novel is saying about the natural world and human dealings with nature?
 
5.     Barton and Quake both fall in love with Roslyn. How does each man see her? What kind of power do you think each character has in relation to one another?
 
6.     Washington Territory was admitted to the union in 1889, the same year as the Great Spokane Fire. The novel explores the fight for and against statehood, chronicling the shift from a society in which mob justice rules and power is seized by outlaws to a centralized government with the authority to subjugate its citizenry. How are these ideologies portrayed in the novel, and where do the characters fit into this discussion?
 
7.     Prescience, levitation, flying, and pyrokinesis are a few of the magical elements that run through the novel. How do you think these occult themes are related to femininity? How might there be a way for those on the margins to reclaim power from mainstream society?
 
8.     Barton, Quake, and Roslyn all must balance their individual desires and moral codes with those of the society they live in. In light of this tension, what do you think each character learns about themself? How does Roslyn balance her desire to live for herself with a responsibility to use the powerful gifts she has for good?