Steven R. Boyett (Ariel, The Architects of Sleep, Elegy Beach) took his time in writing Mortality Bridge, a thrilling mix of rock 'n' roll, B-movie chases, Dante and the Orpheus story. A long time, in fact, as he started work on the novel in the middle 1980s and finally saw it in print earlier this summer (in a limited edition from the fine folks at Subterranean Press).
The book follows Niko, a world-famous rock guitarist who, as happens from time to time, made a deal with the devil, trading his soul for success. Niko didn't read the fine print, discovering too late that the contract extended to those he loved as well. After his longtime lover dies, Niko makes a mad dash into the depths of Hell in a desperate attempt to bring her back.
The scenes in Hell could have been drawn from any number of death-metal album jackets, with rivers of blood and massive, bewinged demons, but Boyett's vision of a mad Disneyland sticks with the reader, as does Niko's intense drive to finally do something right in his life, even if that is only shepherding his wife's soul from the underworld to heaven.
In recounting the book's long gestation process on John Scalzi's Whatever blog, Boyett writes of crafting dozens of complete drafts of the book over a two and a half decade span. The issue wasn't writing something publishable - an author of Boyett's skill certainly had that the first time out - but of coming up with a book that completely satisfied him.
This brings to mind the brohahahaha over George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons, which took several years longer than anyone (especially Martin) expected. Fans got hot under the collar, wondering how hard could it be to write a quarter-million-word extension of a complex sequence of books to the satisfaction of the most important person in the equation, the author.
That's right. We, as readers, are an important part of the equation, but it's the author's duty to produce work that satisfies themselves above all else. Boyett (or Martin, or Neil Gaiman with the later issues of Sandman or Alan Moore at the tail end of Miracleman) could have published this book back in the late 1980s. It would have probably found an audience, but readers would also probably note that something was missing. The book, no matter how well written, would have felt incomplete.
It doesn't feel incomplete now.
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