Whenever writers come together, ideas are born.
In July of 2011, Christopher Golden and Jonathan Maberry sat in a Chinese restaurant in Rhode Island, discussing the nature of story and of plot. It has been said that there are only seven basic plots, and that each and every story can be reduced to fit within the parameters of one of those fundamental structures. While the authors of Four Summoner’s Tales could debate that assertion for eons, that dinner conversation brought Golden and Maberry into a tangential discussion about diverse works that share the same root plot, and how the quality and value of a story comes in the details and in the approach of the individual writer.
In other words, it’s all in the execution.
Wouldn’t it be interesting, they mused, to give a group of very different writers the same short, simple premise—just a single sentence, without any other parameters—and see what the result would be?
Long before the fortune cookies arrived, musing turned into planning, and not long thereafter came the single-sentence premise from which the authors would work:
A strange visitor comes to town, offering to raise the townsfolk’s dearly departed from the dead—for a price.
It was agreed that the authors could interpret “strange visitor,” “town,” and “raise” any way they liked. The stories could be set in the past, present, or future, in a fantasy world or the real one, and be based on science or magic.
The novella form was chosen as the best platform for this endeavor, long enough for plots to be fully explored and brought to fruition, but short enough to still be collected side by side. At novella length, four seemed the perfect number . . . thus, Four Summoner’s Tales.
The only question that remained was who would pen the other two novellas, but Maberry and Golden found themselves in swift agreement, quickly enlisting Kelley Armstrong and David Liss, both renowned for their talent and imagination. Soon, the ideas began to coalesce . . .