With The Nightmare Quest Of April May (paperback, Kindle), author Rosemary Jones is taking her fourth trip to Arkham, Massachusetts for yet another cosmic horror story connected to Fantasy Flight’s H.P. Lovecraft-inspired card game Arkham Horror.
In the following email interview, Jones explains the connection, as well as what inspired and influenced this supernatural story.
Photo Credit: Rozarii Lynch
To start, what is Arkham Horror: The Nightmare Quest Of April May about, and when and where does it take place both in relation to our reality as well as to the game and the other Arkham Horror novels, and especially the previous three you’ve written: Mask Of Silver, The Deadly Grimoire, and Bootlegger’s Dance?
Arkham Horror: The Nightmare Quest Of April May takes place during the same time period as the events of The Drowned City expansion. For those not playing the game, this is another novel set in the spooky strange city of Arkham, Massachusetts, during the last half of the 1920s, about nine months after the final events of The Bootlegger’s Dance, and several years after Mask Of Silver, which was set in 1923.
An unusual storm is causing the Miskatonic River to rise, and the city is bracing itself for catastrophic flooding. At the same time, people are beginning to suffer unusually violent nightmares. The hospital wards are starting to overflow with patients who cannot wake up.
In the midst of this pending chaos, a young woman is struggling with her first full-time job: taking orders for classified advertisements at the Arkham Advertiser. Her own nightmares are filled with visions of a masked man insisting that she do something to help. While feeling rather small and helpless in face of all this catastrophe, April will, as her baseball friend Lefty would say, step up to the plate. She does her bit for the defense of Arkham and her friends.
Where did you get the idea for The Nightmare Quest Of April May and how, if at all, did that idea change as you wrote this story?
I was asked to craft a novel set during the time period of the game’s The Drowned City expansion. The events in the novel happen shortly after the events in The Forbidden Visions Of Lucius Galloway by Carrie Harris. Since both the campaign expansion and Carrie’s novel were being completed while I was writing my novel, it’s not a direct sequel. You can read either novel as a stand-alone story and you don’t need to have played the expansion to know what’s going on. However people who have read Carrie’s book or played the expansion will probably solve the mystery of what’s causing all the issues in Arkham a bit faster than April and her friends.
Arkham Horror is a big setting, essentially the whole world in the 1920s, so there’s room for many different types of stories. Carrie and I are clearly writing about the same world, just different parts of it. I’m a fan of Carrie’s writing so I’m delighted to be following her debut in Arkham Horror with a similar but different story.
The young woman you mentioned as being at the center of this story is April May. Is there a significance to her name?
Oddly enough, no. April May’s full name popped into my head as I was starting to outline the book and just stuck. Eventually I did have to build an explanation for her unusual name, which I will tell in the next answer.
And I have to ask, because I’m an asshole, has anyone made any good jokes about how you could’ve called the book The Romance Of May December or The Stalled Acting Career Of January Jones? I’ll shut up now.
No, but I decided that April would have undergone a lot of teasing as a child because of her name. Further, her father had put his idea for her name on the birth certificate without consulting her mother. As someone who did not speak English as his first language, he thought it just sounded nice to name his daughter after the month when she was born. He didn’t realize how odd it would sound with his Anglicized last name.
Which is vaguely related to a real family story about one of my aunts being named by my grandfather…and him running the announcement in the newspaper he owned…before telling my grandmother.
But why April May originally popped into my head, I cannot tell you. I just knew that was her name.
Given that it’s based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, everything connected to Arkham Horror is either cosmic horror or has a bit of cosmic horror to it. How do you describe The Nightmare Quest Of April May, genre-wise?
There’s definitely cosmic horror in this one. Lovecraft’s best-known monster is casting a shadow over Arkham.
The Nightmare Quest Of April May is obviously not your first novel. Aside from the other Arkham Horror novels, you’ve also written some Forgotten Realms novels, as well as Cobalt City stories, which were recently collected as Wrecker Of Engines. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on April May, but not on anything else you’ve written, and especially not your previous Arkham Horror novels?
Since the Arkham Horror books are set in 1920s America, I have fun putting some real novels and stories that I own and love into the fictional libraries of my characters. I made April a big fan of the pulps, those story magazines which featured the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the other writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror in the early 20th century. I don’t own any actual 1920s pulp magazines, but I have later reprints.
For this novel, I specifically reference the stories of Ralph Milne Farley about a man transported to a world of giant sentient ants. Also, a horror psychological thriller The House Of Dr Edwardes by Francis Beeding is causing a few nightmares for Arkham investigator Dr Carolyn Fern.
How about non-literary influences; was The Nightmare Quest Of April May influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games? Aside from Arkham Horror, of course.
As a young girl, April was scared silly by the silent movie The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, which features a homicidal hypnotist. As Dr Carolyn Fern notes, hypnotists like herself are rarely portrayed as heroes in early 20th century pulp fiction or popular entertainment. Which is unfortunate, as the two women need to work together to help Arkham.
If you are a fan of Arkham Horror, you’ll already know Carolyn is one of the “good guys” but the characters in the book don’t necessarily have that knowledge. In fact, the more I dug into how psychology and hypnotism were portrayed in the early 20th century, the more I felt that Carolyn would face some frustrating prejudices about her own work. Which, in turn, ended up influencing many of the early encounters with Carolyn in the novel.
When I interviewed you about Mask Of Silver, you said you’ve played Arkham Horror. And, as you mentioned, The Nightmare Quest Of April May takes place at the same time as The Drowned City expansion. But do you think what happens in April May could work as an add-on for Arkham Horror?
The two main characters in the story are not “investigators” or cards in the game. But if April or Lefty, who is a garbage collector and friend of April, show up as cards, I’d be delighted. I think they both have strengths and weaknesses similar to the investigators.
Also, I had enormous fun writing long-time investigators Dr Carolyn Fern and Harvey Walters, who each help April in their own way. They even get to tell the story from their point of view at certain moments, which was a departure from my earlier books. I’m particularly proud of how Harvey solves the problem in his basement.
And then, on the flipside of that, do you think someone who enjoys these kinds of stories, but does not play Arkham Horror, would enjoy The Nightmare Quest Of April May? And, more importantly, understand it?
I absolutely want anyone who likes a mystery with supernatural elements to enjoy this book. This story is about a group of friends who find themselves caught up in awful events helping each other and their community. If that appeals, and you like a little Jazz Age history thrown in, this may be a good book for you.
So, is there anything else a potential reader might want to know about The Nightmare Quest Of April May?
It’s not grisly horror. I get asked this a lot. People may be scared in my books. They may be harmed. But there’s a strong element of hope for a better world which runs through all my books. If you label my stories cozy, it’s probably true to some extent.
There’s also knitting in all my Arkham Horror novels so far. It just happens, even though I’m a terrible knitter.
Finally, if someone enjoys The Nightmare Quest Of April May, and it’s the first Arkham Horror novel they’ve read, which of your previous ones would you suggest they read next, and after that, which one written by someone else would you suggest they check out?
If you enjoyed Nightmare Quest, definitely go read The Forbidden Visions Of Lucius Galloway by Carrie Harris. Because you’ll now know before Lucius what is causing all the problems. And you can scream at Lucius like me “no, no, don’t go down those stairs!”
For my books, start with Mask Of Silver. In tone, it’s the most similar to The Nightmare Quest Of April May.
