Goodies General Notes and Table of Contents (read this first!)


Chapter Twenty Two

The catacombs are cool. And the neat thing about them is that, while I’ve fictionalized the details (such as the entrance at L’Arenes De Lutece) most everything that I say about them is absolutely true. There are over 300 kilometers of tunnels under the streets of Paris, a mixture of sewers and catacombs and quarries and old basements. Cataphiles are real. Old, hand drawn maps are real. It’s all very spooky stuff, and a perfect setting for a suspense novel. I’m surprised more haven’t taken place there.

Here’s another reason why I like Rebekah: she’s giving an angry, frustrated speech about why conspiracies aren’t true (the monocausationalism speech), and yet she’s doing it in the catacombs—catacombs that she insisted they go into, because she needed proof. She knows what she believes, but reality doesn’t quite fit into the black-and-white way she views the world. Yet even though she comes to realize this, she never stops believing that the world should be black-and-white.

One of my favorite things about the entire catacombs sequence, but the end of this chapter in particular, is the really strong setting. Reading about the dark and cold really evokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of the tunnels. I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

Dr. Vigil is named after Dan Vigil, a coworker of mine.

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