Kelly McCullough knows how to play with language.
He describes his novels as adventure stories with a core of myth and heroism, seasoned with wit.
When developing the Webmage series, he asked this guiding question: “What cool things can I do with computers and parallel worlds if I come at it from the magic side?” The result: a fast-moving adventure series featuring a “snarky hacker” who, with a “cynical, sarcastic shapeshifter, half-laptop, half-goblin” as his partner, goes up against cosmic injustice.
If you like Golding’s The Princess Bride, you’ll recognize the ingredients of an interesting read, but when you realize that the protagonist really is as funny as he thinks he is, McCullough’s genre-bending approach becomes irresistible.
Much of the fun comes from McCullough’s inventive metaphors. He compresses apt details with rich connotations to spark insight, as in this example from Webmage: “Chaos. The raw, wild wine of creation.” The adventures of his hero, Ravirn, are set in a universe that is itself an extended metaphor: MythOS, or myth as operating system. McCulough’s metaphor for his world-building process is also provocative. Fascinated by hidden social dynamics, McCullough writes by “trying to build an alternate world to ours, make it as real as possible, and then demolition test it by setting stories there and pushing the extremes to see what breaks. It’s tremendously fun, and people seem to enjoy reading the results.”
Notes
Quotations are from http://fantasy-faction.com/2012/kelly-mccullough-interview