Brandon Sanderson is one of the most prolific fantasy and science fiction authors. He’s also very transparent about the projects he’s working on — and the ones he decides to shelve. One of the ideas he’s been playing with the longest is a modern fantasy story about a necromancer with the working title Death by Pizza!, which he first mentioned in 2010.
After numerous revisions and major changes in the story’s plot, including making his necromancer a heavy metal musician instead of a pizza delivery guy, Sanderson found a collaborator to actually finish the book. Songs of the Dead by Sanderson and Peter Orullian is releasing on June 16, and Orullian spoke with Polygon about the team-up.
“Brandon usually only collaborates when the person he’s collaborating with brings a strength to the work that he doesn’t himself have,” Orullian says. “I’ve toured as a musician. I know the rock and metal culture he had been struggling with.”
Orullian met Sanderson at the Life, The Universe, & Everything science fiction and fantasy symposium in Utah and the two struck up a friendship, with Sanderson blurbing some of Orullian’s early fantasy novels. Sanderson had developed a system for necromantic magic, called thanaturgy, and became interested in heavy metal culture after learning about how much it’s been stereotyped.
“That’s a sensitivity that people in the fantasy and science fiction community have because they’re often dubbed nerds and geeks and sort of marginalized,” Orullian says. “[The book is] really about the characters who are bound together by this music and this culture. In that way it could be a proxy for anybody’s sort of found family, whether it’s fantasy and science fiction readers or country fans.”
Songs of the Dead is set in London, the birthplace of heavy metal. It follows Jack Solomon, a heavy metal singer who discovers the music venue he loves is the gateway to a secret world called the Strata, where thanatists and corporeal ghosts called semblances dwell in versions of the city’s past.
“The Strata are not a perfect reflection of the past; they’re actually sort of an aggregate of memory, and as you know, people’s memories are imperfect,” Orullian says. “That gave Brandon and I a little bit of flexibility because if you’re writing true historical fiction, you really don’t want to get the details wrong.”
Because the Strata is shaped by memory, places and people can fade away if they are forgotten by the living. Jack learns that a powerful thanatist and his allies are trying to fight back against modernity by killing songwriters and replacing them with undead lookalikes. An ancient song could be a terrible weapon or exactly what Jack needs to protect his friends.
“One of the things I love about music is that it’s this language that I think can unify,” Orullian says. “The antagonist hopes to use it in order to change culture, but I really like the idea that music is something that allows people to share an understanding or an experience in the absence of the other opinions that they may hold that would divide them.”
While Sanderson originally envisioned Death by Pizza! as a comedic story, Songs of the Dead is a sincere and, at times, very dark novel. Jack became a cutter after his brother died and his mother abandoned him, trauma that he grapples with throughout the book.
“He finds some friends, and he finds the music, and the music becomes a proxy, a way to relieve the pressure that he feels that usually results in him wanting to cut,” Orullian says. “His coping mechanism has become music, and that’s not uncommon.”
Songs of the Dead is the first book in a planned trilogy called The Strata Wars. If the series is successful, Orullian would like to expand it with additional trilogies set in other cities that have long histories. But Sanderson has completed his part in the project so he can focus on his Cosmere books and multiple adaptations of his novels including AppleTV’s Mistborn movie and Tomorrow Studios’ Skyward.
“He’s really pleased with the way that Songs of the Dead came out, and he knows it’s in good hands,” Orullian says. “He knows that I live and breathe the world the same way he lives and breathes the Cosmere.”
