Writing as Resistance: How Politics Shaped The Devil’s Revolver
By V.S. McGrath
When I started dreaming up The Devil’s Revolver, sometime around 2010, all I wanted to do was tell a fun adventure story—a fantasy set in a world that wasn’t a stand-in for feudal-era Europe. At the time, I was playing the video game Red Dead Redemption and thought, why not the Wild West? And so Hettie Alabama’s story was born.
Little did I know that over the years, the tale of a girl with grit, a gun and a grudge would become part of my political banner.
Long before the 2016 US election, I’d decided I’d do my best to write a “smart” book. The protagonist would be female, because there were already enough male cowboy stories out there. I would also have a Chinese character because there were few stories featuring Asian characters from that era. Beyond that, I hadn’t though much about political messages or “fight the power” anthems. I just wanted a fun romp with horses and magic.
For research, I consumed Western movies and books. Then I sat down to watch the 1996 Ken Burns documentary The West. I thought I’d get stories about cowboys, but the documentary mainly focused on the destruction, erasure and forced resettlement of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Indigenous genocide had never been detailed for me so completely, not even in history class.
Suddenly, I realized I was treading on dangerous ground. How could I tell a magical story in a problematic genre that had historically erased and misrepresented entire groups of people, my own included? How could I develop a system of magic that didn’t co-opt, appropriate or offend all the different cultural traditions and beliefs that actually exist?
The answer was more education. Reading more, asking more questions. I learned about anti-oppression. I read up on Indigenous social justice issues. I became more aware of the history of the place called North America and how we got to where we are today. And still, I had the deep fear that I was missing something.
When the manuscript was bought by Brain Mill Press, I insisted on a sensitivity reader specifically for Indigenous issues, with the understanding that this was not a rubber stamp of approval by any stretch. I worked with Dr. Angela Jaime, director and professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Wyoming, who set me on the path to my political awakening. For that, I am forever grateful for her patience, energy and emotional labor. Even though my books don’t deal in great depth with Indigenous issues, the lenses that Dr. Jaime helped me cultivate got me to see the rest of the series more clearly and make me more aware of how my storytelling could be anti-oppressive.
The questions at the heart of the story were simple: Who gets to exist here? Who has privilege and power over whom? I thought hard about how people with magical powers would be integrated and regulated in the world, and what that kind of challenges they’d face depending on the other privileges or marginalizations they experienced. Crafting three-dimensional characters meant fully understanding the intersection of their identity aspects.
Meanwhile, the worldbuilding of The Devil’s Revolver demanded that I think about my system of magic without ascribing a scientific method or value judgment to it. After all, many different cultures and religions have “magic” in them—rituals, traditions, prayers, medicines, faith and more that can’t be or have yet to be explained or proven by scientific means. If every culture had access to magic through their particular cultural traditions, then there was no one “true” system of magic. All theories and beliefs had to be equal and subjective. I had to decolonize the magic in my fictional Wild West.
Additionally, diminishing magic in my world became analogous with the climate and energy crises, with the governing body—the Division of Sorcery—denying magic’s decline while hypocritically hoarding power by forcibly taking it from others.
This became a major plot point in the later books. When I started reading about refugee children being separated from their families and detained at the border, I funneled my anger, grief and energy into my writing. The Division became an existential threat to everyone in the story as they conscripted the gifted, took children from their homes and experimented on them or enslaved them. The series’ villain evolved from a single maniacal bad guy to a whole entrenched system of people with power and privilege.
By the end, The Devil’s Revolver became much more than a magical cowgirl adventure. The story of Hettie Alabama and her cursed gun isn’t about heroism: it’s about hope and defiance in the face of loss and suffering. And it’s about the spectrum of morality, and how being an outlaw sometimes means the law, and not the person, is wrong.
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“The Houseguests” is a short story that bridges books 3 and 4, and is being offered on Brain Mill Press’s website at www.brainmillpress.com.
All of the net proceeds* from the sale of The Houseguests will be donated to RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency that promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees.
The fourth and final book in The Devil’s Revolver series, THE LEGEND OF DIABLO, will be out September 17. It is available wherever you buy books.
Visit www.devilsrevolver.com
Twitter @VS_McGrath,
Hell’s not so scary when you’ve been there twice already…
It’s been three years since she lost her sister, Abby, to the Division, and Hettie Alabama has gone rogue. Roaming the West with an outlaw posse, robbing banks and stealing magic, she’s broken every rule she once believed in. Nothing matters anymore but finding Abby.
Meanwhile, the world is on fire. Hungry for power, the Division leaches magic from the vulnerable, with dire consequences that set Hettie’s pursuit of her sister on a collision course with dangerous monsters and even more dangerous men. It’s up to Hettie and her cursed revolver, Diablo, to find a way to save the world—or end it.
The Legend of Diablo delivers an action-packed conclusion to the Devil’s Revolver series steeped in violent history, dark magic, and hope that demands an accounting.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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