Though it's bookended by major historic disasters and set over 130 years ago, Leyna Krow's debut novel feels at once familiar and fresh, an engaging page-turner reimagining the past with a touch of the supernatural.
Fire Season opens just before one of the most impactful events of Spokane's history: The Great Fire of 1889. More than 30 blocks of downtown were decimated as hot August wind fanned the flames across the city's mostly wooden infrastructure. While devastating to residents and business owners, cleanup and reconstruction of the city began almost immediately, this time with more fire-resistant brick and stone.
In Fire Season, the Great Fire also sets off a chain reaction of deceptive schemes as the lives of its three main characters intertwine. While each lands somewhere along the spectrum of questionable morals, their self-serving motives and troubled backstories still elicit empathy via Krow's masterful character development.
For Krow, who previously established her place-focused writing style — usually with an unusual twist — in her 2015 short-story collection I'm Fine, But You Appear To Be Sinking, the pivotal moment setting the tone for Fire Season was partly inspired by a past summer job guiding walking tours of downtown Spokane.
"I always started with a brief history, and you know, the Great Fire is such a pivotal part of Spokane's history, but there's no consensus of how it started," Krow says. "And I told that story over and over and over again, and I just felt like I wanted to write something about that because it's both strange and it just feels like a very Spokane problem to have a major element of history where nobody can agree how it began."
Historians do agree that the fire started in a boardinghouse and restaurant on Railroad Alley called Wolfe's Hotel (on today's city map, it would have been located around Howard and Spokane Falls Boulevard). As to whether it was caused by a kitchen fire or an overturned kerosene lamp, the verdict's less clear.
"I just thought that was a really cool entry point to a story, so I started working on it," Krow says.
She began writing early drafts in winter 2015, originally as a short story from just one character's perspective, the delusional banker Barton Heydale, who's disliked by almost everyone around him and thus plots his revenge on all of Spokane Falls, as the city was then named. Heydale leverages his job at the bank to scam residents out of disaster relief funds, his story unfolding in the novel's first third.
"It's a fine line to walk with unlikable characters because if you make them too unlikable, readers don't want to be with them," Krow says, adding that readers of early drafts "couldn't deal with Barton," so she had to revise.
Though Fire Season doesn't transition to its sole female character's perspective until the final third section, Roslyn Beck is there from the start as a resident of Wolfe's Hotel. An alcoholic prostitute, Roslyn has another big secret she's hiding from the world.
Then there's Quake Auchenbacher, a charismatic con man who's managed to hoodwink officials in two other Washington cities that also suffered major fires that year — Seattle and Ellensburg — into believing he's a fire investigator sent by the feds.
"Fiction at its core is about evoking empathy to some degree," Krow says. "It doesn't have to be that you like somebody, but can you feel that they're human? Barton was the biggest challenge because he is pretty monstrous in what he winds up doing, and then Quake's not a good dude, but he's fun, sort of a joyful criminal."
"I feel like with Roslyn, it's sort of flipped," she continues, "She's a likable character but who does some unlikeable things, or some difficult things. She's largely a product of her time and place, and she's struggling to get out of that."
Krow thoroughly researched local historical records of Spokane's Great Fire, but acknowledges that she also took plenty of creative liberty with the facts.
The fires that also happened that year in Seattle and Ellensburg were real, but there was no scammer posing as a fire inspector, she says. In the book, Barton is manager of the city's only bank, but in reality there were several banks in Spokane Falls at that time.
"It was sort of back and forth. I would go and gather information as I felt like I needed it, but it's been so long that there are parts of the book, I'll be honest, I don't remember if they're accurate or if I made them up," Krow says, laughing.
"I worked really hard to get the setting and the feeling," she adds. "And then I felt like I had license to do a lot of other things."
Further embellishing Fire Season's historical setting is Krow's introduction of women in this version of the world who possess special powers. Breaking up the main sections following Barton, Quake and Roslyn are two "interludes," plus the prologue and epilogue, which set the tone for these witch-like abilities of select women: flying, pyrokinesis, telepathy, mind-body transcendence.
"I wanted to have something early on that would let readers know that, hey, there are people in this story who have abilities that we do not have in the real world," Krow says. "You don't get to Roslyn until the third section and to have read 200 pages of a book and then all of a sudden you're like, 'This bitch is magic?!' That's not fair to readers."
Roslyn also challenged Krow in ways more related to current events. While writing Fire Season, Krow's daughter was born. That life-altering moment for her, paired with turmoil surrounding the 2020 presidential election, spurred some deep reflection she couldn't ignore.
"I felt like I had this third chunk that didn't fit with the first two because I returned [to writing] a different person," Krow says. "And the more I worked on it, the more I had this desire to show that."
"Roslyn is a female character in a time and a place that's super not friendly to women, and rising above all of these dudes who do not take her seriously in the slightest," she continues. "I think part of that was a reaction to the current political climate, and to having a daughter; thinking about what it means to be a woman in the world." ♦
Fire Season Book Release with Leyna Krow + Friends • Tue, July 12 at 7 pm • $27 (includes book); students free with ID • The Hive • 2904 E. Sprague Ave. • auntiesbooks.com • 509-838-0206
