Playlists for each of the main characters in A Step Past Darkness!

something for everyone

I wanted to introduce a new feature to my Substack. I think (but am not sure) that most of my subscribers are writers interested in craft. But I also have fans of my fiction that want any details they can get about my books, some of which overlaps with craft and some of which does not. Though Substack has a variety of features, TLDR, the easiest way for me to deal with this is to just tag posts that focus on my novels so fans can reach them easily. (So, for A Step Past Darkness, this is the link https://verakurian.substack.com/t/a-step-past-darkness). If you are mainly here for craft/publishing articles, you might want to give these posts a skim, because while the below might not interest you from a craft perspective, if I wrote a 2k post on how I wrote the character of Casey, that might interest both craft people and fiction fans. Lastly, pending no disasters, I should be back with a standard post on Tuesday (alas my two week vacay is coming to an end).

And now.. playlists!

I made Spotify playlists for each of the 6 main characters in A Step Past Darkness. They lean heavily to the mid-90s, with some 80s, and I don’t think I picked too many songs that occurred after their high school years. I hope you have fun with these! (and no spoilers here)

Casey

Casey is a person with many sides and I wanted the playlist to capture all those sides. Hard driving athlete? (C&C Music Factory to work out to) His sentimental side? (“Time after Time” and Roxette) A couple songs that are a little melancholy, and a couple that are more upbeat. If I could introduce a younger generation to songs that were huge back then but you won’t hear now because they weren’t big enough like “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth..” or “Wild Night” that would be great. (esp since Gen Z does not know the joys of phone booths). Also, for anyone who read my very first Substack post, I’m learning to play both “All I Want is You” and “Santa Monica” and I’m not the absolute worst at it..

James

For whatever reason, I always associated “Today” with James. There is a scene in my head that never made it into the book where James is coming home from a party in the middle of the night high and drunk, listening to “Today” on his headphones and singing and stumbling around. Kelly is scared he’s going to get in trouble, so climbs down her trellis to try to retrieve him before he wakes up Rick-the-Dick. He ends up falling down and lying on his back while listening to the song, and he says to Kelly, “You know this song is about suicide?” She does not like him saying this—it has certain implications— so she says, “No, it’s about a birthday.” James laughs at this hysterically, and she forces him up the trellis where he falls into her room. I stuck “I Melt With You” at the end to brighten the mood a little. I could see young James dancing to it on a good day, or older James being in a different state than he used to be.

Jia

A lot of Jia’s songs are older. These are songs that I picked because I associate them with anti-war movements, with social movements, or in the case of Enya, straight up what would be playing at The Gem Store. Also I have to give some form of shout out to The Breakfast Club.

Kelly

This was the easiest playlist, because many of these are exactly from my high school era and I had a strong sense of Kelly’s musical taste. I could see her favorite band being Collective Soul or Gin Blossoms. There is a scene cut from the book about the mixtapes her and James make for each other—she deliberately tortures him with Collective Soul and Hootie & the Blowfish. In the original version of the last 1995 chapter—which I rewrote extensively—the capstone 6 are at Wiley’s bar having that Very Consequential conversation, and someone (I feel like this would be James, strangely enough) puts “Let Her Cry” on the jukebox.

Maddy

This was honestly the hardest, because I wanted it have a lot of Christian music, and I don’t know a ton of Christian music. So some of these are more Christian-adjacent, but can you admit that honestly Creed kinda slaps.. Got some angry girl songs in there, and couldn’t help the tongue-in-cheek inclusion of “Losing My Religion.” For those of you who did not grow up in the 90s, on the original Beverly Hills 90210, Brenda and Dylan broke up in his convertible to this song, making it iconic and I will forever associate that with them.

Padma

I was just looking for as many temporally appropriate vampire songs as possible. I think it’s mentioned only briefly in the book but Padma is a huge Anne Rice fan. (There are parts of the book that were cut that reference her interest in the role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, which she played online in AOL chatrooms). I listened to Toadies a ton in high school; the “Sympathy for the Devil” cover plays at the very end of Interview with the Vampire (film); “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is the “the world is a vampire” song; and the band Savage Garden got its name from Anne Rice. Also Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” is directly referenced as playing in the mine party, but I can also see the kids dancing to it on the raft. (It’s actually the song that is playing in the scene referenced at the very end of the book with respect to Maddy dancing at the lake.)

Thumbnail credit by Namroud Gorguis on Unsplash.