Baal (Page 30)
Robert McCammon Tells How He
Wrote Baal
Baal is my Angry Young Man novel. It was also my first published novel, and the first book I ever tried to write. I think that in Baal you can feel the friction of shoulders being squeezed by iron walls: my shoulders, pressing against the walls of a dead-end job.
So maybe I'm still a little angry after all.
Baal is about power, written at a time when I had none. I was twenty-five years old when I wrote Baal, and working at a department store in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. My job was ferrying advertising proofs between the local newspaper and the various department heads: "traffic control," they called it. When I went home at night, I sat down at my old Royal typewriter - long since deceased - and worked on the novel that would become Baal.
One character in Baal particularly stands out to me, and that's the elderly and very innocent Virga. I used to have lunch at the same place every day, a restaurant called the Molton Grill that's no longer in Birmingham, and an elderly Catholic priest would come in almost every day as well. He had his favorite table, he always seemed to order the same thing, and he ate alone. I watched the man, and I created the character of Virga in his image. I never knew the priest's name, but I have his face in my mind. And maybe some of his spirit in Virga.
You always hear this said to young writers: "Write what you know." I wanted to write about things I didn't know, so I consciously set Baal in locations as far from the South as possible: Boston, the Middle East, and Greenland. I wanted a global scale and a story that would take the reader to the very edge of Armageddon, and I hope I succeeded.
Robert McCammon
June 1988