Teeth: An Inspiration and a Theme for Great Cities

So! Now I have a protagonist, a general idea of an antagonist, a handful of names, and the faintest of outlines for a story. I'd recently written a piece of short horror fiction called 'Club Hex', and my favourite line came towards the end, where the hero gets ripped apart in the back seat of an old VW Bug:

Marvin turned in his seat, looking like a vicious and psychotic clown wrapped in shiny black vinyl. His mouth opened far wider than Cyril thought possible and my god all those fucking teeth. The teeth, it seemed, had teeth. So many teeth.

And Did Those Teeth

I've always liked the word 'teeth'. There's just something so visceral about the way it sounds: the sharpness of the tuh, the long e and then the interdental fricative that closes the deal. You can't say 'teeth' without using your ... well, you know.

Teeth -- in dreams at least -- symbolise power. If you're in the midst of a dream and your teeth start to fall out, then you're subconsciously worried about powerlessness. Teeth (I'm enjoying writing this post) are also something of a keystone of health -- if your oral hygiene goes to shit, you're susceptible to a multitude of health woes including heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

Let's also not forget that being stranded on a massive self-sufficient shipping vessel for a prolonged period of time can bring about scurvy, one of whose symptoms include the loss of your pearly whites.

I imagined the city-state in which a good portion of Babushka takes place; it was definitely a plutocratic society where the rich had everything and everybody else basically had to make do. I decided to call the place Gorod Zubov, which is 'City of Teeth' in Russian. And it isn't named for the giant concrete structures that line the major boulevards that meet in the city centre like a massive asterisk (or sphincter). No, it received its name from the millions upon millions of teeth discovered by the original settlers who'd come from the east with their slaves many hundreds of years before. So many teeth there, buried in the silt and sand on the peninsula left behind by a receding glacier.

I believe setting is almost as important a component of a story as is character. Hell, I believe the best settings become characters in themselves.

And with this horrible frozen city-state, Gorod Zubov, I found the theme I was looking for with this story: namely, POWER.