About Geek Addiction

 

After the video of Penny killing a vampire goes viral, she agrees to become a patient at Dr Lem's geek rehab clinic. However, she soon begins to suspect there's something very wrong going on... Geek Addiction is the fourth story in the series and is also Penny's debut as a lead character.

Since Penny wasn't that developed in Lesson One: Vampires, we used this story to establish her personality and introduce her family. Originally, we were going to make a spoof of The Following, with Penny as a less murderous Joe Carroll asking her friends to do stuff for her, but when it was time to actually write it, we just couldn't turn it into anything interesting. So, we went with the much simpler mad scientist in the basement scenario. In between Penny's investigation, there's plenty of opportunities for the airing of geeky grievances. We had already mentioned A Song of Ice and Fire in Lesson One, but here we got to make fun of the insane theorizing that goes on at places like westeros.org. Penny's Blackfyre theory was made up by us, but the obsession with House Dayne is real.

Penny's Blackfyre theory

With a new location, came a whole new supporting cast. Penny interacts the most with her roommate Anne, who hates the X-Men movies so much that she made a Bryan Singer voodoo doll, and Sam, another, less angry, X-Men fan. There was a third female patient, Lena, but after some rewrites, we realized that she was superfluous and gave some of her dialogue to Sam. We chose to focus on the X-Men for two reasons: we've read the comics and watched the movies; a Bryan Singer voodoo doll is very easy to draw (Penny's Pilou Asbæk doll on the other hand, was a failure because drawing a blond Joshua Jackson is trickier). We briefly considered giving Anne a J J Abrams voodoo doll, but we really didn't feel like remembering the frustrating mess that was Lost.

Anne's special doll

First warning: Anne's recipe for making a real voodoo doll was something we read somewhere and we have no idea whether it works or not, so don't blame us if you're unable to cause your enemies excruciating pain. Second warning: we made up the celebritytoenails.com website and if by any chance you find a similar one out there, it has nothing to do with us.

We wish we had been able to include more Malazan references, but Geek Addiction already has enough dialogue as it is. We did mention Hellian, who was hilarious in The Bonehunters, but sadly became somewhat annoying in later books. We're ashamed to admit that Penny's geeky sins, which she confesses near the end, are our own...

One of Penny's fellow patients is the mysterious Takagi. She's never quite sure whether she can trust him or not, but they end up working together to find out more about Dr Svenson and his special patients. Takagi is the resident hottie and like Nina is bisexual. He's also a bit kinky. We added the shibari for aesthetic reasons, but it ended up having an influence in his backstory. Like with Bob in Mummy Issues, we had a different idea of what the character was going to be when we began writing this. We'd love to say more, but we can't because spoilers. Takagi shows up again in Penny and the Silver Key Part 1.

One of the last sequences we added was the one in the library, which was created with the sole purpose of making fun of Peter Thiel and The Diversity Myth. It could've been just a little humour (that no one who hasn't read the book will get), but Anne's final rant about Silicon Valley ended up giving us the Necronomicon's special brand of madness: fanaticism.

This sequence also segues nicely into the introduction of the Silicon Valley cultists, who are one of the cosmic threats Tim and Penny are going to have to deal with. We came up with the idea of a Lovecraftian cult hiding in Silicon Valley thanks to The Contrarian. This sequence features the debut of the Necronomicon and the first mention of celebritytoenails.com (9 out of 10 sorcerers give it 5 stars on Yelp). Lovecraft's famous tome represents some serious competition for Bob, who shows up briefly in Geek Addiction.

This story is why we added 'a little bit of naughtiness' to our promos about the series. The naughtiness in question consists of Takagi's kinkiness and a conversation between Penny and Sam about weird erotica, which naturally features a reference to dinosaur erotica.

Because Geek Addiction, Mummy Issues, and Rebellion were going to be a single book (Lesson Two), they have common references and themes.