'A Discovery of Witches': USC professor looks for a deeper magic than 'Twilight'

‘A Discovery of Witches’: USC professor looks for a deeper magic than ‘Twilight’

April 10, 2011 | 11:05 a.m.

It’s no secret that bloodsuckers, brain eaters and bay-at-the-moon types are all the rage in pop culture, but back in 2008 the mass of it all hit USC professor Deborah Harkness like a thunderbolt. It was in Mexico at an airport bookstore — Harkness, a historian of science, was on vacation — and the moment makes for a key moment in Scott Timberg’s great feature on Harkness and her first novel, “A Discovery of Witches.” Here’s a quick excerpt from the piece:

“To walk through the airport was to be hit with vampires, witches, ghosts and demons at every angle in the bookstores,” says Harkness, a good-humored and enthusiastic woman of 46, over a cappuccino in Pasadena. “It was so huge — it seemed to me much bigger than what had happened with Anne Rice. And as a historian of science, trapped in Puerto Vallarta during what turned out to be the rainy season, I thought, ‘Why do these creatures still exert such a pull on us?’ “

The whole thing felt to her like a throwback — a throwback of 450 years. “People believed that the supernatural and the natural existed, intermingled. We think of ourselves as having very little in common with people in 1558. And yet there were walls of this stuff. What if 16th century people were right, and the supernatural and natural coexisted? How would that play out? It started out almost like a kind of logic problem.”

The result of her inquiry is her first novel, “A Discovery of Witches,” which starts out in a contemporary England in which witches, vampires, daemons and humans fight for good light in Oxford University’s libraries and even sometimes attend the same yoga class. Humans know about these creatures but keep their distance: There’s an uneasy detente, with stereotypes, wariness and even bigotry in the mix …

You can read the rest of Timberg’s piece on the Pennsylvania native right here. (You should also check out his truly enlightening pieces on Philip K. Dick that ran as a series on the Hero Complex.) It turns out that Harkness is also an award-winning wine blogger and had a bit of video fun with both of her public-life pursuits …