I Need a Title

[kaasirpent]

No, not for this post. For the novel I'm currently working on. It's tentatively titled Necromancer at the moment, but that's dull.

Since the bad guy is doing all his killing with fire, I thought it would be prudent to rename it to something involving, you know...fire.

You don't have to beat me over the head with a brick but four or five times until I get the point.

So. Titles involving fire, burning, incineration, cremation, flames, conflagrations....

The story is an urban fantasy very much in the same vein as Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files series, but with a slightly less "noir" feel. More like...Criminal Minds meets The Dresden Files. But not exactly.

The bad guy killed a known necromancer (hence the working title) and an as-yet unidentified second person by incinerating them in flames so hot, nothing but ash was left. He then killed an infamous prisoner and a guard using the same method, but in broad daylight in a prison cell.

He has just burned down a bar where the prison guard was last seen, presumably to prevent any information about the guard's whereabouts from getting to the cops.

So fire is his preferred method of murder, and he uses magic to do it. Powerful, dark magic.

The only title I have come up with that doesn't suck so bad it creates a window into another universe is Dark Fire, and I don't really love it, either.

So, help me LJ-Wan Kenobi. You're (not really, but kind of) my only hope.

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

"incinerating them in flames so hot, nothing but ash was left"

Is this an unusual sort of fire, in the world of the book? I'd think it would be pretty hard to do, especially in public and/or on the scale of burning up a whole bar. So as a reader or investigator, I'd be looking for the means he used to make such fires. Some unprecedented sort of fire-magic?

So what occurred to me, would be some take on 'spontaneous combustion' - a claimed phenomenon that may or may not have really happened, at odd Dickensian times, for no known cause, but thought to have some sort of psychological (ie magic?) cause?

Could someone in the book talk about 'harnassing spontaneous combustion' even sarcastically? Spontaneous Annihilation?

Or something on 'holocaust'? Spontaneous Holocaust?

Or something related to the sort of heating or melting that's done in a 'crucible'? Chemical term for reducing to ashes?

[kaasirpent]

Yes, it is unusual. He uses powerful, dark magic to create the fire so that it's hot enough to cremate a human body (or two, as the case has been so far) in just a fraction of the time it would normally take.

One of the characters is just about to make an off-the-wall suggestion, although I hadn't thought of SHC.

Both "crucible" and "ashes" are definitely in the mix.

Thanks. :)