“God-killing seemed a lofty ambition. Then again, is that not what we’re here to do in our hunt for the Dweller in Darkness?”

All of Cassius Marius’ life has been spent in service to the Pale King. Ever since his birth sixteen years ago on the night the Hero of Hathur died, his mother prepared him to join the Lightbringers: seven young men selected every equinox by the Church of the Pale King to descend underground to hunt and destroy the Dweller in Darkness, a chthonic entity the Church names as source of an unnatural blight ravaging Hathur and beyond, year after year.

Cassius has known since he could speak that he was destined to destroy the great evil poisoning his home. His inevitable confrontation with the Dweller on his holy descent changes him inside and out and puts him on a collision course with the Pale King he once worshipped. With his world and body crumbling around him, Cassius must choose between loyalty and honor, family and humanity, not to save his home. But to destroy it.

COMPS ARE YOUR FRIEND

Comps are a marketing gimmick, yes, but they can also be a source of inspiration. The seed that grew into the Deadlights Duology sprouted during a comps class at the Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop in spring 2022. It was my first time attending the workshop after spending years writing an epic fantasy novel, only for me to be disabused early on by several agents and editors as to the odds of a debut author selling a doorstopper manuscript in the current world of trad-publishing, let alone one meant to start a series.

A tad despondent, I started pondering something shorter I could write next during the comps class taught by literary agent Elizabeth Copps. She proposed we try to reverse-engineer a story from a pair of comps. Mine came preloaded, as I was reading The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers at the time and had just the day before fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about the medieval French nobleman/serial killer Gilles de Rais, with both the fictional and historical stories revolving around a mysterious, possibly occult play.

From The King in Yellow-meets-Gilles de Rais, the story of my dark fantasy-horror novellas The Mystery of the Pale King and now Dweller in Darkness exploded outward. Just from knowing the comps, I knew the protagonists, the antagonists, and the central hook that would grab readers whether they read the back cover or heard me describe the idea. Whereas at the time I worried I had poured myself into my epic fantasy novel for nothing, I can look back and see that nothing was wasted, that all of that writing (I’m talking hundreds of thousands of words) made me a more efficient writer, because God knows I wasn’t going through that again. The work was the engine, the comps became the fuel, and the Deadlights Duology was off to the races.

BUILD THE BOX BEFORE YOU THINK OUTSIDE IT

Worldbuilding requires rules. Whether these rules are as quantifiable as the Brandon Sanderson school of hard magic or as opaque as the Jeff VanderMeer school of new weird, they must exist to undergird the thematic and emotional scaffolding of the story.

What fantasy and sci-fi writers have to worry about that realist literary types don’t is we don’t get to presume the reader knows the rules of our extraordinary settings from the start. More than in other literary traditions, establishment of these rules takes much more precedence in speculative fiction for the simple fact of orienting a reader to an entirely new setting (tidally-locked planet!) or perspective (raccoon detective!).

Only after establishing what is known can the author reveal not everything is what it seems. You align character with the rules of the worldbuilding, meaning you have them demonstrate and rely on their knowledge of the rules. Then you can effectively pull the rug out from under the character and thus the reader. One word I particularly like here is “misbelief.” You start with a character believing one thing and through the course of the story they either come to terms with their misbelief or cling tighter to it.

For example, our main character Cassius in Dweller in Darkness was raised in a world that praises his namesake, the antagonist of the previous book. His reckoning with the truth that the hero whom he was named after was in fact a villain is a huge part of his arc.

THE KEY TO COSMIC HORROR IS DREAD

Another use for a character’s misbelief is dread. Sure, horror has shock, there’s disgust, but of all the fears nothing cuts deeper than dread. Dread is the essence of cosmic horror, the notion that we are less than ants in the face of an indifferent at best, malicious at worst universe, because unlike the other fears, you cannot do anything about dread. You can’t run from it, fight it, or even understand it. Dread, like inertia, creeps (shout out Massive Attack).

All this intersects with misbelief by bringing cosmic horror down from an intellectual to an emotional level. There is something slithering off-page the character cannot see, hear, or sense at all. Let’s call this eldritch abomination “the truth.” While the character toils in their efforts to maintain their misbelief, the truth keeps bubbling up, prodding them to stare into the abyssal truth. It is up to the author to decide if the character succeeds or fails.

By building that box around the character, referring to their misbelief, you can now see what lies outside of it and start bringing those two halves into conflict and perhaps resolution.

FOLLOW THE BEAD ON THE STRING

Imagine a long string held horizontal and taut. Now imagine a single bead sliding across it. That bead is the heart of the story. As it travels across the string, an author’s goal scene to scene is to keep your readers following the bead like they were transfixed by the Virgin Mary. The moment their gaze wanders or they lose track of the bead, the storyteller did something wrong (taking ownership is the only useful perspective I find as an author, as we don’t control audiences but we do control how we tell stories). We’ve all experienced a book, movie, or show that had our attention and then fumbled it. The storytellers took their eye off the bead.

On the flip side, we all have fallen in love with stories that carry us along with purpose and propulsion, stories so masterful they transcend and become greater than the sum of their parts. If the emotional axis of a story, how it makes us feel, is the Y and the thematic axis, what it’s about, is the X, our favorite stories hit his chart smack dab in the middle. One of the strengths of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror is the ability to do this at scale. Speculative elements, whether they be monsters, magic or faster-than-light travel, can stand in as symbolic substitutes, demonstrate internal character’s strength or conflict externally (superhero fights are basically extended arguments with fists), or depict unheard-of civilizational disruption across a continent, a planet, a galaxy.

Bringing it back to worldbuilding, after my experience doing so much prior to writing my first novel, I went in the opposite direction with the Deadlights Duology and that looser grip gave me the ability to see the bead much better than I believe I had before. I started to intertwine the character’s personal stakes with the larger plot as much as possible, tying them together for enhanced effect. That’s the reason in Dweller in Darkness (no spoiler as this is spelled out in the opening pages) our main character’s mother is responsible for the tradition of seven Lightbringers that kicks off our story. It gives our main character a direct connection to and reason to believe in the world state and gives a supporting character greater agency in the story. As much fun as worldbuilding is, it should ultimately be born out in character. 

SWEAT THE POISON OUT

Dweller in Darkness was not the original idea I had for the sequel to my debut The Mystery of the Pale King. There were a few reasons I put the original idea aside but one looms largest. The 2024 U.S. presidential election once again shook me and the country I live in to its core. The rage, the disgust, the fear, it all had to go somewhere. What writing has always done for me is allow me to sweat the poison out. There’s nothing less judgmental than a blank page.

The sequel needed to change because I had changed. This would be an angry story. There would not be peace, not for those who wrought the world of the Deadlights Duology. Peace would have to wait until after I told the story of how their world ends. Fascists abhor creativity and art because imagination is anarchic. Imagination allows our minds to go anywhere we choose, inhabit anyone’s POV (empathy, another fascist weakness), and dream better worlds. Fascists have no imagination and their jealousy frustrates them to no end.

But it’s not enough to write an angry screed. My favorite dark fantasies are laced with romanticism, however bruised, however bloodied, a flickering flame that refuses to go out in the dark. While Dweller in Darkness was an exorcism of all the darkness swirling inside me at the time, it also became a vessel for hope, because stepping into the dark made me seek out that flickering flame and hold it close until the end.  

Sam Flynn (he/him) is a lifelong resident of Ohio where he lives with his wife Angela and their plethora of pets. He is the author of the Deadlights Duology consisting of the dark fantasy/horror novellas The Mystery of the Pale King, named one of the best reads of 2024 by Grimdark Magazine, and its sequel Dweller in Darkness, both published by Timber Ghost Press. When not writing or reading, you can find him watching old movies or going on long runs.

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Dweller in Darkness (Out Sept. 22): Timber Ghost Press | Amazon | Goodreads

The Mystery of the Pale King (Available now): Timber Ghost Press | Bookshop | Amazon | Goodreads