[RLM] What was your inspiration to write the Culling of The House of Boars?

In 2023, I wrote my debut novel, The Seven Deaths of Prince Vlad, which was a reimagining of the Dracula mythos from the perspective that Stoker’s Dracula was the tale Van Helsing & his cohorts wanted to tell. The real events being far more sinister. In that book the Voal Negru plays a central role in what happens after the events depicted in Dracula. I had a lot of readers tell me that they hoped I would continue the tale of the Voal Negru and I really played around with how I could do that and tell a tale I thought worth telling. Ultimately, I decided to go back to their origin, and you get the first glimpses of that in Culling of the House of Boars.

[RLM] The main character, Adaric, mentions how prideful the strigoi are (with pride being the reason for his death). Is there a specific reason you chose pride as a theme for your novelette?

It really emerged after my second or third revision of the story. I started to get a good feel for what the ageless strigoi had become and what would motivate a creature like that. They are at the top of the food chain and they know it. The Houses are very insular so one’s place within the hierarchy becomes supremely important and intrinsic to their psyche. It’s like old saying, “pride comes before the fall”.

[RLM] The story ends with Adaric vowing to find a way to become a strigoi again. Do you have any plans to write a continuation?

Absolutely! The intention was always to move both forward and backward in the timeline with additional novelettes and novellas, delving deeper into the rise and fall of the six Houses and of the Voal Negru.

[RLM] As a vampire fan the strigoi are new to me, how did you create your vampire archetype?

The strigoi are based very heavily on Romanian folklore and all the central aspects of Zalmoxis and his religion was taken from the actual belief system and history of pre-Roman conquest Dacia. I almost always use actual folklore as the backbone of my stories; there’s a lot of real history buried in all my work.

[RLM] During the creative process, is there anything you wish you’d done differently?

I’m really happy with where Culling ended up. It was always intended as a short story or novelette, so I wanted it to be quick, tense and brutal. It’s my way of providing readers with both an introduction to the world of the strigoi and to people new to my work, an intro to me as a storyteller.

[RLM] What surprised you the most about publishing this novelette?

It was a lot more challenging as a writer to tell a concise, standalone story in a shorter format. Most of my other works are either full-length novels or short stories. Culling falls somewhere in between both and it took more discipline than I expected as a writer to tell the story I wanted in a novelette format.

[RLM] What, or who, inspired you to become a horror author?

Personally, my wife. She’s the one that really kept me motivated when I first started writing The Seven Deaths of Prince Vlad and we spent the better part of the year talking through the story and various scenes. Without her it would have wound up on the pile of unfinished stories that I have accumulated over the years.

Professionally, it’s Gerald Brom. I grew up on his artwork and when he started writing fiction of his own, I was hooked. I was always a horror fan. I loved the books by Stephen King, Peter Straub, and all the others growing up but never felt inspired by them. They were great stories. I enjoyed them, but they never felt like the kind of stories I wanted to tell.

Then came Brom’s The Child Thief, Slewfoot, and Krampus. They are just something above and beyond. He has a contrarian style of horror that really resonates with me. Everything he writes turns the typical horror tropes on their head in a way that feels really genuine. Like I said before, I grew up on a steady diet of Brom’s artwork from his early TSR days onward, and the mind that created those incredible, unique, dark visuals tells a horror tale unlike anyone in the genre today. I love his work; I think his serial killer monologues in The Evil in Me are without peer. He has carved out a corner of the horror community that is uniquely Brom. You can hear a couple of paragraphs from one of his books and you instantly know its Brom. That’s what inspires me to carve out a corner of horror that is uniquely me, that sounds like me and tells the tales I want to tell.

[RLM] Is there a genre you haven’t tried yet but would like to?

I really enjoy swimming in the horror / dark fantasy end of the pool, but I do want to continue to challenge myself as a storyteller.  One of the goals I have set for myself as a goal is to write across the different subgenres within the horror/dark fantasy genres. Next year I have a World War I horror novel coming out from Crystal Lake Publishers, He Who Has Done Evil, and that’s written as an epistolary horror. I am hoping to tackle Western Horror and a novelization in 2026.

[RLM] What are you working on next?

I have just finished the edits for Red Queen, Yellow King, the first of my “Book of Alice Duology with Edge Weaver” Books and I am working on completing the second book. It’s a very dark re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan interwoven with elements of the King in Yellow. I like where we have taken the story and I am enjoying bringing all these character arcs to their, often grim, conclusion.

I am also working on It Pierces an early twentieth century folk horror that I think will really appeal to readers who enjoyed Adam Nevill’s The Ritual and Stephen Graham Jones The Only Good Indians.