I’ve called it a Western, horror, alternate history, dark fantasy, and probably a few other things while trying to explain it.
All of those fit, but none of them really get to the heart of the book.
Whatever genre label I stick on it, WSAD has always been character-driven first.
It follows people trying to survive their past and present, what they’ve done, and what they’re willing to become when the world starts closing in.
I pulled a lot from the American Civil War and the Bleeding Kansas era. That part of history is tied closely to my own family, and it also happened to fit the grim-dark world I wanted to build.
The story itself is anchored in post-Civil War America, when the country was trying to stitch itself back together while old wounds, new money, religion, violence, and ambition kept pulling in different directions.
A stinking wound stitched back together wrong.
There is something else moving through that world too.
Something is moving through the ruined places, the woods, and the empty stretches of country people know better than to linger in.
At least until the cracks start to show.
Plants and animals begin turning up wrong. People hear things they cannot explain. Prayer, superstition, demons, and whatever else might be bleeding through all get mixed together in places where nobody asked for any of it.
A Post-Civil War World With Something Wrong Beneath It
I wanted the history to stay recognizable beneath all that.
The towns, wars, railroads, politics, prejudices, poverty, and people belong to the period. The stranger parts of the world are simply there beside them, sitting in the dark where they have apparently been for a very long time.
Still, the demons were never what interested me most.
The people were.
WSAD is about family, guilt, faith, addiction, pride, violence, survival, and the stories people tell themselves so they can keep moving.
It gets dark, but there is humor in it too. Friendship, stupidity, bad decisions, quiet moments, and people trying to get through another day without making everything worse.
That matters to me because horror works better when there is actually something human underneath it.
The darkest thing waiting for somebody is not always hiding in the woods.
Sometimes it is the way your lungs burn while you are running for your life, the smoke stuck in your clothes from a dying fire, or whatever is left of you once the gunsmoke finally settles.
Where Shadows Are the Darkest is out now.
