Every author that tackles a genre with outside-the-norm characters wants to make the best ‘bump-in-the-night’.
Let’s note that I originally wrote that line, using only ‘horror’ and ‘fantasy’ as genre examples. But fortunately for readers and writers, so many of the stories that we bring into the light lately are almost impossible to categorize. Though it makes it difficult to slot ourselves into the tiny boxes that many retailers and publishers require, it can be incredibly freeing in the craft to bend the rules of the strange and unknown into the worlds and creatures we require.
I have found that the clearest way to build a monster (or hero!) from nothing, is to avoid the sway of existing myths and legends. This may seem counterproductive, as for how can you craft something new and unique if you don’t know everything that already exists so that you don’t accidentally copy it?
The truth is, you will never know every urban legend, mystical creature, legendary figure. You will never know all the folklore and secret stories whispered to children before bed. You will never be able to speak every language, read every book, or follow the village elders to their camp fires amongst thousands of years of experiences to make sure that you, and you alone, have created the perfect beast.
It’s an impossible and infinite undertaking. Every moment, new books are being written, movies are being released, and parents are inventing reasons for that sound that clawed your child up from sleep and sent them screaming from their room. I myself, early in my experience of writing, found myself a couple hundred pages into a novel that I believed was a concept and a monster that had never been created before.
A mere six months later, a movie was released with an almost carbon-copy monster to my initial concept. I allowed this fact to collapse my dream of finishing that novel.
But that was a number of years ago, and I realize now that the only uniqueness you can bring to your creatures or villains now, is the perspective you build around them. In “The Spark That Left Us” I toy with the concept of Hell and of souls. I’d always been intrigued by the concept of selling your soul. Not as something to do, but as a common assumption across many cultures that it is done. Obviously, there are those desperate enough to sell them, whether for life or love or liberty, but I had always questioned the “why” surrounding “why would the person buying, want the souls?” What could they possibly be used for? In much of the lore, the seller of the soul simply has a predetermined amount of time left in this world in exchange for their soul, and then off they go, dead or otherwise. I wanted to shift this concept into something grander, and more life changing than merely a timer set for the end. Selling their souls enslaves them to the Collectors and the Tenders, a combo team of paranormal people and creatures that are in the business of altering reality and controlling minds. When a soul is sold, there is a shift, in reality, a cover-up of a sort, fragile and as simple as possible that both satisfies the deal, but also strips the memory of the deal from the victim – and leaves them profoundly changed. How are they changed?
They can now be fully controlled by psychics, who rally into their brains and force them to carry out serial killer-like crime sprees until the Collector has decided their soul is tarnished and rancid enough to carry them off to Hell. Sold souls, but with a twist.
Even the psychics themselves, the Tenders, are blackmailed, bullied, and enslaved by the Collectors to carry out these crimes.
Though some of them like it.
Victims into monsters, the powers of individuality and autonomy removed. The ones who sold their souls, doomed to an existence that they have no idea how they fell into. Their eyes liquid silver, and their skin sparking and electric if they go too long without killing – a side effect of their souls trying to free themselves.
In an ironic twist, that it’s the constant killing that prevents them from turning into an uncontrollable and violent monster, manic and destructive in their murderous force.
It only takes one element. One fact that is widely acknowledged, and then you skew its perspective. You give it a why, and an answer to that question that echoes farther than anything you’ve ever seen.
My latest work, “When Shadows Creep” plays on a one line concept that I read online, and spun my imagination into overdrive.
There’s the idea of liminal spaces. That there are places that only exist in brief snatches of time, which you can cross into, experience, and cross out of, but only for minutes or moments. There are stories of people finding rest stops on the side of the highway they can never seem to find again, because it only exists on that month, on that day, at that minute, and you just happened to catch it. Abandoned spaces, rooms in schools that for forty seconds on July 31st between noon and two, suddenly flicker back into the existence of the day the school opened.
I took this idea, once again, and spun it into a different perspective. I wondered what would happen if these moments, or places where these moments happen, were actually thin spaces between realities. And then I wondered who would protect them. And then, of course, I wondered what would happen if something decided it wanted to use it for its own nefarious scheme.
Crafting bad guys, and creatures, and worlds, and powers doesn’t need to be strenuous. You don’t need an in-depth rule book and pages upon pages of translations from your mind to the page. Tolkien did it but look at the depth and the breadth of that world. He created everything from nothing.
But if your monsters live in the world that you engage in every day, why not take what you know, and take what you believe best, hold on tight, and give it a twist.
K.Brooks is an author out of Ontario, Canada. She’s written three novels, one currently available and two others are in the editing process. She works in advertising and is always influenced by the weather when it comes to finding inspiration for her work. She often embarks on aimless road trips and alone time with the wilderness.
More blog posts and behind-the-scenes can be found at
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