Category Archives: Inspiration

#BadMoonOnTheRise

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Bad Moon On The Rise

The great Books and Such blog has been running a daily feature throughout October called #BadMoonOnTheRise that features an interview with a horror-thriller-occult author and highlights one of that author’s works. Guess what? Guess who is the featured author on Day 27 of #BadMoonOnTheRise?

Books and Such kindly wrote: “Today we welcome Stephen Morris! If you like some history interwoven with your horror/occult thrillers, this is your kind of book!”

How long have you been writing horror/thrillers and what drew you to the genre?

I have always been fascinated by black magic and the misuse of power – my first true love was the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz!” The bad guys – especially the supernatural bad guys – were always the most interesting characters and seemed to have the most fun. In high school, I toyed with the idea of writing an epic that followed a particular family of wicked people who would eventually produce the Antichrist but I have yet to write that book. Occult thrillers are now my favorite reading – I’m always looking for another great book or series or author to add to my Kindle!

How did you come up with the idea for your book?

I was reading a history of medieval monastic curses against the nobility who would attempt to encroach on monastic land or privileges and as I read one of the cursing prayers, I immediately saw a witch being burned using those same words to curse the mob who had brought her to the stake. I also visited and fell in love with Prague and discovered several Czech legends that could easily be seen as the result of some of those curses. As my friend Rob and I were standing on the Charles Bridge at sunset when spring evening, he said, “You know everything about medieval theology and witchcraft and Prague history and legends; you should do something with it!” In that moment, it all clicked and I knew immediately what the story of COME HELL OR HIGH WATER would be.

If you could erase one horror cliché, what would it be?

Do the good guys ALWAYS have to win?!?!

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel about an Estonian werewolf who flees his homeland in 1890 to find someone who can free him from the wolf-magic that he has lost control of. He makes his way from Estonia through Latvia to Lithuania and Poland. He finally reaches Prague and hopes to find a “cunning man” or a “wise woman” to free him from the curse he has brought upon himself, but he only seems to find frauds and charlatans – poor Alexei!

Favorite horror movie and book?

It may sound cheesy but the 1970s made-for-tv movie CROWHAVEN FARM still gives me the shivers! I think Kate Griffin’s MIDNIGHT MAYOR series are the best occult thrillers available and her MAGICALS ANONYMOUS series are the best books with a slightly more light-hearted take on that same material.

For more details, please go see the post on Books and Such!

Define “Trilogy”

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Traitor to the Crown trilogy follows the adventures of colonial witches trying to help the American colonists by overthrowing the power of British witches who intend to crush George Washington and the colonial rebellion.

What is a “trilogy?” It seems that answering this question is harder than I thought. As I was working on Come Hell or High Water with my editor, I realized that there were two different ideas of what constitutes a “trilogy” and that each speaker may not even be aware that other participants in the conversation may be operating with another definition in mind.

One definition of “trilogy” is more like “series.” According to this definition, the trilogy is a series of 3 books that follow the adventures of a set of characters. Each book is a stand-alone novel and tells a story that is “all wrapped up” by the end of each book, though a larger arc will only be resolved at the end of the last book. The excellent Traitor to the Crown books, pictured above, are an example of this kind of trilogy. (You can read my review of these books here.)

The other definition of trilogy is that one story is broken up into 3 books and although each book can be read on its own, there is no real conclusion to the story until the end of the last book. The classic example of this kind of trilogy is The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. He wrote one big novel and was told by his publisher that it had to be broken up into 3 books as it would not fit into one set of covers and there was a paper shortage in the UK at that time (due to WWII rationing). It was fairly easy to divide the novel as he had structured it as a series of “books” and so each installment of the “Lord of the Rings” contains two of the six books. This kind of trilogy is sometimes called a “serial,” as the story is released or published in installments. Each installment might tell a self-contained episode or two of the larger story but the real story is not concluded until the “grand finale” of the last installment.

When I wrote “Come Hell or High Water,” I also wrote one novel and was then told by the publisher that it would not fit between one set of covers. (This put me into the same company as Tolkien, which I thought was pretty good!) But my novel was not organized in the same way “The Lord of the Rings” was and so it was more difficult to divide into 3 installments.

The first thing my editor and I had to do was figure out, then, was how and where to divide the novel into thirds and how to slightly re-organize the story as a result of this division.

Luckily, there is no limit on how large the digital file for a eBook is, so the entire trilogy is available as a single eBook as well as 3 individual eBooks that match the 3 paperback books of the trilogy.

Elizabeth, the Feminist Vampire for Women’s History Month

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Looking out from Castle Annaghs in Waterford, Ireland. This is the area in which the dearg-due is reportedly buried.

Looking out from Castle Annaghs in Waterford, Ireland. This is the area in which the dearg-due is reportedly buried.

Elizabeth, the dearg-due in the Come Hell or High Water trilogy, has a starring role as the central Bad Guy in CHoHW, Part 2: Rising. She stalks the streets of Prague, killing–only!–men and helping reawaken the 1350’s curse that will threaten to destroy the city.

The dearg-due (Gaelic for “red blood sucker”) is an authentic character from the folklore of Waterford in the southeast of Ireland. Although the original story does not identify the dearg-due by name (I gave her the name “Elizabeth” and any Gaelic speakers will know something is amiss about the character from the moment we meet her in Part One: Wellspring because her surname is the Gaelic for “hag” or “witch”). In the original Irish folktale, a young woman in the countryside outside Waterford was in love with a local shepherd-boy and they wanted to marry. The girl’s father, however, struck a bargain with the local landlord and insisted his daughter into the arranged marriage with the landlord who was much older, as well as more wealthy. The landlord was an abusive husband (as we would now call him) and beat his young wife on several occasions, finally beating her death on one occasion.

Following her burial on the landlord’s estate — and the story is very specific that she was buried under or near the great oak tree that had stood on the estate near the river since the 1100s and was the site of the wedding of Strongbow [the first English knight to occupy Irish territory] and the daughter of the local Irish king — the girl rose from the grave to kill both her husband and her father (who had no doubt received great benefits from the marriage of his daughter to the landlord) and she continues to seduce and kill men — only men! — in revenge for the way she was treated in life. She kills the men during sex and laps up their blood or eats their organs, to sustain her own existence as one of the Undead.

The tale also stresses that the dearg-due is not effected by sunlight or garlic and cannot be destroyed but only forced back into her grave and pinned beneath the earth by the construction of a small cairn (“tower” or “pile”) of stones on her grave. The cairn will pin her under the earth until someone removes it, allowing the dearg-due to escape her grave and begin her rampages again.

There could well have been a young girl forced into an arranged marriage by her father and beaten to death by a rich, abusive husband near Waterford and that this gave rise to the legend. However, the story is also easily read as a shorthand version of Irish history: the young girl (poor, Irish, a Roman Catholic) is forced into an abusive relationship with the landlord (wealthy, English, a Protestant) in the very place where the English occupation of Ireland began centuries ago. She can be temporarily subdued but never destroyed and continues to rise again and again to attack her tormentor.

The dearg-due is a killer aligned with George and Fen’ka in the CHoHW trilogy but she could easily become a heroine in her own book or series, still coming to the aid of women in abusive relationships and slaying their abusers. What better way to honor both Women’s History Month and St. Patrick’s Day than by remembering the Irish female vampire, the dearg-due of Waterford?