“The Devil Rides Out” – Horror Books and My Own Writing

Hi,

no doubt, like me, you love reading, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be on the website of an author. And like me, you probably enjoy books of a somewhat darker nature, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be looking at the website of an author of Gothic vampire thrillers, horror and dark fantasy.

I do love these genres and sub-genres, although I’m never quite sure where one ends and another begins. That’s not to say I only ever read such books. Amongst some of my favourite novels I would list “Birdsong” by Sebastian Faulks, Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”, “1000 Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini, “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marques, even Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince” – what a gem!

So, not everything I love is a medieval Gothic thriller. Not every good story starts and ends with Vlad Dracula. I don’t just read about vampires and zombies and horror. But I do love these genres very much. The first book I can remember being really influenced by was “The Devil Rides Out” by Dennis Wheatley, a real classic occult and horror novel—a literary version of Hammer House of Horror, if you will. And since then, there have been countless more: “The Historian” by E. Kostova, “Salem’s Lot” by Stephen King, and more recently, “Empire of the Vampire” by Jay Kristoff to name three of the better ones.

And as for my own novels, I’ve previously had a post-apocalyptic horror book get to Amazon’s #3 for genre, so I’m not exactly a novice. I’m currently writing The Blood of The Dragon series. Book 1, “Blood of the Damned,” is due out in 2025. The series has various elements that will, I hope, add considerably to the vampire genre. That will, in a sense, give it a solid grounding in ancient myth and lore. That possibly might do as much as any other book has for the genre since Bram Stoker first put quill to scroll, over 127 years ago. But time will tell, and more on my writing in a future post…

For now, if you haven’t already read the classics I’ve mentioned above, I strongly suggest you consider getting down to your local library toot sweet. Happy page-turning, and bye for now.