Fun fact: Shadows of Ruin started with the concept of zombie angels – because let’s face it, zombie angels are the most gothic thing ever. But even more than that, I just love a bad boy. Gage, my MMC, was inspired by one of my favorite stories – The Princess Bride – where Westley describes a punishment called “To The Pain.” This macabre torture is designed to take away all a person’s senses – no hands or feet to touch, no eyes to see, tongue to taste, nose to smell – except for their ears. They get to keep their ears so they can always hear the screams when someone sees them.
I leaned into that with the idea of a celestial hero cursed to live an eternity of suffering as a punishment. He’s stripped of his wings, his divinity is burned away, and he’s exiled from the only world he’s ever known. To heap on a little extra misery, there’s no chance at afterlife for him if he dies; he simply ceases to exist. So he can’t die, he must not – but he can’t really live either – not when living is a state of constant suffering, with poisoned blood and a vengeful rage that threatens to consume him and everyone around him.
The only thing that’s left to him is his will – which is what got him in trouble in the first place.
I also wanted to examine just who could fall in love with a creature like that, and why she would. What does it take to see past all the dark parts of someone’s soul? To love them in spite of the darkness? The way my characters decided to answer that was to examine how the things that break and destroy us actually make us stronger. So yes, Shadows of Ruin is also a zombie angel romance. The MCs are broken people – ruined – but that shared trauma also gives them common ground.
Do you know someone like that? Who knows all your darkest parts but loves you anyway? There’s nothing that makes you feel more seen than someone who truly understands what you’ve been through and empathizes with that. And there is also no one more capable of hurting you than someone who knows exactly what your greatest weaknesses are.
Gothic stories, particularly romances, want to make you uncomfortable. They want to force you to examine what makes falling in love with the dark so beautiful and worth fighting for, and they want to make you bleed on every page so that when you win at the end, it’s a victory you earned.
If you follow me on social media, you may have noticed that I had originally planned for SoR to be included in the Bound in Shadows anthology (see ARC signup link below!) as a short novella. But the characters in SoR took all my best-laid plans and threw them out the window, so now I’m letting them tell me the story in all its dark and heartbreaking detail.
Because of that, I don’t have an actual release date yet. This is a WIP and unfortunately, this is how it goes for writers sometimes. I’m not going to rush things, but I’m so excited to get this story out there. It’s a prequel to a series of books set in the dark, twisted world of Velmourne – that occasionally crosses over into a contemporary New York City. This is lush, dark, gothic fantasy on an epic scale, with plenty of haunted castles and dark magic to spare, and it’s going to twist mythology into something new and unique. I’ll be sharing snippets and sidebars over the next few months about how this story is developing – so make sure you’re getting my newsletter!
