“From Legend” follows a law enforcer navigating a complex web of danger, mystery, and personal history, all while investigating a puzzling death that threatens to unravel the dark secrets of his catastrophic past. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Driving around running errands made me wonder what my mundane city might look like in an alternate history where fantastic things could happen. I began to envision a Sheriff-type of character (a Shire Reeve in the old language), and because of my fascination with the Batman mythos, he took on some of those attributes: peak athleticism, extremely intelligent, prone to brooding alone, etc. But I didn’t want him to be a vigilante–I wanted him to be above board and beyond reproach for where I planned to take him in the story.

How did you approach developing the character of Logan Hale, and what inspired his intricate relationship with Clara?

Logan starts out as somewhat two dimensional. He seems overpowered, but he’s got issues with his father’s legacy, a man whom he simultaneously admires and disrespects. This lurks beneath his outward confidence and acts as the foundation for his own obsessive tendencies that ultimately become destructive. I wanted him to struggle with duty and obsession, something that up until the events in this story he was able to keep married together.

Regarding Clara: Music inspires a lot of what I write–the moodiness and atmosphere of a song might create an abstract idea in my head, often entirely different from what was intended by the musician(s), I’m sure. In the case of “From Legend,” an entire album (Koi No Yokan by Deftones) fueled the pacing and to a large extent, the plotting of the book. The last track of the album suggested dreamy imagery to me, where the person represented by the song’s POV was following after a woman. There was an aspect to it that really struck me as the listener that nothing else seemed to matter to the POV but this woman. And so, I had the idea of ending the book with the protagonist chasing after a woman in sort of an obsessed, unhinged way. To do that, I had to reverse-engineer Logan and Clara’s relationship from there; I had to build something unrequited that would continue to dog Logan.

What inspired you to create the unique, distorted world of Beldenridge and its background of an alchemical disaster?

There are lots of post-apocalyptic stories as well as those where the world is hurtling toward apocalypse in the near future. The realization of that world-ending upheaval always looms large. I thought it would be interesting to see a world where said event happened at some point in the past, but instead of obliterating the world as we know it, the event stunts and diverts it. The world that emerges in the book looks a lot like Victorian or Colonial times despite the fact that it’s 2017. The analogy I like to use is tweaking the recipe for a cake. You have the same base set of ingredients, but altering the ratios or bake time, or even introducing one or two other ingredients, will result in something similar to the original intention, but decidedly off. Man’s pursuit of alchemy provided a convenient way to achieve that where the world up until that point was the same as ours–it was working with the same set of ingredients, so to speak.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

I just started writing the third book in the Reeve series, titled “Riders of the Black Cowl.” Seeing as I’m on the very front end of the process, it’s hard to say when it will be available, but if I had to guess, I would think sometime late 2024. In the meantime, readers can check out the second book titled “Villains.” Stylistically, it’s my nod to Cormac McCarthy, as I was reading Blood Meridian while writing it.

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