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Psychoactive-Aided Divination
Darkness and Blight follows a shaman as she claws for survival in a collapsing world of carrion ghouls, fractured tribes, and cruel magic, where every act of endurance blurs the line between humanity and despair. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Defying Expectations and Dragon Pedicures
My goal as a writer is to subvert expectations, a role I may sometimes take too much to heart, occasionally progressing even to the sentence level. Like many readers of fantasy, I grew tired of the medieval European settings, omnipotent gods, brave knights, and damsels in distress. Lydarc may be in almost constant distress, but she’s no damsel, not by a long bow shot, mister!
I also wanted to set the story in my own backyard, the forests of the Siletz Valley, where I hunt and explore. The Valley of the Giants, a real old-growth preserve, formed the idea for the blastforms. Valsetz, at the end of the book, is a real abandoned town in this rugged coastal forest.
But from there reality takes a severe hit. I always wanted to incorporate shamanism in a story. The spirit journey, spirit animals, and psychoactive-aided divination are all a very real part of that ethos. What seems like a crazy dream to us is the natural state in a shamanic worldview. Who’s to say that our reality is the most correct version?
Lydarc’s voice is so distinct. How did you develop her perspective without softening the harshness of her world?
To me, Lydarc epitomizes the human experience. Through the endless pain and struggle, all she really desires is someone who cares about her, a home, and maybe a tiny measure of peace in the end. It’s no grand victory. Life is not guaranteed to be easy or even rewarding. It just is. Deal with it.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Strength through adversity and over time. The incredible—and sometimes neglected—value of found family. The evolution of romantic love into something even truer. The deep-seated desire for dragons everywhere to just make it to their pedicures on time.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
Originally, I intended for Darkness and Blight to be a standalone novel. How can anyone write fifteen sequels? Then a thought kept nagging at me: what if Achus, the head witch from hell, actually survived and followed Lydarc and her companions back to the human realm? The second book—the working title is The Drunken Corpse—is currently writing itself and should be available in early 2026.
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In the broken wastes of post-apocalyptic Oregon, reality has split into three realms: the scarred human world, the damned underlands, and the Overs—godlike beings hungry to invade.
Lydarc, pierced with a cursed shard of an Over, suffers endless pain, berserker rages, and visions of a blood-soaked future. When her tribe is slaughtered and their souls trapped in the underlands, she leads a desperate band into hell itself—through battles with mythical monsters, betrayal, and a hellgate that demands death as the price of entry.
Among her allies are a cryptic mentor, a spirit-bound apprentice, a dragon who hoards books instead of gold, and an ex-lover begging her to save his lost daughter. But one of them hides a devastating lie. And awakening the shamanic power inside her could destroy what’s left of humanity.
Darkness and Blight is a brutal grimdark fantasy odyssey where myth collides with quantum horror, and one fractured soul must face traitors, monsters, and her own guilt to save her people—or shatter the last remnants of reality.
Darkness and Blight
The story follows Lydarc, a shaman whose survival in the hostile wasteland of the bitterwood feels both desperate and defiant. Her battles with carrion ghouls, her visions, and her fraught ties to her tribe form the beating heart of the book. Alongside her are figures like Wayland, Rapha, Leisil, and Sitka, each carrying their own griefs and secrets. The novel shifts between past and present, weaving together brutal survival, strange magic, and an undercurrent of looming doom. It is a tale drenched in blood, pain, and flashes of tenderness, set in a world teetering on collapse.
The writing is harsh and unflinching, sometimes even grotesque, but it never feels hollow. Author Dap Dahlstrom has this way of dropping you right into the mud and gore, then undercutting it with dark humor or an intimate confession. I loved how Lydarc’s voice carried such bitter resilience, even when she teetered on madness. The story doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of survival, and I enjoyed that. Sometimes the violence was relentless. Every chapter bleeds. Still, I couldn’t look away.
The ideas behind the story fascinated me. The notion of peri-souls and spirit animals, the fractured world of “afterarth,” and the endless tug-of-war between survival and humanity gave me plenty to chew on. Sitka’s transformation into the bear was one of my favorite moments, both raw and oddly uplifting. And Leisil’s chapters hit me hardest. Her childhood trauma, her brutal induction into the Resistance, all of it felt painfully real under the fantasy trappings. I found myself angry, sad, and unexpectedly protective of her. The slang language was sometimes heavy, but it added character to the dialogue.
By the end, I came away impressed and strangely energized. This book is for readers who don’t mind being dragged through blood, madness, and despair if it means glimpsing strange beauty on the other side. If you like your fantasy dark, twisted, and uncompromising, you’ll find a lot here. I’d recommend it to fans of grimdark fantasy.
Pages: 372 | ASIN: B0FGK5NFPN
LITERARY TITAN 