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Fast-Paced, Cinematic Narrative
ȚEPEȘ is a dark historical war novel that follows Vlad Dracula’s rise from hostage and prince to ruthless ruler as he navigates Ottoman expansion, political betrayal, warfare, and the brutal struggle to defend Wallachia. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It was a combination of a lifelong fascination with the myth and deep frustration with how modern pop culture treats it. I had loved Bram Stoker and the atmosphere of classic gothic darkness since childhood. Yet, sitting in a cinema watching another film adaptation, I realized that after a century of repetition, the “fanged monster” had lost all its sharpness and weight.
I refused to be just another passive critic complaining on social media about how it should have been done. I decided to act. I immersed myself in the study of the fifteenth century and the life of the real Vlad III. The deeper I probed into the archives, the clearer it became that the reality of his existence was incomparably more brutal and terrifying than any fictional myth.
Intertwining his fate with my writing became an obsession. I lived in isolation, researching and writing into the early hours of the morning to capture the raw atmosphere of Wallachia—a realm of despair, betrayal, and bloodshed trapped between two great powers. I wanted to forge a fast-paced, cinematic narrative grounded in uncompromising historical fidelity that would strip the real Vlad of pop-culture clichés.
You portray Vlad as a prince, hostage, strategist, ruler, lover, and eventually legend. Which aspect of his character was most important for you to explore?
This cannot be answered in a single word. The novel charts Vlad’s entire life and evolution so that the reader understands where his hatred for the enemy was born—that it was not merely a duty to defeat a foe, but a deeply personal feud.
We witness his formative years, from his childhood captivity under the Ottomans to his study of Western strategy under János Hunyadi in Buda. Without this trajectory, Vlad would appear as a flat superhero who materialized out of nowhere with full mastery. The reader must see the ordeal he endured to acquire this knowledge and how he later deployed it against the Ottoman Empire—whether as a feared warrior in the chaos of battle or as a cold strategist over maps.
At the same time, exploring his human anchor was vital. His relationship with the Ottoman girl Zeynep was not intended merely to satisfy the expectations of Stoker’s fans. Though she appears only briefly, she is essential to understanding Vlad’s inner world. She, alongside his most loyal companions, Dragan and Mircea, and his friendship with Stephen the Great, represents his sole connection to humanity. Without them, Dracula would be nothing more than an unfeeling machine of slaughter, devoid of emotion and conscience.
These aspects are linked into a single entity. It is an equation—remove any part, and the outcome falls apart. The final portrait is that of a brilliant, fanatical Voivode who sacrificed his own soul out of devotion to his land.
What research went into recreating fifteenth-century Wallachia and the political tensions between the Ottomans, Hungarians, and neighboring powers?
The research was painstaking and exhaustive. I refused to deviate from historical reality, spending months studying Vlad III before writing a single line.
It was meticulous work. I was surprised to discover that despite Dracula’s global renown through Stoker, historical records contain glaring gaps—for instance, the exact day and month of his birth and death remain unknown to this day. Where history fell silent, I had to employ my own creative vision to make the story even more profound. That is precisely why this book is classified as historical fiction rather than non-fiction.
My research extended far beyond Vlad himself. I conducted an in-depth study of his adversaries and allies—Sultans Murad II and Mehmed II, János Hunyadi, Matthias Corvinus, and many others. Understanding the geography and the shifting frontiers of the fifteenth-century Balkans was equally demanding. For months, I studied period maps, academic papers, and historical documents to plot the precise boundary changes year by year. I needed to understand exactly what Vlad was defending and where the Sultan was striking in any given year.
The result of this research was an immense chronological timeline that I had to reshape into a fluid narrative. My aim was not to write a dry textbook. My task was not merely to recount what Dracula did, but above all to reveal why he did it.
What do you hope readers understand about Vlad after finishing the novel that they might not have understood from the familiar Dracula legend?
In a single word: patriot. He was a man carved by his enemies, who turned himself into a rampart of Ottoman corpses. He and the whole of Wallachia—a beautiful yet impoverished realm perpetually torn apart by foreign rulers—stood against the overwhelming force of a finely tuned Ottoman military machine. Direct confrontation was impossible; it meant certain death. Yet Vlad did not flee, surrender, or bow to the Sultan. He wielded every strategic and physical skill at his disposal, and with a handful of loyal men, terrified one of the most powerful rulers on Earth so profoundly that the Sultan turned back, retreating home to Constantinople in disgrace with heavy losses.
What I want the reader to grasp is that the driving force behind this Wallachian Voivode was love. Not the romantic devotion depicted by Stoker—love for a woman—but an uncompromising love for his homeland. A love so fierce that he was willing to sacrifice his soul and his life to protect it.
ȚEPEȘ: VLAD III DRACULA
Sebastian Valerius’s Țepeș: Vlad III Dracula is a sprawling historical war novel that treats Vlad Dracula as a political creature before anything else: prince, hostage, strategist, son, lover, prisoner, ruler, and finally legend. The book moves through the brutal machinery of fifteenth-century Eastern Europe, where Wallachia is squeezed between Ottoman expansion and Hungarian ambition, and where nearly every alliance carries the possibility of betrayal. Valerius calls the novel political and historical fiction with Gothic horror elements, and that combination fits it well. The Gothic quality comes less from the supernatural than from the atmosphere of dread surrounding power itself. Courts become cages, diplomacy becomes coercion, and the landscape of Wallachia gradually turns into an extension of Vlad’s mind: defensive, scarred, watchful, and terrifying.
The book’s strongest achievement is the way it builds Vlad. His childhood as an Ottoman hostage gives him language, discipline, military knowledge, and an intimate understanding of the empire he’ll eventually fight. His relationships with Murad, Mehmed, Radu, Hunyadi, Zeynep, Anastasia, Matthias Corvinus, Stephen of Moldavia, Dragan, and Mircea keep changing the meaning of loyalty around him. Some people teach him strategy, some offer tenderness, some use him, and some stay loyal long after loyalty makes practical sense. That accumulation matters. By the time Vlad turns terror into policy, the reader understands the chain of experiences that brought him there without being asked to mistake understanding for absolution. His conversations with priests and chroniclers sharpen this tension beautifully, especially when the novel asks whether a ruler can deliberately sacrifice his own soul for the survival of his country.
Valerius writes at full pressure. The prose is physical, dark, and intensely sensory, filled with mud, iron, smoke, winter, blood, wolves, cages, maps, and the constant shadow of the stake. Battles aren’t treated as decorative action scenes. They’re problems of terrain, intelligence, supply, deception, morale, and timing. Some of the most gripping passages concern poisoned wells, destroyed granaries, blocked mountain passes, false retreats, disguises, cavalry traps, and the sheer logistical impossibility of feeding an enormous invading army. That attention to strategy gives the famous 1462 campaign a genuine narrative engine. The violence is just as deliberate. It grows increasingly difficult to witness because the novel makes Vlad’s methods progressively more extreme, culminating in acts that show how thoroughly the weapon he created has begun to consume the man who created it. Valerius keeps returning to the uncomfortable question beneath every victory: if fear saves the state but destroys the ruler’s humanity, what exactly has been saved?
That question gives Țepeș its emotional weight. Beneath the military campaigns and political maneuvering is a tragedy about a man who craves control because nearly every formative experience of his life taught him what it means to be powerless. Vlad can defeat armies, discipline a country, manipulate enemies, and turn his own reputation into a weapon, yet he can’t command loyalty from kings, reverse betrayal, recover lost years, or return to the person he might once have become. Zeynep is especially important in that respect. She represents a private life Vlad could imagine but never inhabit, which makes the vision surrounding his death unexpectedly moving. When the dying Vlad finally imagines peace, home, love, and children, the novel reveals how small and human his deepest desire has always been. The later epilogues then pull outward again, showing the man giving way to rumor, propaganda, an empty tomb, and finally the name by which history will remember him.
Țepeș is an ambitious, ferocious historical epic about the manufacture of a legend and the terrible usefulness of fear. Its Vlad is tactically brilliant, emotionally damaged, politically perceptive, capable of profound loyalty, and increasingly capable of horror. That combination makes him fascinating because his victories and his moral collapse are part of the same story. Valerius gives the reader war from the council chamber to the supply wagon, politics from the marriage bed to the dungeon, and a portrait of Dracula shaped as much by those who betrayed, loved, feared, and exploited him as by his own choices. By the final pages, the familiar historical figure feels less like a distant emblem and more like the result of a long, brutal process in which survival becomes ideology and reputation becomes immortality. Savage, intelligent, and darkly absorbing, Țepeș turns Vlad Dracula into a living argument about what power costs when survival becomes the only law.
Pages: 307
A Survivor
Creatures of the Night follows an orphan fleeing captivity into the Yukon, where she finds a community of women and confronts human predators and a monstrous presence stalking them. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve wanted to write horror – and a werewolf horror in particular – since I’ve been writing. I was a little kid thinking about how scary werewolves are. But what scared me about them was not a big, menacing dog. I never really got into the stories about the person who has the werewolf curse. For me, I was always more sympathetic toward, or I was more scared for, whoever the other character was. I really loved The Werewolf of Fever Swamp. It scared me so much as a kid. That centralized the victims, not the predator, as werewolf stories tend to do. Talbot and such. We’re supposed to feel for them. And in the other movies, Jenny Agutter’s character, or Emily Perkins’ Brigitte, or Dee Wallace in The Howling, I was always so much more on their side or feeling for them because here was someone they loved and trusted who turned into an out-of-control beast and tried to kill them in their own homes. Of course, that is absolutely a very real and horrifying situation for many women and children out there in the world, especially women and children. So it had to be young women. And of course all kids go through puberty, but for women it’s this huge transition around them where they go from innocent, cute little doll to something to be preyed upon and sexualised, sometimes consciously but also unconsciously, and by members of their own family. The men and women in their own homes suddenly start treating them differently. All of a sudden the world is full of predators, and they are the prey. And it happens so young for them, you know, you listen to women talk about the first time a family member sexualised them, either by accident or deliberately, and it’s like, they’re kids. Children. I think that Little Red Riding Hood takes on a whole new meaning when you know that. The coat being red is a metaphor: the predator, the girl going out on her own. It’s such a vulnerable time.
So I had that. Little Red Riding Hood was the big one, but all of the stories that have used lycanthropy as a metaphor for adolescence. I am a huge fan of Angela Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber, and I love Ginger Snaps the movie, but I wanted to bring the concept back to the Red Riding Hood origins, where adolescence makes the girl a predator, which I think is a little unfair, and instead makes them vulnerable to society’s predators. And I needed a setting where all of that could come together, so to speak, with the men everywhere, and religion, and the authorities, all these patriarchal, male-dominated spheres. So a mining boom was perfect. And when I found Donald Trump’s connection to Klondike – his grandfather Frederick was a vile, sex-trafficking pimp and predator; that’s where the Trump fortune started – I had to, because who is the most prominent face of a predator of children today? Of course. Epstein’s number 1 fan and friend. Plus Yukon, Dawson City, it’s so remote, so cold, so isolated. I love Canada’s landscapes. I spend as much time as I can there, and I always feel like I’m going to be inspired by the surroundings. And I did follow the White Trail up to Dawson City, by car – I’m not crazy – and I couldn’t think of a better, or worse, situation to put these women in.
How did you approach writing Eliza’s transformation from the frightened Miss Laura into someone capable of defining her own identity?
As much as I love them and they are an inspiration, I’ve also always been a little offended by the metaphor of adolescence turning a girl into a monster. You see it a lot. Sometimes it’s done beautifully well, with great sensitivity, but I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to have it, yes, make her vulnerable to predation, but also that feminine rage that comes upon so many girls in puberty; that’s a strength. That’s a defensive mechanism. And with everything I just described, how society just turns on so many girls, of course they lash out. Of course they scream and slam doors and go nuts. I wanted it to both make Eliza vulnerable but also be the defining difference that makes her a survivor and helps her stand up against the dangers.
The women in the novel have remarkably distinct voices and relationships; how did you develop them as individuals while maintaining the sense of a shared found family?
I worked in a women’s prison for three years as a teacher. I taught creative writing and various other literacy-based courses, and while I would never directly depict anyone’s personality with whom I met in there, there were certain dynamics among the women that were really inspiring. The depths of their character. It sounds silly, but women in prison are not only a cohort that are demonized, painted in very simple dimensions, but stupidly sexualised by predator filmmakers as well. But found families were everywhere in there. I saw women who hated each other come to one another’s aid if a vulnerable moment should have come upon them in the presence of the guards or something; the need to protect each other from predation – which the screws in that prison absolutely were – came before any other disputes between the women. It was amazing. Society never looks deep enough to see how amazing the dynamics are in a women’s prison. And who else gets treated like that? Sex workers. In horror especially, the genre has a lot to answer for; the sexual women always die horribly, and they’re never really explored. They don’t have origins or destinations. They’re just victim one, victim two, and the way they’re written, especially if you go back to slasher movies from say twenty to twenty-five years ago, there was almost a fetishised delight or voyeurism in watching these characters die.
So it was very important to get their individuality. I spent a lot of time on that. Who are these women, where do they want to be, where did they come from? I had a great cache of experiences to draw from since the prison.
Was the creature intended to represent the predatory behavior of the men in the story, or do you see it as having a different symbolic meaning?
It was a culmination of the predation by the men, yes, and the religious institutions, and the authorities. Once you open that door, you see it everywhere. Structural predation. Not just enabling predators, but maintaining the vulnerability of their prey. That’s why I had to have a culturally diverse cast. Because as bad as it could be in a Catholic orphanage, there were also residential schools, there were brothels run by Trump-esque men, there were police who used their authority and their positions to prevent people from protecting themselves while not protecting anyone as they should. And of course the fetishisation of Shuya’s culture. You see how a woman like Tigra could occur. I’m not asking for anyone to sympathise with Tigra, really, because she’s ultimately doing her share of awful things, but you can see how a person like that could be created by a world so fiercely predatory.
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They don’t know she is being followed. A beast out of mythology will stop at nothing to possess her forever. Or destroy her and everything she loves.
A Modern Theme
Zara’s Gothic follows a paramedic who, after a life-altering road accident, retreats to a secluded property where she lives in a handmade van beneath the shadow of an abandoned Victorian house. Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?
I have always wanted to write a gothic novel, being most inspired by Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca and The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions. I was taken by the sight of an old, crumbling house, now in its last stages of collapse. It spoke to me. Maybe the story is a way to preserve the house’s memory.
What drew you to combining paramedic trauma with Gothic haunting?
Although I love the standard repertoire, I wanted a modern theme people could relate to. And, something different, something unique.
Zara’s inner world feels intensely sensory and unstable—how did you approach writing her perception?
It is said that there is a normal. I believe there are other ways of perception. Zara’s on the outside because she’s not like ‘normal’ people. The book is dedicated to Professor Elaine Aron, whose pioneering work on HSP, highly sensitive people, tells us that there is nothing wrong with ultra-sensitivity. It exists in humans and animals; it is not a mental disorder. No more of this “you’re just over-sensitive” rubbish.
If a reader remembers only one image from the novel, what should it be?
Oh, there are many. Without spoilers, it’s when Zara is hit with the reality that the immutable laws of physics no longer apply. Imagine how abjectly terrifying that would be!
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Amazon
Guilt ridden accident survivor Zara Wilander thinks she is taking on the renovation of a crumbling mansion. But instead, the house takes her on—Zara is progressively haunted. Or, is she simply losing her mind?
Flamboyant estate agent Jenner Reid believes this to be the case and encourages her to continue. But Reid has history with this house. When Zara learns his dark secret, and those of the old house, it may be much too late.
Mounting horror and astonishing word craft result in a masterpiece of the macabre, with all the elements of the classic romantic Gothic style. It is, however, refreshingly different. In the best traditions of The Beckoning Fair One and Rebecca, Zara’s Gothic will thrill your mind and chill your blood.
If you dare…
Zara’s Gothic: A Thrilling Journey Into Adventure, Horror, Mystery, and Romance
Zara’s Gothic opens with a woman already half-shattered. Zara Wilander, a paramedic in upstate New York, is wrecked by guilt after a road accident kills a dog and nearly kills a pedestrian; when work, therapy, and ordinary housing all fail her, she ends up living in her handmade van on a secluded property dominated by a derelict Victorian house that seems less abandoned than watchful. From there, the novel widens from trauma narrative into Gothic haunting: a lonely, hyper-attuned protagonist, an eccentric real-estate man named Jenner Reid, and a decaying house whose pull may be supernatural, psychological, or some unnerving braid of both.
I found myself most taken with the book’s atmosphere and with the way it inhabits Zara’s consciousness. McRoberts doesn’t give her a clean, tasteful suffering; she gives her jagged perception, sensory overwhelm, intrusive memory, odd wit, and a genuine estrangement from the social world. That makes the novel feel intimate. The prose often leans baroque, but in this case, the excess is part of the weather system: rot creaks, trees thrum, sound wounds, silence has grain. When the book is working at full voltage, it feels less like reading a plot than like walking through a feverish interior architecture.
What I really liked, though, wasn’t just the haunted-house apparatus but the tenderness threaded through it. Zara’s bond with her van, her craftsmanship, her ache for solitude, and her unstable reliance on Jenner give the novel an emotional undercarriage sturdier than its melodrama. Some scenes sprawl, and some flourishes arrive in clusters. This book has a peculiar pulse. It wants grandeur, morbidity, vulnerability, and sentiment all at once, and more often than not, it earns that ambition.
I’d recommend Zara’s Gothic to readers of Gothic fiction, psychological horror, haunted-house novels, women-centered dark fiction, and literary supernatural suspense, or anyone who likes their genre work emotionally raw rather than mechanically slick. It reminded me, at moments, of Shirley Jackson by way of Mexican Gothic: not because it copies either, but because it understands that a house can become an accomplice to grief. This is a strange, bruised, haunted novel that turns damage into atmosphere and atmosphere into destiny.
Pages: 224 | ASIN : B0H6JL2WX7
Fly Stone, Fly
Fly Stone, Fly by Dust Kunkel is a feral, river-haunted dark fantasy about Clayton Bergmann, a boy left alone in the Idaho wilderness after his parents disappear, who grows into grief, prophecy, and revenge with a foul-mouthed dog named Dammit, a Shakespeare-soaked mind, and a family curse snapping at his heels. The story moves from survival tale to Western Gothic blood-feud, with Big Jim looming as both villain and nightmare, and with stoneflies, river water, old stories, and bad dogs carrying more meaning than they first seem to bear.
I admired how strange this book is willing to be. Its voice has burrs on it: funny, wounded, profane, lyrical, and sometimes gloriously overgrown. Clayton narrates like someone trying to lash a broken raft together while already in the rapids, and that urgency gives the novel its pulse. The Shakespeare references could have felt ornamental, but here, they’re weighty, private, and handled often. The book’s best passages do not merely describe wilderness; they make the canyon feel sentient, accusatory, almost liturgical.
What I enjoyed most was the book’s refusal to sand down pain into easy nobility. Clayton’s loneliness is not pretty. His friendships are not tidy. Dammit, Lina, MK, and the rest feel carved from contradictions: loyal and dangerous, comic and damaged, ridiculous and mythic. The novel’s maximal style asks for patience; it can wander and double back. But that excess is also part of its charm.
The target audience is readers who want dark fantasy, Western Gothic, revenge fantasy, mythic coming-of-age, and literary fantasy with a rough comic streak. Readers who like Neil Gaiman’s myth-in-the-modern-world sensibility or Stephen King’s gift for giving childhood terror a local address will find something kin here they enjoy, though Kunkel’s voice is more backwoods-baroque and river-drunk.
Pages: 498 | ASIN : B0DTDDG3T8
Shadows Amongst the Threads
Shadows Amongst the Threads is a haunting, soul-baring collection of poetry that plunges headfirst into the murky depths of the human psyche. Written by J.A. Santana, the book explores the concept of the “shadow” — that darker half of our personality Carl Jung warned us not to ignore. The poems are a tapestry of anguish, longing, introspection, and myth. The collection moves through surreal landscapes—withered forests, shadowy corridors, dreamscapes, and apocalyptic ruins—while reflecting on fear, identity, sin, love, and collective moral decay. Santana threads together classical references, psychological insights, and raw emotion, pulling readers deep into a world where monsters wear familiar faces, often our own.
I enjoyed how immersive and atmospheric the writing is. Santana’s voice feels ancient and modern all at once—like a lost prophet speaking in riddles. The rhythm and word choice at times feel Shakespearean or Biblical, yet there’s also a grounded emotional rawness in many of the lines. Some pieces like “Darkness,” “Doppelgänger,” and “Rain I” are unsettling in their vivid imagery but unforgettable in their truths. You can feel the poet wrestling with shame, existential dread, and an aching thirst for meaning. And it isn’t just gloom for gloom’s sake. There’s an undeniable urgency behind the words—as if Santana is begging readers to confront their own shadows before they become monsters.
The language, though beautiful, is dense. I found myself needing to take breaks, reread stanzas, and sometimes simply sit with the weight of it all. A few poems are abstract or metaphor-heavy, and the emotional intensity sometimes overwhelms the clarity. But even when it was hard to follow, I never doubted the sincerity. There’s a strange kind of beauty in getting lost in Santana’s bleak, lyrical universe. It’s not for everyone, but for those who’ve stared down their own darkness, it will feel eerily familiar.
Shadows Amongst the Threads is a collection that rewards patience and introspection. I’d recommend it to anyone who loves poetry that digs deep into the soul and isn’t afraid of getting their hands dirty. It’s especially powerful for readers interested in shadow work, trauma, mythology, and the emotional weight of existence.
Pages: 94 | ASIN : B0BKGZ6L6V
The Haunting of Wellsley Manor
Len Handeland’s The Haunting of Wellsley Manor is a gothic horror novel that follows William Martens, a young man seeking to escape the dead-end monotony of his hometown by attending Cornell University. But his aspirations are soon entangled in a series of ghostly encounters at his grandfather’s decaying estate in Ithaca. As he settles into his new life, William is haunted—literally and emotionally—by family secrets, unresolved trauma, and spectral figures that begin to cross the veil between the living and the dead. The deeper he digs into the house’s eerie history, the more he realizes that some legacies come with strings attached and blood on their hands.
I was drawn in from the very beginning. The dialogue felt natural and raw—sometimes even painfully real, especially during the tense moments between William and his bitter, emotionally distant father. There’s something incredibly satisfying about a story that doesn’t rush. The buildup is slow and deliberate, and that pacing works here. It lets you soak in the atmosphere—the creaking floors, the dusty corridors, the strained silences. The house itself becomes a character, and not just a spooky backdrop. What Handeland nails is the eerie tension between generational pride and inherited guilt. His prose has this honest, almost nostalgic warmth when depicting William’s relationship with his grandfather, Isaiah. Those moments hit me hard.
Sometimes the writing dipped into the overly descriptive, and while the story’s emotional arcs were compelling, the scares occasionally felt more atmospheric than truly chilling. I didn’t mind that too much—this is more The Sixth Sense than The Conjuring—but readers expecting non-stop frights may be left wanting. Still, the dream sequences and ghostly children were deeply unsettling in a quiet and lingering way. The mirror scenes especially gave me the kind of slow-building dread I love in horror fiction.
I’d recommend The Haunting of Wellsley Manor to anyone who enjoys a slower burn and emotionally rich storytelling. It’s a ghost story wrapped in a coming-of-age tale, laced with regret and second chances. If you liked The Others or even older Stephen King novels like Bag of Bones, you’ll probably enjoy this. It’s not just about ghosts. It’s about how the past clings to us, follows us, and sometimes, if we’re not careful, swallows us whole.
Pages: 236 | ASIN : B0DTBZNRV9
