Blackspire

Behind the scenes of my western folk-horror serial.

Spoiler warning: If you haven’t finished reading The Eater & the Eaten, I recommend doing that before reading this post. You can start here. Rather own it? Get it in That Which Feeds On Us.

Ready to push on? Here we go!

The first course of my western folk-horror serial, The Eater & the Eaten, concludes with Kit Caine saying, “It’s safe to say that I loved her from the day I first saw her.” That’s kind of how I feel about both folk horror and westerns.

While fantasy has probably been the brightest literary love of my life, she wasn’t my first. I was reading Louis L’Amour before I’d even heard of J.R.R. Tolkien or knew what a hobbit was.

Horror has also been a big part of my reading for a very long time. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Clive Barker were big influences on me. Later, I’d discover the works of Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter, and Wes Craven. All of my writing tends toward horror. It’s even central to ADTR (there are also a lot of western influences in ADTR, go figure).

All that to say that, The Eater & the Eaten probably comes closest to combining all of my influences and interests. It also gave me an excuse to jump back into westerns as an entertainment genre. I bought and started (but have yet to finish reading) Lonesome Dove. I watched Tombstone for the 100th time, went through American Primeval again, cued up Wyatt Earp, dove into Godless, and watched Bone Tomahawk again. It’s been a lot of fun, but it was never supposed to happen. I blame Ed the Editor for this.

The Origins of the Story

Originally, The Eater & the Eaten was supposed to be set in Wales. The plot was similar but not identical.

Kit Caine didn’t exist. Instead, there was an unnamed boy in his place, who grew up to be an Anglican priest. Alys and her mother were present, of course. Rhian was the sin eater of a small village, ostracized by her fellow villagers but called on in secret, then hidden away in shame. Rhian died, and Alys took her place. The rest of the story was pretty similar, although the unnamed young man fathered a daughter on Alys, and Alys actually died in the fire.

With the shift to being a western, things changed.

What’s with the Food Motif?

With a title like The Eater & the Eaten, I couldn’t really do less, could I? The menu aspect was a lot of fun to think up, and I tried to tie the dishes listed at the start of each chapter into key parts of the story. Some of them are obvious, like the cake and gin in chapter 2, but some are less so, like Kit’s father being the poached whitefish. I also tried to work related elements into the story as much as I could, from Kit’s consumption to a couple of acts of oral sex (which I can honestly say has never appeared in my work before, haha).

Why Is Alys Dark-Skinned?

Some of y’all may have noticed that my fair folk aren’t fair-skinned. That’s intentional. Mine are the descendants of Indigenous peoples pushed to the fringes by waves of immigrants. We have genetic evidence that the earliest inhabitants of what would eventually become Britain and Wales were dark-haired, dark-skinned, and light-eyed.

What’s with Goodman?

Goodman is what you get when you rip away someone’s culture, language, religion, past, and future, and then pump them full of hatred for their people and themselves.

Eventually, that becomes the ouroboros, eating its own tail. Always consuming, never satiated. Always taking, reshaping others into something less than human (at least until they conform or forget who they once were). They’re ultimately always empty and always ravenous because of that. Those consumed are likewise empty, hollowed out of their connection with their pasts, their cultures, cut off from their very roots in the mists of time.

That’s something that comes up a surprising amount in my writing. It’s a pretty strong undercurrent in The Roots That Clutch, and it’s touched on in others. As an old, cis, white guy, it’s also something that’s been on my mind a lot since I’ve shaken off the shackles of my upbringing (raised Southern Baptist in the Deep South). There’s probably an essay in there tied to cultural loss and identity that I might flesh out at some point.

The Story That Wrote Itself…Until It Didn’t

While much of the story spilled onto the page almost unprompted, there was one part that I struggled with mightily: the end. I wrote no fewer than five different endings!

1. Original Ending: Alys is alive, but hideously scarred. She shows up at the end and seduces John out of some of his life force to help her heal. This felt both out of character and unsatisfying.
2. Alternative Ending 1: Similar to the official ending, but Kit has discovered that blood will heal Alys. The catch is that only blood from a living human being will do it. Kit used his role as a sheriff to supply donors, but only the worst of the worst. John is horrified when he learns that Kit’s been reviving Alys using the blood of murderers and rapists because he’s concerned that the evil will somehow infect her. Kit plans to kill John, cover Alys’s body with his blood, then cut his own wrists and bleed out on her in an attempt to finally revive her. This was probably the most disturbing of the endings, but it was likewise unsatisfying.
3. Alternative Ending 2: Alys is alive and has mastered the darker side of her powers. She tries to eat John the same way that Goodman was trying to eat Kit. Totally out of character for both Alys and Kit, and therefore not particularly believable.
4. Alternative Ending 3: Alys actually died in the fire. This was incredibly anticlimactic IMO and was instantly deleted.
5. The Official Ending: I like a couple of things about this ending. First, it’s ambiguous. Sure, we hear two gunshots, and John assumes that Kit has set Alys free and then himself, but it could just as easily have been Kit catching dinner after John left him ammunition. Second, assuming that John is right, it ties in with cowboy romanticism/the doomed lovers, which is a huge part of what’s probably my favorite book in King’s Gunslinger series, Wizard and Glass (although The Wasteland is a close second). I know some of you aren’t fans, but you’re just wrong I do love it.

Anyway, I appreciate each and every person who’s read, commented on, and/or shared this serial. It’s been much more enjoyable than I’d expected, and it made me realize just how much I love writing horror (especially folk horror).