For those of you who have already read
Shattered World I: Paris,
by now you know that I have set the book in various locations around
France. I have been fortunate to have visited the major locations in the
novel, which inspired me to include them in the story. Having seen this
places made them come alive for me while drafting the manuscript.
To bring
Shattered World I: Paris alive for my readers, every Wednesday for the next four weeks I'll be
posting blog spots with photos related to the locations described in the
novel and/or concept art about the demons. Many of the photos I took
myself. I hope you enjoy these.
This week's photos are the most interesting of the series because it
will be dealing with the concept art and ideas that went into developing
the Demon Spawn. [WARNING: There are spoilers in this blog post, so if
you have not read the book be forewarned.]
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| Are the flesh eaters zombies? Not in the traditional sense. I liked
the concept of hordes of shambling dead roaming through the French
countryside and attacking the Demon Hunters en masse but did not want to
turn my book into a zombie apocalypse novel. So I created the flesh eaters as the desiccated bodies of those condemned to Hell who come back to
wander Earth because this is the realm they know. Yes, they eat human
flesh, which is what makes them dangerous, but they do not have the
other attributes of a zombie -- they are not rotting away and being
bitten by a flesh eater does not mean you will die and come back as one. |
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| The idea for the pus zombies came from two separate sources. Scientists
discovered that certain spores can infect insects, taking over their
minds and compelling them to climb to an elevated position where those
spores rupture through the host body. The spores then spread and infect
other insects. I reasoned this was a much more gruesome and unique way
of turning people into flesh eaters than through biting. The video detailing how this process works can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCeyW9m0SXA. |
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| The
second idea behind the concept came from a website report of a young
man in China suffering from a severe, untreated brain infection that ate
through his skull and filled his cranium with pus.The photos of this
poor man were so pathetic and disturbing the writer in me had to
incorporate them into the pus zombies. |
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| I think the use of giant insects is self-explanatory. If regular bugs
are creepy and scary, then enlarging the demons to monstrous sizes makes
them downright terrifying. |
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| Some of my readers have asked where I got the idea of having the giant
wasps in Falaise use Andre as an incubator for their eggs. This happens
quite often in nature, albeit with cockroaches taking the place of
humans. A video detailing how the process works can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovo_T0KqdYg. |
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| When I was developing the demons that would guard the portals, I came up
with the concept of using Golem, the animated anthropomorphic
protectors of Jewish ghettos. However, I wanted mine to be much more
intimidating and powerful than the man-sized guardians from Hebrew
folklore. To give the Golem a more gruesome appearance, I changed them
from being created from inanimate material, such as stone, to being a
compilation of human body parts. I stumbled across the above artwork
while researching other demons and decided to adopt the basic body
design for my own Golem, although those that appear in Shattered World I: Paris have significant differences. |
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| The hand-held six-barreled GAU-17 minigun used by Sasha and Haneef. When
I first saw this weapon I knew I had to work it into the novel. |
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| Holding the GAU-17 minigun. And no, this is not who Sasha is based on.
It's just a coincidence that the model is similar to my character. |
