Vampy Black: Supernatural Terror and Magic

It's fun writing supernatural terror.

Where the world starts to shift, senses shut down, and what was assumed safe is possibly now a deadly threat - if only in the character's mind.

I had a chance to edit a section in Darthaniel's Vampy Black book where our heroine meets the forces of darkness for the first time, and she has this strangely odd Lovecraftian moment where she needs to do something secret in plain sight of a large group of people, but a wicked force of dark magic starts to affect her senses.

It's the moment in the book where everything turns, and you realize Kansas ain't this place anymore.

What was once a normal scene of collecting information and fighting with a friend becomes a moment of sheer terror and strange feelings of death and fear. It's almost alien in a way and I love the effect it has on her. In all likelihood this is magic, evil magic, and this isn't that first-level Magic Missile spell anymore out of fantasy games. It's alien, strange, like some sort of unknown radiation affecting her, and it's terrifying.

I like my magic to be strange and unexplainable. We live in a world that robs us of the unexplained, the moments of confusion, and the mysterious. Everything is explained in some tech site somewhere, the specs are laid out for us to see, and every mystery is explained using CSI science and theory. Even today's pop-culture MMO and movie 'magic' is mundane, some sort of consequence-less superpower that instantly flicks a mana bolt at a level 60 ogre again and again with no mystery, no consequence, and no strange effect on reality.

Magic should inflict a sensed of fear and wonderment. It should not be explainable. It should challenge your assumptions about reality. It should underlie danger.

It should not be of this world.

Instead, pop-culture magic is like our iPhone, easily accessible, predictable, easy to use, powerful, and dare I say it, boring as hell. It's the flashy CG of seen-it-all movies. It's a light switch to flick and never think about. It's not magic anymore because it's not magical.

But...real magic. It is that moment you realize something is out there and likely more powerful than you, and you realize you have no hope of explaining what just happened. There is a fine line here with pulling wool over a reader's eyes, so you have to write it carefully and with some semblance of order. But that hopeless moment of terror where nothing you know can help you anymore - thrills us. It kicks off the roller coaster, and we as readers we love these moments. Things start to get flipped on their heads, and our expectations and minds race at the possibilities.

I wrote magic this way in my On Black Wings novel. Most of the things in that book aren't explained, and our heroine goes through so many jumps to try and explain something that is inherently unexplainable. It's all terrifying, uncontrolled, and also a metaphor for how out of control the world seems right now. Even her powers are a mystery, and how they work are never really understood down to a science. They remain strange and a force to fear, along with what happens to her on a moment's notice because of rules and laws our minds cannot comprehend.

It's a respect of the force "greater than us," and it puts magic back in its proper, mysterious place again. Magic becomes something greater than us, and that makes that strange and unknown force becomes...magical again.