When the Carnival Refuses to Fold Its Tents and Begins to Grow Teeth Instead.
I didn’t mean to write another Halloween book.
I already had Veil of Nightmares to scratch that particular itch. But when the chance came up to join a promotional collaboration with a group of monster authors centered around Halloween, I jumped in without hesitation.
That enthusiasm lasted right up until I saw the lineup.
It didn’t take long to realize my story would likely be… different. Darker. The kind of dark that doesn’t politely sit beside other stories—it looms. It breathes. It bleeds into the margins. And against the tone of the other authors, mine would have stood out like a bruise.
The last thing I wanted was to drag the mood into deeper waters or disappoint readers who had come expecting something more familiar.
So I stepped back.
There was this quiet nudge telling me to pull my story from the collaboration and let the others shine in the space they were creating. Their audiences deserved the experience they had come for—stories aligned in tone and spirit.
But the story itself refused to disappear.
It burned.
And from that fire, Carnival Hearts & Screams was born.
I found myself diving back into the same shadowed realm as my Soul Taker Series, pulling new characters from the dark—faces that feel strangely familiar, yet unmistakably different. They led me to a place that shouldn’t exist, a surreal circus stitched together from nightmares, where beauty and horror dance beneath flickering lights.
A carnival that feels less like a show…
…and more like something that crawled straight from the bowels of hellfires.
And once the gates opened, the performers wouldn’t stop changing.
The characters I thought I understood began to shift beneath my hands like figures in a funhouse mirror. What started as simple silhouettes slowly twisted into something far more elaborate. Personalities deepened. Motivations darkened. Their stories tangled together in ways I hadn’t planned.
Part of that transformation came from something I already had tucked away. Old artwork I’d saved long ago for “someday.” Images that had no story yet—only mood. Flickers of shadow and color that felt too haunting to ignore. As I revisited them, it was as if the carnival itself began dressing the stage. Costumes appeared. Faces took shape. Entire scenes unfolded from those forgotten inspirations, and suddenly the circus had a life of its own.
And then there was the ringmaster.
He was never meant to matter this much.
Originally, he was nothing more than a passing presence—a shadowy figure meant to push the story forward for a moment before fading back behind the curtain. A narrative nudge. A whisper over the loudspeaker before the real show began.
But characters have a strange way of rebelling.
The more I wrote, the more he stepped out from the wings. His voice grew louder. His presence heavier. Until suddenly he wasn’t a blip in the performance anymore.
He was the one commanding it.
The ringmaster took center stage with a quiet kind of menace, the sort that doesn’t shout for attention but somehow holds every eye in the tent. And as his story unfolded, something unexpected began to happen.
Threads started weaving backward.
What had seemed like a standalone nightmare began tying itself to the deeper roots of the Soul Taker Series. Connections surfaced where I hadn’t planned them. Familiar echoes crept into the carnival’s shadows. The ringmaster himself became the living bridge between this twisted circus and the darker world that came before it.
As if he had been waiting there all along. Watching. Patiently biding his time until the spotlight finally found him. And once it did, the show was no longer mine to control.
The dark carnival had chosen its master of ceremonies… and he had every intention of making sure the performance would never truly end.
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