When I set out to write The Hound — the first prequel in The Mythic Symbiote Series — the words arrived with a generosity I’ve rarely experienced. Celtic mythology, Cú Chulainn, the alien suit finding a host in a seven-year-old boy: the story seemed to want to be told, and it came quickly, with momentum and heat.
The Dragon had no such arrangement with me.
Vlad III — Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler — was a man I had already established in the main series as one of the suit’s darker hosts. I knew what he was. What I underestimated was how difficult he would be to write. Every time I leaned into the historical record, into the cold methodical arithmetic of the man’s actual decision-making, the prose became what I can only describe as a thorough manual on fifteenth-century Romanian governance. Accurate. Comprehensive. Entirely without horror.
This is Vlad’s central problem as a subject: the horror is the coldness, and the coldness is almost impossible to render without making the reader feel cold in the wrong way — distanced rather than disturbed. I spent a long time learning the difference, and a longer time finding the voice that could hold both simultaneously.
The breakthrough came from an unexpected direction. Vlad doesn’t drink blood. He never did. What he does — or rather, what the suit enables him to do — is kill with a precision that targets the major vessels: carotid, subclavian, the arterial architecture of the human body. A still-pumping heart, vital arteries, and gravity do the rest. The result is a body almost entirely drained of blood, found somewhere it wasn’t killed, with no wound that a fifteenth-century observer would recognise as the cause of death. No blood at the scene. No visible injury. A man found in the street with the appearance of something having consumed him from within.
Medieval minds did what medieval minds do with the impossible. They assembled a story from what they could see — and what they assembled was the vampire. I didn’t invent that. History invented it. What I did was find the mechanism beneath the myth and show the reader how the machinery actually worked. The suit is the stitching between them: between what the historical record shows and what the legend claims. Both are accurate. They’re simply describing different parts of the same event.
History also gave me considerable room to work. Vlad’s fourteen years of captivity under Matthias Corvinus left almost no documentary record — a gift, of sorts, for a novelist. A man of Vlad’s intelligence and patience does not sit idle in comfortable quarters for fourteen years. The captivity became its own chapter in his campaign: a patient, ruthless intelligence working from within a cage that was never quite as secure as his captor believed, moving pieces toward a return that was always the only possible conclusion.
History gave me one more thing: an unnamed wife. She existed; she simply left no record. I gave her a name — Ilona — and a character in complete contrast to Vlad: warm where he is cold, open where he is closed, the kind of person who makes a room better by being in it. I gave her an ending I believe she deserved: not a passive tragedy but an act of defiance — a woman who stepped in front of someone else at the worst possible moment. There is a ghost story at Poenari castle. She earned it.
The Dragon is darker than anything else in the series. More graphic. It targets a mature audience and does so without apology, because Vlad demands it — you cannot write a truthful account of this particular life and make it comfortable. What I hope I’ve written is something that makes you shudder at the cold rather than the gore: something that makes you understand, by the final page, why this specific man became the most enduring monster in Western mythology, and why the myth — for all its fantastic furniture — got the floor plan exactly right.
This isn’t a vampire tale. But it is certainly a tale of action and horror.