Tauros Mythology

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. ...

I recently finished a new novel that launches an entirely new series. At its heart is an ancient Atlantean artefact: an amulet containing a technological suit of armour. The opening book is set in modern-day Manchester and follows the suit’s new bearer as she discovers not only its power, but its sentience. The armour is not simply a tool. It questions. It reacts. It forms opinions. That awakening — and the moral tension it creates — becomes the spine of the story. ...