There are monsters in my books.
Hauntings. Vampires. Werewolves. Golems. Legions. Witches. Creatures that have no place beyond nightmares and ancient stories.
But the monsters have never frightened me as much as people have. We can dismiss monsters as mere stories, but dismissing human cruelty is far more difficult. We’ve never needed fangs, claws, curses, or demons to find reasons to hurt, control, own, or destroy one another.
That’s why I use them.
The Eldritch Manor books are, among other things, about slavery. Not American slavery, nor the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery itself: the ancient and persistent human idea that one person may own another, that one life may be reduced to property, labor, usefulness, or obedience.
That idea is older than the United States or the nations that colonized the Americas. It is far older than Christianity.
Humans have found reasons to own other humans for thousands of years.
Its persistence across human history does not lessen the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. That persistent human evil is the story I wanted to confront. So naturally, I chose vampires.
Why Monsters?
There’s a problem with writing about an evil everyone already recognizes.
Mention slavery, and nearly everyone reading this knows their position. We’re aware of who was wrong and who bore the pain. Many of us understand the language and recognize the photographs, the histories, the arguments, and the shame.
That knowledge is necessary but can create distance.
It’s easy to condemn people who lived centuries ago without asking uncomfortable questions about us. From the safety of the present, we can look backward and wonder how they could’ve tolerated something so inconceivably wrong.
In writing these books, I wanted to remove that certainty.
Monsters help me do that.
In my books, vampires are neither enslaved humans nor allegorical substitutes.
They are dangerous. Some are cruel; others delight in murder. Some deserve very little sympathy. Then I place them inside systems that control them.
Now the question becomes a little more difficult.
If someone is given enough to survive but never enough to escape his place, is he free?
Can obedience be called voluntary when refusing means hunger, exposure, or death?
If a society depends upon some of its members being expendable, what does that make the society?
If someone technically volunteers because refusing means returning to the bottom of a society that considers him worthless, how voluntary was his decision?
At what point does protection become control?
At what point does control become ownership?
Monsters let me move the furniture around yet maintain the moral questions.
Slavery Without a Safe Place to Put It
I deliberately did not want slavery to belong to one country in these books.
Valen Corvaxis, one of the principal vampire leaders, carries a name intended to evoke Rome. That was not accidental.
Rome built one of the ancient world’s largest slave societies. Slavery existed throughout the ancient world and across cultures, continents, religions, and peoples. It changed forms. It acquired different laws and justifications. The people holding the chains changed.
That matters to me because reducing slavery to one nation or one period makes something terrible much easier to contain.
It becomes their sin. It belongs to those people in that country in that century.
But that’s the lie of slavery; it is never safely someone else’s sin.
So, I move the story among Spain, Europe, the colonies, and the newly forming United States. Governments, empires, and even the Church matter.
I use them because slavery doesn’t become an institution through cruelty alone.
It requires structure.
When Evil Gets a Desk
A single monster can murder someone.
An institution can decide who is eligible to be murdered, record the decision, assign someone to carry it out, account for the cost, replace the person who performed the killing, and continue operating before supper.
That frightens me more.
The vampire structure in Eldritch Manor has ranks, leadership, administrators, managers, rules, incentives, traditions, punishments, and rewards. Collectively, I call it The Horde.
Not everyone within it needs to be cruel. Some merely need to do their jobs. Victoria Micaela Duran is not cruel for cruelty's sake. She’s efficient. She ruthlessly balances her ledgers and uses people as needed.
That is one idea I keep returning to throughout these books. How many people inside an evil institution actually have to consider themselves evil?
Perhaps very few.
One person writes the law, another interprets it, and someone else enforces it or keeps the records. Others benefit from the system while insisting they had nothing to do with creating it. Some dislike the arrangement but have families to feed. Some know it is wrong but convince themselves that changing it too quickly would cause chaos. Others simply say they are powerless to do anything.
Eventually, an atrocity can exist with no one feeling personally responsible. By then, evil has acquired a desk, and someone has carefully balanced the ledger.
Why Government?
Government appears in these books because it holds a unique power that few other institutions have: the acknowledged authority to enforce compliance.
That power can protect human beings, or it can destroy them.
A government can take something morally indefensible and make it legal. Once it does, ordinary people no longer need to decide the moral question for themselves. They just obey the law.
That doesn’t make government evil; it makes it powerful.
And power interests me.
I am interested in what happens when law and morality agree, and even more interested in what happens when they don’t.
I’m as interested in the person who says, “I was following the law,” as I am in the person who refuses.
And I am especially interested in those who know the law is wrong but obey it anyway because disobedience costs too much.
Why the Church?
My Christian faith makes it impossible for me to leave the Church outside this story.
It would also make it dishonest for me to pretend Christians have always lived according to their faith.
Christianity teaches that human beings possess value that does not come from government, wealth, usefulness, race, rank, or social position. Christians have drawn upon those beliefs to oppose slavery.
Christians have also participated in slavery and defended it.
That contradiction belongs in these books.
I am not interested in using the Church as a convenient villain. Nor am I interested in protecting it from its own history.
I am interested in the distance between what people profess and what they do.
That distance exists in institutions and in churches. It also exists in me.
America Makes the Question Harder
The American Revolution provides an extraordinary backdrop for these books because something remarkable and terrible is happening at the same time.
People assert that liberty belongs to them while other human beings remain enslaved.
The contradiction is enormous.
That does not make the language of liberty meaningless. Quite the opposite. It makes failing to extend those principles impossible to ignore.
A nation can proclaim something true before it is willing to live by the truth it has proclaimed.
That fascinates me.
The newly minted America of these books is therefore neither hero nor villain. It is a place struggling to become something while carrying things it has not surrendered.
The monsters do not create that contradiction; they live among it.
When Good People Do Terrible Things
This is absolutely the part of Eldritch Manor that matters most to me.
Stories about good and evil become easy when good people are always given good choices, but life is rarely that generous. Choices often cost someone else, and refusing to act can carry consequences of its own. Protecting one person may place another in danger, and a person of good character can still do something terrible for reasons he genuinely believes are right.
I don’t want to excuse those actions or pretend that a good motive makes the consequences disappear.
To me, war provides the clearest example.
The American Civil War ultimately destroyed legal slavery in the United States. It also killed hundreds of thousands of people and left devastation across enormous portions of the country.
Calling slavery evil doesn't make the suffering caused by the war that destroyed it unreal, just as deeming that destruction necessary doesn't make the dead less dead. That tension pulses through my books.
There are moments in the Eldritch Manor books when people trying to protect others must make terrible choices, and innocents pay.
I don’t want my characters to walk away clean simply because I know they meant well.
The harder part may be that they must live with the choice.
What Happens Afterward?
I spend a great deal of time talking about choices and less time talking about surviving them.
What happens when you did what you believed was necessary and still cannot forgive yourself, or when you discover you were simply wrong?
That question is personal for me.
Reflecting on my life, I see far too many moments I wish I’d handled differently: times I failed people who depended on me, spoke out of anger rather than wisdom, or let pride take over. There are decisions I cannot repair by wishing the man who made them had known what the man looking back knows now.
Nothing in my life belongs beside the horrors of slavery or war, and I would never pretend otherwise.
But the underlying question matters deeply to me.
Are we only the worst things we’ve done?
I cannot believe we are. If I did, I doubt I could write these books.
Why Redemption?
I believe redemption requires more than regret. Regret looks backward. Redemption has to change what happens next.
It cannot erase the harm we caused, resurrect the dead or make a bad choice good simply because we eventually understood it was wrong.
Not everything can be mended, and the past gets a vote. I just don't believe it gets the only vote.
A person can acknowledge what he did without explaining it away. He can accept consequences and carry what cannot be undone. Then he can become someone who chooses differently when the next choice comes.
Perhaps that does not erase the old man, but maybe it creates the next one.
I need there to be redemption. That’s why redemption runs so deeply through Eldritch Manor.
Not cheap forgiveness or absolution without responsibility. Something harder. The possibility that a broken person can look directly at what he has been, refuse to hide from it, and still become something better.
So Why Monsters?
Because monsters give me somewhere to ask these questions.
Monsters let me examine slavery without pretending it belongs to one people or one century. They let me examine institutions without declaring institutions inherently evil. They let me put good people in terrible situations and refuse to give them simple answers.
And Gothic horror lets me make familiar things strange enough that perhaps we can see them again.
A vampire drinking blood is easy to recognize as a monster. So is a demon demanding obedience.
The harder monsters to recognize are the ones surrounded by respectable language, good intentions, laws, traditions, necessities, and people who believe they are doing the best they can.
Those are the monsters I am interested in.
Eventually, the question stops being whether monsters exist.
The question becomes what we do when we discover something monstrous in the institutions around us, in the people we love, or in ourselves.
And then comes the question that matters even more.
What do we do next?
F. Craig Ward writes dark historical fiction about monsters, old houses, and damaged people struggling to become better.