The Making of Masquerade: An Introduction

Towards the end of The Falls, I was so tortured and broken, I planned to quit writing. That's why the end of the last book is so abrupt, left open and not really and ending. I was just sick of it, sick of everything, and I wanted to focus on my studies and not look at all at writing any more fiction. Boy, how things have changed. Now (in 2022) that I'm at the end of my studies -- the fall of the Roman Empire -- it's the other way around. I want to do nothing but write more fiction, and I've got endless ideas. Me being so warped and distorted, at the end of writing The Falls, is unimaginable to me now. And yet, that was the plan when writing the prior book to that one, The Pixies: to somehow warp or change my life even if meant putting myself through the wringer. I wouldn't recommend this. Whoa, absolutely not.

My eleventh book, Masquerade, suffers as a result. What I wanted after The Falls, and all the madness from writing that book, was something completely plain and wholesome and friendly, even Disney. Then again, I wanted to write a historical sweep of one of the bloodiest eras of all time: The French Revolution. Thats why the book starts out very pretty and precious and not at all threatening -- I even rip off the hypnosis scene from Aladdin -- it's a Disney book. Then, at the end of course, it turns into a horror with their vampire landlord draining the dreams of his tenants to stay immortal forever.

The book shifts and transforms quite a bit, going from a Disney time-travel at the start to a superhero novel and then to this full-out horror. In the first draft, I think this was very poor. There was a strange UFO subplot I had to cut, making Delacroix an alien rather than a vampire. When I got to the final draft, the book -- I think -- really came together. I was able to have Masquerade, the superhero, be a through-line in the book rather than a strange presence that shows up three quarters of the way through.

And yet, this is my weakest book. Because I handled this with the kid gloves and was so afraid of writing something violent and disturbing, I left out all the splatter we associate with the French Revolution. So what we're left with is one of my most puritan, non-violent books which basically erases much of the French Revolution. There's not even a guillotine. It's like how, in terms of foregrounding something, there wasn't even a Xenomorph in the alien film, Prometheus. When it comes to the sequel, trust me, there will be a Xenomorph.