It all began because I had a problem.

I wanted to write an urban fantasy set in the Lovecraftian Mythos but the whole point of the Mythos is that these beings and creatures are so alien that humanity means nothing to them while the point of urban fantasy is humanity's struggle against monstrosity.

The things that populate Lovecraft's Mythos are vast, impersonal creatures. Humans react to them, usually by going insane, but the Mythos does not know nor would it care if it did.

This makes it difficult to say the least. It's also why the Mythos is almost always squarely in the genre of horror.

So along comes Charlie.

Charlotte Tristan Moore. She's a young woman who has survived a terrible thing that happened in her formative years. It nearly destroyed her, but Charlie isn't one to be destroyed. She fought to get herself back through ten years of therapy and martial arts training until she can now make it through her day passing as normal. With her I had to draw from the stories of too many women in my life. Women that through the years have trusted me with their stories and their pain and their strength.

Charlie became the nexus of all those wonderful women, their avatar. (And I pray I did them and her justice.) I had my heroine. Now I needed a villain that could bring the elder gods of the Mythos into line with the story I wanted to tell.

And I discovered Nyarlathotep, the Man In Black, the Crawling Chaos. Son of Azathoth, the Mad God, who may or may not have created the universe, he does walk the earth in the form of a man causing chaos and destroying lives.

He is as close to as trickster god as the Mythos gets. And a trickster god I can work with.

I pulled a lot of things into the development of the Man In Black. I gave him a coat that is alive and hates him, a cursed black-bladed katana, and a red right hand.

The red right hand is courtesy of the song of that name by Nick Cave. You've heard it, it's been used in several movies and TV shows from Scream to Peaky Blinders. It's a great song, hell Nick Cave is a great singer, and it very much informed the air of dark mystery I gave the Man In Black.

I mixed these characters with a world rich from the Mythos, using established things and concepts and adding my own, like a cancer god who is manifesting by bringing bits of itself into our world through tumors, and a fallen love goddess turned crack whore. I didn't hold back and the novel shows it. It's dark and bloody and violent and also full of love and humanity's ability to simply survive in spite of overwhelming odds.

I'm damn proud of it.

And that's how I came to write RED RIGHT HAND, a Lovecraftian horror novel masquerading as an urban fantasy.

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GUEST AUTHOR INFORMATION: Levi Black is the author of Red Right Hand as well as a pseudonym. He was born and brought up in Georgia. He was inspired to start writing because of the Robert E. Howard books and Golden age comics he read as a child.  He currently lives in Metro Atlanta with his wife and an array of toys, books, records, and comics. He also has interests in tattooing as well as photography. He's been weird his whole life and is almost as scary as he looks.