The Darkness in my trilogy is not the kind of monster that we’ve come to know. It is an ancient manipulator disguised as something familiar. In The Darkness, the entity that badgers Edward understands his weaknesses better than Edward understands them himself. It does not howl into the night, scrape at doors, or bang at windows. Instead, it seduces and persuades. It studies the wounds people carry quietly and believe no one can see. Weaknesses like loneliness, hunger, shame, fear, and desire. This ancient being often offers answers. You deserve more. You’ve suffered enough. Take what should have been yours. No one understands you. You are justified.
In Legacy of Darkness, evil is rarely obvious. It comes wearing a mask of permission, rationalization, validation, and love. The Darkness sees the weakness inside a person. It recognizes the wounds that each psyche carries within and understands that people rarely fall into evil all at once; they surrender themselves one compromise at a time.
When I created The Darkness, I explored something I had wrestled with long before writing fiction—the unsettling awareness that evil does not always arrive as a demon, forcing the wounded to make compromises. It learns who a person is, sometimes speaking to him from within. And perhaps most frightening of all—sometimes it tells us exactly what we want to hear.