Happy Monday!

For those of you who made your way over here from the Bradford Bunch Blog, you can find a key to the visual map below; for those who didn’t, you can check out that blog entry here (The Bradford Bunch is a blog featuring my agent’s author clients).

Since I’m a visual artist as well as a writer, I created a map of ten things that influenced my novel currently on submission, RUN DEVIL RUN—an urban fantasy about a Tiki bar owner/magickian in central California who must track down an elusive demon in order to exonerate her parents—two infamous ceremonial magickians accused of killing off rival occultists.

RUN DEVIL RUN, a visual map of influences

Just what is all this hoohah? Here’s the key:

1. Elsa Lanchester as the Bride (Bride of Frankenstein, 1935): my heroine, Cady Bell, has her hair bleached like this iconic movie character. Electricity and man-made monsters are also part of Cady’s story, and the movie provides a connection between Cady and her partner’s teenage son, Jupe

2. Big Sur, California shore: the setting in my book is loosely based on two cities bordering the Big Sur region, Carmel-by-the-sea and San Jose

3. Tiki Bars (pictured here: Tiki Ti, Los Angeles, CA): Cady owns a Tiki bar like this with her demon friend, Kar Yee, an ex-pat from Hong Kong

4. Demons: earthbound ones inhabiting human bodies, and Big Bad ones with nasty teeth and horns that live on another plane

5. Halos (from various religions): the earthbound demons—and anything non-human originating from another plane—have halos that most normal people can’t see; Cady can

6. The Lost Colony of Roanoke: theories abound regarding what happened to this colony. In my universe, earthbound demon origins in America started here

7. Aleister Crowley: Cady’s parents belong to an occult organization of ceremonial magickians inspired by some of those to which this infamous British occultist belonged. Moonchild (1917) is Crowley’s novel about magickians warring over a magickally engineered child; my heroine’s conception is loosely inspired by this. Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist turned occultist and student of Crowley’s, tried to conceive a real-live moonchild in an infamous Babalon Working in 1946 with L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Scientology cult. Truth is always stranger than fiction, folks

8. Demon goetias: Cady seeks help from Lon Butler, owner of a library of arcane books and father to Jupe. Some of them are priceless, and were acquired through not-so-legal means

9. Hellfire Club tunnels in West Wycombe: Lon Butler belongs to a Hellfire Club in my book, but it’s a secret society for demons, not spoiled aristocrats

10. Der Struwwelpeter: a classic German book of gruesome Fairy Tales. I was born in Germany and still have a copy that my parents gave me as a child. In RUN DEVIL RUN, one of Cady’s friends, a retired Catholic priest, discovers an important clue in a similar gory Fairy Tale

XOXO,

Jenn