Delving Into "Devil Killer Fenrik"
...a look inside the "Barbarians of the Storm" book that closes the second arc
Well, it’s been almost a week since Devil Killer Fenrik has been released. It’s the 2nd Side Quest book and the 8th Barbarians of the Storm entry, overall. It was a complicated and hard book to write, even more so than its predecessor, the epic An Axe to Eat the Gods, which was my longest and I feel my most ambitious story.
As I was organizing my thoughts and my path ahead while working on both of these books, things started to shift for the series as a whole. The biggest of these shifts was the total size of volumes the Barbarians of the Storm series would have. As long as it is already, it became 20-30 percent shorter than what I originally had planned. With that, Fenrik 1984 shifted from the end of the 1st arc to the start of the 2nd arc. This has a lot to do with how it and Devil Killer Fenrik perfectly bookend the 2nd arc, in my opinion.
Originally, there was going to be one Fenrik Side Quest per arc. However, Devil Killer Fenrik merged my ideas for two books (Fenrik 1989 and Fenrik 1992) into one story. This contributed to the difficulties I had with it, but it did make for a better book, overall. It also allows me to now jump right into the 3rd and final arc with the next book, which I will probably start within the next month. I will talk more about those plans in a future post.
Anyway, Devil Killer Fenrik is a strange book, which might not mean much with how unique the Barbarians of the Storm series is, but this one features a lot of new genre-bending things. Plus, merging two big ideas into one book also adds to the bizarre adventure Fenrik is thrust into. In fact, people who still simply refer to this series as “sword & sorcery” make me think that they still haven’t read beyond the first two books. Sure, that’s a strong element to the series but it certainly isn’t broad enough to define what Barbarians of the Storm has become, and this genre-bending evolution is why I created a universe where nearly anything can happen. Also, I wanted to have the freedom to experiment with a myriad of cool, pulpy genres.
Devil Killer Fenrik starts out like an episode of classic G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero or the American Ninja films then shifts to Ridley Scott’s Black Rain before giving you a taste of the Blade films, Silent Hill, eldritch horrors, Hellraiser II, and Dante’s Inferno. While I know that sounds like a lot, I had to make it work and for these things to flow into one another seamlessly. Fenrik (and his new allies’) journey in this book is a wild one, but the objective and the path is always clear: get to Hell, save his young daughter, and kill the devil responsible.
The gravity of what happens in this book sets the tone for what the final arc will be. Things will be much darker and due to the “final boss” in this series, they need to be. That doesn’t mean that these books will lose hope. Amelea exists as Fenrik’s guardian angel to keep him fighting for the purity of the light in his war against darkness. But how will he continue to evolve as evil’s power grows and he becomes a literal killing machine standing against it?