All the little facts about the witches and different African ceremonial masks .... are those all true? Goodness gracious, if they are you must do a ton of research!
Heh heh; I pretty much don't write without researching. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. If I fabricate something out of thin air, I generally attempt to base it on something at least semi-factual so that it has the ring of authenticity. For example, for
LABYRINTH, I looked into the kind of trees one would find in the woods of Maine (since I've never been there, I wasn't sure which local varieties would be native to the state). I checked a couple of details about Tudor houses to make sure I didn't blunder in its description. I even found a picture of a Rolls Royce Silver Seraph, just in case I needed to describe it accurately at some point.
Yes, the info about the African masks is true. No, the book by Keziah Mason is not; I made it up on the spur of the moment. However, Keziah Mason comes from the H. P. Lovecraft story
Dreams in the Witch House. Arkham, MA, and Miskatonic University are also Lovecraft's creations. Since I have contributed a significant amount of short fiction to various anthologies dealing with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, I figured it would be fun to blend a little of it into
DARK SHADOWS. As you probably know, the Leviathans were based (loosely and mostly unsatisfactorily) on the Cthulhu Mythos.
In the end, I just hope it ends up coming together so that ye author doesn't look like an airhead. Or if he does, a well-read airhead.
