A teen pushed to the edge.

A town on the brink.

Both about to change forever!

A life-changing event leads Chris Hauser to adopt a vigilante persona and sets him on a collision course with anarchy.

Set in the fictional midlands town of Westbridge in the late-1990s to early-2000s, Nightshade: The Inception has been a labour of love of mine since I was sixteen. As the years went by, my original draft sat gathering dust while I concentrated on work or shorter stories but, at the back of my mind, I longed to return to this book and give it the due I felt it so desperately needed.

Last year, I decided that enough was enough and I attacked the original draft in a frenzy, making cuts and omissions and adding new content in the nearly twenty years since I first wrote this tale of angst, rejection, and debauchery.

Now, I am very proud with how Nightshade: The Inception has turned out and was very happy to finally release it as an e-book and paperback on Amazon in March of 2021.

I was very pleased to be invited to contribute to the Author’s Lounge. A lifelong fan of horror, science-fiction, and action films, I have spent much of my free time between working and studying writing stories of varying length and quality.

I spent about eleven years at university studying first English Studies before moving into Film Studies, specifically the field of Adaptations. I enjoyed looking at the way books and other media are transformed into movies and television shows so much that I went on to complete a PhD in the subject. Afterwards, I turned these skills towards critiquing the media I love so much on my website as well as writing various short stories and novellas but full-length novels like Nightshade: The Inception are new for me.

The challenge of writing such a long, dense story is significantly different to that of writing shorter works; for one thing, you’re placing a lot of trust in the reader to remember things from maybe fifty or even a hundred pages ago and always being mindful of unnecessary repetition. Still, I enjoyed the project as it gave me the time to experiment with different degrees of character development, perspective, and interactions, which I always try to heavily emphasise in my work.

Much of my writing comes from my own sordid imagination or is inspired heavily by my life and the people and events I have encountered and witnessed. At its core, my writing seeks to take the normal, everyday, and the mundane and introduce a fantastical element to it, be it horrific or dangerous, and focuses on dark humour and character-building.

I’ve had many inspirations over the years from a variety of media but, despite my nearly eleven years in university education, my reading is actually quite limited as I like to stick to what I know and like. Accordingly, much of my writing style is inspired by the works of Stephen King, particularly It (King, 1986), which is still my favourite novel, but I am also partial to the Red Dwarf novels by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor (1989 to 1996), selected works by H. P. Lovecraft, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books (Adams, 1979 to 1992).

It’s my hope to reach as many readers as possible with my unique blend of dark humour, relatable characters and dialogue, and fantastical spins on everyday situations. Mainly, though, I write the stories I feel compelled to tell and attempt to weave them together in subtle (sometimes explicit) ways. I am currently working on another novella, this time focused more on horror, but also have a few tentative ideas for further stories later down the line.

#whoisnightshade