Badlands: Viper's Gulch by Robert Hatch

Author:Robert Hatch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, supernatural, monster, hunter, badlands

Afterword

For a very long time (Since I published the first Badlands short stories) I have wanted to do something with giant serpent legends. When you research folklore, you find the southwest is littered with many stories of huge snakes that swallow people whole. The problem is how to make it interesting.

Hunter has faced demons, monsters of all shapes and sizes, magic users, and strange creatures. Really at this point a big snake is kind of a “one and done” kind of affair. Find the snake, kill it, end of story, kind of boring when you think about it.

So I looked at a giant viper from other angles. Some of the less experienced characters of the Badlands could face it. Maybe a group camping and the snake attacks but Hunter comes in to save the day, although a bit cliché at this point and I’ve done that a few times. Maybe attacking a town sort of like a “Tremors” type of thing. However, every idea I had just did not seem to work for me. I looked around and noticed giant snakes were used as sort of a side monster and I could not find an example of the serpent being the central focus of the story. I just put the idea away.

Later on I had an idea for a psychic who was also an idiot. Granted that when we think of mental powers we also assume they grant a level of intelligence. My idea was an idiot with that much power would be a danger to himself and everyone around him. Thus, Cletus was born, but what to do with him.

It was working out an idea with a similar theme (that will be published later) that I came upon the idea of mental projection. That is a construct of the mind that is for all intents and purposes real but controlled by a psychic. In the Badlands, psychic powers, like magic, are very rare. The difference is psychics are less understood than wizards or sorcerers (That’s saying a lot when you think about it). That’s partly because I have already indicated there is an underground of magic users in the Badlands world that guard their secrets but also spend a great deal of time studying their powers and how to enhance them.

Psychics on the other hand are much more random. They are born into their powers, they manifest at different points and their powers are vastly different. I established Lucy Winwood as having psychic powers in “Comes the Hunter” and Hunter himself mentioned there are other with powers in the world. Some were dangerous according to Hunter. It was not a huge leap to pull a character like Cletus out and use him to demonstrate that.

So to what end? As I said the mental construct came to mind then I remembered the classic film “Forbidden Planet.” Monsters of the Id sprang into mind and we were off to the races. So it was easy to add in the giant serpent with little effort.

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