Authors Who Influenced Ornamental Women

The other day, someone asked me if there were any specific authors that influenced the way I wrote Ornamental Women. 

(What, you don't have a copy of Ornamental Women, my Gothic Fantasy novel, that is available in print and ebook? Well, you can remedy that here.)

These are some of the authors whose influence I see at work under the skin of Ornamental Women; they are all people whose work has inspired me, so I list them with all possible gratitude:

 

Anna Smith Spark 

When I started working on Ornamental Women in earnest, I was reading Anna Smith Spark's Empires of Dust trilogy. Dissecting how she wrote about acts of violence was instrumental in giving me the vocabulary for the bloodshed in Ornamental Women, both in terms of word choice and how violence can be used to set pacing in a scene. And I like to think there's some fairly grimdark, horrific violence in Ornamental Women, so you can judge for yourself how successful I was. This particular influence is perhaps most visible in the chapters where Serafina has her back to the wall, grits her teeth, and lets her knives do their dark work.

 

Alexis Flower

Readers might notice--hell, might even object to--my use of deliberate anachronism in Ornamental Women. Nightsong is the most obvious example; it's patently ridiculous to have a bardic subculture inspired by black metal and to have its foremost practitioner speak with an outrageous Valley Girl accent, but Alexis Flower's beautiful, pornographic fantasy comic I Roved Out gave me the courage to throw that stuff in and never look back. If IRO can have characters in gimp masks among all the fantasy questing elements--well, then the field is wide open. If you're familiar with both IRO and OW, it's pretty obvious that Nightsong would party HARD with Maeryll and Cinder. 

Also, Nightsong's Traitor's Argent was heavily inspired by Becky the "psycho Rooster" in IRO, albeit with a weird, biblical bent.

 

Tamsyn Muir 

What I learned from Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tombs series is pretty simple, but it was crucial to the tone of Ornamental Women: you can combine incredibly dark subject matter with characters who are sometimes funny and honestly a little over-the-top. Plus, I could totally see Serafina and Nightsong dressing as Harrow and Gideon for Halloween.

 

Michael Moorcock and Andrzej Sapkowski

Taken together, Michael Moorcock and Andrzej Sapkowski form the two most traditional fantasy inspirations I was working from. Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone was the first fantasy novel I really fell in love with as a teenager, so that's not too surprising. The character Cassie Mabcrowe is a bit of a tribute to Moorcock's hero Corum, who has the alien Eye of Rhynn and the six-fingered Hand of Kwll, but she's the "lady version, who is also power-hungry and a little evil" of that. 

Wayland is a character cast from the mold of Andrzej Sapkowski's Geralt of Rivia or at least descended from that archetypal style of laconic monster hunter. This is probably most evident in Wayland's encounter with the noknitsa, though I think that plot line ends in a far darker way than the Witcher books would ever offer.

Charles Dickens 

One of the biggest influences on my writing style and plot structuring in Ornamental Women was an author it often feels like you're not supposed to admit to enjoying anymore: Charles Dickens. I'll make no bones about it--I love Dickens. 

Dickens was especially inspirational in the way he often sets a weird group of disparate characters wandering in a sprawling setting, with the same set of characters running into each other and intersecting in interesting ways. It probably pushes the bounds of credulity that Serafina crosses paths with Wayland, Nightsong, and Cassie in Piskaro--and that Nightsong separately meets up with Wayland and Cassie--but letting happenstance have a role in the overall structure of the book really appealed to me. 

Also, wherever my sentences got long, and bristled with asides, that's a little bit of Dickensian wordsmithing creeping in. I'm not sorry.

Ornamental Women Podcast Episode

Bad Books for Bad People, Episode 94: Ornamental Women

We’re celebrating the release of cohost Jack Guignol’s debut novel Ornamental Women with a conversation that touches on inspiration, process, and motivation. Settle in for a wide-ranging chat about the novel, a dark gothic fantasy about the intersecting lives of three strange–and sometimes magical–women who want to solve the mystery of a disappearing corpse.

How do you square conflicting feedback from test readers? What are some of the challenges that come with translating subculture influences into a fantasy milieu? Do “bad” characters deserve love? All these questions and more will be answered in this episode. 

Buy a copy here! 

The Moyle Mines

We had to skip a week due to gallery stuff and internet issues, but we were finally able to conclude the Krevborna group's delve in the Moyle Mines.

 

Characters

Dario Diego Durant, swashbuckling swordsman

Doctor Anastasia Nadya Strahov, a gun-priest who says strange thing about blood

Johanna Albrecht, a lycan bard with a particularly keen nose

Ulu, the party's urska mom

Varro, a young snow elf bearing a magical sword

Morwenna, a carrion-eating harpy  

Events

When we last left the Charnel Hounds, they had just defeated three demons in the depths of the Moyle Mines. After the fight, they carried on exploring. They found a pool fed by a natural spring; the water was strangely warm, and deep down in the pool they saw a glimmer of light. Ulu dove into the pool and swam down to retrieve the glowing object. When she resurfaced, she held a glass-fronted wooden case. Inside was a yellowed human skull with a golden laurel wreath at its brow--the light was coming from the wreath.

The group narrowly missed blundering into a cavern with a flammable gas leak--which their lantern would have surely ignited--but Dario noticed that their lantern's flame flared and grew bigger as they headed in that direction. 

They doubled back and found the rest of the skull's skeleton in a large glass case. After placing the skull onto the rest of the skeleton, it animated. The Charnel Hounds were now in the presence of St. Anderlecht. The saint could sense the presence of demons within the caves, and so announced that he must retrieve his sword before dealing with them. The group followed him to a rubbish pit where he rummaged for his blade.

As St. Anderlecht searched, the group noticed the sound of heavy breathing coming from a crack in the cave wall. Ulu reached in and extracted Stavran Moyle, a former commander of the Hounds who had betrayed them, even though he tried to stab her with the dagger he clutched in his hand. Stavran was in bad shape; his leg was broken so badly than bone protruded from his skin and the group could smell that rot had set in. Stavran was tied up and gagged--they planned to deal with him after the demoness in the mines was dealt with. 

After following St. Anderlecht to a chamber with a large pit in the center, Varro and Ulu leaned over the hole to see what was down there--and were surprised to see the demoness and her minions climbing over the lip. Lerhmassa had the lower body of a great golden worm and the upper torso of a human woman. Well, if a human woman had spiraling golden horns and metal plates all over her body. Her minions were mutated miners; sharp bits of gilded metal erupted from their skin in random patches. 

The ensuing battle was difficult. Anastasia discovered that mundane weapons couldn't hurt Lerhmassa, but luckily the group had Varro's magical sword and Ulu still had the potion from Raenessa that enchanted her claws and fangs. Morwenna kept the enemy at bay with her scissor blades, softening them up for other members of the party to get kills. Dario, Anastasia, and Johanna set to work clearing the minions. When Johanna was hit in the melee, she entered a berserk rage and assumed her wolfen form--she bisected her foe in retaliation and sent him tumbling down into the pit in two halves.

During the battle, Lerhmassa seemed to recognized the Hounds, saying, "Ah, you are the ones hunted by Krusikal!" The name Krusikal meant nothing to them. 

Speaking of the pit, after taken some heavy wounds, Ulu charged Lerhmassa and fell into the pit as well--landing on a pile of gold coins and trinkets. During the fight, both Ulu and Varro found themselves near death, but Anastasia's healing magic and the timely delivery of a healing potion from an airborne Morwenna kept the group from taking any casualties. In the end, the minions were dispatched and Ulu took Lerhmassa in her powerful jaws, shaking her decisively to break her neck. 

What was St. Anderlecht doing during the combat? He was busy sharpening his sword with a whetstone. And when he did join the battle, he missed with every swing. When he tried to take credit for the victory after the fact, Ulu knocked his skull back off his skeletal body, rendering him inert again. Johanna took St. Anderlecht's sword and Ulu pried the golden laurels from his skull.

The cave system was thoroughly looted of gold (though the group would later leave the town's trinkets on the doorstep of the church) and they found a tome called The Book of the Seven Carrion Winds on a corpse underneath a mining cart. 

Johanna interrogated Stavran Moyle. They learned that he had betrayed the Charnel Hounds into an ambush by the Fist of Arjal at the behest of a man named Yavor Mikalek. Mikalek paid Stavran, of course, but he also had Stavran's youngest brother hostage. Yavor didn't know the full reason why Yavor wanted the Hounds done away with, but it had something to do with "half a weapon" that Yavor didn't want in circulation. And why lead all of the Hounds into the trap? It was to make sure it didn't look like a single person bearing that weapon had been targeted. 

Once Johanna was satisfied with the information she had, she tore out Stavran's throat. However, a strange thing happened. Purple energy poured from Stavran's eyes, his corpse sat up, said a few words in a different voice, and then he collapsed--dead again, but his eyes and tongue had been burned out. Morwenna then consumed his flesh.

When the group returned home to the Kaul House in Braelin, they found that they had visitors again: Pandora and Morrigan Rue were there, as were Crispin Telimov, the tailor, and the Aivra Williams, the schoolteacher. We'll find out what they want next time.

The Doomed Yee-Haw Roundup

We've been doing group watches of Weird Westerns over on the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Discord server. To keep it varied, I've tried to run the gamut--from eerie psychological horror on the prairie and movies heavy on the brutality to mean-spirited revenge tragedies and the weirdest Spaghetti Western known to man. Here's what we've feasted our eyes on (in case you want some solid recommendations or wish to recreate our film series):

The Wind

Bone Tomahawk

The Salvation

Django Kill, If You Live...Shoot!

Grey Knight (aka The Killing Box aka The Ghost Brigade)

 

The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

Dinner and Delving

After the previous session's downtime, the group was resolved to take the Nokoviks up on their invitation to dinner, then head to the village of Goranstad in pursuit of the commander who had betrayed their mercenary band.

 

Characters

Dario Diego Durant, swashbuckling swordsman

Doctor Anastasia Nadya Strahov, a gun-priest who says strange thing about blood

Johanna Albrecht, a lycan bard with a particularly keen nose

Ulu, the party's urska mom

Varro, a young snow elf bearing a magical sword

Morwenna, a carrion-eating harpy 

Events

The group assembled (along with with Raenessa and Irenya) and made their way to the Nokoviks' place for dinner. (Beaumont D'Orleac stayed behind, saying that someone must watch the house while they're out.) The party was greeted warmly by Yungfang, but a little less so by Mei-Lin, which was par for the course. Still, the Nokoviks clearly believed in hospitality, offering salad greens dressed with ginger and mustard, steamed rice, and a chicken and vegetables dish fried in a spicy chili sauce. For dessert, they were given buns filled with sweet bean paste.

Dinner conversation turned a bit fraught when Yungfang was a little too open when asked why he and his sister had come to the Vespermark from the Khanlands. Yungfang explained, to his sister's consternation, that their village was preyed upon by a vampire lord and that they had led an uprising against the undead. They managed to slay the vampire, but when the vampire's kin arrived seeking revenge they had to flee the country of their birth. Mei-Lin was adamant that telling the story made them vulnerable; she was clearly concerned that they could be hunted down, even so far away from home.

In the morning, the group headed south from Braelin to Goranstad. They found Goranstad to be little more than a shanty town of miners' tents, with only one permanent building: Goranstad's church. However, they arrived in the midst of a flurry of excitement--there was to be a hanging in Goranstad that very night! The condemned was a man named Vatroslav, a former laborer at the Moyle mine, who was caught in possession of a number of stolen gold and silver items. 

Asking around about the Moyle Mines unveiled some interesting facts: the Moyle mine had run dry years prior, but some of the miners still loitered around it; other miners claimed that the Moyle mine was either haunted or cursed; Stavran Moyle, the party's quarry, was seen heading to the Moyle mine to talk to his brother, but hadn't been seen since.

The group managed to convince the guards standing watch over Vatroslav to let them have a word with him before his execution. The man seemed stark, raving mad--speaking of the glory of gold, the shining beauty of golden fruit from the golden tree, and the ascendance of an entity called Lerhmassa. The Hounds recognized the name Lerhmassa--she was a demoness of greed thought long banished beneath the earth. Their interrogation was interrupted by the arrival of the priest and his men, who led Vatroslav to a hastily erected gallows where he was hanged without incident.

Deciding that the Moyle mine should be their next stop, the group was able to bluff their way past the menacing-looking miners guarding the entrance by pretending to be new recruits to the cult of Lerhmassa. They took the birdcage elevator down to the last-known operational mine shaft and began to explore. There were cart rails laid to transport ore and even a few carts still on the tracks. They passed over a carving on the stone floor--a large tree bearing heavy apples. They found a space with spare mining equipment--and discovered an explosive. (They took that with them, of course.) 

The also found a small office area, but all of the survey maps and documents had been effaced with ink to make them illegible. However, when the desk in this room was touched, they perceived a flash of golden light coming from back the way they had come. Heading back in that direction, they saw that a number of demons had been summoned from the symbol on the floor they noticed earlier. The demons had gilded horns and hooves, and carried golden blades with serrated teeth. The group charged the devils. Although the demons were resistant to their mundane weapons, they were still able to best them in combat. Once dead, the demons dissolved into molten pools of gold.

And that's where we ended for the night. Next time they will delve deeper into the mine. 

First Advance

We're trying something new in the current Krevborna campaign: we're actually meeting on a shared video call to do advances as the characters grow in skill and power. Previously, I thought people would consider that a waste of time, but I think they actually had a good time just hanging out and talking about where they want to take their characters.

The session also gave us the opportunity to play through a little "downtime" in the town of Braelin. No dice were rolled, but the characters got a chance to talk with the NPCs more, further their relationships in town, and learn more about their new home. 

 

Downtime 

Ulu paid a visit to the Nokoviks' store. Yungfang wasn't around, but his sister Mei-Lin was. Ulu restocked on rations for the group and bought a bunch of daggers. She asked about any art they might have for sale, and Mei-Lin gave her one of her brother's paintings for free; apparently, Mei-Lin has a low opinion of her brother's art. Ulu also left with an invitation for the group to have dinner with the Nokoviks. On the way back to the Kaul house, Ulu stopped in at the gaol and had a conversation with Ulysses, the town's necromancer sheriff. He compared necromancy to baked goods, which was perplexing.

Dario availed himself of the amenities at the Blue Room, including a brutal massage from Naomi, the woman who runs the place. Later on, he met up with Johanna and Varro to check out the Wolf & Rose tavern--where they met Embrelle, the cambion who owns it. Like the Charnel Hounds, Embrelle was once a soldier, having served in the Hellwar. She and Varro compared greatswords, and made a tentative plan to spar at some point. Johanna asked if they ever had live music, which got her an open invitation to perform on the Wolf & Rose's small stage. They also made the acquaintance of Wyatt Hothstaedder, the Knight Labyrinthian keeping watch on the mountains from Fort Onataiga. Furthermore, they saw some local shifty toughs with small rag dolls tied to their biceps; they explained that they worked for Doctor Ilsa aka Ragdoll Ilsa. They weren't shy in letting the group know that Doctor Ilsa peddles alchemical intoxicants, as well as serving as the local doctor and brothel owner.

More importantly, the group learned that the two men who had been asking around town after them were soldiers from the Fist of Arjal--the very army that had destroyed the Charnel Hounds. No one knew where the soldiers were currently, but Embrelle doubted that they had left Braelin. They seemed very determined to find the last of the Hounds. 

Anastasia and Morwenna took a little side trip to scout out what was going on over at the Children of Eternal Penance compound. They were, obviously, a cult--one lead by a mysterious Brother Jacob. They weren't let inside the walled compound, but were given a printed tract called The Many Sins of Mankind and Cure Above All Cures, which explained that Brother Jacob was "spiritually married" to every member of his flock. It was somewhat obvious that these spiritual marriages also give him conjugal rights, but the less said about that the better. It was also said that Brother Jacob could perform miracles.

When the group reconvened in Kaul House, they found visitors awaiting their return--the two soldiers from the Fist of Arjal were sipping tea in their parlor. Their butler, Beaumont D'Orleac, had made the "guests" comfortable, but Irenya, the maid, was prepared to make them less so--the two soldiers couldn't see it, but she had a pistol trained on them.

The soldiers were there on an errand of conscience: they had found out that the Hounds had been betrayed into a trap in Trevania. As such, they could not stomach being part of a treachery. They had sought out the last of the Charnel Hounds to return a battle standard that had been taken as spoils of war. Before departing, they told the group that one of the men who betrayed them--a commander named Stavran Moyle--was currently in a mining town to the south called Goranstad. That would be the party's next stop. 

Advances

Ulu raised her Intimidation skill

Johanna raised her Survival skill

Morwenna raised her Smarts

Anastasia took the Ambidextrous edge

Varro took the Trademark Weapon edge

Dario took the Attractive edge 

Total Skull: May, 2026

Things that brought me delight in May, 2026:

Hokum

A belligerent American author (is there any other kind?) travels to Ireland to dispose of his parents' ashes at the hotel where they spent their honeymoon. As it turns out, the hotel harbors a few dark secrets that the writer finds himself inextricably drawn into. I really liked director Damian McCarthy's previous film, Oddity, and while Hokum is a little more reliant on jump scares than I usually go in for, it's a worthy follow up with some truly tense moments and a plot that takes some turns you probably won't see coming. I absolutely loved the horrible little horror host man who shows up on the television at one point; when is that guy getting a spin-off movie of his own?

Hannah Whitten, The Foxglove King

From the standard-issue cover art, you probably wouldn't expect that the premise of Hannah Whitten's The Foxglove King is that a busty drug-running necromancer is recruited by the church to spy on the maybe-traitorous crown prince and investigate how entire villages are being destroyed by unknown magic. However, The Foxglove King does quickly settle into a familiar groove of love triangles, power plays in the upper echelons of society, and strange destinies about to unfurl. Even so, this was a fun read with strong characters, a compelling setting, and plenty of potential for this to develop in interesting ways in the rest of the trilogy.

Is God Is

Is God Is had a really intriguing trailer, but I wasn't really sure what to expect from it--which left me way open to being very pleasantly surprised by it in the theater. In Is God Is, twin sisters who were scarred by their father as children are summoned by the dying mother and given a quest: find their father and kill him. What follows is a Southern Gothic revenge tragedy that is a little but arthouse and a little bit psychotronic. It splits the difference by being unrelentingly violent--and often laugh-out-loud funny. I really loved this one; it's in the running for best new movie I've seen in 2026, for sure.

 

Kylie Lee Baker, Japanese Gothic 

Japanese Gothic is another thing that surprised me in May. A friend read Kylie Lee Baker's Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng and was disappointed by the execution, so my expectations were low going into this novel. Japanese Gothic is a tale of two traumatized people reaching across the deep chasmic divide of time, desperate to feel whole. One timeline is set in the modern world, the other is set after the downfall of the samurai. In the "modern" time line, the protagonist is on the run after committing a murder he dimly remembers--and he's haunted by the disappearance of his mother when he was a child; in the "historic" time line, the protagonist is the daughter of a samurai whose father's failed rebellion has doomed the family. There were some moments in this novel that I thought suffered from the usual "horror novel credibility problem," but the ending somehow ties up the dangling threads in such a way that even the moments of narrative strangeness make sense. 

 

They Live

It's been a long time since I've seen They Live, but my girlfriend hadn't seen it before so we gave it a watch recently.  My god, They Live is even more relevant now that when it was originally released; it definitely feels like a Cassandra-style warning to the future that went unheard. They Live is absolutely and deservedly one of John Carpenter's masterpieces. And that fight in the alleyway that feels like it takes up a third of the movie!! Amazing. This is an essential PLANET MOTHERFUCKER movie, of course.

 

Molly Tanzer, And Side by Side They Wander

A new book from Molly Tanzer is always cause for celebration. And Side by Side They Wander is an incredible, heart-breaking novella about an art heist in space that is secretly a riff on Orpheus and Eurydice. The book is highly recommended if you want a small dose of non-technical sci fi that meditates on art and authenticity versus mechanical reproduction. And Side by Side They Wander is a short, quick read, but it grapples with some pretty heavy ideas in its relatively short page count. It also has some stuff for the shroomheads--oh wait, are we supposed to call them sporror fans now? 

 

Dimmu Borgir, Grand Serpent Rising

May was a strange, difficult month for me, but Grand Serpent Rising helped get me through. Dimmu Borgir makes meat and potatoes symphonic black metal--but sometimes what you need is comfort food. What else there to say? This album is their first in about eight years--it doesn't really have any surprises, but it's definitely better than the one that came before it. I know that sounds like faint praise, but this is a solid record worth check out if you like the style.

 

The Ghost

In May, I got a chance to revisit one of my favorite Euro Gothic flicks: The Ghost aka Lo Spettro. Starring the incomparable Barbara Steele, The Ghost is the story of a crippled man whose wife has been seeking comfort in the arms of another. When the scheming duo off the husband, he begins to get his revenge on them from beyond the grave. But is this a story of supernatural vengeance or has someone deviously arranged circumstances solely to benefit themselves? This is one of Riccardo Freda's best; truly a master of the genre making it look easy.

 

Live from the Succubus Club 

Live from the Succubus Club is a supplement about playing vampires involved with the music scene for the fifth edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. Surely, this book was inspired by the upcoming season of The Vampire Lestat, but the material in the book is of such high quality that it's impossible to call it a cash in. This is the kind of supplement that makes me want to run a Vampire campaign, despite the obvious hurdles that poses--like learning the mountains of lore that seem to adhere to the game like non-metaphoric leeches. Still, the temptation is mighty.