Inspirations for The War Devil

With the first book of the Spirit Tamer series, The War Devil, out on Amazon, I’ve been  thinking about the best way of describing it. More specifically how it relates to other books.

Having two books I could relate too seemed like a good idea. Saying ‘The War Devil is similar to ______ and _____’. Off the top of my head I thought of Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep’, but I got absolutely stumped while thinking of a second one. I mean really stumped.

Digging Deep.

One reason for how difficult to pinpoint direct points inspiration is just how long I’ve been working on the story. Most of the time, I tell people I started writing when I was 13. That’s half true. Spirit Tamer was formed by two stories from when I was at least 3 years old. The Toy Wars and Nightmare Tamer.

The Toy Wars was a physical story I told with my Toys. It followed a multi year war starting when I was three years old to when I was 13, and was between my stuffed animals and the plastic action figures. I would watch, listen too, or read things and then reenact them within the greater narrative of the stories I made up with the toys I had. I covered a pretty wide range from interpersonal relationships with betrayals, affairs, friendships and love up to planetary wars represented by the rooms of my home, super weapons, and the politics of both side keeping the various nations intact.

Nightmare Tamer is a bit more difficult to describe. As a child, I had a great deal of night terrors. Most of it is fuzzy now. I can remember being attacked by aliens like ET in my home. I can remember tripping over a mummified body in the middle of a field. And I can remember stumbling into a cave that had a large snake that could control these odd clay monstrosities that it sent to attack me.

Spirit Tamer is a fusion of those two stories. It takes place in a much larger universe with different factions fighting against each other with various interests. However, it ultimately only focuses on 2 or 3 characters as they struggle with their perception of that reality.

Picking Apart the Plot

At first I attempted to think out story plots that I may have read or been in contact with that were similar to the one in my book. A fairly daunting task now that I think about it, but I thought it was ‘a good idea’. The plot isn’t exactly ‘Blade Runner’. There was a lot of mental ground to cover, and my mind just locked up trying to remember everything over the years. I doubt The War Devil is an original or new plot, I’m simply saying of everything I remember reading and watching, nothing leaps out at me and says it’s similar to The War Devil.

Here is the basic breakdown of the plot. A character hires two mercenaries to do a job, the two mercenaries after getting the details decide to just take the money and walk away, but not before fucking about thereby making the situation worse for the character who hired them. At a glance, it doesn’t seem so unique. I could perhaps even point out a couple stories that sound similar, until I break down the details.

See, I could possibly draw comparisons with stories where the mercenaries simply leave the main character, or where the mercenaries stick around but buckle against the pressure and fail anyways. But I have a lot of difficulty thinking of a story where the mercenaries see the danger, recognize the impact, and decide to half-ass it.

There are a lot of subtle references or things that are inspired from other works across multiple media, but that’s true of all creative works. Nothing is really original. Ghost in the Shell comes to mind, as does Blue Submarine No 6, Aeon Flux, Akira, Terminator, Little Petshop of Horror’s, The Matrix, Alien, but one stood out above the others.

Vampire Hunter D.

From the main characters name, the idea of paying mercs to come in and solve a problem out of their control, and the world that was created and it’s effect on humanity. The Vampire Hunter D series stands out among most other stories I’ve read. There’s two things that hold me back from committing to that description.

Vampire Hunter D is a much more static story structure. Typically D is approached in the story, and he works to solve the problem. He doesn’t change as a character, and the stories mostly focus on the characters the higher D. He doesn’t grow between the stories, and at least for how far I got with the series I never felt like I learned anything new from the first book. I much prefer to write more dynamic story with the characters who grow and change from story to story.

The other aspect is how Vampire Hunter D melds the concepts of SciFi and Fantasy. In the Vampire Hunter D series, Vampires took over the world and used technology to reshape the world, and create demons, monsters and other horrors in the wilderness. Spirit Tamer is focused on AI surpassing humanity so there is a much larger emphasis on SciFi. There are fantasy elements to parts of the story, but they are a lot more subtle.

Plus at the end of the day, it would be weird to say my book is like Vampire Hunter D without the Vampires.

If anything you’ve ready here sounds interesting to you, then you can find the first book of Spirit Tamer: The War Devil here;