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Keri Lake on Eldritch
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Vengeance, love, and a story that wouldn’t let her sleepBefore a single chapter of Eldritch existed, the question of whether it deserved to exist was already answered by a simple biological test: did it wake her up? Lake has described this as the only reliable filter she has for which ideas are worth her time.
The story has to excite me and wake me up at three in the morning, or I’ll cast it aside.
warhawkevault.wordpress.com, “🎙 Author Interview: Keri Lake | Warhawke’s Vault Book Blog”Lake was asked in late 2012, well before The Eating Woods series existed, what connected her books to one another. Her answer names the engine that would eventually drive Zevander, the centuries-old assassin at the center of Eldritch, and Maevyth, the woman hunted for a prophecy she never chose.
I actually weave vengeance into a lot of my stories. It’s the common thread throughout my newest series. And love, of course.
The gothic darkness in Eldritch is sometimes read as a genre pose, but Lake traced it to a specific, unglamorous origin: a child on a couch with her mother’s poetry anthology. That early absorption of verse shaped the writerly instinct that would eventually produce flesh-eating creatures and plague-ravaged worlds.
My earliest influences were actually poets. My mom had a huge book of poetry and I’d sit and memorize the poems. I started out writing poetry and my love for twisted tales eventually evolved over time, turning into short stories.
The darkness in Eldritch isn’t fashionable. It has been accumulating since childhood.
How she wrote it
No outline, early mornings, and a disaster of a first draftEldritch runs 774 pages, spans dual timelines, and arrives with its own glossary, map, races index, pronunciation guides, and a list of the Aethyrian gods. Lake built all of that without a fixed blueprint. When she explains why, the reasoning is not temperamental but practical.
Keeping to an outline limits my creativity with the plot. It boxes me inside of an idea that becomes difficult to explore beyond.
The absence of an outline means the first draft carries none of the control a structural plan would supply. Lake is direct about what that produces, and about what the draft’s real purpose is.
My first drafts are a disaster. It’s all about getting the words onto the page as fast as I can.
warhawkevault.wordpress.com, “🎙 Author Interview: Keri Lake | Warhawke’s Vault Book Blog”The shaping comes after, through a layered revision process she described in 2022: self-edit, then her editor for story-level issues and plot holes, then an alpha reader, back to the editor for line edits done in quarters, then beta readers, then a final full read-through. The process is long enough that the elation of finishing the draft has worn off before the real work begins.
Moral simplicity is, for Lake, a craft failure before it is a thematic one. She has been building characters who resist clean categories since her first published book, and Zevander, who unravels over Eldritch’s pages as both a killing machine and a traumatized man, is the fullest version of that refusal.
It’s difficult to relate to something that is completely good or evil. When I write, my demons have a conscience and my angels are flawed.
What she wants us to sit with
A secret passage out of real lifeLake has articulated what she thinks fiction is actually for, and her answer reaches past entertainment into something closer to infrastructure. She made this case in the Inksorcery interview, framing the author’s job as construction work of a particular kind.
Stories are what people escape to when real life becomes overwhelming. In a way, we are creating these secret passages for readers to slip into and leave their stressful circumstances for a while.
That philosophy about fiction’s purpose has a corresponding goal she has set for her own books. She states it on her own website without qualification.
My goal with every book is to give my readers an immersive escape into dark and haunting realms.
Immersion, in practice, meant building a world rather than publishing a book. Alongside Eldritch, Lake made available a full glossary, a map of Mortasia and Aethyria, character art, a races index, and pronunciation guides for the Aethyrian gods, all free. That context matters for understanding the candid admission she posted to Goodreads, which acknowledges that even a fully realized world cannot guarantee every reader will want to live in it.
I strive to write a better book than the last, but the truth is, some readers just don’t vibe with some stories and that’s okay.