The haunted house story is a time-honoured tradition. But for acclaimed author and video game narrative designer Richard Dansky, the true source of terror isn’t always the monster in the basement; it’s the family living upstairs. In our exclusive Richard Dansky interview, the writer behind cult-classic TTRPGs and blockbuster franchises like Assassin‘s Creed and Far Cry sits down to discuss his latest novel, Ghosts of Smoke and Flame, and his deliberate shift into a new kind of storytelling.
Known for his deep dives into interior landscapes and single-protagonist narratives, Dansky reveals that this book presented a unique puzzle. “The trickiest part,” he admits, “was the basic pivot in the concept… I was determined to have a much bigger cast of leading roles and write something more outward-facing with action and humour, as well as the horrible thing in the basement.” The result is a family horror novel that asks: What happens when a family wakes up dead and has to figure out what’s next, with both Heaven and Hell interfering?
For fans of the horror author writing process, Dansky offers a masterclass in evolution. He discusses how the decision to self-publish forced him to take a “clear-eyed look” at the manuscript, leading to a crucial character arc that his subconscious had left unfinished. “That alone improved the story greatly,” he notes, highlighting the freedom and responsibility of the self-publishing journey.
Beyond the mechanics of plot, the interview touches on the philosophy of dread in horror. Citing literary idols like Ray Bradbury, a massive influence since childhood, and Charles L. Grant, Dansky explains his preference for understatement. He believes the scariest monster isn’t the one you describe in graphic detail, but the one the reader constructs in their own mind. This approach, blending the mundane with the menacing, cements Ghosts of Smoke and Flame as a must-read for those seeking a fresh, character-driven take on the macabre. Join us as we explore the mind of a storyteller who looks at the world and asks, “What if I took this one step too far?”
Let’s start at the very beginning. For our readers, please introduce yourself. Beyond the author bio, tell us a little about who you are when you’re not writing, what you love doing, what fascinates you, and what fuels your creativity.
Hi! I’m Richard Dansky, and I consider myself a storyteller who’s very lucky to be able to work in multiple media. For my day job I write video games, I got my start in TTRPGs, and I’ve always made room for fiction and now graphic novels and nonfiction as well. I live in Durham, North Carolina, where I spend a lot of evenings attending Durham Bulls minor league baseball games.
My house is basically a library with a scotch bar and a lot of Bigfoot-themed memorabilia in it – I’ve always been interested in that sort of thing, and then my friends just kind of seized on it and now my house is awash in Sasquatch, but in a good way. And yes, I did enter (but not win) the world’s oldest Sasquatch Calling Contest. Beyond that, I’m engaged in a lot of writing-related stuff, and I take particular pride in the work I’ve done over the years to help support young video game writers.
As for where my creativity comes from, honestly, the best answer is “the world”. I just constantly look around at things and think about what would happen if I took them one step too far. I constantly read and research, everything from regional folklore to “true” ghost stories to stuff lodged in the weird corners of politics and history, and that provides a steady stream of ideas. Not all of them pan out immediately, and some get tossed back into the idea file until the day comes when I’m finally the right guy to pick them back up and get them across the finish line.
In the early stages of a new project, what tends to come to you first: a compelling character voice, a central thematic question, or a vivid image/scenario? How does that initial spark then guide you in building the rest of the story?
Usually what I start with is an image, a particular tableau. Once that crystallizes, I ask myself two questions: How did we get here, and who got us here? From there, I dive into building the characters. Hopefully, I get to know them well enough to understand instinctively how they’d act and talk. That in turn leads me first to the image, and then beyond it.
That doesn’t mean I know all the answers before I start writing. A whole lot of my work feels like my subconscious knows the secrets and is having fun letting me in on them a thousand words at a time. But I take a lot of joy in that sort of discovery, in the moments when I write something and go “Oh, that pays off that throwaway line from chapter four” and things just click of their own accord.
Every book has its own unique set of problems to solve. What was the most difficult ‘puzzle’ you had to crack while writing this book? Was it a plot hole, a character’s motivation, the structure, or something else entirely?
The trickiest part of Ghosts of Smoke and Flame was the basic pivot in the concept of the novel from my usual. My other three original novels had all had a single protagonist and were largely about interior landscapes. This one, from the get-go I was determined to have a much bigger cast of leading roles and write something more outward facing with action and humor as well as the horrible thing in the basement.
The journey from a finished manuscript to a book in a reader’s hands can be a surprising one. What was the most significant way your book evolved during the editing and publishing process, something you didn’t anticipate when you typed ‘The End’?
The biggest evolution came when I decided to self-publish the book. I sat down and took a really clear-eyed look at the manuscript, and I immediately spotted important thing that I’d neglected to follow through on previously. My subconscious had clearly set up one of the characters for a full arc, and I hadn’t yet taken it to its logical conclusion. I immediately had to rectify this, giving that character their full, earned development and moment in the spotlight, and also granting them a much more satisfying resolution. That alone improved the story greatly, I think, and I’m glad I had the chance to go back and make that addition.
Once a book is published, it no longer entirely belongs to the author; it belongs to the readers and their interpretations. Has a reader’s reaction or analysis ever revealed something about your own work that surprised you?
All the time. I still get people reaching out proposing theories about stuff I wrote for White Wolf 30 years ago, and then I have to cudgel my brains and dig into my notes and try to remember what the heck I was thinking at 2AM with a bloodstream that was 28% Diet Coke by volume to keep me awake.
I think the most amusing version of this, though, happened with my upcoming novel Nightmare Logic, where all of the female beta readers I sent it to really loved it and vibed with what I was going for from the beginning, where all the male readers were kind of grumbly and each of them had a different reason they gave for it. I bounced that off one of the female readers, and she laughed and said, “Your book is about handling your shit. Guys are no good at handling their shit.” And I realized she was totally right, and had a good laugh after that.
Writing is a demanding, often solitary pursuit. Beyond the apparent goal of ‘telling a story,’ what is the specific, personal fuel that keeps you going through the difficult stretches? Is it the joy of discovery, the need to understand something yourself, the connection with a future reader, or something else?
Writing, and even more than that storytelling is so intrinsic to who I am and how I view myself that I cannot imagine not doing it. I have been very lucky in that I’ve been afforded the opportunity to tell my stories – and other people’s stories they’ve trusted me to interpret – to millions of people across multiple forms.
There’s a world of difference between writing for video games and writing fiction and writing TTRPGs and writing graphic novels, and each form has its own demands and techniques and unique strengths that nothing else can do, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have been able to tell stories in all of them. So, I don’t want to waste these opportunities I’ve been given to express all these different stories, because I want to keep telling them.
We often hear about authors being influenced by other books. What are some non-literary influences on your work, such as a specific piece of music, a historical event, a scientific theory, or even a landscape, that have profoundly shaped your storytelling?
One of the key elements of my writing ritual is music. Every project I work on, I build a writing soundtrack for. That soundtrack is carefully curated, and I’ll add and subtract stuff as I go along, but it’s specifically designed to get me in a certain mood that fits the story, and that tells my brain “Welp, we’re listening to Porcupine Tree now, time to work on this particular project.”
I’ve actually been lucky enough to chat with a few of the artists whose work I’ve written to, most notably Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers (who soundtracked my novel Firefly Rain) and Peter Nicholls of the band IQ, which was the soundtrack for Ghosts of Smoke and Flame. They were both absolutely lovely about it, and now I need to find a mailing address for IQ so I can send Mr. Nicholls a copy.
Is there an author, living or dead, whom you consider a ‘silent mentor’? Not necessarily someone you try to imitate, but whose approach to the craft made you feel permission to write in your own way?
I’ve learned a lot from so many authors, living and otherwise, to the point where I have an ongoing series of “Writers Who Molded Me” posts on my Patreon. But if I had to pick the one who had the biggest impact on me, it would have to be Ray Bradbury. I was in third grade when I read The Halloween Tree, and it absolutely changed my life in so many ways.
Maybe the most important one of those is that it’s really a book about why we tell stories and why we like to be scared. As a kid, I was scared of everything, I had nightmares every night. And this book gave me something that helped me come to grips with that, and turn it around so that I could make that stuff ultimately work for me.
I mean, yeah, it’s a kids book, but it’s also asking really important questions about the underpinnings of all this. And I read the book, and I started grappling with the questions even if I didn’t know enough to answer them yet, and that started me on the road to where I am today.
Let me give a shout out to Charles L. Grant as well, the king of quiet horror. His writing taught me elegance and understatement in a way that still produced brilliant effects and bone-chilling terror. Reading his book Nightmare Seasons the night before I went into the hospital for an operation was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.
Who was the first person to see your early drafts, and why did you trust them with your unpolished work? What is the most valuable piece of feedback they gave you?
The first person to really give me writing advice was George Scithers, who at the time was the publisher of Weird Tales. He was teaching the fantasy & science fiction class in the very first writing conference I attended, and he said what I still hold to be the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten: Have something to say, say it, and say it to someone. In other words, get an idea, but then put in the work to develop the idea into something real instead of just telling people you have an idea.
And once that’s done, sending it out into the world to find an audience, because the best stories are shared. That advice was far more valuable than any notes he gave on the story I had submitted, which may have been pretty good for a teenager in the mid-1980s, but was by no stretch of the imagination actually “good”.
Horror is often most potent when it’s internal. Beyond external monsters, how do you explore the slow unravelling of a character’s sanity or the horror of their own mind?
A lot of my longer fiction builds on the idea of a character’s inner flaw being manifested externally in a way that forces them to confront it. The slow build of dread is also the fear coalescing into the real world. As it gets stronger and harder to deny, then the main character gets weaker and less certain, and the resolution becomes less and less certain. I tell people I work mostly in dread, as evidenced by moments of fear and uncertainty, and that’s pretty much my approach.
Setting in horror is often described as a character in its own right. How do you approach transforming a location, whether a house, a town, or a landscape, into a source of active dread?
For me, the key is taking something that is familiar and comforting, especially to the main character, and then twisting it ever so slightly so that the difference makes it unsettling and eerie. Little things like that go a long way towards building fear. The character can no longer find comfort or safety in the familiar, because even the little things they used to trust in automatically have proven mutable and susceptible to evil. To me, that slight alternation builds the place as a setting for real horror more than any number of spikes or meathooks or upside down religious symbols ever could.
Writing a terrifying buildup is one skill; delivering a satisfying payoff is another. How do you decide when to finally show the monster or reveal the source of the horror?
Usually, my characters tell me. I don’t believe that my characters “talk” to me, but one of the foundations of my writing is getting to know those characters really, really well before I start composition. If I know instinctively what they’ll do and what they’ll say and what they want, then I’ll also know where their breaking point is. It’s when I get right up to that moment that I pull the metaphorical trigger, and that produces the most impactful moments. Pushing the characters further without that moment just sort of overcooks things and leads to diminishing returns.
The horror genre is rich with established tropes and archetypes. How do you engage with these familiar elements, the haunted house, the ancient curse, the final girl, in a way that feels fresh and surprising? Do you consciously seek to subvert a trope, or do you focus on executing it with such depth and authenticity that it becomes new again?
I have a bit of a background in literary criticism, God help me, so I look at a lot of that stuff in terms of what purpose they serve in the story. I do that, and I think about how I can repurpose or twist that standard purpose to be something new and interesting. I want to subvert the expectations the tropes provide, not for the sake of subversion, but rather to turn them into something that makes sense but provides a different experience. It’s all about “It does this, but what else could it do instead?”
To put it another way, I don’t believe in the Devil, but I love playing with that figure and what it represents and its standard horror behaviors. And when I’m done with it, I’ve hopefully got a new take that builds on expectations and then gives the reader more.
How do you approach writing scenes of intense terror or violence to make them feel physically impactful without tipping into gratuitousness?
So many of my literary idols didn’t need graphic violence to get their point across, and I absorbed that lesson. I’m a big fan of understatement and dread, and letting the reader do it to themselves. There’s a lesson I take away from Lovecraft, which is that the scariest monster you can describe isn’t as scary as the one the reader will come up with in their head.
That’s why he does all these seemingly nonsensical descriptions, like in “The Festival” – he’s deliberately throwing a whole mess of negative images and contradictions at the reader for them to resolve in the way that scares them the most. So I often pull back from detailed descriptions and let the reader do the heavy lifting on what actually might have happened.
Do you have a favourite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?
This one doesn’t spoil anything, but I think in a lot of ways it’s got more hidden menace than pretty much anything else I’ve written. It’s from “Beer and Pennies”, the first story in my collection A Meeting In the Devil’s House, and I think it does a nice job of setting the tone for what follows.
I took a drag on my cigarette, then stubbed it out against the soggy bark of the log I was sitting on. “You’re the Devil,” I said. “What do I call you? Old Nick? Father of Lies? Lucifer?”
“You can call me the Devil,” he said with a grunt. “I don’t hold with being too familiar.”
What is the specific, core truth you are trying to expose or explore through your horror?
To me, horror boils down to this: It’s about taking a real fear and pulling it out of context, dressing it up in a new way, and then being able to engage with it in a safe space using tools that maybe aren’t available in the real world. At the end of the movie or the story or the game, you can then go back to the real world knowing you’ve engaged with it and emerged safely. Maybe you won, maybe you lost, but you got to act and come away with that knowledge.
And I think that’s really important, and I think it’s really powerful. As a result, what I try to do in my writing is to take that concept and use it to address fears that are maybe more subtle than the obvious and popular ones, and give them a chance to be confronted.
You have precisely two minutes in a crowded bookstore to hook a reader who is sceptical of the entire horror genre. They look at your book’s cover and ask, ‘Convince me. Why should I read this? I don’t even like being scared.’
Well, if blunt weapons are off the table, I supposed I’d have to say something like this:
“How do you feel about lovesick angels? Demonic cell phones? Possibly psychic cats? This book has all of that and more. It’s the story of a family that wakes up dead one day, and how they figure out what happened and what’s next, despite Heaven and Hell both getting up in their business. It’s about the power of family, for good and bad, and what someone might do for love. And believe me, if you think your family’s hell, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
Ghosts of Smoke and Flame by Richard Dansky
Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean things get easier…
Charlie and Naomi Oates had the perfect life with their daughter Jessica – until their house burned down with them inside. Now Charlie and Jessica find themselves trapped in the family home as ghosts, while Naomi rejects Heaven because she doesn’t want to be there alone. But there are reasons Charlie and Jessica were left behind, and Hell has taken an active interest in bringing the family together – on its own terms. Can they reunite, even with lovesick angels, demonic cell phones, a snarky lightning spirit, and more standing in their way? Or will the dark secrets they’ve kept from each other end up costing them everything?
Because if you think your family is Hell, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Richard Dansky
Richard Dansky is widely regarded as a leading expert on video game writing and narrative. A 25+ year veteran of the field, he’s worked on franchises including The Division, Assassins Creed, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, and many more. He’s also published nine novels, most recently Ghosts of Smoke and Flame, and two short story collections. Before getting into video games, Richard was a core contributor to White Wolf’s classic World of Darkness setting, and he has worked on numerous other TTRPGs as well.
He has also entered the world’s oldest Sasquatch calling competition, dunked his hands into a vat of liquid nitrogen (twice), and briefly been the world’s leading expert on Denebian Slime Devils. Richard lives in North Carolina in a house that is basically a library with a scotch bar and a bunch of Sasquatch action figures, and he has no regrets
Patreon – www.patreon.com/richarddansky
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-dansky-9b899a/
Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/rdansky.bsky.social
Website – www.richarddansky.com
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Jim "The Don" Mcleod has been reading horror for over 35 years, and reviewing horror for over 16 years. When he is not spending his time promoting the horror genre, he is either annoying his family or mucking about with his two dogs Casper and Molly.
