Photos Related to Wasteland in Red Square -- Demon Concept Art

This week's photos are the most interesting of the series because it will be dealing with the concept art and ideas that went into developing the Hell Spawn. [WARNING: There are spoilers in this blog post, so if you have not read the book be forewarned.]

I was on two minds whether to add dragons among the hordes of demons pouring from the Hell gates because I didn't want the books to seem like fantasy novels. I decided to include them because I needed Hell Spawn capable of inflicting mass casualties. They will only appear in Wasteland in Red Square. This was the artwork on which I based my dragons.

For Wasteland in Red Square, I wanted to up the ante and introduce Hell Spawn much more terrifying and destructive than the soul vampires from Hell Gate. When I stumbled across this piece of artwork, as well as the next two in this posting, I developed the concept of the ravagers. I think they are one of the most evil demons I've come up with... so far.

When I was developing the demons that would guard the portals, I came up with the concept of using Golem, the animated anthropomorphic protectors of Jewish ghettos. However, I wanted mine to be much more intimidating and powerful than the man-sized guardians from Hebrew folklore. To give the Golem a more gruesome appearance, I changed them from being created from inanimate material, such as stone, to being a compilation of human body parts. I stumbled across the above artwork while researching other demons and decided to adopt the basic body design for my own Golem, although those that appear in Hell Gate and Wasteland in Red Square have significant differences. The process on how the Golem are created will feature prominently in the next book in the series -- The Rise of the Sataners.

Are the Nachzehrer zombies? Not in the traditional sense. I liked the concept of hordes of shambling dead roaming through the countryside and attacking the Hell Gaters en masse, but did not want to turn my book into a zombie apocalypse novel. So I created the Nachzehrer as the desiccated bodies of those condemned to Hell who come back to wander Earth because this is the realm they know. Yes, they eat human flesh, which is what makes them dangerous, but they do not have the other attributes of a zombie -- they are not rotting away, and being bitten by a Nachzehrer does not mean you will die and come back as one.