First Came the Darkness. Then came the medical blue.
The idea for my first book, The Dark Harvest Trilogy, began with women I met at a college reunion. They had astounding careers, but parts of their beginnings were a long way from the polished lives they’d built. That distance caught my attention. There was much more to them than their professional introductions could possibly explain.
I took fragments of those life stories and let my imagination get involved. That’s generally where the trouble starts.
I also wanted women at the center of the darkness. Men get plenty of opportunities to be ruthless in fiction. I thought women could handle the assignment.
And I wasn’t interested in making them dangerous only because a man had betrayed them. I wanted women with ambitions, intelligence, secrets, and the capacity to make unthinkable choices of their own. Women whose accomplishments might make people trust them before anyone thought to question them.
The women I met inspired pieces of the characters’ backgrounds. What those characters became belongs to fiction. A college reunion supplied the spark; I take responsibility for the disturbing part.
What Happens After the Introductions?
A reunion gives you the updated version of a person. You hear about careers, accomplishments, and where life has taken them. Years get compressed into a conversation, sometimes with a photograph or two offered as supporting evidence.
But a professional title can only tell you so much.
What interested me was the distance between where these women began and where they ended up. A difficult or messy beginning doesn’t determine someone’s character, of course. People overcome extraordinary circumstances and build admirable lives every day.
For a novelist, though, that distance opens a door. You start imagining what a fictional person might conceal, what she might protect, and how far she might go to preserve everything she’s built.
Then you give her the intelligence and authority to act on those impulses.
Now you have my attention.
That curiosity helped shape The Dark Harvest Trilogy. I wanted to explore women who could occupy positions of power while carrying motives the people around them couldn’t see. Their competence would matter. So would the assumptions others made about them.
An accomplished woman can earn admiration before she speaks. In fiction, that creates a fascinating opportunity to examine what happens when admiration discourages scrutiny.
Giving Women Their Share of the Darkness
Female characters deserve the full range of human behavior, including the parts that make us uncomfortable.
I wanted mine to have agency in the worst decisions, too. They could calculate, pursue power, protect secrets, and understand exactly what they were doing. Their choices needed to carry weight.
There’s something especially disturbing about a person who understands the consequences and proceeds anyway. Add professional authority, access to vulnerable people, and colleagues reluctant to ask questions, and the possibilities become unsettling very quickly.
This is where my interest in psychology meets my interest in medical suspense. I’m drawn to the explanations people construct for themselves. How does someone come to believe that her goal justifies another person’s suffering? When does an exception become a practice? What does she tell herself afterward?
Those questions can keep a story moving long after the reader knows something terrible has happened.
They also explain why my first book needed a cover with a little menace. By that point, a pleasant landscape wasn’t going to cover the situation.
The Book That Started It All
Three chilling tales, one unforgettable journey into darkness. When secrets fester in the shadows, courage is the only light.
The Dark Harvest Trilogy introduces Elwin Jester, a seasoned investigator whose latest mission takes him into Detroit’s decaying Morthaven district. What he uncovers reaches beyond familiar corruption into sinister experiments, psychological battles, and haunting truths that refuse to stay buried.
Inside a hidden clinic, the past collides with a chilling present. Every discovery pulls Elwin deeper into a web of betrayal, power, and humanity’s greed.
The people responsible have knowledge, influence, and very strong objections to being investigated. Their ethics, unfortunately, are less well developed.
Across these three tales, Elwin confronts ruthless adversaries while struggling with his own moral limits. Pursuing justice puts him in increasing danger, and the closer he gets to the truth, the harder it becomes to know whom he can trust.
The trilogy asks uncomfortable questions about the price of progress and the people forced to pay it. Who decides whose suffering is acceptable? How many people have to stay quiet for a hidden clinic to keep its doors open? And what happens when those entrusted with protecting life begin treating it as something they own?
Elwin has to confront those questions while facing people with powerful reasons to keep their work hidden.
It’s a difficult assignment. I gave it to him anyway.
Why That First Cover Is Spookier
The cover of The Dark Harvest Trilogy reflects the atmosphere of that particular book. It was my introduction to readers as E. Chance, and I wanted it to suggest the darkness waiting inside.
Hidden clinics, disturbing experiments, buried secrets, and people making horrifying decisions called for an unsettling first impression.
Consider the cover a fair warning. What you do after that is between you and your reading lamp.
The story has a spookier atmosphere than my later books, so its cover belongs to that mood. It marks where my publishing journey began, before I developed the medical-blue identity readers would see afterward.
That sequence matters to me. I wrote the book, gave it a cover suited to its darkness, and then began thinking more broadly about how my work would look together.
Apparently, once I’d introduced the hidden clinic, I decided it was time to address the color scheme.
Then came the Medical Blue
As I moved forward with other books, I wanted a recognizable visual identity for E. Chance. That’s when I chose medical blue.
It connects to the territory I write about: medicine, psychological tension, professional authority, and the trust people place in those who appear qualified to help them.
I also wanted to move away from relying on gory imagery. There are other ways to make a reader uneasy, and some of them wear clean uniforms and speak very calmly.
Medical blue carries associations with care, competence, and reassurance. Those associations interest me because my fiction often examines what happens when trust meets concealed intent.
A clinical setting can look perfectly orderly while something deeply wrong happens inside it. That tension gives the color meaning within my broader brand.
The Dark Harvest Trilogy came before that decision. Its spooky cover remains part of its identity and the beginning of mine.
The Dark Harvest Trilogy: Your Invitation to Morthaven
My first book grew from a real encounter, a writer’s curiosity, and a willingness to imagine women doing the unthinkable.
From there came Elwin Jester, Morthaven, and three tales about corruption, dangerous ambition, and the cost of pursuing justice when powerful people need the truth to stay buried.
Order your copy of The Dark Harvest Trilogy today and discover the book that began my journey as E. Chance. Step into the shadows with Elwin Jester and prepare for an unforgettable journey.
And if you decide to read it late at night, remember: the cover did its part.
Comments