Why “The Beast Hunters” works

My debut book “The Beast Hunters” recently won “Best in Fantasy” in the 2022 Indies Today Awards, a competition for self-published authors, and it had me burst out in dance in public while walking my dogs. The rush was incredible, and I definitely want to chase that (though it’s a pretty hard thing to chase). Does this make me qualified to spew any kind of story-telling knowledge? “The Beast Hunters” has great ratings on both Goodreads and Amazon, so it can’t be that bad, and a lot of people seem to actually be loving it. I don’t know if this is good enough, but I’m gonna do it anyway and talk about what I think it is that makes “The Beast Hunters” a strong first book in the trilogy (the trilogy is called The Beast Hunter of Ashbourn").

I believe there are recipes to storytelling, and I know some people think that sucks and there shouldn’t be any kind of laws to follow. Well, there really isn’t. Your story is your story, and you can do whatever you want, but there are some tools that often can help make the story fun for readers, and these are the ones I use the hell out of (because they rock).

Foreshadowing

Reading this, I bet you thought “of course,” because it’s so obvious, but there are so many ways you can use this and so much you can get away with that I have to talk about it. Foreshadowing is how you can get away with anything as an author if you do the groundwork well enough. However, if you don’t foreshadow cool events or especially twists, readers will most-most-most often feel cheated. You run the risk of creating a “Deus Ex Machina”-moment (which means “God from the machine), where “the hand of God” swoops in in the last seconds before the hero dies and saves them without them earning it. However, if you foreshadowed that if a character stands on that exact spot, holding that exact sword, after having done some sacrifice or another, then suddenly when they are saved and you’re explained why, it doesn’t feel as “meh” anymore. That’s not a great example, but let’s say you want to hang your character mid-way through the book, but also want them to come back from death (which is not uncommon in fantasy). There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way.

So your character is hanged, killed off, and the readers are shocked. “How can this happen?” “Oh, but I liked him so much.” Let’s say there is no foreshadowing for any kind of scenario, and the character returns suddenly into the gang of main characters. They’re happy he’s back, but wonder how it’s possible. He tells them something, like . . . I don’t know . . . let’s say when he dies, he creates a seed that burrows into the soil and he grows back from that seed. This is not necessarily a very cool twist, but that just means you have to work harder on the foreshadowing. Anyway, so he tells them, and as a reader, you’d most likely think: “How convenient . . . so the guy just happened to have some trick up his sleeve that saved him,” and you’d be right to think so. It will make you distrust any death in the future of other characters because it seems like the author will just “make them survive” in some way. This can be called “plot-armor”, and all Deus Ex Machina moments are plot-armor, but not all “plot-armor” is Deus Ex Machina moments.

However, if things that have happened in the story “suddenly click” once the character reveals how he survived, then it’s cool. If things that blended into the sentences or maybe seemed a little abnormal, suddenly make sense. Readers like this a lot, because there’s a huge payoff to some unknown build-up.

So how do you do it?

Okay, so for example in our seed-survival scenario, there are tons of ways that you can hint at this peculiar way of survival. Let’s say he’s a beast hunter (just to make it simpler), and during the case he might show an incredible interest in flowers and plants along the way. This is simple, but fairly effective. You can take it a step further by making some part of the case take place around some specific flowers, maybe even involve them as some clue? If someone in the group knows about his “condition,” and they don’t want to reveal it to the main character, they can talk in code about it in such a way that it will make sense when it’s revealed. You can do it in so many ways, and it’s soooo freaking powerful. I get away with so much.

This is how I used it in “The Beast Hunters”

This is hard to write without spoiling anything, so I’m just gonna go ahead with a SPOILER WARNING! The next part contains a major spoiler for The Beas Hunters!!

Okay, we good? Great. In my book, I have a character who’s hung about 50% through, and the scene builds up with readers thinking another character will pull some stunt to save him. So it’s pretty shocking when the rope tightens and his neck snaps - and many were left wondering if “that just happened.” I’ve asked a lot of readers if they felt that he wasn’t really dead, and it’s about 50/50 between people who really thought he was dead and people who felt it couldn’t be the end. But all I talked to loved it when he returned, and wondered how. When he explains he’s actually not human, but a beast called a morgal, readers want to know how that explains his survival. In short words, he has a physical heart that beats magically that he has locked inside a chest and buried it to keep it safe. When he dies, he takes over the body of someone nearby his real heart that has died prematurely and becomes them. He usually places his heart close to or in a cemetery, so there’s a reasonable flow of possible bodies.

His name is Topper. So how do I foreshadow this so that when Topper returns it’s awesome instead of lame? The main character, her name is Ara, doesn’t know of his nature, and he tries to hide it. While in a beast hunter shop (only for beast hunters), Ara is warned to be wary of her other mentor, named Khendric, as he seems to change apprentices often. The reason for this is that Topper dies often and returns as a new person, which naturally seems like Khendric constantly loses his apprentices. This suddenly makes sense to Ara after she learns of his nature. Another small thing to notice is that Topper seems quite knowledgeable about things in the world such as locations, roads, rivers, and such, which comes from him having lived for more than 200 years. There are also small comments everywhere in the story that suddenly makes sense once the readers learn of his nature.

As an author, using foreshadowing is incredibly powerful, and if you do it well, you can get away with almost anything.

The Apprentice Trope

I am well on my way to writing my second series too, which is an AWESOME science fiction series, and in both that and The Beast Hunter of Ashbourn series I use “the apprentice trope.” This trope is when, usually, your main character is unknown to the new world exposed to them. Ara is shown the Beast Hunter world by Khendric and Topper, and is totally new. This happen in Harry Potter too, to (you guessed it) Harry Potter. Same thing in Narnia with the kids. The apprentice trope is insanely nice and easy to use, because as an author you get to present the world to the reader through the main characters. We get to learn of the world with them, and you just make it so much easier for yourself. If you don’t use this trope, and all characters know of the world and theme, it’s easy to fall into the trap of “info dumps,” which is where the author suddenly starts writing things about the world that the reader needs to know. This works better in dialogue if the dialogue seems natural, but if it’s just there, written plainly to the reader, it usually slows down the story and may break the immersion. They might be wondering “Why am I being told this?” Which is a good question, and the answer usually is: “Because you need to know this for the future.” And that is not a good answer. It’s the author's job to hide what the readers need to know in such a way that it’s fun and exciting to learn about, and the apprentice trope makes that a lot easier. If you’re writing your first book, and have the opportunity to do this, I would highly recommend it.

In The Beast Hunters, I do this with Ara. In her first days with them, she learns how to set up a camp outside in the wild and make it safe against all kinds of monsters. This is a perfect opportunity to take the readers on her journey so they can learn how different this world is from our own. In Ara’s world, to stay safe at night, you need to spread acronal powder against spikers, put spears up against varghauls, make sure you have a circular defense against dustdevils, and so on. And while Ara learns this, so does the reader. It’s a perfect way to show the reader the world true Ara’s eyes. Without her, I’d have to have the beast hunters set it up like usual, but they wouldn’t talk about why they did what they did, and if they thought about every monster they safeguarded themselves against, it might come off as info-dumpy. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying it might be easier when using the apprentice trope.

There are many other things too

The book is littered with a myriad of other cool things too that help. There’s a compelling mystery that grows to be way more than the beast hunters’s first thought. There’s a lot of humor, especially between Khendric and Topper, which serves as a good contrast to the dark world they live in. There are gadgets and secret beast hunter knowledge and techniques too that draw the readers in. And for originality, the premise of the world is that all monsters are new (except one). You won’t find werewolves or vampires here, instead you’ll find villagemothers, borlins, wretchers, yenferds, oxins, claylins, emerons, and so many other creatures. I’ve heard that besides a good story, the monsters are what people stay for. They are fun, and it’s like discovering Pokemon again. When Pokemon first arrived, we didn’t know any of them, and that’s what we found exciting, and I hope to create the same feeling.

There are so many other tools to use for storytelling, but I think these two are some of the main pillars in this story, together with the “found family trope” as well. Thanks a lot for reading and good luck with future reading and writing endeavors.