Peter Lancett

In 2008 Teresa Schaeffer and I made a conscious decision to write an original feature-film screenplay exploring the themes of youth-cult obsession, the age-old search for eternal life and the failure of immigrant communities to culturally integrate, particularly when they’re concentrated in homogeneous ghettos.

   To tell the story we drew on various staples of mythology, folklore and history. The folklore we took from southern and central Europe, folklore that has come down to us in the form of vampire legends - although the folk-ish vampire is far removed from the aristocratic iconography that began with the creation of Count Dracula. The history is brought to our story via the infusion of true-life blood lust in the documented sado-masochistic horror of Countess Elizabeth Báthory. The mythology comes from the Cherokee people, for whom The Ravenmocker is the thief of life and a fitting title for this tale.

   The script has met with critical acclaim and several times has come within a whisker of going into production, but alas the wheels of independent film often move with glacial slowness. Yet we have constantly been encouraged to bring this story to some kind of birth and in the end we came to realize that we could best achieve this by adapting the script as a novel. The result is here before you now.

   The opportunity for The Ravenmocker to come to the screen will always remain open, but with this novel the story comes to life, and we’ve adopted a writing style intended to make it easy to visualize the scenes. The reader’s mind then, becomes the silver screen on which they play. We hope that you’ll enjoy The Ravenmocker.

                                                      Peter Lancett, England, November 2015