Camille is not easy to explain without giving too much away.

She exists in the spiritual world of Black Water as an entity with real power and real presence. She is not a background character. She is not a device. She is a force in the story with her own will and her own relationship to Alan Charms that neither of them fully understands at first.

What I can tell you is that she is spiritual but she has physical effects. The things she does in the spiritual realm show up in the physical world in ways that characters feel before they understand. She affects people around Alan — Monica being one example — in ways that trace back to her presence in the realm Alan accesses.

This is what I borrowed from Peretti and made my own. Peretti’s spiritual beings influenced the physical world but the barrier between the realms was fixed. In Black Water Camille crosses that barrier in ways that blur the line between the two worlds in a manner that Peretti’s architecture did not allow for.

Writing her required a different kind of discipline than writing human characters. Human characters have psychology. They have backstory. They have motivations that trace back to things that happened to them. Camille operates by different rules. Her motivations are shaped by the logic of the spiritual world she inhabits. Making her feel real without making her feel like a device was one of the harder writing problems I worked through in the building of this book.

She is going to become more central as the series develops. What she is to Alan and what their relationship means in both worlds is one of the things I am most looking forward to exploring.

Stephon Rudd