What got me about Dekker’s Black was not just the story. It was the structure.

Thomas Hunter lived in two worlds simultaneously. The modern world — our world, recognizable and grounded. And an ancient world that felt prehistoric and elemental and completely different in every way. When he was in one world the other was still running. The two tracks affected each other. What happened in the ancient world had consequences in the modern one and vice versa.

I had never seen that done before. Not like that.

It solved a problem I did not know I had yet. As a future writer I was drawn to ancient settings. Limited technology. Swords and fire and physical stakes that the modern world with its cars and phones and hospitals had diluted. I wanted to write stories in that world. But I also wanted to write stories that felt relevant to the reader sitting in the present.

Dekker showed me you did not have to choose.

You could tell both stories at once. You could have the ancient world with its weight and its texture and its elemental drama while keeping a foot in the modern world that the reader already understood. The two worlds could talk to each other. Could create a tension that neither world could produce alone.

When I started building Black Water I knew from the beginning it needed that architecture. Two worlds. Two sets of stakes. One character caught between them. I took Dekker’s framework and made it my own — different rules, different purpose, different spiritual logic underneath it. But the double world structure was his gift to me.

I am grateful for it every time I sit down to write.

Stephon Rudd