So, you’ve probably heard me mention monsters (joke, just kidding I know I talk about them incessantly), so I thought I would go into a little detail here on my blog. The most questions I get asked are about the monsters, so expect a few more species-specific posts over the next few weeks!
This is the first sketch I ever did of one.
Today’s monster is a nagy! This is the first monster I ever conceived of, and I’ve been using related imagery for most of my teasers and photos and even the front cover of the book.
When you think of a nagy, the first thing that should pop into your head is: tentacles! Yes, the nagy has tentacles. 12, to be precise. It is the size of a barn and has no bones, but is covered with a mild paralytic slime—meaning, it might make you go numb, but if you get in large doses, you won’t be able to walk.
They have several rows of teeth and an excellent sense of smell. They are incredibly difficult to kill. They are vicious, violent, fast, and luckily, quite rare.
They will eat animals, such as deer or cows, but their preferred meat is human. That said, if hungry enough, they have been known to snack on their fellow gargs, so I guess I wouldn’t say they have very discriminating taste.
If you meet one, run. Find a river to throw it off your scent. Otherwise, get your affairs in order.
This monster is one of the simpler in concept, and I took pieces of it from the Krakken or Cthulu—you know, the typically tentacled monsters. But it was just the beginning…
This is the stippled drawing I did. It’s about 20” W x 14” H. I used sharpies, and it took me about 12 hours.
This one is smaller, but another style I tried with markers. It only took about 2 hours, but I think you can tell, haha.
This is a teaser image I made of tentacles in an abandoned house (abandoned places being basically the entire setting for the book).
And another abandoned bench + tentacles.
In my head, the nagy sort of represents the series as a whole, so even though it’s the simplest of the monsters, and a lot less complex and interesting than some of the others, it’s probably still the closest to my heart.