Samuel DenHartog's Blog: The Road to 1,440 - Posts Tagged "letters"

There’s something uniquely unsettling about stories where evil doesn’t roar, but whispers. When I first set out to write Subject to Corruption, I wanted to explore that quieter battlefield — the one where ordinary souls are slowly nudged off course by unseen hands. Not through dramatic temptations, but through small, daily choices that seem harmless at first. The idea was to show how the greatest defeats often start with a simple shrug.

Rather than telling a traditional story, I chose the form of personal letters between two demons: a mentor and his student. It gave the work a rawness and intimacy, letting readers feel the slow, grinding efforts to undo a single human life. I wanted readers to laugh sometimes, to feel a creeping unease at others, and to realize that these battles — exaggerated though they are — have shadows in the real world.

Crafting the voice of Vilethorn was a careful balancing act. He had to be clever, cruel, and yet strangely funny in his own way. The tone had to walk a line between dark amusement and genuine philosophical reflection without ever becoming preachy. Every letter became a chance to explore pride, fear, loneliness, self-importance — all the subtle cracks that evil loves to widen.

Stories like this, I believe, are most powerful when they leave space for the reader to recognize themselves. Subject to Corruption is not just a story about a demon and his assignment; it’s a distorted mirror, held up with a crooked grin, inviting the reader to wonder where the real battle lines are drawn.