David Lambert's Blog

Some stories arrive fully formed. Others take years of pressure before they finally break the surface.

Black Lung was the second kind.

I didn’t start writing it because I wanted to scare anyone. I started because the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. A dying Appalachian town. Coal dust everywhere—on porches, in lungs, in the air itself. People who cough but never quite understand what they’re breathing in, or why the town feels like it’s slowly suffocating.

At first, I thought I was writing about a place.

Then I realized I was writing about a process.

Black Lung isn’t really about a monster in the traditional sense. It’s about consumption. About what happens when something ancient learns how to survive inside people, and when people learn how to profit from it. It’s about exploitation—of land, of labor, of silence—and the way entire communities can be taught to accept their own slow destruction because “that’s just how it’s always been.”

The horror comes from familiarity.

Coal towns exist. Company towns exist. Environmental illness exists. The scariest part wasn’t inventing the entity beneath the mountain—it was realizing how little invention I needed once the groundwork was laid.

When I write Southern Gothic horror, I’m not interested in jump scares. I’m interested in atmosphere. The weight of air that feels wrong. The sense that something has been watching long before the first page. Black Lung demanded patience. It wanted grime. It wanted history. It wanted characters who didn’t see themselves as heroes—just survivors making one more compromise to get through another day.

I spent a lot of time thinking about breath while writing this book. Who controls it. Who steals it. Who sells it back.

And that’s really what Black Lung became for me: a story about suffocation—physical, moral, and generational. About how easy it is for evil to feel ordinary when it feeds you just enough to keep you alive.

This isn’t a fast book. It’s a slow inhale.

If you’ve read it, thank you for trusting me with the descent. If you haven’t yet, just know this: Black Lung wasn’t written to shock you.

It was written to stay with you.

— David A. Lambert

I get asked two questions all the time: “What inspired you to write this book?” and “Where did the idea come from?”

The short, honest answer? I’d like to make a little money off it. I’m a writer, sure—but I’m also practical. Of course, it’s incredibly rewarding when someone reads my book and says they loved it. That’s the kind of fuel that keeps the engine running. But yeah, like most authors, the dream is to profit from the work.

As for where the ideas come from? That’s the easier one: my imagination. All my books are fiction, so every story, character, and scene comes from that noisy, busy place in my head. But I think what people are really asking is: “How does a story like this actually begin?” That’s where the creative process kicks in.

For Cane Creek, it was a simple conversation—a friend mentioned her grandmother grew up in a small Kentucky town by that name. Cane Creek. There was something about it—musical, eerie, haunting. It stuck with me. That was all it took to crack the door open.

Hushbone, though, was different. The seed for that story came during my morning commute down Pellissippi Parkway into Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was winter. Still dark at 6:30 a.m., headlights carving through the cold. Off to the side, up on a hill, I passed this old white church—lit from within by soft yellow lights, glowing eerily in the dark like it was watching the road. Every day I drove by, it gave me this creepy, unsettled feeling. And if you know anything about Oak Ridge, you know the National Labs are nearby—and strange rumors have always circled that place.

I started thinking: What if something was buried under that church? First, it was aliens—Oak Ridge kind of lends itself to that. Then I thought maybe vampires—but I’m not a vampire guy. Then one morning it hit me: What if something ancient and malevolent had been sealed away beneath the church? Something dangerous. Something forgotten. And what if the church was never built to worship…but to contain?

That drive turned into a ritual. Each morning, more of the story came to life. And just like that, Hushbone was born.

I grew up a Georgia kid—the kind who practically lived outside. If I wasn’t riding bikes or swimming in a mud hole, I was deep in the woods with my friends, soaking up every second of summer and coming home covered head to toe in that thick red Georgia clay. Nothing smelled like it. Nothing stained like it. Rust-colored memories, permanent in every sense.

One of our favorite spots to crash was Bo Trivett’s dad’s old Vietnam army ambulance. Parked out back and left to rot, it became our basecamp. Sleeping on those dusty old stretchers? Probably not safe—but unforgettable. Those nights, the woods felt alive in a way only kids can feel. Spooky, electric, and full of stories just waiting to be told.

Rangatang was born from those memories.

What if five boys—just like the ones I grew up with—went on one last summer camping trip? What if their fun and freedom collided with something much older, much darker, hidden in those woods? What if something cursed was waiting... and followed them home?

Sam, Billy Joe, Jake, Tanner, and Will—these characters are stitched together from real people. We all had a group like that. And we all had that girl. For me, it was Angie Thomas. For the record, she had brown hair, not blonde. I had a crush on her for half my life. But that’s another story.

The Entity at the center of Rangatang? That’s straight out of my imagination—but the setting, the fear, the feeling of something creeping just out of sight? That’s real. At least, it was real to us back then.

I wrote Rangatang to explore that edge between childhood and something far more dangerous. A line crossed. A mistake made. A creature that never forgot.

I hope you read it. I hope it takes you back to your own muddy summers—and I hope it chills you just enough to keep the lights on.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

—David A. Lambert

Rangatang