Red Serpent: The Falsifier

The reason why The Falsifier and ultimately the rest of the fourteen book saga came to be was because of my constant fear of vampires. I remember reading Dracula at a quite impressionable age and watching many vampire flicks. But there was one particular book, I remember, which I took out from the local library that gave me chronic nightmares and even possibly insomnia! I just couldn’t sleep. The images in the book were so scary and yet so fascinating to me that I thought they’d jump off the page! At one point, I couldn’t even muster up the courage to look at the book. It was that fear which later transmuted into a fascination for the mythic creatures. I started reading other books on vampires, like the ones by Anne Rice (yes at eleven!), and I started to fall in love with them. This was what made me want to write a book. At first, it was a way to pass time with my friends during recess, where I’d write short stories and sometimes even enact sections from these stories with them. But then, it got me thinking— I wanted to write a serious, grand book, which I soon outlined. I left the outline for some time, pursuing other things and moving to India for a while, after facing a few racial backlashes in school. That’s where I suppose the idea of racial tolerance was imbibed into the book later on. I took up writing the book again and finally finished in 2008. I remember in some parts of The Falsifier, there are political speeches which I wrote that were inspired by some speeches given by George W. Bush, during his presidency and the War on Terror, and the speeches of Barack Obama, leading up to his inaugural address. It can be said that certain situation and events in the book are based on the War on Terror, the racial and religious intolerance post 9/11 and the ever-changing immigration policies of the United States. Of course, some of these events are pushed to their limits, to see what the mind’s eye could perceive if certain negativities were achieved in reality.

“A sprawling epic…action packed and romantic…twists through vast swathes of time, space and metaphysics. A great read for sci-fi lovers everywhere.” — award winning filmmaker and author Martin Simpson.