Why I Keep Writing About the Darkness Within Us

We often talk about novels, characters, or the investigations that unfold within their pages. Yet we rarely talk about the question that gave birth to them in the first place.

This isn't an article about one particular book.

It's about the reason I've spent so many years writing.

There is one question that has followed me since I wrote my very first novel, and over time I've realised it has never truly left me.

Do we ever really know the people around us?

It sounds like a simple question.

We live surrounded by family, friends, neighbours and colleagues. We share conversations, routines and ordinary moments, convinced that we know the people who are part of our lives.

But the longer I write—and the more closely I observe people—the more convinced I become that reality is far more complex than it first appears.

We all reveal only part of ourselves.

The part we choose to show.

Behind it lies a quieter place, one we rarely allow anyone else to see. A place where our fears, contradictions, old wounds and difficult choices quietly coexist.

Looking back now, I realise that I've spent my entire writing life exploring that hidden place.

One of my earliest novels was The Artist. On the back cover I wrote these words:

We never imagine that the person sitting beside us in a café, the caretaker who has greeted us for years, a colleague at work, or even the friendly neighbour who holds the lift door open while we're carrying our shopping... could actually be a murderer. And you... you might be their next victim.

When I wrote those lines, I believed they were about a killer.

Today I know they were about something far more unsettling.

They were about how little we truly see beyond appearances.

As the years passed, I realised that I was never truly interested in discovering who committed the crime.

What has always fascinated me is understanding what happens inside an ordinary person before they cross that invisible line between everyday life and darkness.

Perhaps that is why certain writers have stayed with me throughout my life.

Edgar Allan Poe showed me that fear doesn't need monsters. Sometimes the most terrifying place is the human mind itself.

Arthur Conan Doyle taught me that observation is far more than simply looking. Sherlock Holmes solved mysteries because he noticed what everyone else overlooked, and that lesson has stayed with me ever since.

Wilkie Collins revealed how families can become the guardians of hidden truths. Agatha Christie reminded us that evil often wears the most respectable face imaginable, and that understanding why someone kills can be more compelling than discovering who did it.

But if there is one writer who has shaped my understanding of human nature more than any other, it is Robert Louis Stevenson.

Most readers remember Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a story about a monster.

I've never seen it that way.

To me, it has always been the story of a single man forced to live with two versions of himself.

As time went on, I realised that this duality belongs to all of us.

Every human being carries both light and darkness within.

The difference lies not in whether they exist, but in how we choose to live with them.

Perhaps that is why my novels have changed over the years while, in truth, continuing to ask exactly the same question.

When I wrote From the Darkness, I finally understood what I had been searching for all along.

Many readers see it as a novel about a serial killer.

I've never seen it that way.

To me, it has always been the story of a man trying to remain a loving father, a devoted husband and an ordinary citizen while struggling against a darkness capable of destroying everything he loves.

The crime was never the heart of the story.

It was simply the consequence of a much deeper battle.

The same question echoes through Those Who Look Too Much, where the mystery is no longer who kills, but what happens to those who spend too long staring into darkness.

Can we pursue evil without allowing part of it to settle inside ourselves?

The Gospel of the Killer continues that search from another perspective. The investigation uncovers a murderer, certainly, but its real purpose is to ask another question that has followed me for years:

Are we truly willing to face the truth when it stands before us, or do we instinctively look away?

Even The Crimson Thread Falcon, set among the foggy streets of Victorian London that have inspired me for so many years, grows from exactly the same fascination.

The gas lamps, the narrow streets and the mystery are only the setting.

The real journey always takes place inside the people who inhabit them.

People sometimes ask me why I write crime fiction and psychological thrillers.

The answer has never been crime.

Crime is simply the doorway through which I enter a story.

What truly interests me is everything that comes afterwards.

I want to understand how one seemingly insignificant decision can change a life forever.

How an old wound can shape an entire destiny.

How someone who appears perfectly ordinary can slowly become someone they never imagined they could be.

Writing has become my way of exploring those questions.

Not because I believe I have found the answers.

Quite the opposite.

I write because I am still searching for them.

Every novel is another opportunity to step a little closer to that place where guilt, fear, compassion, violence, love and hope exist side by side.

A place where people stop being heroes or villains and simply become human beings struggling with themselves.

After publishing more than twenty novels, I think I finally understand the invisible thread that connects them all.

I've never written about killers.

I've written about people.

About the masks we all wear.

About the distance between who we believe we are and who we become when nobody is watching.

And I suspect I will keep writing about them for many years to come.

Because that question I asked at the beginning still follows me today.

Do we ever really know the people around us?

I don't know if I will ever find a definitive answer.

Perhaps there isn't one.

But as long as I keep wondering what may be hidden behind a glance, a silence or an ordinary smile, I will keep writing.

Because, in the end, I've never been interested in monsters.

I've always been interested in people.

—

José Maestre Vilanova
         July 2026