Profile

David W. Edwards is the writer, director and producer of the feature film Nightscape and author of the novels Nightscape: The Dreams of Devils and Nightscape: Cynopolis. He attended the University of Southern California’s prestigious screenwriting program and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Literature while working for a variety of Hollywood production companies. He’s the founder and former CEO of a successful high-tech market research firm, and a former two-term state representative. He currently lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his family. 

Q&A

What’s your main inspiration for the Nightscape series?

The most obvious influence on my work is H.P. Lovecraft’s pulp-era stories of cosmic terror. His mythology resonates today because it’s informed by a decidedly modern (or even post-modern) brand of existentialism. The alien gods of his imagination are wholly indifferent to humanity. In Lovecraft’s universe, the human race is both alone in having moral compunctions and subject to the whims of gods and other supernatural forces it can’t hope to understand. The Nightscape mythology involves a similarly abstract pantheon but for wholly different ends. At the risk of sounding pretentious, the series is intended to dramatize the evolution of human consciousness. Saying much more than that would risk spoiling future narrative developments.

Should I experience entries in the Nightscape series in any particular order?

Each entry in the series—book, comic, film, album or whatnot—is designed to stand alone. Provided I’ve done my job properly, you can enjoy them in any order and more importantly, on their own merits. Experience with the series, however, will be amply rewarded. For instance, Nightscape: The Dreams of Devils contains a bonus short story that serves as a prequel to the film. This story—about a radical puppetry group and its experiments in ‘acid telepathy’—offers an origin for the film’s supernatural threat. The story and the film complement each other without spoilers. But you’ll have a qualitatively different experience if you take in both.

Are you a novelist who makes films or a filmmaker who writes novels?

Is it a cheat to describe myself as a Möbius strip–a novelist who makes films when viewed one way, and a filmmaker who writes novels when viewed another? I suppose that’s a fancy way of saying I’m peripatetic. That’s how one of my former bosses described my tendency to seize on one interest after another. Don’t worry: Nightscape is forever, natch.