It’s April, 2019, and it’s once again time for daily,
letter-themed posts. Instead of trying to find people, places and things from
the Stone Soldiers universe, I’m going to do something different this year. I’m
going to take readers behind the scenes and share some of the cool stuff that
didn’t make it into any of the books. Most of this stuff is actually from
folklore—tidbits of this and that that I researched and studied to work into
the novels. Unfortunately, not all that research ends up making the cut, and a
lot of really interesting stuff gets left behind…
For today’s A-entry, I picked an easy one, the Almas. If you
haven’t heard of the Almas, don’t feel bad, you’d know the creature from its
more common, North American name: Bigfoot.
That’s right, ole Harry Henderson himself is known by avariety of names from around the world, including Alma or Almas, from the
Mongolian/Russian region, which comes from some local dialect and means “wild
man”.
How does the Almas fit into the Stone Soldiers universe? In
2016, I was working on a series of prequel short stories that showed the history
of Detachment 1039 before the Stone Soldiers program—Shadow Detachment. One of the last stories I was working on was to
be set in the 1981, and was to have Major Mark Kenslir going behind the Iron
Curtain to steal the Head of Medusa from the Soviets. Yes, it's a supernatural version of the classic Clint Eastwood Cold War film, Firefox...
While the story, Red
Magick, was to feature the infamous Rasputin (surviving into the modern era thanks to
magic), I felt it needed something more. Looking into Soviet and Russian
folklore, I stumbled across the Almas (Bigfoot in Russia), Stalin’s experiments
to put human heads on gorilla bodies, and the Dog-faced men of Eastern Europe.
It all seemed to go together and I set out to finish the story…
...Which just kept
getting delayed and delayed. Maybe one day, I’ll finish it, but for readers of
the series who might have wondered where Bigfoot is in a supernatural series featuring
so many modern myths, have no fear—Bigfoot is out there, in multiple places
around the world.
And while you’re waiting for the next Stone
Soldiers/Spectral Ops installment, maybe you might want to check out Rasputin,
Dog-faced men, Stalin’s super soldiers experiments, and of course, the Almas.
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