Daniel Draym, a native of Louvain, Belgium, has always been an avid reader with plenty of his own ideas for stories. “But as a banker,” Draym explains, “you don’t have much spare time.” After recently retiring from his stressful, 100-hour workweeks, Draym finally sat down to create a graphic novel that would combine his love of history, mythology, and popular fiction. A couple of pages in, however, he realized that he needed to go deeper into his idea than comic panels would allow. The result is Draym’s debut novel, Dream Whisperer, the first book of the Fleming Chronicles, in which mythological and pop-culture figures collide against the backdrop of WWI.

The world in which Dream Whisperer is set starts with the premise that all characters from well-known legends and folklore actually existed, from the gods of world religions to Sherlock Holmes. (“I suggest you brush up on your Greek mythology,” the book’s protagonist, Fleming, says early on. “A lot of the most outrageous stuff in those stories did happen.”) And, crucial to the story, that list includes the terrifying aliens that lord over humanity in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. 

“They’re almost indescribable, and that’s what fascinated me,” Draym says of his early reflections on Lovecraft’s mythic aliens. “There was also this very nihilistic view that humans were just a speck of dust in the universe….That was a brilliant move by Lovecraft.” While he deeply appreciated these works and drew from them heavily, Draym did not set out to create fan fiction or even pastiche. For him, starting with a few characters that would already be familiar to many readers was just a way to “hit the ground running” toward the larger, existential questions about history and myth that Draym wanted to address.

Among the many characters with roots in popular culture that make up the book’s central team of monster hunters are Mycroft Holmes, the older brother of a certain detective named Sherlock, and the hero, Fleming, whose name is both a reference to James Bond (created by Ian Fleming) and the historic migrations of Flemish people, like Draym himself, into Britain. There’s also the titular villain, the Dream Whisperer, better known to Lovecraft fans as Nyarlathotep, the shape-shifting Outer God who resembles devilish figures like Loki in Norse mythology. 

There are, of course, very real historical elements propping up these fictional titans. As Kirkus Reviews states, “…this adventure peppers keen-eyed readers with references to everything from Jack the Ripper to 1908’s Tunguska event,” and Draym’s own eye for details in the historical moments make “the ensuing supernatural events that much more exciting.”

With crisp, fast-moving prose, snappy dialogue, and vibrant imagery that calls to mind the book’s origins as a graphic novel, Draym introduces the Dream Whisperer at the moment of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914, appearing in the guise of Countess Mathilde von Covey and setting in motion the violent act that sparks WWI:

From an open window of the second-floor flat in the building across the street from Schiller’s, a splendidly attired couple had witnessed the double assassination and subsequent capture of the assassin….She was wearing a high-necked dress with bold patterns, similar to those Gustav Klimt used in his first portrait of Adèle Bloch-Bauer.

“Someday, Frau Grafin, you’ll have to tell me how you knew, three months ago, this exact window would offer us such an entertaining spectacle today,” the man complimented her.

She smiled and raised her glass of sparkling Burgunder Sekt in a toast.

“To the end of the world as we know it, Freiherr zum Wohl!”

They clinked glasses and laughed.

“It’s such an important moment in our history,” Draym says of his decision to set the story during WWI. “It was the height of empires…[and] the start of modern times in Europe. I think it drew the map for Europe’s next century.” In that atmosphere of chaos and change, Draym saw an opportunity to insert the Dream Whisperer’s commentary on today’s world.

Slightly different from the Lovecraft-ian figure that inspired it, Draym’s Dream Whisperer earns its name by infiltrating humanity’s dreams, influencing them, and bringing out their worst behaviors. “Basically, if you had to name [the Dream Whisperer] today, you would call it Facebook, or Twitter, or Google,” Draym says. In thinking about the influence of social media on today’s world and how he sees it as flooding people’s minds and confusing their view of reality, he saw the combination of the Dream Whisperer and a time of incredible upheaval as the perfect way to explore how violence and racism can take hold of a society. “The story of the Dream Whisperer is about extremist ideas,” Draym says. “An extreme political idea that throws the world into chaos. It’s a theme that is bubbling up again today as if we are coming full circle.”

Draym says that his main ambition was to create a fast-moving story that would keep people reading but that the novel also needed to be an intelligent page-turner rooted in history. As Fleming and his colleagues rush to stop the Dream Whisperer, they find themselves confronting deeper questions about supernatural influence and manipulation while the very real battles of the Great War rage around them.

Draym is now at work on the second installment in the Fleming Chronicles, which will blend Lovecraft-ian horrors with the rise of the Nazi party. History, mythology, and religion—the subjects he loves most—all do share a troubling common thread in that when they are written down, the authors and people in charge will shape them to meet their own ends. And this is exactly the idea that he hopes to evoke with his own Lovecraft-ian Dream Whisperer. “A recurring theme is that you can’t really trust what’s been written,” Draym says. “The more you read about history, [the more] you understand that it’s something very fluid.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.