Dark MC romance usually rides through desert dust and US highways. Poison Apple takes place in a German industrial town, where the darkness hits harder, and not because of a lack of light.
The town in the book is invented. The feeling isn’t. I only write what I know.
I don’t come from the Ruhr area, where Poison Apple is set. I grew up in the south-west, on the lower Neckar, and I’ve watched a slow disappearance my whole life:
- A well-known hosiery factory: gone.
- A microphone factory: gone. Its halls now house sheltered workshops.
- A headphone factory: gone.
- A maker of shoe insoles tried to save the company with designer shoes: gone.
- Four iron foundries once. One left.
And everyone in town knows what happens to the one that’s left if the big carmaker next door ever decides to shut its gates.
Half the town now lives off the old institution that keeps growing. Factories made things. Now the town takes care of people. Nobody planned it as a trade-off, it simply happened.
Nothing in a place like that collapses with a bang. It goes quietly, one gate at a time, and what grows in the gaps is something else: clubs, back rooms, people who know someone who knows someone. That’s the ground the Sons of Ragnarök MC stands on, and it’s why a single mom with a beauty salon and a toddler fights harder for every euro than any biker in a cut.
Gray concrete. Empty halls. Quiet streets where everybody knows everything and nobody says it out loud.
The poison apple never tasted like danger. That’s the whole point.
Poison Apple: Snow White and the MC Beast, out October 13. The first course of a five-course menu.
👉 Pre-order now: mybook.to/PoisonApple
