Goodreads asked Christian Ellingsen:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Christian Ellingsen My writing tends not to come from a single idea, rather lots of ideas gathering together and playing off each other over a time until they reach a sort of critical mass, at which point I can start writing.

One idea, though, that helped form The Silver Mask was: what would it be like if Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos was a mainstream, state endorsed religion rather than the realm of crackpots on the fringe of society?

Of course, there are real-life pantheistic religions with malevolent deities, but what if they were all malevolent, that there were no nominally good deities to offset the twisted ones?

In the end, as it played off other ideas, it became an original pantheon of malicious gods and goddesses and the setting became more focused around what it would be like two hundred years after those deities had been overthrown - short enough that the fallout of their destruction still marked the world but long enough that order had been re-established.

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