Cyberpunk/Urban Fantasy Fiction
Release Date: July 23rd, 2025
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
If you make a deal with the Devil, don’t forget to read the fine print.
Three operatives find themselves on the run after a corporate sabotage job goes awry. Now, their predatory employer, a heavyweight weapons-tech firm, wants its elite A-team dead at all costs. Jon is a smooth-talking charmer. Friedrich is a hacker prodigy. And Guion is the ice-cold tactician who keeps them all in line.
Backs against the wall, the men strike separate infernal pacts to stay alive. They vanish into the urban badlands of New York’s Five Hives, vowing to lie low and figure out why they’ve become targets. Meanwhile, Jon suspects there’s an insidious evil possessing his friends, and he wonders if they all got more than they bargained for.
Amid an escalating war between local gangs and the firm’s private shock troops, the fugitives uncover a conspiracy that threatens to destroy everyone they know and love. But can they stop the destruction before their inner demons seize control?
Interview with Russell Anders
What is your favorite part of the book?
There’s a scene in which Friedy and Nana Robin sit at her kitchen table and have a real heart-to-heart. Over the course of that conversation it becomes obvious that this is the first time Friedy feels fully accepted without any pressure from anyone, including himself, to be anything other than what he is. It’s sweet and genuine and very much based on the relationship I had with my grandmother.
Does your book have a lesson? Moral?
This is a story about the dangers of normalizing malignancy. The demons make that case pretty bluntly, but you can see it in the mundane world as well. The world is unkind, and it is that way largely because people collectively decided that was okay. They accepted institutionalized poverty and oppression as normal and it was allowed to spread.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Most of the characters in this book are based on real people. I say based on because they all moved quite far from their source material. Those close to me will likely recognize where Steve comes from and likely say it’s an exaggerated but accurate portrayal.
Jon, Guion, and Friedy are all based on me. They all represent different facets of me from different times in my life, but they all come from deeply personal experiences and traits. Friedy is the doubt and self-loathing of my childhood. Guion is my tendency to hyper-rationalize. Jon is my naive and sometimes stark sense of morality. All these characters grew into entities independent and less representative of me as I developed the book. The seed from which they all sprouted, though, was me.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
As I worked my way through the book and the characters revealed themselves and grew, I found I liked all of them for one reason or another. However, if I had to pick just one I would, after some teeth gnashing, pick Steve. Not only was he a ton of fun to write, but I got to reveal some unexpected depth with him. Even better, he wound up perfectly spotlighting the idea of boiling the frog when it comes to accepting evil. He’s innocuous enough at first, even fun. Jack is creepy and the beast is terrifying from its first appearance. But Steve? He just eats a lot and refuses to take anything seriously. Annoying at times, but evil? Come on.
Until all of a sudden things change. He doesn’t change. He’s who he always has been. And he’s been a demon.
What character in your book are you least likely to get along with?
Friedy. I get the guy. Like I said earlier, he’s based on a young me. But he’s hard to like. He has a lethal allergy to taking responsibility for himself and his actions. He’s thin skinned and reactionary with a rancid sense of consequences. In his heart of hearts he’s not a bad guy, but he hates himself and that makes it hard to get along with him.
What would the main character in your book have to say about you?
Jon: “Dude, what the fuck? You’re a god. You can make anything and anyone and this is the world you decided to create? This is the life you gave me? My team and I struggled. We struggled to do our jobs. We struggled to stay alive. We struggled to save people. We struggled because of you. You didn’t have to do any of this. We didn’t have a choice. You did. What kind of person makes that choice?”
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
A rule I have is that I won’t tell a story unless it needs to be told. When I feel I have to get a story out of me is when I know I have something worth writing.
At the risk of sounding pretentious, I want my writing to primarily be art, not product. Sure, I want my books to sell well and collecting a nice royalty payment on the regular sounds pretty nice, but I don’t want that to be the prime driver.
I wrote this book to get certain things out of my head and into the world. I’ve done that, and I did it in a way that didn’t leave dangling threads. In time, I might go back to the Five Hives and discover there’s more there than I thought and feel the impetus to tell another tale set there. But for now, I’m moving on to another cast of characters in another corporate-dominated, overdeveloped and impoverished urban sprawl on a whole other Earth.
About the Author
At the age of four, Russell Anders started telling stories, often interrupting his mother during bedtime reading to ask, “Then what happened?” She always answered, “You tell me,” and his imagination conjured fantastical tales of dragons and dinosaurs.
He gravitated toward a career as a technical writer and writing coach for software companies. He also briefly served as a columnist for Dragon Magazine. One of his favorite hobbies includes tabletop role playing, especially as the game master. And yes, he's as cruel to the characters in his games as he is to the characters in his books; his players love him for it.
Russel lives with the constant canine companionship of whip-smart but goofy Sigurd, an English Mastiff (the best breed ever).
Daemones ex Machina is his debut novel.
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