About Prima Materia

Welcome! I am L.S. Johnson, award-nominated author of dark fantasy and weird fiction, and this is the repository for all things related to Prima Materia. An author friend described PM as “the vampire War & Peace” ... and honestly I still haven’t come up with a better logline for it. 😊 Prima Materia is about warring vampires, the alchemists who want their blood, and maybe—just maybe—the return of a serpent god; it’s about the ethics of violence and the nature of faith; it’s got found families, dry wit, and an awful lot of blood and biting; it’s set in a diverse, queer, grubby, bawdy Enlightenment Europe both like and unlike our own, where “science” and “reason” are often in the eye of the beholder and beings not quite human walk among us. Every writer, I think, has a passion project, the one where we throw every trope and element we love into a story and run with it. Prima Materia is mine. 

In this notebook you’ll find pieces related to the series: choice bits of research, galleries of art, character and conlang guides, notes on craft, the soundtrack I’m working with ... All I ask from you is to sign up before you dive in. I won’t use your email for anything save to send the occasional update on the project. I’m hoping in the future to offer subscribers some perks: exclusive shorts, preorder discounts, that sort of thing. But that won’t be for a while yet; 2022–25 really flattened me for all sorts of personal reasons, and recovery has been slow. 

Questions? Thoughts? Please feel free to reach out. And if you do sign up for this site? Thank you. This may be my passion project, but it’s also a passion I want to share. Your support helps to keep me going.

❤️ LSJ