D.A. Schippers
D.A. Schippers is the author of The Butchers of Bläckwood, a literary horror universe rooted in ancient mythology, theological judgment, and primordial consequence. He describes its governing framework as Primordial Judgment Horror, a form in which ancient forces weigh human conduct and render consequence through the figure of the Butcher.
Writing also as Dr. Dave Schippers, Sc.D., CISSP, he is a cybersecurity researcher, academic leader, and the author of nine nonfiction books on artificial intelligence, leadership, and doctoral education.
The Bläckwood Universe grew from a lifelong engagement with horror, from the slasher tradition and atmospheric film to immersive theatrical horror, combined with a working practice of Jungian active imagination.
The mythology carries many of the same intellectual concerns that shape Schippers’ nonfiction work, but expresses them through archetype rather than argument. Consequence. Judgment. The limits of human systems. What remains when those systems no longer hold authority.
The Dual-Identity
Outside the Bläckwood Universe, Schippers writes as Dr. Dave Schippers, Sc.D., CISSP. He serves as Vice President and Chief Academic Officer at Walsh College, is the founder of Iron Dog LLC in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is the author of nine nonfiction books on artificial intelligence, doctoral education, faculty leadership, and cybersecurity.
His titles include Burn the Script: Kill the Leadership Theater, Burn the Script 2: The AI Reckoning, The Scholar's Key, The Master Key, The Faculty Keystone, The Teaching Assistant Key, The Force of Technology (Second Edition), and AI for Analogs.
His nonfiction work also includes the AmplifAId Intelligence model, the Cognitive Assessment Framework, and the CtQ Cybersecurity and Technology Quotient instrument. Across these projects, Schippers applies systematic analysis to questions of cognition, leadership integrity, professional judgment, and the integration of artificial intelligence into institutional life.
The fiction and nonfiction are not separate intellectual projects. They approach many of the same underlying questions through different forms.
One uses frameworks, evidence, and argument.
The other uses myth, archetype, and consequence.
Early Butcher Concept
Samuel Akintola
The Influences
The Bläckwood Universe draws from a personal canon of horror traditions, each contributing something specific to its architecture.
John Carpenter’s Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, and Prince of Darkness helped shape the sensibility: atmospheric, slow-burning horror rooted in place, where forces older than the people confronting them arrive on their own terms.
Carpenter’s Escape films, and the figure of Snake Plissken in particular, also influenced the Butcher’s moral complexity. The Butcher is not a conventional hero, but neither is he an agent of chaos.
Friday the 13th Part III contributed to the visual grammar of the horror icon, especially the relationship between figure, mask, and mantle.
A Nightmare on Elm Street explored the territory where psychological and supernatural horror become difficult to separate.
The Howling offered another important lesson: communities can learn to live alongside the supernatural, accommodate it, and build customs around what they know but refuse to confront directly. The towns near Bläckwood’s marked forests operate in much the same way.
→ Read the full essay: On the Films That Built the Sensibility.
Halloween Horror Nights and the architecture of immersive horror. Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights has been a significant influence on the Bläckwood Universe. The first visit, HHN 30 in 2021, provided an early model for how an original horror mythology could be experienced as a coherent world rather than a collection of disconnected scares.
Wicked Growth: Realm of the Pumpkin Lord demonstrated how original mythological material could support an entire environment with its own rules, symbols, and governing presence. Welcome to Scarey: Horror in the Heartland showed how separate stories could be connected through a larger mythology without sacrificing their individual identities.
Universal Classic Monsters: The Bride of Frankenstein Lives demonstrated the power of treating established archetypes with theatrical seriousness rather than irony. Puppet Theatre: Captive Audience showed how spatial compression, competing visual registers, and dense environmental storytelling could make a confined setting feel larger than its physical boundaries.
HHN Icons: Captured offered another important lesson. Jack the Clown demonstrated how a central figure can become the organizing catalyst for a mythology that expands far beyond a single appearance. The Bläckwood Universe applies a similar structural principle to the Butcher, while giving that figure a very different moral and cosmological function.
Later experiences reinforced ideas the universe was already developing in prose. Dead Man’s Pier: Winter’s Wake demonstrated how atmosphere, environmental storytelling, and emotional restraint could carry horror without relying on constant spectacle. El Artista: A Spanish Haunting further showed how architecture, history, and supernatural presence can become inseparable parts of the same experience.
What Halloween Horror Nights ultimately contributed was not a collection of visual references. It demonstrated how horror becomes more powerful when mythology, environment, character, sound, and physical space all appear to obey the same underlying rules.
. → Read the full essay: On Halloween Horror Nights and the Architecture of Immersive Horror.
The trajectory from slasher novel to literary horror universe. Three years ago, the project was not conceived as a literary horror universe. It began as a slasher novel influenced by Friday the 13th Part III, gradually moving into anti-hero territory while drawing on analytical research into what gives enduring horror franchises depth beyond spectacle.
The early drafts were poor.
What changed the project was the bloodline.
Origin stories began reaching further and further into the past, from the modern era to World War II, the medieval period, and eventually antiquity. Each period revealed a different Butcher from the same line, bound to the same older system of judgment.
At that point, the story had become larger than the book that started it.
The slasher novel became the Bläckwood Universe when the mythology could no longer fit inside a single narrative.
→ Read the full essay: The Origin of the Universe.
On the Bloodline Beneath the Bloodline
There is a layer of the Bläckwood Universe that the FAQ does not name and the homepage only gestures toward. The bio page is where it can be said plainly.
The current Butcher is David Compeau.
David is the writer’s first name. Compeau is the writer’s bloodline.
Schippers is the surname carried through this writer’s institutional life. It appears on diplomas, professional credentials, academic appointments, contracts, and the spines of nine nonfiction books.
Compeau runs deeper.
It is the patrilineal name that traces through this writer’s father and the generations before him. Family circumstance changed the surname carried forward in one generation. The change was ordinary, the kind of thing that happens quietly in families and becomes permanent through paperwork.
But the bloodline did not change.
The Compeau line that carries the Butcher’s mantle through the Bläckwood mythology is therefore not a surname borrowed from an external legend. It comes from the writer’s own ancestry.
In the fiction, that name is given back its continuity.
Across centuries and continents, different Compeaus answer the same call in forests bound by the same primordial pact. The mythology gives the bloodline a scale that ordinary family history could not.
The modern Butcher, David Compeau, carries more than the restored name.
He carries the writer’s first name as well.
In Jungian terms, he functions as a literary shadow. He moves through a moral world the writer’s institutional life can analyze but cannot directly inhabit. He acts where institutions stop. He answers to a code older than law, reputation, procedure, and social permission.
He carries the bloodline restored.
How autobiographical David Compeau truly is remains intentionally unresolved.
He can be read as the writer’s shadow, but he is not a simple self-portrait. Elements of the character were seeded by other real people as well, shaping pieces of his temperament, his moral structure, and the way he carries the mantle.
Readers will have to decide for themselves how much of the writer is inside him.
The same is true of the earlier Butchers in the Compeau line. The men who carry the mantle through wartime, medieval history, and deeper periods of the mythology were not created as empty historical figures. They were seeded from real human material and then transformed through fiction.
More of that relationship will become visible as the books move further into the history of the bloodline.
The Bläckwood Universe is therefore not entirely detached from autobiography.
It emerged from a writer working with Jungian active imagination and discovering that the figures appearing on the page were carrying family material as well as fictional material. The shadow work is real. The ancestry is real. The act of integrating those things through fiction is ongoing.
The books are where that integration takes form.
The Butcher knows.
The forest remembers.
The accounting is being kept.
Early Butcher Concept
Early Butcher Concept
Early Character Concept
