Clark Hays's Blog - Posts Tagged "dracula"
Hearts of darkness: The vampire as voyage of discovery
Note: This is a piece we wrote for our new Soapbox feature on our webpage to support "Discovery Month" at Cowboy and Vampire Industries.
Undead fiction, like The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, help readers discover worlds beyond the reach of maps.
Everybody knows vampire fiction is dead. (Actually, undead.) There’s nothing original left to write about the undead. Every interesting lens vampires provide to examine social trends — the morally draining effects of capitalism, our uneasy relationship with mortality, our simmering mistrust of our sexual natures — has been done to death. There is nothing new under the sun, or hiding from the sun, and no possible way to breathe life back into the creatures of the night.
Or is there?
The thing about vampires is that since Poliodori first set pen to paper, since Stoker crystallized the archetype, they have refused to go away. Despite pronouncements from pundits and the best efforts of clumsy writers enchanted with clichés and stereotypes, vampires endure. And it’s not only because they represent the dark side of human behavior — we do an admirable job in fiction and in reality of showing the worst of ourselves without them — but because they represent that part of human nature that seeks out new places, that drives us to explore.
The glorious madness, the single-minded obsession that sends cheerful fellows to the green and venomous heart of the Amazon, to the oxygen-choked tip of Mount Everest, to the cold and silent depths of the ocean, to the ice-choked emptiness of the North Pole — the desire to explore, to learn, to understand — is fundamental to being human. That driving force is as much our legacy as the cruelty and sexual fetishes we layer onto our undead villains. Conveniently, our kind has developed an archetype that allows us to continually travel beyond the edge of the maps we rely on to guide us through our own experience: vampires.
The undead are both the vehicle and the journey for traveling to new frontiers of mortality and immortality, sexual freedom and perversion, kindness and cruelty, strength and power. They are the maps we draw to find out more about ourselves and, even in occasionally clumsy hands, the stories we tell about vampires tell the stories about us.
This often-hidden theme of discovery and exploration is brought to the front in our books, The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
There are some obvious themes of exploration in all the books as Tucker, the down-on-his luck cowboy, and Lizzie, the unwilling queen of the vampires, travel together into a new realm — love — and discover much about themselves and each other as the blaze a new trail. There’s also much to discover as two very different worlds collide. Tucker, comfortable in his rural life, is thrust into the middle of the urban world and the refined sensibilities of highly urban, and sophisticated vampires. And even before she becomes a vampire, Lizzie had to discover what makes LonePine, Wyoming, population 438, so special to the man she loves.
But there are even more powerful, unique themes of exploration at the heart of each standalone book.
In The Cowboy and the Vampire, book one of the series, religion is the new frontier and we take readers to the edges of faith and belief — and beyond. Lizzie and Tucker are thrust into a world of vampires who practice a mirror-image Christianity, a dark religion dating back 2,000 years in which evil is good, and kindness is weakness. The mad, tyrannical leader of the most powerful vampire faction uses this religion to batter his enemies and plots to hasten and apocalyptic end of times — at least for humans.
In Blood and Whiskey, book two, the uncharted territory is the political system and long-standing hostilities between vampire species. In an unexpected power vacuum, Lizzie has to balance the needs of the anxious ruling elite of the undead world against the seething hostility of masses of long-oppressed vampires, all while trying to protect humans from a danger they don’t even know exist. The book explores how vampires and humans choose to organize themselves socially and culturally. It’s a long, dark journey through a bloodthirsty monarchy, political power and the plight of disenfranchised.
In our soon-to-be-released third book, Rough Trails and Shallow Graves (working title), we explore the spiritual dimension. Our vampires die, completely, every dawn which means they truly experience and understand what happens after death. Their souls, their selves, are liberated in a daily Near Death Experience and they travel to the Meta, a giant energy field that contains and sustains all life. We use the experience to explore the afterlife and an emerging external spiritual dimension with implications for human existence.
Of course, the books are also loaded with all the things that keep the vampire myth popular — blood-sucking passion and perversions and violence, as well as comedy, action and romance, and a sustained exploration of the modern American West.
As long as there is something in us that causes us to look beyond the moment, beyond our selves and beyond our immediate environment, there will always be vampires. And because of that, because we never stop searching, never stop seeking, never stop redrawing our maps, the undead are here to stay.
Undead fiction, like The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, help readers discover worlds beyond the reach of maps.
Everybody knows vampire fiction is dead. (Actually, undead.) There’s nothing original left to write about the undead. Every interesting lens vampires provide to examine social trends — the morally draining effects of capitalism, our uneasy relationship with mortality, our simmering mistrust of our sexual natures — has been done to death. There is nothing new under the sun, or hiding from the sun, and no possible way to breathe life back into the creatures of the night.
Or is there?
The thing about vampires is that since Poliodori first set pen to paper, since Stoker crystallized the archetype, they have refused to go away. Despite pronouncements from pundits and the best efforts of clumsy writers enchanted with clichés and stereotypes, vampires endure. And it’s not only because they represent the dark side of human behavior — we do an admirable job in fiction and in reality of showing the worst of ourselves without them — but because they represent that part of human nature that seeks out new places, that drives us to explore.
The glorious madness, the single-minded obsession that sends cheerful fellows to the green and venomous heart of the Amazon, to the oxygen-choked tip of Mount Everest, to the cold and silent depths of the ocean, to the ice-choked emptiness of the North Pole — the desire to explore, to learn, to understand — is fundamental to being human. That driving force is as much our legacy as the cruelty and sexual fetishes we layer onto our undead villains. Conveniently, our kind has developed an archetype that allows us to continually travel beyond the edge of the maps we rely on to guide us through our own experience: vampires.
The undead are both the vehicle and the journey for traveling to new frontiers of mortality and immortality, sexual freedom and perversion, kindness and cruelty, strength and power. They are the maps we draw to find out more about ourselves and, even in occasionally clumsy hands, the stories we tell about vampires tell the stories about us.
This often-hidden theme of discovery and exploration is brought to the front in our books, The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
There are some obvious themes of exploration in all the books as Tucker, the down-on-his luck cowboy, and Lizzie, the unwilling queen of the vampires, travel together into a new realm — love — and discover much about themselves and each other as the blaze a new trail. There’s also much to discover as two very different worlds collide. Tucker, comfortable in his rural life, is thrust into the middle of the urban world and the refined sensibilities of highly urban, and sophisticated vampires. And even before she becomes a vampire, Lizzie had to discover what makes LonePine, Wyoming, population 438, so special to the man she loves.
But there are even more powerful, unique themes of exploration at the heart of each standalone book.
In The Cowboy and the Vampire, book one of the series, religion is the new frontier and we take readers to the edges of faith and belief — and beyond. Lizzie and Tucker are thrust into a world of vampires who practice a mirror-image Christianity, a dark religion dating back 2,000 years in which evil is good, and kindness is weakness. The mad, tyrannical leader of the most powerful vampire faction uses this religion to batter his enemies and plots to hasten and apocalyptic end of times — at least for humans.
In Blood and Whiskey, book two, the uncharted territory is the political system and long-standing hostilities between vampire species. In an unexpected power vacuum, Lizzie has to balance the needs of the anxious ruling elite of the undead world against the seething hostility of masses of long-oppressed vampires, all while trying to protect humans from a danger they don’t even know exist. The book explores how vampires and humans choose to organize themselves socially and culturally. It’s a long, dark journey through a bloodthirsty monarchy, political power and the plight of disenfranchised.
In our soon-to-be-released third book, Rough Trails and Shallow Graves (working title), we explore the spiritual dimension. Our vampires die, completely, every dawn which means they truly experience and understand what happens after death. Their souls, their selves, are liberated in a daily Near Death Experience and they travel to the Meta, a giant energy field that contains and sustains all life. We use the experience to explore the afterlife and an emerging external spiritual dimension with implications for human existence.
Of course, the books are also loaded with all the things that keep the vampire myth popular — blood-sucking passion and perversions and violence, as well as comedy, action and romance, and a sustained exploration of the modern American West.
As long as there is something in us that causes us to look beyond the moment, beyond our selves and beyond our immediate environment, there will always be vampires. And because of that, because we never stop searching, never stop seeking, never stop redrawing our maps, the undead are here to stay.
What is the Hell is Western Gothic?
As part of our book tour for The Cowboy and the Vampire: The Last Sunset (the fourth and final book in the series), we were asked to talk about Western Gothic, a genre we might have invented, for one of our blogger pals (view the original post here).
Here's a slightly modified version for our friends on Goodreads:
Western Gothic is a fairly narrow but very deep and wildly entertaining literary genre. We say that as recognized (by each other) experts in the field of Western Gothic Studies, a field and (and likely a genre) we created, and with all the confidence an exhaustive, seconds-long Google search can bestow (see sidebar).
So what is Western Gothic? It is a style of fiction that transplants the moody, death-obsessed themes of classic gothic fiction (think The Castle of Otranto or, of course, Dracula) to the wide open, inspiring vistas of the modern west (Riders of the Purple Sage, or All the Pretty Horses). We’re pretty sure we invented the genre with The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, a series of four books set in the modern west and featuring sexy, brooding vampires bent on world domination.
We wrote the first book — The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance — in 1999. Our fourth and final book in the series — The Cowboy and the Vampire: The Last Sunset — hit the shelves of bookstores on June 9. Not only are we experts in Western Gothic, we’re also pretty good with numbers. It has taken us an average of 4.25 years per book. Western Gothic requires an intense commitment. (Check out book two, The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey, and book three The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves here.)
The Last Sunset, like the first three books, explores the tension and connection between opposites: life and death; mortality and immortality; love and lust; urban and rural; thought and action; strength and decay; good and evil; and country music and whiskey.
Our books — and all books in the Western Gothic genre — exist in the negative space between dark and light. Gothic fiction uses the darkness — the creepy atmosphere, curious, obsessive behavior and morbid thoughts — to focus on the light, providing the perfect backdrop to illuminate the best in people: the desire to overcome death, to hope and to love. Westerns, ironically, use the light to set off the dark, weaving stories of good men pushed to the limits by the cruelty and avarice of others (usually tyrannical land owners) or the blind apathy of nature. Our books live in the borderlands between the two worlds, a forever twilight of gray nights and last sunsets.
We love writing in the Western Gothic genre. Not only do we get to explore huge, archetypal themes about human consciousness, love and death, and more, we get to move our characters across stunning natural landscapes with deconstructed shootouts and heart-pounding action. Add in the quirky humor natural to small towns and a long-suffering cowdog with the soul of a poet — and some pretty steamy undead erotica — and we think it makes for an unforgettable reading experience whatever the label (hint: it’s Western Gothic).
Sidebar: Why Western Gothic isn’t the same as Weird West
Searching for Western Gothic returns a bunch of scattered results and a re-direct to Wikipedia’s entry for Weird Westerns. Weird Westerns are not the same as Western Gothic, which, once again, we probably invented and definitely should have trademarked. By contrast, the Weird Western genre has existed for decades, transports occult shenanigans to the old west, and is probably most often associated with the golden age of pulp paperbacks. Weird Westerns may have reached their apogee with the spooky Jonah Hex comics of the 1970s, but Western Steampunk is a more recent energetic offspring and heir to the crown. Not to dismiss a popular genre, but the West was probably always weird — it took two writers, Clark Hays (me) and Kathleen McFall, to make it Gothic.
Here's a slightly modified version for our friends on Goodreads:
Western Gothic is a fairly narrow but very deep and wildly entertaining literary genre. We say that as recognized (by each other) experts in the field of Western Gothic Studies, a field and (and likely a genre) we created, and with all the confidence an exhaustive, seconds-long Google search can bestow (see sidebar).
So what is Western Gothic? It is a style of fiction that transplants the moody, death-obsessed themes of classic gothic fiction (think The Castle of Otranto or, of course, Dracula) to the wide open, inspiring vistas of the modern west (Riders of the Purple Sage, or All the Pretty Horses). We’re pretty sure we invented the genre with The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, a series of four books set in the modern west and featuring sexy, brooding vampires bent on world domination.
We wrote the first book — The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance — in 1999. Our fourth and final book in the series — The Cowboy and the Vampire: The Last Sunset — hit the shelves of bookstores on June 9. Not only are we experts in Western Gothic, we’re also pretty good with numbers. It has taken us an average of 4.25 years per book. Western Gothic requires an intense commitment. (Check out book two, The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey, and book three The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves here.)
The Last Sunset, like the first three books, explores the tension and connection between opposites: life and death; mortality and immortality; love and lust; urban and rural; thought and action; strength and decay; good and evil; and country music and whiskey.
Our books — and all books in the Western Gothic genre — exist in the negative space between dark and light. Gothic fiction uses the darkness — the creepy atmosphere, curious, obsessive behavior and morbid thoughts — to focus on the light, providing the perfect backdrop to illuminate the best in people: the desire to overcome death, to hope and to love. Westerns, ironically, use the light to set off the dark, weaving stories of good men pushed to the limits by the cruelty and avarice of others (usually tyrannical land owners) or the blind apathy of nature. Our books live in the borderlands between the two worlds, a forever twilight of gray nights and last sunsets.
We love writing in the Western Gothic genre. Not only do we get to explore huge, archetypal themes about human consciousness, love and death, and more, we get to move our characters across stunning natural landscapes with deconstructed shootouts and heart-pounding action. Add in the quirky humor natural to small towns and a long-suffering cowdog with the soul of a poet — and some pretty steamy undead erotica — and we think it makes for an unforgettable reading experience whatever the label (hint: it’s Western Gothic).
Sidebar: Why Western Gothic isn’t the same as Weird West
Searching for Western Gothic returns a bunch of scattered results and a re-direct to Wikipedia’s entry for Weird Westerns. Weird Westerns are not the same as Western Gothic, which, once again, we probably invented and definitely should have trademarked. By contrast, the Weird Western genre has existed for decades, transports occult shenanigans to the old west, and is probably most often associated with the golden age of pulp paperbacks. Weird Westerns may have reached their apogee with the spooky Jonah Hex comics of the 1970s, but Western Steampunk is a more recent energetic offspring and heir to the crown. Not to dismiss a popular genre, but the West was probably always weird — it took two writers, Clark Hays (me) and Kathleen McFall, to make it Gothic.
