Evil Hearts and Snappy Outfits

            Since, apparently, the release of my old vampire series – Those Who Hunt the Night and Traveling with the Dead – on digital last month via Open Road Media (www.openroadmedia.com) qualifies me as a “well-known author of vampire fiction” these days, I guess it’s okay for me to write about my take on vampires and vampire fiction. (The third of the James Asher vampire series, Blood Maidens, is available in print from Severn House, U.K., but not yet in digital).

            I’ve always preferred my vampires dangerous. When I was working on Those Who Hunt the Night, I read various novels of vampire fiction which were around at the time (this was long before Twilight – Ms. Meyer might not even have been born then), and I recall one in which the vampires, though eerie and powerful, were rather benign, like a secret society of people who lived forever and only “immortalized” those who really deserved to live forever; who only drank a little bit of human blood from people who knew them: consenting adults, as it were. And I remember thinking, “No. If vampires were really like that, why the horrific legends?”

            So I came up with the best reason I could think of, that vampires have to kill. The blood nourishes vampire flesh, and doesn’t necessarily have to be human. (I recall Anne Rice’s Lestat, among others, lived for decades on rats). In my view of vampires, they kill – and kill humans – because the psychic energy released by the human soul at death is what enables vampires to exercise psychic influence on people: to read dreams. To influence dreams. To make themselves appear to the living as overwhelmingly attractive, to cloud human judgement and human perception… Why else would you walk down a dark alley with a total stranger?

            Vampires must kill in order to hunt, and in order to survive.

            That being established as a base-line – along with total destruction at the first touch of sunlight, something which is in some legends and not in others – what kind of person would survive as a vampire? What kind of person would become a vampire? Not someone anybody in their right mind would want to get close to.

            The development of my version of vampires evolved from there.

            Another thing about vampires in legend: a lot of them are very snappy dressers. They’re frequently protrayed as sophisticated, and wealthy enough to have all sorts of henchmen and booby-traps for the unwary around their castles. This is because, of course, even a moderate amount of money looted from early victims, if properly invested, yields a quite substantial income over two or three centuries. And if a vampire isn’t smart enough to get himself a good accountant and proper investments, he probably doesn’t survive.

            Wealthy, well-dressed, sexually attractive, been everywhere, remember the world centuries ago, utterly selfish and ruthlessly charming – the ultimate power figure. No wonder people are fascinated by the idea. And, an infinitely variable archetype: every writer does them differently.

            And that’s what fascinates me.