From College Professor to Vampire Slayer (or at least Vampire Writer) ~ Spooktacular Blog Hop
Welcome to the Spooktacular Blog Hop! Today, I’m posting on why I love writing about vampires. Then I’m giving away an e-book bundle of all my paranormal novels (Sanguinary, Legally Undead, Waking Up Dead, and Fairy, Texas) to one lucky winner! So check out my post, leave a comment, enter to win, then HOP to the rest of entries. And have a great October!
How does a college English professor end up writing urban fantasy books about vampires?
That’s a question I get more than I expected when I first started this fiction-publishing journey.
In some ways, my interest in bloodsucking fiends is unsurprising. My academic specialty is the British eighteenth century, and the period is full of vampires, starting with the great vampire debate of 1732 (are vampires real?) and continuing through a number of stories, poems, and plays—enough to fill a book, and then some (and I’ve done just in an edited collection entitled Beyond the Count: http://bookShow.me/B00KNKOQIY)
Moreover, the eighteenth century saw the development of gothic literature, starting with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto—and we can trace the influence of that gothic literature pretty much through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and right up to today’s urban fantasies.
So I can certainly point to some nicely academic reasons for writing a book like Sanguinary. And as my edited collection of early vampire stories illustrates, my interest in vampires is a long-standing one.
Honestly, though? I wrote these books because they are what I wanted to read.
I love urban fantasy. It’s my favorite escapist fantasy. But when I started writing urban fantasy, there weren’t nearly enough of the kinds of vampires I wanted to read about. The thing is, I like my vampires to be brutal and bloodthirsty—as much as I enjoy the recent trend toward sexy vampires (because YUM), I think there’s a reason that we, as a culture, keep coming back to the kinds of vampires who are absolute monsters. Both kinds of vampires—those we want to devour and those who want to devour us—are the expression of the human id, that part of us that is unsocialized, that wants what it wants without thought of consequence. The hot vampires of paranormal romance allow us to fantasize about one kind of unsocialized behavior. But the murderous vampires allow us to explore even darker fantasies.
The vampires in my novels don’t have a sparkle among them; they are definitely more beast than beauty—and that’s what I like best about them.
I’d love to hear from other folks, too. Tell me: What do you like best about vampires and vampire fiction? (It’s an entry on the Rafflecopter!)
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These books are included in the giveaway:
Legally Undead (Vampirarchy Book 1)
