Follow Me Into Darkness is OUT NOW!
When I was eleven or twelve, I read Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire for the first time. I found it at the library, back when I took the bus downtown after school and wandered around, getting into various kinds of low-level trouble. Sometimes I went to the library and did what I’d done years earlier when my mom would drop me off there while she went to aerobics classes at the YMCA across the street. I would run my fingertips along the spines of books and wait for one that caught my eye, either because of the title, the colors, or some little frisson of … something. Call it library magic ;)
Interview with the Vampire got me into whole other worlds of trouble than the petty smoking pot or shoplifting I was getting up to outside the library. For one, it made me an intense Anne Rice fan at the age of eleven, which a.) caused many awkward parental conversations at the time, and b.) is a bit embarrassing now. For another, it resulted in a two or three year period in which I wrote wrote sentences with the verb following the adjective like Anne Rice does (“old she was”; “dark it was, and twisty”), which wasn’t pretty. I’M OVER IT, I SWEAR.
But it was a hugely important book too, for all that I cringe a bit when I look at it now. It was sensual and decadent. It was overwrought and baroque. It was indulgent and fantastical. And it was queer as hell. It taught me new words, new histories, introduced me to new places, and showed me new ways of telling stories.
It was also my introduction to New Orleans. And, if I’m totally honest (which I am obviously being, since I just publicly confessed my deep and heartfelt love for Anne Rice), when I moved to New Orleans this past autumn, one of the first things I did was wander through the Lafayette Cemetery #1 and visit the tombs that Anne Rice wrote about in Interview with the Vampire and The Mayfair Witches. And then, yeah, okay, I walked to her old house on First Street.
So when I got involved with Follow Me Into Darkness, a Mardi Gras anthology the release of which would coincide with my first Mardi Gras living in New Orleans, I knew I had to set my story in New Orleans.
“Touched,” is the story of Philippe Rondeau, who sometimes sees people’s future when he touches them. It’s set in Prohibition-era New Orleans, but even then the booze flowed as freely as the jazz. Here’s the blurb:
Sometimes when he touches people Philippe Rondeau sees their future. It’s erratic and inconvenient, but mostly he’s learned to deal with it. Sure he hasn’t found true love yet, but he has friends and lovers, and is kept busy running his family’s jazz club in Prohibition-era New Orleans. But now it’s Mardi Gras and all bets are off. In the space of one night, Philippe falls under the spell of jazz musician Claude and learns a terrible secret about his powers. If Philippe is certain of anything it’s that the future can be tricky, but the chance at love makes it all seem worthwhile.
It was a total delight to join forces with the crew from Lead Me Into Darkness (our Halloween anthology, which is FREE)—Santino Hassell, Kris Ripper, J.C. Lillis, and J.R. Gray.
You can order FOLLOW ME INTO DARKNESS now!
