By
JOHN SCHERBER
FLESH AND BLOOD
Last year I was having vampires on my mind,
even though I’m mainly known as a mystery writer.
Naturally I had read Bram Stoker’s Dracula years ago, and later, several of
Anne Rice’s hugely successful books. I thought the vampire Lestat was a
successful character. I had also noticed that vampires were back again in a big
way. A brief scan on Amazon gave me a sense of what was happening. I found
child vampires, gay and lesbian vampires, vampires mixed with every possible
variety of paranormal critter as well. Even a book called, TheVampire State Building. I came away with the feeling that the old
Transylvania was now YA turf. The teens were snapping it up, but it appeared to
lack the frigid dignity of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. I used the Look Inside function at
Amazon to check a few pages of these books here and there, and I knew what I
was seeing. It was not what I do.
Any book I write starts with asking myself who
my target reader is. You don’t write the same letter to your daughter as to
your father. I wanted to write a vampire book––no, a vampire trilogy, for grownups. I would call the
first volume, And Dark My Desire. I
could see my publisher gasping at the boldness, the thinking out of the box aspect
of the concept.
Easy to believe this, since I am my own
publisher.
I always write books I would like to read
myself. And Dark My Desire, I
thought, would contain three H’s––horror, humor, and humanity. Instead of
Transylvania, I decided to set my undead fable in Wisconsin, a sensible and
down-to-earth terrain, uncluttered by zombies and other undead trash. I used a
city I called Kenniston, an old river town I’d used before in one of my Paul
Zacher mystery series, titled Vanishing
Act. Kenniston is actually based on St. Paul, where I lived for twenty-five
years.
I made a tactical decision not to research the
recent efforts of the YA writers. I knew I wasn’t going there. I decided I
wanted a vampire who was born in the 1870s, staked in the 1930s, and found
himself (horrors!) unable to get out of his coffin for 77 years. His family had
been onto him, and buried him twenty feet down beneath the family mausoleum. It
was only when road construction condemned a portion of the cemetery that he was
able to make his getaway during the excavation.
Unfortunately, his return catapults him into
the twenty-first century. His last memory was of partying in Prague in 1933. It
was not a good launching point.
I called my vampire Monty Townshend, and
imagined him fleeing Kenniston in 1930 after a scandal at the yacht club, where
he was accused of doing something improper to a young debutante’s neck. In New
York, he signed on as a dance host on the Ile
de France, ending up two years later in Prague, at the twilight of the Art
Deco era. Here he met his demise at the hands of what he terms, “thugs,”
relatives of his latest victim.
On his revival in Kenniston in 2011, he finds
it a world far different from the Prague of the early thirties. Monty’s task is
to adapt and survive the quirks of a new century. His Victorian family mansion
is now in the hands of a social climber, a woman full of feminist leanings.
Monty’s never encountered this before. When he entered his coffin, women had
barely gotten the right to vote. He decides to stay on, fascinated by her
Ukrainian maid, who somehow senses what he is. Ultimately, Monty’s attention is
riveted by Jennifer Martin, a neighbor, who, although she’s about to be married
in six months, retains a distinct taste for risk. Monty is eager to supply it.
So here we have the main elements. The shock
and horror of living by sucking the blood of others, the humor and missteps of
adapting to a strange time in a familiar place, the humanity of love and lust
among the living and the undead.
Naturally, Monty comes to a bad end. How could
he not? This is why we have trilogies. Vampires are often survivors, and have a
way of returning. When Monty comes back, after being stabbed in the back, he’s
understandably mad. But it’s not too late; he’s just in time for Jennifer’s wedding.
Imagine the reception, and then the honeymoon.
It’s told in book two, And Darker My
Wrath.
You’ll find a sample on both on my website:
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