VAMPIRES IN CYBERSPACE

 I'm following up my first effort on Kindle with the first part of a good-sized vampire novel, Hot Blood.

At 150,000 words plus , Hot Blood ought to have been out years ago. It was originally written as part of a two book contract with Pan Macmillan. They'd already published Night Feast, a second-hand copy of which you can most likely pick up on the Internet. And Hot Blood had gone through the whole editing process. I even have copies of the original cover -- by Fred Gambino -- in my files. But then the horror market crashed and burned, Pan got taken over, the new parent company slashed its horror list, and sadly the finished novel never made it to the shelves. And yes, I know that things have changed since then. The horror scene has definitely picked up, and vampire tales are particularly popular these days. So I did approach a couple of big publishing houses with Hot Blood. But the book is set in 1985, and the reaction that I got was "no one's going to go for that." Well, now that the book is freely available on the Net, let's see if that opinion can't be proven wrong.

The story is an epic one, starting in New York, then heading off to Central America before taking in various locations in Eastern Europe. There are not only blood-suckers, but magical beings and some demons too. And yes, as you can guess from the cover, the whole thing has a rather sexy edge . Someone will probably accuse me of bandwagon jumping on that score, but the truth is that this tale was penned a good long time before anyone had ever heard of Sookie Stockhouse or the Cullens. Those other guys are jumping on my wagon, looked at from that point of view.

The terrific cover is by the multi-talented Steve Upham of Screaming Dreams. He's currently at work on the cover for book #2, and I hope to be using a lot more of his artwork as I put new stuff out on Kindle.