A WAR BETWEEN IMMORTALS

Last year saw the publication of my chiller Under the Ice from Samhain Publishing. And it certainly drew some critical praise, but it was short, a novella in fact.

This year sees something much, much bigger, because my dark fantasy epic Hot Blood is out from the same publishers. Here's the back-cover blurb:

Who dares to challenge a vampire? Two very different immortal creatures have arrived in New York City. One is Tanya Merrit, the last of the Ykrall, a race that lives among—and depends on—human beings. The other is Janos Wolkran, an ancient and extremely powerful vampire. He has with him a brood of servants, humans that he has converted. But one of his servants is dying. And Wolkran has chosen Tanya’s lover, Kathy Harrison, as a replacement. When he kidnaps her, Tanya sets off in a pursuit that will lead her around the world…and into a battle to the death between immortals. Hot Blood starts out in Manhattan before moving on to Latin America. And then, after a brief stop-over in London, England, the action transfers to Prague, and beyond that to Budapest, finally ending up in the Zempleni Mountains, part of the Carpathian Range. Like I said, this is one big book  and took me several years to finish. The novel is available either  as a superb-looking trade paperback or in e-book format, either directly from Samhain, or from Amazon, Nook, or Kobo. Want a piece of fiction you can really get your teeth into? Well, this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy!

AT LONG LAST BLOOD!

Let me transport you back in time to the late 1990s. Remember those days? (And I really don't want to hear that you weren't even born then, smartarse!)

Pan Macmillan had a couple of years earlier published my second full-length novel, Night Feast, a great thick blockbuster of a horror tale involving some of the nastier gods of Ancient Egypt transmuted into human form, the plot spanning the decades from the Great Depression to the -- back then -- present day.

And they were within a couple of months of publishing my third one, again big and thick, but spanning continents rather than decades this time. It was called Hot Blood, and featured two different types of vampire, one good and the other extremely evil.

I'd checked all the edits. I'd read the final proofs. The cover was done, and I felt all ready to go ...

When Pan decided to cut their horror list almost altogether and the book got dropped (I kept the advance, you'll be glad to hear).

This was the start of the massive slump in horror publishing that happened around  that time. In fact, pretty well none of the major publishers were interested in even looking at that type of fiction for a good seven or eight years thereafter -- and believe me, my long suffering agent Leslie Gardner of Artellus really tried.

And when vampires did finally make a huge comeback -- well -- they weren't the types of vampires featured in my novel, not by an awfully long shot.

But now I'm very proud to say that, after 15 years or so, Hot Blood is finally to see print. Samhain Publishing -- the same guys who brought out my chiller Under the Ice last year -- are producing it as an e-book first, and hopefully as a paperback later on. I took the opportunity, naturally, to revise the book and bring it up to date before I even showed them the manuscript. And they have run with it since then, with the end result that I sent the final  proofs back just two days ago, and the novel will be available in September.

I hope my readers feel that it's been worth the wait.

NON-SPARKLY, NON-ROMANTIC, NASTY, EVIL, BLOODTHIRSTY VAMPIRES

Late last year, Samhain Publishing took my short novel Under the Ice -- which had previously been a self-published Amazon e-book -- and brought out their own version of it. And this year they're doing the same again, with a much longer novel this time.

Hot Blood runs to over 120,000 words and is a vampire epic, starting in New York, taking in Central America, and finally moving on to Eastern Europe ... Prague, then Budapest, then finally the Carpathians. And these aren't any Twilight kinds of vampires I'm describing. No, these bloodsuckers are very definitely not nice ones.

After all the swooning and white weddings, I get the feeling some readers will be extremely glad to see some non-sparkly vampires back. But for those who prefer a little romance mixed in with their dark fantasy, the heroine of the novel is a supernatural being herself, although of a very different kind. She ...

No, I cannot tell you too much in advance, now can I? Hot Blood will be out as a Samhain e-book in September 2014.

THREE 4 FREE

The last in my 3 collections of horror tales is free on Amazon Kindle for the whole of today and Sunday. Like its two sister books, The Books of Shadow: Volume III only contains stories that have previously seen print, and includes fiction from Weird Tales, Midnight Street, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

ALL RIGHT NOW

I'm very fond of letting you know when things are going well, aren't I? And so it's only fair that I cop to it as well when I occasionally mess up.

I was having at look at the template documents for  my triple collection of horror stories on Kindle -- THE BOOKS OF SHADOW -- a few days back and realized that I'd let a formatting mistake slip through. And that's a shame, because these three books represent the best of my dark fiction over more than 30 years, the very oldest in the series being 'Headlamps' from The 14th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories back in 1981.

And so I promptly sat down and fixed the error. All three books are now properly formatted, and have brand new linked tables of content and publication info about every story.

GUEST BLOGGER -- TONI V. SWEENEY

My very first guest blogger is Toni V. Sweeney, a terrific author of sf, horror, fantasy, vampire fiction and more. We first began corresponding when she started to review my Raine's Landing novels, and we have been corresponding ever since. Here she is, talking about the influences on her work:

A special thanks to Tony for having me as his guest. We’ve only met through the Internet but I count him as a friend and applaud the novels he’s written. In a recent blog, Tony spoke of places he’s visited where he got the germ of ideas later flowering into novels. I haven’t traveled that much, and certainly not outside the ol’ US of A, but I have used the locales I’ve lived in as settings for some of my novels…specifically the Nebraska Panhandle (yes, there’s one there, too) in Serpent’s Tooth, Walk the Shadow Trail, and Vengeance from Eden, which were written for Nebraska’s celebration of statehood) and Middle Georgia and the Golden Isles in Jericho Road.

None of these have the haunting chill of Tony’s books—except Serpent’s Tooth, though demon worship in Nebraska does sound a little far-fetched when spoken out loud—but I think I managed to depict the loneliness of the sand hills, as well as the tight-knit conformity of a small Southern town fairly accurately.

There’s one thing more than any other that’s influenced the way my books are constructed, something people have come to call my “style.” (Hey…I’ve got a style now, how about that?) I suppose I’m a child of my time…and my time was the early 50’s, when moving pictures were the most popular form of entertainment before the Boob Tube usurped it. In those days, there were not only dramas and westerns but sweeping epics of adventure, costume dramas of pirates, Robin Hood, rogues and rascals and villains. Nowadays, you rarely see those, except for an occasional Indiana Jones rip-off or if Cinemax steps in with The Borgias. It was the time of Frank Yerby, Samuel Shellabarger, Rafael Sabatini…men who wrote what would probably be termed the picaresque novel, tales of men conquering mountains and nations, and discovering new worlds—simply because they were there. Their stories were made into Technicolor sagas enthralling this little viewer for hours (in those days, you could pay your money and stay in the theatre the entire day if you wished.) And when I began to write, I unconsciously patterned my stories after theirs.

One series—The Adventures of Sinbad—seems to mirror those stories enough that several readers have told me they “absolutely adore” my main character. I admit it’s easy to see him swinging across the deck of a ship, with dagger between his teeth while he hangs onto the heroine with one hand and a rope with the other, a la The Crimson Pirate. In fact, I think I had him do something almost like that in one story…

Other novels open with an incident leading to a flashback. In fact, one novel is simply one extended flashback, returning to the present only in the last chapter. Others are more linear, with cuts to other points of view showing things happening at the same time in other places, the dialogue interspersed with stage direction-like movement. In telling my tales of adventure, romance, violence, danger, and—on occasion—lust, I harken back to those days in those darkened theatres as I shoveled in the popcorn with my eyes glued to that glad bead-silvered screen. Good or bad, that’s just the way my mind works, and so far, it’s successful. The results are—in several reviewers’ opinions, “readable and enjoyable tales…outside the box”…which I owe to two things: my imagination and those childhood entertainments.

And then television came along…and opened the box even wider…

Toni V. Sweeney was born after the War Between the States and before the Gulf War. A native Georgian, she has lived on both coasts, thirty years in the Midwest and is now trying for thirty more in Nebraska. Her first novel was published in 1989 and she currently has 27 novels in publication. Her last novel The Wizard’s Wife, was released in February, of this year, and her latest novel, Runaway Brother, written under her pseudonym Icy Snow Blackstone, will be released by Class Act Books in August, 2011.

RED XMAS

* I can't say I care much for Xmas, with its merry supermarket queues and festively snarled-up traffic. But the season is as hard to get away from as an avalanche, and I'm afraid I won't have time to blog too much until the start of '09. So I thought I'd put an article here to keep you going until then ... something decidedly unseasonal, for the benefit of those who feel the same way at this time of year. And what could be more unseasonal than vampires? We all love vampires a good deal more than dumb old Santa, don't we? So, if the sleigh bells have started to slay you, here's my contribution to the "holiday" season:

BLOODY HERO: HOW 20th CENTURY SOCIETY
TOOK THE VAMPIRE TO ITS HEART

Contrary to popular belief, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) was not the first English-language literary incarnation of the Eastern European ‘vampire’ legend. That honour goes -- back in 1819 -- to a story called The Vampyre, originally attributed to Byron but actually the work of his physician, John Polidori.
There were plenty of others in between -- the penny-dreadful Varney, le Fanu’s Carmilla, even Baudelaire had a go. But Polidori had already defined the male of the species at the beginning of the century. He was of noble title. He was pallid. He was moody and magnificent. And he was a seducer.
He was in fact the image of the good doctor’s most famous patient, Lord Byron himself.
None of which could have prepared the world for what Stoker would unleash on it some eighty years further on.
"He is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can ... appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements ... he can command all meaner things ... and he can at times vanish and come unknown."
No club-footed Lothario this. More like a dark, prehistoric god.
The censorious Irish Protestant Stoker seems originally to have begun writing Dracula as a form of therapy -- he was ‘plagued’ by a rather mild erotic dream. Too much has already been penned about the sexual imagery of his creation, most of it made instantly redundant by the one line: "It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion."
It’s the ambivalence of Stoker’s attitude to the great vampire that fascinates the reader rather more. Dracula is utterly evil; we are left in no doubt as to that. Yet even this Victorian tub-thumper has to struggle hard to hide a touch of admiration for the Count, and mostly fails. A brute he may be, and yet Dracula is portrayed more often than not throughout the novel as a proud, majestic brute.
And an ambivalent attitude can swing, pendulum-like, in either direction -- as the passing of time was to reveal.
Numerous imitations followed, but the next time that the vampire made a real impact on Western culture it was not in book form but on film.
F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) -- and the same is true of the Hertzog re-make -- have no place in this discussion; his vampire is a pathetic, loathsome parasite. The same could never be said of Bela Lugosi in the classic 1931 movie version of the Stoker novel. Here he is at last, made eight feet tall and of monochrome flesh. The flashing eyes. The purring voice. The sensual lips. Just watch those hands, how masterfully they caress the very air. And yet, true to the book, Lugosi remains wholly the villain. Fascinating he may be. But worthy of sympathy? Admirable, even? Victorian morals hadn’t been eroded that far. Yet.
By 1958, they were starting to be abandoned. Writers like Kerouac and actors like James Dean had already laid the groundwork for the fast-approaching culture of the Sixties. And 1958 gave us another faithful adaptation of Dracula, the Hammer version this time.
Watch Christopher Lee at work and marvel. He is utter elegance in motion, perfectly turned-out, charming but aloof. With his unflinching stare and small tight smile, he might well be a relative of that other Fifties-through-to-Sixties icon, James Bond.
And it’s already getting rather hard to totally dislike him.
The popular novelist’s perception of the vampire remained pretty much unchanged, meanwhile. As late as 1975, Stephen King in Salem’s Lot was giving us a sucker with no obvious redeeming features.
Then, the very next year, the blood hit the fan when Anne Rice actually dared to ask a vampire not only what he was thinking, but what he was feeling.
Louis is at very least the anti-hero of Interview with the Vampire, but is a pallid figure compared with his feisty mentor, Lestat. And in Lestat, Anne Rice captured the spirit of an age so new it would have appalled Stoker to the core. Sex and drugs and rock-and-roll? Well, in vampires we have beings who are innately sexual, who sink needle-like fangs into slavishly willing veins ... and as for rock-and-roll? If that means ‘youth culture’, then what template could be more perfect? Vampires stay forever young.
It is no co-incidence that, in later Vampire Chronicles, Lestat actually becomes a rock star. He may be a brute, but he is a successful and a wholly honest brute.
There is no absolute rejection of conventional morality here, however. Rather, there is moral panic. Because interestingly, both in the novel and in Anne Rice’s script for the screen adaptation, the more romantic Louis is never shown actually killing a human, though we are told he does it all the time after experiencing some initial qualms. Rice simply cannot bring herself to show it.
The pendulum had swung partly, not wholly, the other way therefore. Sympathy for the Devil? Not quite -- more a case of sympathy for the unVictorian impulses in all of us, which a new legion of gurus was encouraging us to embrace.
The floodgates had been opened for a whole new breed of vampire, both in print and on celluloid. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Hotel Transylvania gave us ‘vampire as romantic lead’ and spawned an entire sub-genre of imitators. Whitley Strieber in The Hunger even presented us with a vamp with a good excuse; his Miriam Blaylock is driven not by evil, but by loneliness and an all-too-human need for companionship, m’ lud.
On film we had ‘vampire as good guy’. In John Landis’s Innocent Blood, Marie is depicted unquestioningly as the heroine of the piece, while in Jim McBride’s Blood Ties the vampires are a peace-loving minority persecuted by Christian fanatics -- the word ‘pogrom’ is actually used. Both films get around the moral problem of their heroes’ dietary tastes in interesting ways. The Blood Ties clan have opted to feed solely on each other, while Marie only preys on very bad people, in this case Robert Loggia’s pugnacious Mafioso and his gang.
1992, though, gave us the most simpatico bloodsucker of them all in the shape of Gary Oldman in Francis Coppola’s so-called 'Bram Stoker’s Dracula'. It is anything but. "The heart of him is not"? Oldman’s Count is nothing but heart, a magnificently melancholic, tragic and romantic figure, driven down the centuries by one thing alone: love. Which, we had already known since the Sixties, is all you need. And which generally provides its own morality. Van Helsing has become a crackpot, a curmudgeon, and a spoilsport. Oldman’s death-scene, at the climax of the film, is more Romeo and Juliet than The Beast Must Die.
But could this trend last forever? Pendulums swing both ways. By the Nineties, drugs were enslaving whole communities, strangers with dark flashing eyes were putting bombs on planes -- and eventually doing worse things with commercial aircraft -- and the connection between sex and blood had become an unhappy one.
In the same year as the Coppola movie, Poppy Z. Brite finally saw in print the ground-breaking debut novel she had been working on since her late teens. Zillah of Lost Souls is as engrossing and as beautiful a creature as Lestat, but infinitely more corrupt. Where Lestat simply tries to be the best vampire he can be, relative words like ‘best’ do not feature at all in Zillah’s vocabulary. He is a creature purely of appetites, will do anything to appease them, and feels not the slightest twinge of conscience since he has none. What Stoker’s vampire does to Lucy Westenra is awful, but he does it to survive. What Brite’s Zillah does to Ann Bransby-Smith, on the most vulnerable night of her young life, is done purely for the fun of it, and is unforgivable.
The attitude in movies started changing too. Disquiet had already been expressed as early as 1987 in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, where her nomadic vampires were depicted both as an enviably happy band and as utterly sadistic killers. By 1995, Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction was making comparisons between vampiristic appetites and the sociopathic urges of war-criminals. By 1996, From Dusk Till Dawn was stripping away the tawdry allure of a Mexican bordello to reveal the horrors beneath. And by 1998, Blade was in action against a lethal foe.
Ambivalence remains in all these movies though. John Carpenter with Vampires (1998) seemed rather more sure. "Have you ever seen a vampire? Well first of all, they’re not romantic, all right?" snarls James Woods’ leather-clad slayer. And in this film they definitely aren’t, since they bear more resemblance to George Romero’ s zombies than to Oldman in a topper.
And so we end the century rather less in love with vampires -- and ourselves? -- than we once were. But still not wholly certain. Who among us can’t identify with interviewer Slater when he begs of interviewee Pitt "make me like you"? Forever young. Forever beautiful. It’s a dream hundreds of thousands of us take out second mortgages and risk disfigurement for, every single year.
Of the current century? Wes Craven’s Dracula 2001 takes us almost back to the beginning, with a traditional Count possessed of all the darkness and chilly attraction of Stoker’s original.
But it is perhaps in the warm tv embraces of the cult phenomenon Buffy that we find ourselves most comfortable. Most of the vampires that she fights are monsters, yet she finds romance with Angel and even an unlikely friend in Spike.
We are prepared to embrace our own darker side, it seems. But only sometimes. And even then, only ever conditionally. Do we see ourselves -- at the end of the day -- as brutes yes, but as brutes with hearts? That’s where the real ambivalence lies, and the pendulum keeps on swinging.

This article first appeared in Prism: The Journal of the British Fantasy Society, copyright (c) Tony Richards 2003