The Vampire Rises

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If you follow me on Twitter or read this blog regularly you probably know I have a new book coming out this summer: Vampire Rising. It’s a novella, actually. We will be revealing the cover on June 3, the same day the book becomes available for pre-ordering. See the graphic on the left for a list blogs where you can see the cover, read a blurb and the first excerpt.

It’s been two years since the release of Unbroken and in the time since it was published I wrote one short story, “The Christmas Present,” which was a romance but more of a fantasy, involving voodoo gods, Obeah and an undersea world which may or may not have been imagined. I found I liked juxtaposing the ordinary with the extraordinary, the very real with the imagined. I’ve played with fantasy in my short story collection, Damaged Angels. In “The Cross,” the deceased narrator writes letters to his earthbound friend from “the anteroom to the hereafter,” telling him, “I write these words, my notepaper the crystal blue sky, filaments of clouds, my fantastic ink…” and in Intermezzo, a God comes to earth and falls in love with a mortal.

I decided I wanted to write fantasy again but something longer this time. It was Jose (the real life Jose on whom the character Jose in Unbroken was based) who first surfaced the idea of writing a book about Vampires. I wasn’t sold on the idea—too common, too done. But then as I outlined the story I wanted to tell, I started to think about Vampires and what they stood for in my head. I pulled out a long owned but never read copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and I was on my way.  

If What Binds Us drew it’s inspiration from The Great Gatsby, Vampire Rising is inspired by the three greatest works of fiction ever written: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, To Kill a Mockingbird and the Bible.

This one is for anyone who has ever felt different…and afraid of being different.

Vampire Rising is, I think, my most ambitious work to date. I wonder what readers will think of it.

In Manus Tuas, Domine…
Visit http://www.vampirerising.com/ to learn more. 
 

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