The Vampire Rises
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.
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