Year of the Vampire

Back in 1976, my older sister brought home a paperback novel called Interview with the Vampire. A fifteen-year-old Ru read it and it changed her world. Anne Rice’s vampires did what Bram Stoker’s could not—they made the night sexy and romantic and tragic and gorgeous. The story was Louis’, but Lestat stole the show.

Walking through the mall in 1985, I spied a display of hardcovers in the bookshop, each titled The Vampire Lestat. Apparently, the villain in Interview had captured more souls than mine, and while it took Anne Rice a decade to publish the sequel, it was worth the wait. Her writing inspired me to pattern my own style after hers; oft accused of indulging in “purple prose”, she painted scenery and sensation like no one else I’d read. I wanted to paint the pictures in my head with the same robust strokes, employing the same air-brushed hyperbole to burnish the end result. I read each successive volume of The Vampire Chronicles (The Tale of the Body Thief remains my favourite), but hopped off the bandwagon when Ms. Rice veered off to tell stories of ghosts, witches and werewolves. I admit, fascinating as the other creatures of the night may be, vampires top my food chain.

This past year, Ms. Rice returned to the vampire world with Prince Lestat—I am nearly finished devouring my copy (thanks, Ter!), and once again, my imagination has been fired by the beauty in liberating darkness. The ultimate predator, armed with preternatural allure and indomitable will, the vampire does more than inhabit that darkness. He owns it.

Over the past twenty years, I’ve written a slew of my own vampires, each from a wholly different world and possessed of entirely unique and individual personality. Each of my top three exists in his own nocturnal sphere that, like parallel dimensions, operates side by side with, but doesn’t cross over into, the others. I recently had the brilliant idea of bringing them together for a writing exercise, but every one of them wanted to know why he should oblige me.

Except Black, of course. Black flatly refused … which opened the floor to his arch-nemesis, Raymond de Haven, but still, with Julian reluctant and Darius plainly unconvinced, my great idea seems doomed. Unless they have something to say, none of them will cooperate. I guess it’s a sign of pure character development that I can’t make my vamps do my bidding. Apparently I work for them …

… as it should be.