INFUSING SOME FRESH BLOOD INTO
THE VAMPIRE
Or: Why I Ignored Everyone’s
Advice And Wrote Another Damn Vampire Novel
So, why vampires?
That's the question I'm most
often asked when people ask me about my writing at all (it doesn't happen
nearly as much as I'd like, since I love talking about writing). I think the
most concise answer I can give is that vampires give me a little bit of
everything. In today's world, vampires have the ability to transcend the
monster role they were traditionally given and can now be just about anything.
They are the monster that most resembles us. They are us. They are the best and
worst parts of our natures amplified and given the power to enact their desires
on a large scale. How is that not attractive to a writer? What's more, being a
minor history buff, I love having the ability to pull characters out from
various parts of history and examine how becoming a vampire either changes or
doesn't change them.
I love researching the folklore
of vampires in different cultures and bringing that into my work, but it's
probably fair to say that I've been more influenced by the newer Anne Rice
style vampire. That crap with crosses and mirrors and holy water never made
much sense to me. It's all based on the idea that the vampire is inherently
evil and that the Christian faith is inherently good, both concepts that I reject.
Vampires start as people so, to me, there would have to be good vampires and
bad vampires. And as for religion, well, what about a vampire that's older than
Jesus? Why the hell would he care about a Christian cross? People created the
vampire idea to explain things they didn't understand, but every good boogey
man has to have a weakness, so they made those up too. I wanted to start from
scratch with my vampires.
I started with the idea of doing
a different take on vampires than what I was seeing out in the movies and
novels of the time. This was many years back, however, so certain things have
caught up a little. But I liked the idea of vampires having a society, a
political hierarchy that explained why nobody knew about them. If you live
forever, what do you do with your time?
In most movies, all vampires worry
about is feeding, but think about it like a person. How much of your day do you
worry about eating? A society gives you what you need to survive (food) without
having to work as hard for it, so you have time to do other things. In my
vampires' case, they spend their time building up their personal power so that
nobody can mess with them. The more power and wealth you have, the safer you
are. It's been that way for hundreds if not thousands of years. All a vampire
needs is to save some money and, over time, he's got a fortune. Money is power
in our world and power equals safety. So, that was the basis for The Order.
Vampires are the true aristocrats of the world because blood is easy to get
when you control the power of nations and, ironically, nations are easy to
control when you can offer its leaders everlasting life, enormous sums of
money, and the ability to dispose of their enemies.
So, I started off with science as my
vampires’ basis just because I wanted to do something different and make them
more plausible. However, I love seeing magic done well in a book. Jim Butcher's
Dresden Files, for example, has fairies and magic and different species of
vampires and werewolves and all kinds of stuff, but what makes it work is that
Butcher explains his magic in a very specific way and keeps it consistent
within his world. You know how things work in that world, which makes it feel
real. I love that!
When it's not good is when it seems
like an author is being lazy and describing things as magic because they don't
have the imagination to figure out a way to make things work any other way.
Then magic becomes just a deus ex machina
that the writer is pulling out of their ass to solve plot problems for
themselves without doing the work.
My novel also features some sort of
magic, you could say, in the Jiang-shi which are the Chinese folklore vampires.
They have powers and abilities that normal science can't explain, but some of
it can still make sense if you look at quantum physics. Or, you can believe
that they actually have magic and that's that. That's sort of my nod to the
classic mystical vampire that can't be explained away.
For the purposes of my novel, I
combined the Jiang-shi idea with that of the "hungry ghost" that is a
staple of Chinese myth. I explained the creation of the Jiang-shi as a Hungry
Ghost taking up residence in the dead body and strengthening the po, thus
re-animating the corpse. However, I wanted the Jiang-shi to have some
distinctive features, so I made them unaffected by sunlight because my regular
Vampyrs are. I also made them more psychic/emotional vampires than blood
drinkers, though they can feed on blood that is strong with their emotion of
choice. I gave them the traditional weakness to religious items wielded with
faith because of the positive energy of the faith which clashes with the
negative energies that sustain them. Naturally, given their origins, I wanted
to make use of Taoist philosophy in their workings. I forget where I read this,
but there was some Chinese demon or creature that tried to avoid sleep because
their po was given a taste of their eternal punishment as they slept. I thought
this was really novel and different, so I incorporated it into my Jiang-shi as
well. For variety, I also gave them the Kuang-shi (which is really just the original
pronunciation of Jiang-shi), which are the green and white furred monsters of
legend as servants.
But, after all that, there was still
something crucial missing: why should a reader give a damn about any of this? The
story in its final form began to take shape came about when I realized that I
needed a viewpoint character to get the reader into this world. Originally, it
was going to be done third person and I was going to follow all the vampires
back and forth as they schemed and plotted, but it was all too much. There was
nobody for the audience to really root for.
Originally, there was this guy named
Avery who had just been brought in by Caroline and was kind of her side-kick.
However, he never worked. Nobody I showed the script to thought the character
belonged. I was going to get rid of him when it occurred to me that maybe the
reason he didn't work was because we weren't seeing things from his viewpoint!
Once I decided to write the entire book as Avery's story, everything else sort
of fell into place and the book became richer and more poignant, because here's
a guy who is coming into the situation with the same expectations that the
vampire reader has, along with the same context, and so the reader hopefully is
right there emotionally with Avery when confronted by these vampires that don't
act the way we've all been taught that vampires should act.
My name is Brian Patrick
McKinley and my first novel is called Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony.
It was published by Mystic Press on September 29, 2012 and it's the culmination
of a lifelong dream for me. I hope you’ll check it out!
Brian is a lifelong vampire fan from New Jersey and has
written four screenplays, a stage play which won a state-wide contest and was
produced by a NJ community theater, and numerous short stories which have been
published online in various magazines.
Brian's website: http://brianpatrickmckinley.webs.com/
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0085QCYUA
Ancient Blood's Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ancient-Blood-A-Novel-of-The-Hegemony/393476997370425
Buy Ancient Blood at B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ancient-blood-brian-patrick-mckinley/1113006782?ean=2940015618280
Blurb for: ANCIENT BLOOD: A NOVEL OF THE HEGEMONY
Avery Doyle loves vampires; he’s
read every novel, seen all the movies, and researched the folklore. When his first one-night-stand,
Caroline, turns out to be a true vampire on the run, he jumps at the chance to
leave his ordinary life and join her as a “child of the night.” The honeymoon ends, however, when
Caroline’s brutal Creator Sebastian enslaves them on his island estate and
Avery must confront the dehumanizing reality behind his dreams.
In order to survive, Caroline and
Avery take their place as servants in Sebastian’s household during a gathering
of the most powerful vampires on Earth, the Hegemony, and soon find themselves
involved in the myriad intrigues and deceptions that form the night-to-night
existence of The Order.
A society of wealth, power, and
inhuman decadence whose existence is protected by human complicity and
disbelief, The Order is the immortal aristocracy hidden behind the giant
corporations and political leaders of the world. Sebastian, however, has a plan
that will change The Order forever and shatter human civilization.
To avoid this terrible fate, Avery
and Caroline will not only have to defy the most powerful creatures on Earth,
but also confront the darkest aspects of themselves. For in the world of the
Hegemony, even victory may cost them their souls . . .
A fast-paced thriller that both
re-imagines and pays tribute to the traditional vampire, Ancient Blood is a story of love, ambition, sacrifice, and betrayal
that is frighteningly human.
3 comments:
Thanks for the look into your creative process.
I like the idea of using Chinese mythology in the vampire lore. The Jiang-shi are probably something that many readers have not been exposed to, making this a fresh look at vampires.
Thanks Sandy and Anna! I appreciate the comments!
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