May 1st is the day when my latest story, Kremlin Necropolis, is posted on the ZNB presents Patreon page. The story is set in the same world as The Risen, where saints can become vampires and vice versa. Not a free site, but I think it only costs a couple of bucks to read if you’re interested. I wrote it a while ago, but it’s probably more apropos than ever today.
And yes, the Kremlin Necropolis is a real place.
An early Christmas present just arrived – I sold a story to ZNB Presents! Set in the world of The Risen, it’s called Kremlin Necropolis and takes place about thirty years ago. In the Kremlin, of course, featuring Mikhail Gorbachev and Joseph from The Risen. Given the cast, it’s a bit of a secret history, similar to the other Risen stories I’ve posted, Let Them Eat Cake and The Three Marys, and will be available at the ZNB Presents Patreon page next May.
Which means I might actually have to post more often than once a year to remind folks when the story comes out.
Happy Thanksgiving! To help you celebrate, I’m posting an almost appropriate story from the world of The Risen – Let Them Eat Cake. Of course the story’s not actually about Thanksgiving, and really only peripherally about eating, but what the hey. It is a story about vampires, and though it is a completely different story from The Three Marys, there is one similarity. Both are alternate histories.
Because what’s the point of writing stories set during famous times throughout history if it’s not alternate? Am I right?
So, how did I come to write a straight-up vampire story like The Risen if I’m not actually much of a vampire fan? I don’t like the Dracula flicks, don’t like Interview With a Vampire or Twilight. I am, however, a huge Buffy fan, and when vampires became all the rage about fifteen years ago following the success of Buffy and Twilight, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon as well.
As usual, my timing was less than spectacular. By the time I finished The Risen the vampire phenomenon had come and gone. All that was left was paranormal romance, and The Risen is definitely not paranormal romance. More the exact opposite, actually.
I’m a huge Buffy fan – you can talk all you want about today being the golden age of American TV, but I think none of these more recent shows hold a candle to Buffy either as great TV or sheer fun. (K-dramas are another matter.) Twilight, on the other hand, has never done much for me. For one thing, as a fifty year old guy (back then), I was hardly the target audience. But secondly, and more important for me personally, was the fact that I’ve never liked the whole idea of pretty, sparkly vampires. I like my vampires to be evil, really evil. I mean, come on folks. Vampires feed on humans. Making them broody and misunderstood is pretty much a total reach in my opinion. Buffy only pulled it off because something was done to Angel and Spike to change their fundamental vampire natures, a gypsy curse for Angel, and a mad scientist for Spike. Still, I knew that if I ever wrote a vampire story I had to include a few sparkly vampire types to help push sales and at least come halfway to the popular idea that vampires should be love interests. But how to do that without making a travesty of my firmly held belief that vampires should be monsters?
Easy answer – make them both! And so the idea of the Risen was born. Vampires that didn’t die when you staked them (which is part of Stoker’s original story), but needed to be burned or have their heads sliced off. If you didn’t do that they’d be reborn, only not as vampires. This time they’d come back as saints. Because what could be more opposite to a vampire than a saint? Vampires prey on humans, but saints pray for them.
Of course, to make it even more complicated, I decided that just as a staked vampire could be reborn as a saint, so could a staked saint return as a vampire. And so on, back and forth through the centuries, until someone finally kills them.
Or maybe they eventually turn into something else.
Took a while, but my newest book, THE RISEN, is finally available. You can buy it from Amazon here, or click on the link on the Where To Buy My Books page above. Hopefully it will be available soon at Barnes and Noble as well, but B&N is having tech issues at the moment, and I couldn’t wait on them any longer despite my reluctance to steer sales to Amazon.
Lily Devine has everything. Youth. Talent. Beauty. Only twenty years old, she’s just won the starring role in the biggest blockbuster movie event of the season, only to have her entire world upended when her grandmother tries to kill her.
And steals her life.
Abby Crane’s situation is much different. Happily engaged, she’s two weeks into her dream job at the Mendes Foundation. She and the incredibly charismatic Milos Mendes are on their way to a meeting together when their car suddenly skids off a snowy road and crashes in a deep ravine. Milos is killed, but Abby manages to crawl back up to the road where she meets…Milos?
Welcome to the world of The Risen, where saints can become vampires, and vampires saints. Where a history professor and her wife fight the undead alongside a 2,000 year old former vampire and a special forces vet. But where do Lily and Abby fit in? One is not quite a vampire, the other is not quite a saint. Can they possibly remain alive long enough to discover what they really are before Milos and Lily’s grandmother kill them?
Find out in…
…The Risen.
The Three Marys is a story from the world of The Risen that puts forth as simply as possible the central idea of the book, that the undead can be saints as well as sinners. Literally. Click on the link below to read.