WAITING FOR TWILIGHT

I passed on sleeping in an icy tent four nights running to see the midnight opening of this final movie of the Twilight series I've  loved. To be frank, I couldn't have stayed awake. I hit the first showing the second day, and the film didn't disappoint. The audience broke into applause when it was over. I didn't want it to end.

The incredible imaginations and storytelling skills of Stephanie Myer's Twilight saga--and Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books--ignited an urgent need in me to create my own living dead hero.

I hadn't planned on writing a vampire story, but I'd committed to writing a novella set somewhere in Italy. In tossing around ideas for a title, Night Train--an old rhythm and blues song from long before my time--popped up in my head. Night Train to Naples came about because of its alliteration. Now I had to decide who would be on that train to Naples...and why.

My characters never clamor to have their story told. I see them. As I pondered my story, my mind filled with a vision of Alexandros Nicolaides--a tall, strong, Greek vrykolakas, his long blond hair streaming, the emerald of his eyes deepened by the experience of seven hundred years of being undead.

...Alex boarded the night train to Naples in Rome and chose a seat at the back of the car facing the door. To help hide his pale face, he pulled the collar of his suit jacket up before settling into the humming, slick sway of the brightly colored train, feeling satisfied at how yesterday had gone. After successfully delivering a grouping of matched diamonds and a remarkable ruby spinel to a new customer in Lyons, he'd flown to Rome today on the company plane...

There he is--my Greek vamp, who lives in contemporary times. Because I love gems and precious stones, he's a gemologist and a diamond courier. Intended as a standalone, the story evolved into the Night Train paperback series collection.

At the time I was developing the first story, Amber Allure author Christiane France told me she had no interest in weaving a tale of the living dead. "Anyway, I don't know the rules for writing them."

Oops. If there were rules for what the mythological creatures we call vampires, vrykolakas or the Romanian strigoi are like, I needed to research this before I wrote another word.

The historical picture shows mankind as fearful and superstitious. Every culture has had a demon or spirit that sustains its life by sucking  the "essence" out of a person, usually by drinking their blood or sucking out their soul. The creatures have similarities, but differences, too. In the Western world, gothic horror films and books depict vampires as blood-thirsty murderers. They include fanged male and female undead beings whose images can't be captured on film or reflected in a mirror. Only decapitation, fire, sunlight, silver or wooden stakes kill them. Displaying the cross of Christ in the face of this evil can't protect you, but garlic or waving branches of wild rose or hawthorn can. (Go figure.)

It was only in the early seventeen hundreds that records in southeastern Europe detailed the folkloric fear that the dead could return as revenants--a result of witches, suicide, evil beings invading the body, or the bite of a vampire. Mass hysteria resulted in weird and gross treatments of corpses to prevent this. Suspected revenants were executed in public.

John Polidori coined the word vampire with his 1819 book, The Vampyre; A Tale. He was Lord Byron's physician, and three years earlier the two of them had joined Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley (of Frankenstein fame) and Claire Claremont, the mother of Bryon's daughter Allegra in Geneva. Shut indoors by rainy weather, they spent the days spinning horror tales. Polidori's book emerged from this setting. Lord Ruthven, his vampire, is charismatic and suave, reminiscent of what we'd call a serial sociopath today. The killings aren't graphic. The story meanders, but what can you expect from something written two hundred years ago? (It's free on Kindle.)

Many of today's stereotypes about vampires--such as fangs--began in 1846 with Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood. This is a Victorian penny dreadful series later published in book form by James Malcolm Rymer.  It's $1.99 on Kindle, but I didn't buy it because the only review rates it "boring, boring, boring."

Fifty years later, Irishman Bram Stoker's famous Dracula drew on Victorian werewolf and demon lore to voice the "anxieties of an age" and spawn the horror genre. It fits in the vampire, gothic, horror and invasion literature categories.

In our time, queen of the horror genre Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, the first book in The Vampire Chronicles, was released in 1976. Long before I'd imagined writing about them, or had even heard of Anne Rice and what she wrote, I saw this 1994 film. I went only because it starred Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Brad Pitt and Christian Slater. It scared me spitless. I rushed out to the lobby to recover, then forced myself to return to see how it ended--rather depressingly, I might add. Later, I slogged through eighteen CDs of the Chronicles's richly woven Blackwood Farm. It was right out of my nightmares, and depressed me even more. I am obviously too timid for tales of horror. Rice's vampires follow the traditional trend, but the deeper message is to turn from evil to God. 

Vampires are not real. They were spawned in the minds of writers. Fortunately, the wonderfully imaginative Meyers and Harris have shown us we can alter the historical picture and disregard any rules about their nature.

Charlaine Harris's Stackhouse series vamps have come out. They live openly among humans in southern Louisiana, can be seen in a mirror and photgraphed. Per tradition, they sleep only during the day because sunlight is deadly. Silver can burn and even small exposures are toxic over time. Stakes and knives can destroy them. Only the rogues murder humans and drink their blood. The others drink synthetic or "true blood" (thus the name of the HBO series) donated by humans.

Twilight's vampires live secretly among humans. Some avoid the gothic horror of ripping out human throats by confining themselves to a quick, merciful kill to slake the blood of big game animals. They never sleep because they never tire. They avoid sunlight because their skin sparkles like diamonds in it. Humans seeing that effect would know what they were. The discovery would incite vampire hunts to rival those of the seventeenth century.

This is Romeo and Juliet with a twist--its teenage lovers marry and live happily ever after, thus freeing Romance writers from old dark stereotypes. Another vampire "rule" has bitten the dust. 

It was important in crafting my three Night Train novellas that the vampires be my vampires, not those of someone else. I chose the traits I wanted from the stereotypes and added new ones of my own.

If you're interested in writing about vampires, my advice is to forget about "rules." They don't exist. As long as you make your vamps believable, they may be anything you wish them to be.

Just go for it.

Carolina Valdez
http://www.CarolinaValdez
http://www.twitter.com/carolina_valdez
NIGHT TRAIN - available now http://www.amberquill.com/AmberAllure/NightTrain.html

FOR A CHANCE TO WIN a trade paperback copy of my gay erotic NIGHT TRAIN stories, leave a comment here with your email address. A winner will be selected on January 31st.

ASHLEY WON THE COPY OF NIGHT TRAIN. CONGRATULATIONS!