Vampires Suck and That's Why We Love Them by Guest Blogger Billie Sue Mosiman

If you look really close, you might find Billie Sue Mosiman in this picture.

About Billie:  After keeping journals and diaries in her teens and aspiring to be a writer, Billie Sue Mosiman studied English Literature as her major at the University of Alabama. Hoping to experience the Hippie Revolution in 1968 in order to further her writing, she traveled to San Francisco and then to Long Beach, California where she met her husband-to-be. Throughout her twenties and early thirties, she wrote short stories and finally began work on novels. She had three NY agents before going with the William Morris Agency in 1982. Her first novel, WIREMAN, was sold in 1983. In ensuing years, she published thirteen novels and more than one hundred fifty short stories. One novel was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel and later another novel was nominated for the Stoker Award for Superior Novel. She taught writing for AOL online and Writer's Digest. She was an editor, a columnist, a book reviewer, and published articles and poetry. Today she travels frequently and is writing a new horror novel, BLACK WINGS.

Vampires Suck and That's Why We Love Them

by Billie Sue Mosiman

Nora asked me to stick up for vampires since she'd had a guest blogger who did the same for zombies. First off, let me say I like zombies just fine and dandy. I've written a zombie story that you can find in my hardcover collection of short stories, DARK MATTER. (This story will soon be in an e-book collection.)  But I've written about all sorts of paranormal creatures, so I'm an equal opportunity lover of the non-human. These sorts of characters give writers the freedom to explore completely different worlds and even emotions that might be different from what we feel as humans. So I love them all, take that as a given.

Until I wrote LEGIONS OF THE DARK, I had written only of the vampire in a few short stories. I was contacted by DAW Books to write a trilogy of vampire novels and I had to think it over a little while. Though I had admired Anne Rice's INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, recognizing it as a book that would become a classic, and though I had written vampire short stories, the thought of an entire trilogy of novels seemed a daunting task. Did I love the vampires enough to want to live with them through three or four years of writing? Most importantly for me, did I have anything at all to say new or fresh about vampires? I couldn't answer the last rhetorical question until I wrote the books; I knew that, so that left the questions of how much I cared about vampires and was it enough to sustain me through lengthy works? I finally answered yes and dove into the first of the VAMPIRE NATION CHRONICLES in LEGIONS. I discovered I loved the characters—which is the most important thing to me when writing—and the fact they were vampires had a lot to do with it. They could live forever, given they did not meet some unforeseen accident. They were the repositories of vast amounts of historical knowledge. They had heft, they had weight, they even, in some instances, had duties to preserve and even help mankind. No, they do not sparkle. No, they are not weepy and weak. No, they are not just creatures to represent sex, either gay or heterosexual. These are unhelpful stereotypes. My vampires were great creatures, nearly god-like, with longevity that boggled the mind, and with distinctly human emotions. It always seemed to me that whether you were alive as a human or dead as a vampire, you would still be beset by all your earthly problems and desires. That would not change.

CNN interviewed me by phone for their CNN site when I was writing VAMPIRE NATION CHRONICLES and asked me why I thought people loved vampires so much. I said I thought it was because we are mortals and we live with the notion we would die. The vampire does not die, his immortality is what the mortal longs for deep in his soul, therefore the vampire mesmerizes us; we admire and envy him. For we will all die. We will lie in a grave or become ashes in an urn. We know this and it is a thought we must live with—the hardest reality any human faces. As we read the novels of vampires for a small time we become that immortal being. We live his long, long life, we follow him through centuries, and we revel in his life, even if he is among the “undead.” For that time immersed in the novel we, too, are immortal.

Except for an angel, the vampire is one of the only fictional creations that is truly immortal. Now that I am writing about fallen angels--ANGELIQUE and the forthcoming novel, BLACK WINGS—I have a large overview of writing about the immortal and after a long career of writing realistic suspense thrillers, I've discovered that the immortal is more fun. Whether he has fangs or wings, whether he can disappear or fly, he is not me, he is not US, and as a writer, I can explore all sorts of avenues that are blocked to me when writing about real people.

In LEGIONS OF THE DARK, I was able to explore and examine the vampire life of a young girl just becoming vampire. In RISE OF THE LEGEND the story progressed with her son, Malachi, whose father was human, making him a half-breed—a dhampir. In HUNTER OF THE DEAD Malachi has to hunt down the monster vampire who killed his wife and took his only child. The trilogy gave me a broad canvas where I could carry through and follow generations of vampires. I grew to love these creatures more than ever before because I recognized their humanity and that is what we care about most in our fiction. In subsequent lifetimes, do we grow more moral or less? It was a question I wanted to explore and a trilogy of novels afforded me the time and space to do it.

This trilogy of novels has moved my work away from criminal suspense thrillers into dark fantasy-horror territory and it seems that is probably where I was headed all along. I was one of the first female authors to ever write about serial killers, one of the first to use that term, and I plumbed the subject for many years in my writing while doing copious research and study of famous serial killers. Today I write of a different creature in the vampire and the fallen angel where I can deal with an even greater evil than that displayed by the monstrous human being. In the end it appears my entire career of work deals mainly with evil, terror, the innocent taken too early, the wrinkled, dry, uncaring heart, the corruption of the soul. As I hoped to entertain, I was doing my own exploration of the questions that I hoped to answer for myself--what is evil, are we born into it or do we acquire it, how does a heart and mind allow itself to commit atrocity against a fellow man, where are we going and where have we come from? Is there redemption? Whether I write of the damaged human man or woman or the immortal creature, the questions are all the same because in the end it has to do with the condition of spending time on earth in a body--live, undead, or supernatural.

So I have no quibble with the zombie or the werewolf or the vampire or the angel or the ghost. I love them all equally well, but so far, my work has concentrated on vampire and angel so I can say for sure that we don't have to settle for one or the other, pin all our love on one, or disrespect those who choose an immortal that is not the one we have chosen to write about. We can have them all. We can love and enjoy them all. I know I do.

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What Are You Reading Between the Covers? - #15

This book review is long overdue. I have three books to blog about today; Somebody's Daughter by Marie Myung Ok-Lee, By Slanderous Tongues by Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gellis, and Blowout in Little Man Flats: And Other Spine-tingling Stories of Murder in the West edited by Billie Sue Mosiman and Martin H. Greenberg.

Ms. Ok-Lee's writing is beautiful in Somebody's Daughter. Her book about a young woman searching for her birth mother in Korea moved me. The characters were wonderful and the ending, while unexpected, suited the novel perfectly. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased she did not take the Hollywood approach to adoption. Her novel also addresses being a stranger in a foreign country and what identity means. A powerful story. Highly recommended.

Switching gears to a fantasy novel wasn't very hard after Ms. Ok-Lee's book with By Slanderous Tongues. Ms. Lackey and Ms. Gellis co-wrote this tale beautifully. I didn't know it was a series when I picked up the book. I was looking for novels on Queen Elizabeth I and this one popped up in my search engine. Skeptical at first, I soon warmed to the witty characters and the interesting twist on history, which lends all of the happenings in the royal family to Queen Titania and King Oberon and The Dark and Bright Courts of the fae. They vie for their favored heirs of the royal family to assume the throne of England. I didn't find the plot hard to follow; enough of the back story was explained for this to be read as a stand-alone novel.

From faeries to murder, you can't go wrong with editors Billie Sue Mosiman's and Martin H. Greeburg's Blowout in Little Man Flats: And Other Spine-tingling Stories of Murder in the West. The first story in the collection drew me in and is one of my favorites, When Your Breath Freezes by Kathleen Dougherty. I  loved this story about Alaskan nuns! I've never thought of those two words going together, but this story changed my mind. My second favorite in the collection, We Killed Them in the Ratings by J. Michael Straczynski, proves that some people will do anything to keep their television ratings up. (Yes, he created Babylon 5.) Scrimshaw by Brian Garfield has a predictable ending for me, but maybe,  I've been mysteries too long; the story is still well written and entertaining, though. Bull and Bear by R.L. Stevens, while very short, delivered an unexpected ending that made me laugh -- saying more will give away the ending, and I enjoyed Clark Howard's Wild Things as well, the story of a man who lives alone in the wilderness and invites a strange woman into his home.

As always, happy reading and happy writing to all!