I had always envisioned myself writing historical fiction and science-fiction. I split the difference by writing a large volume of time-travel science-fiction. Recently, with the serials First Contact, Hemavore, Winter and Fruit of The Deceiver, I have received an unexpected level of praise from readers and some fellow writers. Of course my mother is afraid to even crack the cover of anything I write. She recently told me, “I really do try to read your fiction. It starts out all clear and normal, and then I get to a point and say to myself, ‘What have I created?’ You write well—it’s just so demented!”

Sorry Mom. In my defense, I did attempt to rewrite Lassie Come Home. Somehow it turned into Den of The Ender. My Lassie is a nice dog—you have to give me that. He doesn’t go all ‘Hills Have Eyes’ and start eating people. But the parents of the boy who adores Lassie, now they have some issues…

Recently I had three different readers tell me that I have a unique ability to evoke horror without the usual tropes and gore. All three asked me how I wrote Fruit of The Deceiver. I was unable to answer these questions. And, you know, since I’m a writer, and an arrogant jerk, I’m supposed to be able to come up with something smug, something like, “Because Bram Stoker’s villain is my villain’s bitch!”

Since that does not explain a thing I suppose I shall have to explain that as well. What I am throwing out there are some aspects of the method. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m apparently writing so well in a genre I have generally avoided even reading, and never had any intention of writing in. My colleague V.J. Waks has also recently confided in me that she is drifting into horror, particularly where her short fiction is concerned. Let me just offer up my thoughts on the process as I misunderstand it, before answering the big question begged by the title above.

I only use my apparently ‘demented’ imagination to shape the facts of my fiction. I always use history, science, or a theory advanced by someone an order of magnitude smarter than I, as the premise for a story. I use my alienated point of view and crackpot apostasy to then gouge, twist, mutate, and—okay Mom—‘dement’ the subject. I don’t make stuff up, just erode or unravel it a bit.

We all—every one of us—live in a world where our ancestors were bright shining pillars of justice, founts of truth, wells of wisdom; chosen by a supernatural omniscience to inherit a world and make it better. The nastiest warmongers write history and do so to depict themselves as either saints, martyrs or saviors. Horror is typically written, as is most fiction, with the characters holding this common history as written by the victor in their mind as a social backdrop; the stage set upon which horror bursts like an injustice, making the banishment of this horror simple if difficult. However, as a reader of thousands of real stories, I can easily put my finger on the human timeline and pick out something as nasty as anything a mere imagination can cook up.

In many cases we need merely change perspective. In the early 1970s Robert Redford starred in the edifying western adventure Jeremiah Johnson, based on the life of infamous mountain man ‘Liver-eater Johnson’. To remake this film into horror all we have to do is retell the tale from the perspective of the Crow Indians whose livers Johnson dined on—raw!

This is really a science-fiction tool to help the reader more closely identify with the character by not granting the reader more information than the character would have. I call this ‘engineering Stockholm Syndrome’ by using a narrow scope to force the reader to consider the story from the character’s perspective. With horror this effect is amplified as the reader is not as prone to simply step back away from the doomed character into the narrator’s viewpoint.

V.J. Wak’s short Hunger, is an excellent example of this method. The standard intrusive narrative style in American fiction, with its attendant numerous perspective shifts, facilitates an easy out for a queasy reader. Take the all-knowing god-narrator away and just leave the character, and the reader will have to either stop reading—it’s okay Mom, put it down—or stick with the character to the end. To me, this is the essence of cultivating a horrific image in the reader’s mind, making science-fiction and horror truly compatible genres.

In recent feedback for Fruit of The Deceiver, a reader wrote, “Why does the killer think he should be saved from a gruesome death?”

The answer is that all of us—even psychos and mass murderers—want to believe that, even though we might do evil, that we are not evil. I have a stupid friend who recently lost his house because he did not bother to check and see if his estranged wife had made payments while she was living there and he was living in a cardboard box. When a mutual friend told me of his plight, I blurted, “How stupid can one white man be?”

She came to his defense though, saying that he was intelligent, but just did stupid things. You see, even this idiot, this lovable cerebral dead-end who jokes about only having read a single book, wants desperately to believe that he is intelligent even as he lurches witlessly through life. In the modern secular mind intelligence is increasingly viewed—particularly by atheists—as a soul-surrogate.

Modern serial killers have been taught since childhood that they are evil, and may consider themselves so. But to just about any pre-modern person the notion that he was evil simply because he committed objectively evil acts would be quite alien. Just as my friend tenaciously clings to the false belief that he is smart in the face of his own idiocy, ‘The Red Hand of the Caliph’ was simply doing God’s will when he slew that quaking merchant on the banks of the Euphrates. ‘The merchant’s death was not unnecessarily cruel, so why God, would you curse me to a most hideous end?’

The worst murderers among us can know the sting of injustice, and if your reader is locked in with them, they will not be so easily inclined to just step away and say, ‘Oh just eat his ass creepy crawly, he was a rotten character anyway.’

Authentic dialogue, including not using anachronistic terms, is very important to assist in the suspension of disbelief. In terms of the protagonist in Fruit of The Deceiver, Abd al-Latif, I have a chapter of his own memoir translated into English to get a feel for how he structures his thoughts. It is my primary reference work for this serial. His speech will be a reflection of that structure. So even though I don’t have his spoken words, I can attempt a reconstruction, whereas most writers will be content to use him as a mouthpiece for over-informing the reader. The worst thing I could do is to have Abd al-Latif think and speak like a 21st Century nominally Christian doctor. This is simply good advice for writing in any genre.

I do everything I can to reject tropes in fiction, though I must fail in writing without them in the end. Using the magical blood model in writing vampire fiction repels me. Although the disease model for zombie fiction is really more sensible, I reject that on pure non-conformist grounds. For the answers to zombies and vampires I did what Stoker did—instead of copying or diverging off him—and looked into folklore and history.

For both fictional complexes I used the work of 19th Century eugenicists, who believed in blood having a ‘vital essence’; that each and every one of us is just the carrier of a willful genome with a conquering or conniving attitude depending on our parentage. The belief that human blood had a plant-like memory, a drive to multiply and overwhelm like some creeping vine, was once held as truth by most of the scientific and political community—the assholes that gave us two world wars—and is becoming a resurgent theme in modern political literature. I am not talking about genetic predispositions, but a belief that our blood had a race-identified memory, that trumps any and all cultural conditioning.

According to the eugenics model, a person with a genetic marker shared by 97% of Olympic athletes cannot decide to sit at home and play videogames, but will be driven by his ‘vital essence’ to go out and conquer, subvert or impregnate his race enemies at the Olympics. In the eugenics view a descendent of Shaka Zulu [apex mass murderer] will be a murderer, even if he is raised in Norway by two pacifistic white parents. His very blood will drive him to murder his parents in their sleep after they tuck him in, and he will, like some Highlander villain, rampage across the world killing.

This brings us to the title.

When discussing the concept for Hemovore my coauthor Dominick told me he wanted a ‘classic Stoker’ vampire, not the watered down modern versions. He wanted to ‘go back to the beginning’. I reasoned that is what Stoker was doing, going back to the beginning, which, to a late 19th Century Englishman was the birthplace of humanity, Europe, the place where prehistoric Neanderthal skulls had been found.

Of course we now know that humanity was born in Africa and spread around the world, as have subsequent blood diseases. Wanting to stay faithful to Dom’s vision of Stoker’s Vlad Tepes-inspired European monster, and also wanting to honor his concept of ‘going back to the beginning’, I arrived at the ultimate first vampire; a savage Adam, with humanity by turns his reluctant and witless Eve. I recalled one scholar’s opinion that Vlad Tepes ‘the Impaler’ committed said crimes [sitting people on sharpened poles] due to the fact that he was raped by three Janissaries [homo-Christian-slave soldiers] when being held under the Ottoman Sultan as a hostage in his youth. There is also a record of a dark-skinned dervish whirling before the severed head of Vlad, Count Dracula of Wallachia, when it was finally returned to the place where its body had once been raped, Istanbul.

When Dominick got my line of reasoning he objected. “Yeah, a black African villain—but could we not dwell on the homo rape!”

I must respect my coauthor’s wishes. So, there will be no explicit depiction of the Caucasian posterior submitting to the African…

I think you get the point. I cannot abide writing in some ironclad box of fantasy laws, and therefore felt compelled to attack the very genre.

“Hello, my name is Jeannot, and Count Dracula is my prison bitch. Beat that.”

Now, if I can just get you to sympathize with Jeannot—and his countless victims—then I shall count myself a good writer of horror.

If you are interested in the ‘Dracula is my prison bitch’ concept click on the Hemavore tag and pull up ‘My Mamaloi’.