ASMSG Scifi Fantasy Paranormal Emagazine March 2014 | Page 21

Why I Ignored
Everyone’s
Advice And
Wrote Another
Damn Vampire
Novel!
Brian Patrick McKinley
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 littlebit 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

II Source: DeviantArt: Antiplod

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.
Thiswas 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?
We could hold a Masquerade Ball!
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 we