Hi Everyone!! Please give a warm welcome to author Margo Bond Collins as she shares with us "Why Vampires", tells us about "Sanguinary" and keep scrolling to enter the giveaway!
Why Vampires?
Anyone who writes urban fantasy must eventually face the question: to vamp, or not to vamp? And everyone who reads urban fantasy has an opinion on vampires and whether or not they’re an interesting and useful part of urban fantasy. But no matter any one writer’s or reader’s opinion about vampires, the fact remains that these particular monsters keep rising from the dead.
There are piles of novels featuring vampires, and I’ve been asked several times why I would want to add to that pile. Part of the answer is simple: I wrote the earliest draft of Sanguinary almost ten years ago, after Buffy, but before the Twilight series came out—and before there was quite so much vampiric competition. But I decided to go ahead and submit it for publication because in my narrator Cami Davis's world, most of the vampires are not sexy. They’re frightening and deadly—and they’re the kinds of vampires I want to read about.
Not that I can’t be convinced by a sexy vampire—Damon Salvatore, Spike, Jean-Claude—and Cami's vampire-partner Reese definitely draws on the sexy-vampire tradition.
But the terrifying vampires are the ones that fascinate me, and I love reading theories about why vampires have remained steadily popular at least since their first appearance in Europe during the eighteenth-century vampire scare of 1732. In part, I tend to buy the idea that vampires illustrate our anxieties about aging and death. But more than that, I think that, as Nina Auerbach claims, each generation creates the vampire it needs. So our urban fantasy vampires reflect a world in which sex and death are often intertwined—and where we find violence and horror sexy.
Of course, none of this postulating fully answers the question of “why vampires?” I’m not sure there is one single answer to that question. In “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” Stephen King writes that the horror film “deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized. . . .” I think he’s right—and I think that fictional vampires appeal to those instincts, too. They are our bloodthirsty, lustful, amoral (sometimes immoral) selves, set free on the page. Ultimately, both the best and the most frightening thing about vampires is the fact that they keep. coming. back. No matter how many times we stake them, behead them, burn them to ashes, they are truly undead—as a symbol of all we fear and love, their continued existence is virtually guaranteed.
Thanks again Margo for hanging out with us today!!! Loves, scroll below to find out more about SANGUINARY, read an excerpt, click on the links to stalk, I mean follow Margo and don't forget to enter the giveaway!!
By Margo Bond Collins
Blurb:
Only fifty years left before vampires rule the world.
When Dallas police detective Cami Davis joined the city's vampire unit, she planned to use the job as a stepping-stone to a better position in the department.
But she didn't know then what she knows now: there's a silent war raging between humans and vampires, and the vampires are winning.
So with the help of a disaffected vampire and an ex-cop addict, Cami is going undercover, determined to solve a series of recent murders, discover a way to overthrow the local Sanguinary government, and, in the process, help win the war for the human race.
But can she maintain her own humanity in the process? Or will Cami find herself, along with the rest of the world, pulled under a darkness she cannot oppose?
Available for purchase at
Excerpt
Reese
loosened his hold enough for my circulation to start back up, and the blood
rushing to my palm felt like needles dancing across it. I rubbed it with the
thumb of my other hand, and Reese's gaze followed the motion.
"We're
leaving," he said, his voice harsh.
No. No way
in hell was I walking out of here with a pissed-off vampire.
That's how
cops got dead.
Instead, I
took a step backwards and pulled myself up onto a barstool. Reese's upper lip
curled, revealing a fang, and I held out my hands placatingly.
"Hear
me out," I said.
I didn't
really know if I could trust him, this cowboy-vampire I had been thrown
together with. He was only meant to be an informant, my visits to see him at
the Blood House a cover for him to pass information to me.
But that's
not how it was working out.
Garrett
had said Reese was on our side, as much as it was possible for any vamp to be.
I wasn't sure he thought of us as anything more than dinner. But he was all I
had right now—my partner was too vamp-addled to help me, and Iverson and his
crew weren't rushing in to save me.
The
department wouldn't force me to stick it out, wouldn't expect me to team up
with a vampire for anything more than the most superficial of connections.
I could walk out at any time.
But if I
did, it was unlikely we'd find out enough to stop whoever was killing these
women.
So that
left the option of going in deep.
Almost
everyone who went undercover with the vamps came out addicted to their bite.
The ones who could still string two sentences together, like Garrett, stayed on
the force. It's not like the Sucker Squad had cops banging on the door to join
up.
We worked
with what we had.
The press
portrayed us as bumbling and stupid—and maybe we were. Sending detectives in
against humanity's worst nightmare? We were like little kids trying to hold
back the dark with matches, bound to get our fingers burned, and worse, maybe
burn the house down around us if we weren't careful.
We didn't
really understand what we were doing, or what we were up against.
Going
under was dangerous and ugly.
But I was
beginning to think it might be necessary.
"I'll
tell you everything," I said to the vampire snarling at me. "But I'll
need your help."
Reese's
lip dropped back down, covering the fang.
I was
glad—it was easier to contemplate joining forces with him when he wasn't
reminding me that he was one of the monsters.
Giveaway
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