Political Monsters: Vampires, Aristocracy, and Big Business!

Click to download two chapter sample

It has sometimes been said that the classic vampire story (by which I mean in literature rather than mythology) reflects something of the traditional class divides. It boils down to the aristocratic vampire feeding off the working class man and woman, a parasite upon society, contributing nothing to it – and certainly not doing anything to earn their money or station. I don't know how much truth there is to this but, like many literary theories, it is at least a fun idea worth playing with.

But where does that leave the modern vampire? What, by this token, does he (or she) have to say about the society we live in? Well, in most of the modern literature vampires are romantic heroes/anti-heroes with a tragic history and/or nature, and only occasionally are they purely villains. When they are baddies, they seem to be simple agents of evil or the now anachronistic parasite. Today of course, it is not so much the aristocracy that is perceived to be the chief parasite on society but big business and the criminal cartel – which is what lead me to adopt my own themes. I'm not really trying to present any political case, I am, after all, just writing ePulp and wouldn't want anyone to read too much into that. However, this presents me with a fun variation to play with. The vampire can still be a monster but it is reduced somewhat to a consumer, while others, not simply exploited, are reduced to commodities. The Blood Cartel is a business and it's goals are primarily about profit and if you are not part of it, then you are either a source of profit, an obstacle, or irrelevant.

Of course, the thing about the modern vampire is that it is seldom really a monster anymore. Look back at the old myths and early films and and stories and in most of them, they are soulless human shaped things that feed on us. Now, in so far as they are monsters, they are very human ones. In so far as they are alien in their evil, it is in the manner of the sociopath – sociopathy being a very human condition. So, I figured, why not go all the way and make the bad vampires sociopaths? Then I can focus much of the actual evil with the ordinary humans acting from sociopathic tendencies or plain immorality. (I think it worth drawing a distinction, as the sociopath seems incapable of valuing people in a moral way)

Blood Traffic Issue #1: The Bow Street Vampire is now live for Amazon's Kindle!

The Bow Street Vampire is set in an alternative world, in the British capitol of Londinium. Here, old gods have begun to be worshipped once more and the supernatural has become a familiar experience - except for vampires, creatures of myth that have remained unreported...until now.

In a police service rather different from our own, based not in Scotland Yard but in Bow Street and where its members are still known as Runners, Detective Inspector Jim Varney has the job of investigating the murders of illegal immigrants. Were they killed to support the underground trade in transplant organs? Was their blood farmed to supply such operations - or for something else?

He and his small team soon uncover a deadly trade and a terrible new addiction, all controlled by the vicious Blood Cartel.

Tomorrow...blood is the new cocaine!

You can download the first two chapters (about a quarter) of the book here.

And you can find it on Kindle here:

Amazon UK and Amazon US

Finally having this published is a weight of my mind and I can again return to work on the the next book and planning the future ones. Neill will have some time towards the end of this month, so he will be able to work with me again to develop covers and promotional images for Issue #2: Peel's Bloody Gang. My goal is to have that title published in late July or early August. Issue #3: The Food Chain has been drafted but needs some re-writes here and there before I begin the first round of corrections and preparations for publication. Working with Neill's time table again, I should be able to get this published for Kindle in November this year.

With the first three issues published in Kindle format we'll prepare an omnibus edition of all three for paperback only in time for Christmas. It will still be cheaper to buy the individual volumes as eBooks, so I don't think it will be worth making an omnibus edition available for that format at the moment. However, it would just not be economical to make print on demand books available for such small books, hence this strategy. I won't make so much money on them in this format either but it will expand availability, which has to be a good thing. (and for readers who don't own Kindles or an equivalent, they are also sales that I wouldn't have made otherwise!)

And beyond that? Well, the world that I've been creating for the Blood Traffic series has many more stories in it, some of them will tie in to Blood Traffic, building a larger narrative with some catastrophic events later on. The question is, when should I start writing them? I suspect that, time permitting, the most I can write in a year will be three books of this modest size and with eight or nine planned for Blood Traffic, it will take another two to two and a half years to complete it. I have to ask myself, would the series benefit from other stories running along side it? Though that would mean a longer wait for those wanting a resolution to the series they started with, it would afford me some variety in what I'm writing. Perhaps that will help keep what I'm writing fresh. Alternatively, by taking too much time away from a series, I may take a bit longer to get back into it.

For now however, I hope that you will give The Bow Street Vampire a try – and hope all the more that you will enjoy it!

Milton

Sex, Sauce, and Pulp

OK, so I had a hard time deciding whether or not to include a bit of nookie in the first of the Blood Traffic novels but eventually, with a little persuasion from Robyn, I opted to include one. Yet still, I’m not sure it was the right choice.

The facts are these: I have aimed at writing some old fashioned pulp novels, albeit with a modern flavour. Sauce and sex have long been a part of the pulp tradition, so it seemed natural to include them. Perhaps it is worth pausing to ask what that tradition is...

Pulp refers to the cheap paper pulp that was used for printing equally cheap fiction magazines that had their heyday in the first half of the Twentieth Century. There were very many of these titles, covering a full range of genres, such as western, mystery, horror, adventure, detective, and romance. While some of the mainstream titles could be a little suggestive, there were many with titles such as Spicy Detective, or Spicy Horror, which were more overtly suggestive, featuring black and white illustrations that often featured a little nudity - albeit, never full frontal, but still favouring plenty of bosoms, bottoms, and long legs. If you hunt around, you can find a number of these stories available on-line, though I’m not sure of their copyright status. I have read a fair few of them now and have to say that some are very good, with sharp prose littered with witty quips - though others are pedestrian and clearly bashed out to fill empty pages. They can also be rather shocking, bringing home just what the accepted attitudes were in our very recent past - something worth remembering, as it is all too easy to forget how racist and misogynistic we have been in the West. The media are naturally self censoring - as society’s attitudes change, the media give us what our new attitudes approve of and so we can end up with a sanitised view of the past.

While the pulps slowly vanished, their style of stories continued in short ‘pulp’ novels - or novellas by today’s standards. These have all but vanished in print and to some extent this would seem to be the result of changing economics in publishing in this country. Still, these books continued into the early 1990’s.

Stylistically, what connects them is their brevity, fast pace, cheap thrills, lowbrow entertainment, complete with all the action, corruption, gore, and sex that their genres allowed. Not to mention their covers! Long before the days of PhotoShop, these were all painted, colourful, and frequently a bit saucy (irrespective of the story being so). One way or the other, they were about titillation, if not always sexual.

So, that is what I’ve aimed for. Lowbrow, lightweight, fast paced, and short, peppered with a measure of action, gore, and...just the one sex scene. And that short scene was the hardest to write. Still, the question is, should I have written it? Is it really an expectation of the genre that I had committed myself to meeting? Does the expectation still exist? Or am I missing the point by wondering that? Perhaps these books are about offering a cheap banquet of thrills, with each course offering a little something that won’t be to the taste of all but which is ok because the next course will be something different. I suppose I shall just have to wait on reviews - book two doesn’t have any sex, though there was one opportunity in the story, I felt it would be a little too nasty for my taste, so I skipped that. There is also an opportunity in book three for something between a couple of the main characters, but its inclusion will rest upon the response I get with regards the first two.

Perhaps what troubles me is not the sex per se, I’ve nothing against sex in life or literature, but that of all of those obligatory sex scenes that I remember reading in the old pulp horror novels of my youth, was that none of them was very good. From Guy N. Smith (good grief, they were bad!) through to James Herbert (predictable in every sense), they never really managed to be all that erotic. In fact, of all the stories, the ones that seemed to do best at titillating were some of the old pulp magazines where they really did have to stop short of giving the details.

So, what didn’t work for me in those two authors I mentioned? OK. Let’s start with Guy N Smith, if only because he’s such an easy target. He has penned a huge number of pulp horror novels in his career, sometimes having as many as five published in a single year, and which include some pulpy classics such as The Crabs (a series of six books featuring giant man eating crabs - really!) and The Sucking Pit. First of all there is the clumsy prose and use of language reminiscent of an adolescent schoolboy - that’s never going to work. Then there is the implausibility: people meet fall in love, into bed, and are willing to sign away vast chunks of their estates the next afternoon. I just don’t believe it. Of course, this is not to say that the books were all bad - I did read a bunch of them, as did very many others - but the sex didn’t work for me.

And what of James Herbert? While his early books fell into that category of short genre pulp, he has earned a reputation for being somewhat more literary and original - but the sex? Well, I’ve not read all of his books but those I have tend to have an obligatory sex scene in roughly the same point, you just know it’s coming (no pun intended). And it’s boring, each scene seems to read the same as the last one you read - there’s not much spice and there doesn’t even seem to be much of a build towards it. In short, a couple have sex and I don’t care.

So, my current thinking is...if I am going to have sex in any of the books:

• There should be some build up - if only a little.
• It should be a little bit spicy, something interesting, perhaps even forbidden.
• If it can’t be spicy, then it needs to have a point, or the reader won’t care.
• It should not be too predictable.
• It should not dominate the story - it’s just one course in the banquet!

And that is as far as my thinking on this matter has gone. What remains for now is to canvas you, my readers and potential readers, for your opinions: What do you think about sex in pulp? Is it something that you want to read? Is it something you expect to read? And if it is, how far should it go?

Blood Traffic Site Launches - With Free Chapters!

Well, I have been very busy indeed over the last couple of months – but not as busy as my friends. I have had friends re-reading the first book for last minute mistakes and another hard at work creating cover art, wallpapers, and the web site – not to mention an attractive look for my blog. My thanks to all of them because it really is thanks to them that I’m about ready to publish Issue One of the Blood Traffic series.

Right now, the web site is live and you can download the first two chapters of the book for free, along with a selection of wallpapers:

http://www.blood-traffic.com

And here are a few of the possible cover designs – no final decision has been made (still):

The Original Vampire...

Vampires have come a long way since the days when they were supernatural monsters, creatures that were all horror, little beauty...and certainly no romance. It sometimes seems like they’ve been hijacked by authors looking to spice up their romance novels - but the feeling is both disingenuous and mistaken. It seems to me that vampires became the subject of allure and very human dilemmas since they first found their way into fiction.

We can look back to Dracula and see a monster, even a rapist but then we have Lord Ruthven and Camilla, both monsters but both also seducers. And what of Varney the Vampire, was he not a very human monster?

No, while the vampire as a romantic hero has been popular in modern fiction at least since Anne Rice penned Interview With A Vampire, the germ of such characters has been with us for much longer, along with the allure of immortality and the tragedy of its price. I suspect that Ruthven, Camilla, Dracula, and Varney have between them given us most of the literary vampires since. Not all, of course, some writers have looked back to the old myths and legends of such creatures – but most.

The trick then is, as has been realised by countless author before me, not to find the original vampire but an original story about vampires. Not a new monster but a new angle on an old one. And so, that is where I found myself, two Octobers ago, in a pub with a friend of mine, a writer of SAS thrillers who was thinking of branching out to other genres. He had just such an idea and planned to have a go at writing it as a short novella for the next NaNoWriMo.

And that got me thinking about eBooks and for the first time about the freedom the medium offered writers. I started thinking about pulp literature – not the old magazines but the style and spirit of cheap, short, and fun novels of a kind that I felt sure that folk would still enjoy but which the economics of print probably didn’t leave room for these days. Over the following year I started to notice that others were thinking on these lines also, the novella was clearly returning as a medium, with many shorter books of around twenty-thousand words doing rather well.

I was not quite idle during this time, almost, but not quite. What I was doing was thinking, dreaming really, of what kind of stories I would tell. Eventually the dreams become plans and the plans went onto paper and become plots.

I am now happy to announce that I’m very close to publishing the first of what will be a series of short novels of forty-fifty thousand words a piece. I have decided to set the stories in alternative world, still much like our own but with sufficient differences to allow me room to play and do things my way.

Of course, writing the story is only half the work for a self publisher...I am now faced with the daunting task of creating a web site, a cover – and with those an image, along with promoting the books and ideas behind them. And then, thinking optimistically, should I actually sell any then I’ve got to think about such things as tax and National Insurance. It’s going to an adventure and I intend to write the process up in this blog. Even if I’m not successful, perhaps the experience will prove of some use to other budding writers out there.

Milton.