A new book! Three characters. Spooky Louisiana setting. Blood.
I don’t live in Louisiana, do not teach history, have never been imprisoned and don’t “believe” in vampires. Yet An Unremembered Grave is the story of a history professor, a prisoner and yes, a vampire, in Louisiana. So what was I thinking?
The History Professor
Danni Telfer was abandoned as a toddler and has no history, which may account for her getting a Ph.D. in the subject. But amphitheater classrooms of bored college freshmen aren’t doing it for Danni. When an ill-advised affair with her department chair results in an invitation by the dean to get out of Dodge for a semester, she scrounges an obscure grant to study the history of cotton in Louisiana. Danni has always been “different,” prone to odd experiences no one else seems to share. And now she’s about to find out why.
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“History” in my long-ago formal education was an agony of boredom. Kings, wars, names and dates memorized and instantly forgotten. A wasteland of data actually painful to recall. But I hang out with friends now who are History professors, and from just listening to their shop-talk quickly learned that “history” isn’t like that any more. Approached creatively, it’s a vast cache of stories, most of which do not involve kings, battles or specific dates. Had I to do it over again, I might major in History! Thus is born Danni, an alter-ego whose academic skills I admire and envy even as I create them from the distant perspective of the English major.
The Prisoner
Antoine “Monk” Dupre didn’t murder anybody in Opelousas ten years ago. Yet he was convicted and sentenced to life in Louisiana’s infamous maximum security prison at Angola. Monk, in the company of his cat, Bastet, works as head inmate counsel, helping other men struggle toward freedom even though his own case is hopeless. In the prison hobby shop he fashions exquisite wooden cats in the image of the Egyptian deity for which his own cat is named, only joking that his carvings might have magical power. But all that is about to change.
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Once a plantation, Angola is an entire town that, as such, appears on no map. It lies at the end of a single, two-lane road in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wild, snake-infested hills and a treacherous stretch of the Mississippi River. Isolated even now, seething with brutal history and snared in Louisiana’s traditional laissez-faire political corruption, Angola might be seen as the prison exemplar, a fantasy prison embodying all prisons. Except Angola is real. For seventeen years I visited a friend imprisoned there and talked on the phone with him every week. We even wrote and published a short story together. But that’s another whole book, a memoir in progress. For now, Angola belongs to Monk, a desperate man whose life hangs on the skill of a History professor… and a vampire.
The Vampire
The man, Stephane Grimaud, was born to Basque shepherds near Bayonne, France, before there was France. But Grimaud is no longer a man; Grimaud is a vampire. Staked and buried by a courageous but dying slave during the Civil War, Grimaud has slept beneath the soil of the plantation called Angola for 150 years. When a crew of prisoners grading a golf course for the warden unearths his grave, Grimaud struggles to stand, starving and terrified. He will need help if he is to survive in a world unimagined before he slept. How fortunate that an adept is nearby, one of the mortal humans who see and understand realities beyond the accepted one. Her name is Danni and he knows what she is, but why does she flee from him in terror?
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Kids love stories of the occult, witches and vampires, magic and all things outside the quotidian. Most outgrow it. I never did. So it was with fascination that I observed the recent, sudden and unprecedented popularity of vampires in fiction and media. (At this writing there are 10,920 vampire novels listed on Amazon Kindle, most written in the last five years!) What is this about? I dived into the research and came up with a theory. Interest in vampires demonstrably increases during periods of social change. The current time is such a period, a paradigm shift of incomprehensible dimensions, and so of course there are vampires everywhere. But why? Why do people, particularly young adults, crave endless stories of deathless, humanoid beings who drink human blood?
Eureka! In human blood is encoded the history of the human race. But history is threatened with obliteration by social change, and the blood-coded stories in every individual perish when the individual dies. Vampires cannot die, and so shoulder the task of consuming and preserving human history. The vampire, born of a Balkan folk belief and refined by the minds of many writers, including mine, is a symbol rising from our collective unconscious. Young adults, teetering between the dying world of their parents and grandparents, and the unknown world in which their children will live, are acutely, if unconsciously, aware of the shift. They, and I, long for the vampire, who preserves what we cannot. And so… Grimaud!
Fascinating theory about vampires. I strolled through the YA books a few weeks ago and realized that 3/4 are about post apocolyptic (aii–I am not going to go look for the right spelling) societies or about vampires or other such creatures. I wonder what it portends for their generation? I grew up during the VN war years, Haight Ashbury, love and peace–a time of upheaval also but don’t remember vampire novels. We had exploration of space novels instead.
I am so glad you have a new book out. I decided I wanted to reread some of your books and much to my dismay, our very excellent library only had one of them–Blue. I was sure I had read it but as I began to read, it did not seem familiar. It was with such joy that I sank onto the bed on a Saturday afternoon, to read for as long as I wished. And I was captured by your use of words. Thanks for putting them together for us, your readers.
Thanks, Ruth. BLUE is one of my favorites, totally weird and fun. Hope you’ll enjoy AN UNREMEMBERED GRAVE, even more weird! And I’d guess that the VM era, while fraught with sociopolitical upheaval, didn’t involve the sort of massive, fundamental change now taking place. The last comparable paradigm shift was the Industrial Revolution, which included a long spike in fascination with vampires. The current (technological) paradigm shift threatens everything that has gone before, a fear only enhanced by general knowledge that humans have surpassed the ability of the planet to support our numbers and yet we keep breeding. And fracking and dumping toxins and further destroying what’s left of the ozone layer, not that anything can save it now. Scary, scary stuff, calling for an army of vampires who can at least save the stories of who we were!
I’ve just lent the late Margot Adler’s book on the fascination with vampires, Vampires Are Us, to a friend who enjoys vampire romances. Interesting analysis of the genre.
I’m hooked!
A good one, Abbie, and I love the illustrations! Anne Marie Welsh, Writer, Editor, Book Doctor http://www.annemariewelsh.com/ 858.456.5205
Illustrations? Whimper. None in the ebook, which I just finished.
There aren’t any illustrations, just the cover, but I can see having little line-drawings – Spanish moss, prison bars and of course, Bastet. Those used to be conventional, back in the day!
Woo hoo…………….. I am ordering it – it sounds like just my cup of espresso (or French roast).
Still having some typeface problems with the print version, but the ebook is ready. Hope you like my terribly academic vampire!
HI Abbie,
Quite a departure from your other books, but right up my alley
I’ve read Fantasy since my youth, we are of an age, and I know the challenge you faced combining the elements into a solid and moving story.
It must have been quite daunting to offer us something new in the Vampire
world.
I’m really looking forward to the next book . There will be one or more, won’t there?:)
You write so well and really are a master of the verbal palette.
One of my favorites” A whipworm of doubt hatched in her mind, it’s infinitesimal movements spreading rivulets of unease.”
Thanks so much, for a terrific read and the exposing of that horrific prison.
Best Wishes,
Fred Spector
Is this the same story you were working on in 2011, mentioned in the blog titled “My Vampire”?
That’s the one!
I loved this book. I think it would make a great series. Please, Please have them meet again.
They will, in St.Louis.
I just finished the e-version, and I find I’ve missed illustrations that appear in the print version (no dead-tree nonsense for me, thank you). I shall do the reverse of my usual pattern, to have (but packed away due to small cramped house) bought the print version, and then buy the pixel version to allow me to read them without the light which my husband objects to when he’s trying to sleep. I am too, but he’s more successful at it than am I. Also, I hope that if my print copies are damaged, I’ll have the pixel version to console me until I can obtain another print copy.
I enjoyed myself very much, even to several snorts of appreciation or humour. I liked the idea that memory or history is contained in the blood–not the usual bit for vampires. I found the characters likeable, and the main three each had sorrows which affected their choices.
Rik Spector above says that this is quite the departure from your usual, but when I think about elements and plot in The Paper Doll Museum, I see a number of parallels in overall plot structure and in the use of secret societies, personal secrets, working with disparate characters, or characters with disparate backgrounds, the need to believe something beyond one’s comfort zone…
As with The Paper Doll Museum, I hope there will be more stories with these characters.
Glad you liked AUG! I plan to do a sequel but not until after at least one new Bo Bradley.
Just finished “An Unremembered Grave”. I will remember this book and the vivid characters for a long time. I’m so happy you’re planning to write a sequel and will watch for it. I want to know what happens “afterward” for Danni and Antoine and also hopefully more on Grimaud. What a fascinating and unusual take on the Vampire.
Thanks, Nightshadow. Definitely going to be a sequel and definitely with Grimaud! For years I’ve heard other writers saying their characters actually exist for them, are real to them. I always felt that mine – Bo and Andy especially – were sort of in suspended animation somewhere, but not qualitatively “real.” But Grimaud? Yeah, he’s out there somewhere. Of course, he would be. 😉 Next up will be a new Bo Bradley, and then Danni and the vampire will meet again.
Abigail:
You knew that I knew both J. W. Stevens as an employee in Palo Alto, Ca and as Douglas Dennis, the ANGOLO writer.
I’m finishing my first novel titled DIABOLIC SOUNDS OF SILICON VALLEY to be around 70,000 words if my Muse assists.
Stay well. I’m 85 — Betty 81; both healthy.
You were a tremendous friend and asset to Doug.
C. Rea Jordan
Sequel please!!! Love this vampire character!
Thanks, Beth, Grimaud is my fave, too. And I intend a sequel if I can ever get to it – Grimaud in St. Louis in a fabulous lair in the limestone caves beneath the city, reconnecting with Danni there as she investigates a sex-trafficking ring she stumbles over while trying to track her own history. Not everybody “gets” Grimaud. He’s not the standard teen vampire character. So glad you do!