I read every Bloom County comic strip I could to satisfy my endless Penguin Lust...
And I grew up reading a steady diet of Stephen King. This part you probably already knew.
But what you may NOT know is that when I was 15, I had a very brief run-in with vampires, courtesy of Stephen King's book SALEM'S LOT.
It was a typical West Texas summer. The days were long and generally hot and humid. I lived indoors by a fan (or my AC.) This really wasn't that different from any other season, as I've always been a bit of a homebody. I was an avid reader, inhaling books by the stack, and I had discovered Stephen King thanks to the movie CHRISTINE just the year before. I didn't get to finish the movie so I read the book, which ended up being one of my favorite SK books of all time. I loved the conversational tone of it, which featured multiple POVs. I loved the time frame of the late 70s when it was set. I loved the lead character, Dennis, who was a cool kid made even cooler by the fact he had a nerdy, outcast of a best friend.
I loved it so much, I became an immediate SK devotee. And as a new devotee, I had to read every single title I could get my greedy little paws on. The white-cover romance novels on my shelves were replaced by thick horror novels that I would inhale word for word. And going from romance to horror wasn't as much of a left-turn as you might think. I'm all about story, so I loved the human drama of these stories. (CARRIE was the outcast, coming to terms with being different. CHRISTINE was about friendship, and how far one would go to save their pal. PET SEMETARY was about love and loss and letting go.) Stephen King is a master storyteller and I knew I was in good hands.
I trusted him so much that I bought SALEM'S LOT and fully intended to read it all within that brutal summer. This was not an easy decision for me, especially after I freaked out watching the tepid TV movie. See, I'm not a fan of vampires. In fact, they scare me more than zombies, werewolves, ghosts and demons COMBINED. The reason is simple. Vampires are seductive. You WANT to get close to them even when you know it would spell your doom. They are alluring. Charming. Often handsome/beautiful. They are mysterious and compelling and they offer the promise of immortality. What could be more seductive than that?
Even the way they kill you has sexual overtones. They seduce you into an embrace so that they can penetrate you with their sharp fangs, sucking the life right out of you.
Being raised in a strict Southern Baptist household made this equally alluring and forbidden.
So it would be fair to say that I was freaked out by the book before I even cracked the cover.
Worse, I made it a habit to read right as I was going to bed at night. And, it being summer, I went to bed later than my mom. So if I was alone and scared and thinking too much about vampires, I only had my cat, Fluffy, to keep me company.
I'll be honest, it took me a while to get into the story. I was reluctant to read it, and it didn't make it any easier for me that the book read drier than the previous ones that I had enjoyed. But I stuck with it like a trooper, because that's what you do as a fan. You read every single book, you know every single story and you catch every single aside SK threw at you through his various works, referencing things only true fans would catch. (Which is what gave me the idea to do it for my books.)
Within about a week, I was invested... if you can call wearing a cross around your neck and sprinkling garlic salt on your windows "invested."
I'm not ashamed to admit that I was freaked the hell out. But I wouldn't quit reading. The gauntlet had been thrown and I was determined to live up to the challenge.
So this particular night, I read my requisite chapters late into the night. It was hot, but I had that window shut and locked up tight. I was using an overhead light, which was my first mistake. The switch for said light was wayyyyy across the room. With the light on, this distance was maybe about five or six feet. The minute you flipped that light off, however, it was a good mile, mile and a half.
I had made the mistake of moving my bed from the wall nearest the switch to the far wall right next to the windows.
This would be my second error of judgment.
Finally I mustered the courage to make that long, lonely trek across my pink shag carpeting to turn out the light. I don't even think it was fully dark by the time I took that running leap and dove under my heavy comforter. Sure it was heavier than one would need on a 80-degree night, but I felt fairly confident that it was the only bedding I had that was fang-proof. I covered myself head to toe, with just a little gap facing the fan so I could breathe.
(I still sleep this way, using a fortress of pillows now to cover my neck. Thank you EVER so much, SK.)
It took a few minutes, but I finally started to calm down. I could breathe easier, my heart rate returned to normal. Everything was fine.
Until...
Within minutes of my safe return to the bed, I heard a loud THUNK against my bedroom window. At that point I bolted upright in bed, a scream locked in my throat, certain that a horde of vampires had finally pinpointed my location. I was certain that if I turned toward the window, I'd see the white face of the undead staring at me, beckoning me to open the window and leap into that eternal abyss.
Worse, I was afraid I'd willingly do so.
Needless to say,I didn't look. Not no, but HELL NAH. There wasn't any way in this world or any other, in this life or any other, that I would turn my head toward that window. Nuh uh. No way. Ain't happenin'.
At least until I heard this pitiful meow coming from the outside.
What I had forgotten up until that point was that my cat, the aforementioned Fluffy, used my (normally open) bedroom window to get in and out of the house. Sadly, for the both of us, I had forgotten this little factoid once I started making my bedroom vampire-proof.
I let Fluffy in (quickly) and finished the rest of the book without incident.
Stephen King is a fucker, s'all I'm sayin'.
I honesty never intended to write a book about vampires because they scare me so, but thanks to a late night conversation with my best friend, who suggested we were vampires in a past life because we seem to come to life between midnight and dawn, it sparked the idea that inspired MY IMMORTAL WHICH I wrote overnight, every night, for a month solid in 2004.
This time, however, I made sure all my cats were INDOORS before locking the windows. Somehow I still freaked myself out. I guess I'm a fucker, too. I mean, I guess I'd have to be, I've returned to the bloodsucking genre twice more after that, once, to convert my Gothic romance into an urban thriller for a movie script, and once for a dark sojourn into erotic horror.
If you like vampires, or horror, or being scared, pick up MY IMMORTAL, TASTE OF BLOOD, or RAVEN WALKS... if you dare.
*Crosses, garlic, cats and comforters not included.
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