Canada’s reigning vampire queen, Nancy Kilpatrick, has written and edited many horror books, sometimes mixing it up with a bit of eroticism. Last year, she co-edited Tesseracts Thirteen: Chilling Tales of the Great White North, together with David Morrell. This year, she has unleashed Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead. Nancy stopped by to discuss vampires, eroticism, tie-in books and her future projects.

IFP: What is it about vampires that draws readers to them?

NK: Big answer here: the vampire has archetypal appeal, meaning, it’s an energy that exists in the human psyche and like all archetypes, there are phases when that energy comes into play. Because the vampire is an archetype, it reaches to the core of every last one of us and we are both attracted and repelled. That’s the nature of such a collective energy.

IFP: How did your fascination with vampires begin? And where do you keep all those hundreds of vampire books you’ve collected over the years?

NK: I watched vampire movies as a kid on the Late Show, then later at the movies. You’re right; I’ve got a ton of books. They are on bookshelves lining every wall in my office, stacked on top of each other and in front of each other and I’m definitely out of space because there are some boxes of books, too. I was obsessed for about 15 years with collecting every books that had been printed and managed to get all the old ones, including some first editions. Now I’m overwhelmed! LOL!

IFP: The title of your latest anthology is Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead. How have vampires evolved? How are these undead different from good old Dracula or Carmilla?

NK: Vampires have evolved over time since they first appeared in folklore and mythology, then through the various centuries of literature. Dracula and Carmilla are definitely old school, way old. We don’t have counts and countesses anymore (well, they do in some countries but not North America). Different decades have produced undead that fit into the mores of the times in which they were/are penned. What we see now is the romantic/erotic vampire wanting a relationship with a human. That didn’t happen in Dracula and Carmilla. Both of those characters played at or pretended to be interested in the human but really it was as prey. Today’s vampire is really interested in a relationship and that’s very different.

IFP: One thing I’ve noticed is that vampire fiction doesn’t seem to be so hot in short story magazines, but it thrives as novels. Why do you think there is such a discrepancy? Or is there even a discrepancy?

NK: There are quite a few vampire anthologies and I’m in some of them. For instance, I have “Vampire Anonymous” in Vampires: Dracula and the Undead Legions; “Bitches of the Night” in Blood Lite; “Traditions in Future Perfect” in The Bitten Word; “The Vechi Barbat” in By Blood We Live. And there are many others.

I think there’s a bit of a backlash about vampires in the minds of some editors of short fiction magazines. They might resent that vampires are enormously popular right now and will be through the end of the Twilight movies and the finish of shows like True Blood and The Vampire Diaries. It doesn’t leave much room for other supernatural creatures or even new supernatural creatures. Sometimes, editors feel they aren’t seeing anything BUT vampire fiction – everyone wants to be the next Stephanie Meyer. I’ve heard editors say, “If I get one more vampire story submission….”

IFP: Aside from vampires, do you have any favourite horror creatures? Mummies? Werewolves? Ghosts?

NK: I love writing about ghosts and zombies. I’ve only done one werewolf story, for a magazine White Wolf used to publish, but they stopped publishing so that story didn’t get printed and it’s specific to their world, so I’m not sure I could revise it. Ghosts and zombies are creepy and fun to write about and to read about. Finding a way to modernize ghosts, that’s a challenge and when it’s done, it’s usually a terrific read. Zombies are kind of like the original vampires of myths and legends, mindless, food-obsessed entities you can’t reason with, which makes them incredibly threatening. I love a challenge!

IFP: You wrote two books based on the Jason X movies and a Vampire: The Masquerade book. How did you get the opportunity to do some tie-in writing and what was the experience like?

NK: As One Dead is the Vampire: The Masquerade book, which I co-write with Don Bassingthwaithe. White Wolf approached me to do a novel in their vampire world, because of the vampire books and stories I’d published. I wasn’t real familiar with their world, having only done a short story for This Fragile Path, so I had to go to Savage Garden, a goth club in Toronto, to study the game and talk to the people playing it. I knew Don and knew he’d written for White Wolf and suggested to them that I work with a collaborator and they were all for it and generous and paid us both what I would have gotten as a solo writer Don had an idea for a premise that was from something else he’d written – the Camarilla (the good vampires) were relegated to a small area of downtown Toronto called The Box. The rest of the city was in the hands of the Sabbat (the bad vampires). We hammered out the plot and it became a two-character point-of-view novel, me writing the female character who was not Camarilla but Inconu (unknown), and Don writing the male Sabbat. We did it by email and it worked really well and was fun and easy and I think we have a great and unusual story for the White Wolf World.

I’d been in line to do a book in the Blade world for Games Workshop, which contracted with film companies, but that book series didn’t really go. They asked if I wanted to do something else and gave me a couple of choices and I picked Jason, so it was a Games Workshop/New Line Cinema project. I wrote book #3 in the series, Jason X: Planet of the Beast. This is Jason based on the movie Jason X, when he’s in space, so these were science fiction horror novels. Jason is a tough character to write because he has no personalityand no dialogue. He’s just a killing machine, a kind of zombie with a machete. So, I had to make the other characters lively and interesting and somewhat sympathetic so that, when Jason appeared, things could happen and have meaning. I worked hard to find a way for one character to survive and planned on another book in the series. Someone else had been commissioned to write #4 and the first thing he did was kill off my character who survived! I was incensed. I got in touch with the editor and practically demanded I be signed to do book #5. I worked with the ideas in #4 in such a way that my character did survive, had a son, and that son was the pivotal character in #5, which is called Jason X: To the Third Power. And, thanks to an insane scientist in #3 fooling with DNA, her son might be Jason’s son! I had a lot of fun with those books. I remember my editor saying to me early on, “Now, a lot of people have to die. Do you have a lot of people dying?” I calculated and said, “Yeah, I do.” “How many?” “Maybe 200.” “That’s good,” he said, “that’s very good.” After all, Jason is a killer.

I’ve also done a few short stories for pre-existing comic characters. “Here, There and Everywhere…” is in The Phantom Chronicles, and “Sleepless in Manhattan” is in Hellboy: Odder Jobs. And I’ve just handed in a story for a Kolchak anthology.

IFP: You’ve also written erotica under the name “Amarantha Knight”. How did you become interested in writing erotica?

NK: I had the idea of eroticizing vampires and proposed The Darker Passions of Dracula to the publisher of Masquerade Books in New York. He went on a car trip with his then-girlfriend, now-wife, who read it and loved it. He came back to me with the idea of a series called The Darker Passions and I wrote seven erotic pastiches based on horror classics that are, hopefully, sexy and also tongue-in-cheek humorous. The original publisher went out of business and then another publisher wanted to do the series and got as far as Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, then ran out of money. Now, a UK publisher is doing limited editions of the seven titles for collectors, and this will be awesome. They’ll be out beginning in December. The url will be on my site and Facebook once the publisher gets his new website up.

I’ve always liked writing erotica because sex, to me, should be part of fictional life and too-often in the past it wasn’t. Or, if it was there, it wasn’t fun sex, silly sex, experimental sex. I wanted to write something extreme that broke through a lot of barriers, and did.

IFP: There’s also your other nom de plume, Desirée Knight. How is Desirée different from Amarantha?

NK: Desirée, who I introduce as Amarantha’s younger sister, is more what they call Vanilla, meaning, she isn’t extreme, just sexy. I’ve written two books as Desirée Knight. Hunted is about a woman running from the Mafia who joins a rather diabolical circus. Mercedez: Day of the Dead is a ‘true’ story of one of the Vivid girls, and I’m the ghost writer, although the copyright is in my name. I didn’t know I was a ghost until the book was published – came as a bit of a surprise!

IFP: What is the scariest short horror story you’ve read and why?

NK: Sorry, nothing comes to mind as the scariest.

IFP: Can we expect another vampire anthology or novel from you soon?

NK: Actually, I’m about to edit another vampire anthology. We’ll see. I’ve been working on three novels for a couple of years and would like to try to finish one this year, if humanly possible. Again, we’ll see. I’ve got more short fiction coming out, and also a graphic novel, Nancy Kilpatrick’s Vampire Theatre. Years ago, I wrote the scripts for three comics in the Vampirotica comic series, those scripts based on 3 of my inner-connected short stories. The published has long wanted to do a graphic novel and that’s now happening. The original stories will also be there, with the comics, plus an interview with me. And we have a tie-in song available as a free download that was written to go with the stories and recorded by the Vampire Beach Babes. So, it’s a cool meta-project, coming in August. People can check my website for updates to get the url for the graphic novel website when the publisher gets the site up.

Bio: Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick has published 18 novels, around 200 short stories, one non-fiction book (The Goth Bible) and has edited 10 anthologies. She writes mainly horror, dark fantasy, mysteries and erotica and is currently working on two new novels. Some of her recent short fiction appears in: Blood Lite (Pocket Books); Hellbound Hearts (Pocket Books); The Bleeding Edge (Dark Discoveries); The Living Dead (Nightshade Books); Don Juan and Men (MLR Press); Vampires: Dracula and the Undead Legions (Moonstone Books); By Blood We Live (Nightshade Books); The Bitten Word (Newcon Press); Campus Chills (Stark Publishing); and Darkness on the Edge (PS Publishing). Recently, she co-edited with David Morrell the horror/dark fantasy anthology Tesseracts Thirteen (Edge SF&F Publishing). She is the editor of Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead (www.vampires-evolve.com). Her graphic novel, Nancy Kilpatrick’s Vampire Theatre, will be out in August, and a collector’s edition of the erotic horror series, The Darker Passions, begins December 2010. You can check out Nancy’s latest endeavors at her website: www.nancykilpatrick.com.

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