The Children of the Night

'Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make.' Dracula by Bram Stoker (first published 1897)  

Let me start this post by saying that, just because I haven't included vampires in my books (yet) I have nothing against them. I like reading vampire novels. But I like my vampires as legend intended them. I want them to scare me. I want them to be proud, beautiful monsters. 

If you like your vampires sparkly, that's fine. Good luck to you. I prefer mine bloody. Each to her own. 

For me, Lestat, central character of The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice, is the consummate vampire in his beauty and the way he revels in his unashamed monstrosity. Kurt Barlow, in Stephen King's Salem's Lot, is my ultimate horror novel vampire. When it comes to romance, I have a weakness for Jean-Claude, Master Vampire in the Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton. 

But my first vampire love is with the great Count Dracula himself. And I also have an enduring fascination with Bram Stoker, the Irishman whose imagination conjured up such an iconic character.

Dublin

My interest in Abraham Stoker (known to his family as Bram), began about 15 years ago when I was in Dublin. I visited a quaint, little church close to the banks of the River Liffey called St. Michan's. St Michan's looks unimpressive from the outside, but, in its vaults, there are mummified bodies.

One of these is an 800 year old mummy called 'the crusader'. When you visit St Michan's, you can go into the crypt and shake hands with the crusader. Well, you could 15 years ago. Things may have changed since! 

On the day I was there, the guide showing me around said that Bram Stoker had lived nearby and visited St Michan's regularly. Who knew, he speculated, whether the crusader might have been the inspiration for Count Dracula? 

Whitby 

I started this year by fulfilling a Dracula related ambition when I spent new year in Whitby. Whitby, a fishing port on the North Yorkshire coast, is the place where, in Stoker's novel, the Russian ship, the Demeter runs aground during a fierce storm. All of the crew are missing, presumed dead, with the exception of the captain's body which has been lashed to the ship's helm. As the ship runs aground an animal resembling a large wolf or dog is seen leaping ashore from it's deck. The ill-fated ship's only cargo is described as silver sand and boxes of mould or earth from Transylvania.

Whitby did not disappoint. 
It is an incredibly beautiful, atmospheric town. I can see why, having stayed there, Stoker chose to set so many scenes from his book in Whitby. He would have drunk in, as I did, the view through the Whalebone Arch across the harbour to the cobbled streets, dominated by the imposing ruins of Whitby Abbey which sits brooding atop the winding 199 steps rising up the cliffs from the narrow streets below. It is easy to see how this prospect would have inspired his macabre and creative imagination. 

My own imagination was fired by Whitby. As I made my way along the tiny, cobbled lanes and looked up at the imposing outline of the Abbey, I could imagine that Dracula and his descendants were still around. I was inspired to think about creating my own beautiful monster.

Watch this space...

Indulge Your Paranormal Lust by Margo Bond Collins

Welcome to the Paranormal Love Wednesday Blog Hop, where we celebrate paranormal romance in all its many forms! Every Wednesday, we invite authors of paranormal fiction to share snippets of their works, either published or unpublished, involving some aspect of paranormal love.

In my first entry on the Paranormal Love Features page, I noted that even those paranormal stories that don't focus on romance in some way tie in to our deep-seated connection to the sexuality of the paranormal. Sexy vampires, for example, have been with us for quite a while—and long before vampires were openly sexy, they carried a sexual connotation. In Bram Stoker's original novel, for example, Dracula has hairy palms (and for some great information about the historical connections between masturbation and hairy palms, check out this excellent article).  Carmilla, from Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 novel, seduces her female victim in scenes of pretty heavy-duty sublimated eroticism. Lord Ruthven from Polidori's The Vampyre seduces virtually every woman with whom he crosses paths. And the blood exchange between vampires and their creations is often a heavily eroticized version of other exchanges of bodily fluids.

Similarly, werewolves and other shapeshifters appeal to our animalistic sides—the parts of us that want to let go and revel in violence and/or sexuality. And hardly a traditional monster is without its seductive side. Incubi and succubae are openly sexual, drawing energy to survive from the seduction of their victims. Early witches were said to have "congress with the beast" (or sex with Satan). And demons offered people their hearts' desires in return for their souls.

As a general rule, I would argue (as many others have) that our monsters illustrate our deepest, darkest desires. In our cultures, we create that which both frightens and entices us. And then we depict it over and over again, as many ways as possible, as often as possible, because these depictions are safe outlets for our less cultured selves.

Given that, paranormal love offers us a way to indulge the parts of ourselves that we might not openly share in our daily, structured lives. These stories allow us to be the monsters and the victims, the lover and the beloved. They allow us to delve into the parts of us we don't usually let out into the light—and in doing so, they allow us to understand ourselves, and one another, better than we might otherwise.

So if you love vampires, shapeshifters, demons, witches, faeries, incubi, succubae,  or even the occasional ghost or goblin, click on the entries on our Blog HOP page!

But before you go, tell us: what do you love most about paranormal love?