Irene Peterson Talks About Vampires...

I’ve about had it with vampires.

I’ve been reading about them and their supposed charms for a long time.  Everybody got the idea that vampires were wonderful when Anne Rice published her famous interview with them book and after the movie with the ever gorgeous Brad Pitt, vampire novels became all the rage.

But not for me.  Call me queasy.  The vampire book series by another author, one of the first to jump on the bandwagon, made me sick.  This author’s idea of the vampires making love was to have them slit open a bit of chest and allow the lover to feed on the blood when they were doing it.  UGH!  If that floats your boat, well, fine, but ICK!  Think about it.  You get to feel a cold dead guy’s hand on your nice plump warm body and then you have to cut yourself and suck blood? Dead guy’s blood?  And this is sexy?

So, after years and years of reading vampire related stories, someone asked me to guest on her paranormal blog. I called it something along the lines of How to Kill a Vampire and in it I outlined all the various ways throughout time that have worked to dispose of the walking dead.  I did plenty of research because, unlike the mythos that has been changed thanks to television and the cinema, I wanted my mythos to be the truth, the actual way of killing off deaders and keeping them dead.

The stakes have to be made of a certain wood, though in the long run, any wooden stake will do as long as it reaches its mark.  The head must then be severed.  Dead vampires do not sparkle, but they can reunite with their severed heads if the heads are left near the neck or the heads are not buried between the vamp’s legs.  Better yet, bury the vampire’s body under a waterfall, body facing down, not up, so if they should reanimate, they will dig down into the earth instead of up into freedom.

There are also so many things a vampire cannot do: can’t cross running water, can’t stand garlic, can’t walk on sanctified ground, cannot venture through a ring of salt, and most important of all, they absolutely cannot tolerate sunshine.  They will burn to a crisp if exposed to sunlight and no blanket or sunscreen can prevent that.

With all this knowledge building up in my brain, it seemed inevitable that I write a vampire story.  Only I decided to make this a true vampire story in which the undead stinks of rotting flesh, it cares nothing for humans other than a source of food and it lies.  I came up with a man whose job it was to dispose of vampires, came up with a Latin name for him and had him work for an Archbishop. 

Dead Dreams features Jim Ryan, a man whose own parents died because of vampires, raised at first to become a priest, but whose innate anger causes him to be chosen to do away with vampires.  His job title is Lignarius which is Latin for “one who works with wood” and “one who fixes things”.  His little quirk is that, in order to do his sacred job, he feels that he has to remain pure of heart and body and mind, so, at his age, he is still a virgin.

Of course, I needed to make his life more difficult when he runs into the vamp he has just decapitated.  

Purchase Dead Dreams: http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Dreams-ebook/dp/B008O64HC4

Visit Irene Online: http://www.irenepeterson.com/

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