Cozying Up to Vampires?

Good morning, fellow Stiffs and readers. Here's a treat for you: friend Rebecca Cantrell AKA Bekka Black, who's going to talk to us about her new release, iDrakula, which is getting rave reviews and mentions all over the internet and in some pretty big newspapers too.

Rebecca has visited with us before, to talk about her historical mystery series - A Trace of Smoke just won another award, by the way; congrats, Becky! - but this is something different. Something new. Something totally rad and cool. Read it and weep over the fact that you didn't come up with the idea!

Without further ado, here's Bekka:

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Thanks for having me here on Working Stiffs! It’s an honor to participate in a forum about murder, work, and life. As someone whose life work seems to have a lot to do with murder, it’s a cozy spot to hang out.

Speaking of murder, my new novel, iDrakula, just came out in print form and as an Apple app. It’s about the ur-vampire, Dracula, but updated to the modern age and told only in text messages, emails, voicemails, and web browsers. If Dracula were around, this is what his life would look like.

Let’s look at our own lives, shall we? Close your eyes. Oh right, you can’t do that and read, so pretend that you are closing your eyes while you read this. Ready?

Imagine you’re out swimming in a clear blue ocean, maybe a little farther from shore than you should be, but it’s a warm day and you can see the beach so you feel pretty safe. You’re enjoying the waves and the sun on your face.

Something scratches across your thigh. You look down. The ghastly shape of a great white shark glides through the water under your feet. You’ve seen the surfboards with a bite out of them. You’ve heard the stories. You feel a thrill of terror. You are in his domain and he can eat you as easily as you pick a peanut out of a bowl. A ribbon of red threads out of your leg into the sea.

You swim for shore. If you make it, you have a story to tell for the rest of your life. If you don’t, well, someone else does.

If you’re lucky, that shark might lose interest. Maybe a school of tuna will swim by and distract him. For the shark, there are plenty of fish in the sea. But if that shark were a vampire, he’d have to eat you. Humans are his only source of food, after all.

In iDrakula I have an autopsy, written by medical examiner and author Dr. Jonathan Hayes. I put it in there to remind us what vampires are about: death. They’re at the top of the food chain and we’re not.

But what if that shark looked like Bela Lugosi? Or Christopher Lee? Or Tom Cruise? Or Brad Pitt? Or Edward Pattinson? If the face around the fangs were sexy enough, would that thrill of fear turn into a thrill of something else entirely? The women being bitten in the movies look like they’re having a lot more fun than, say, a shark attack victim, but…

As we near Halloween, think about where you fit in the general order of things. Maybe on All Hallow’s Eve you stick close to shore, lock your windows, and smear garlic on your window frames. Or maybe throw the windows wide open.

Happy Halloween!