Back to the Books: "The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories"

This book is one of my most favorite books of all time.

It obviously pre-dates the internet age, where most of these stories can now be read.

But back when I was growing up, if you wanted to read good vampire stories, you had to hunt them down.

I had checked this book out of the New Lenox Public Library when I was fifteen and devoured it.

And then my mother surprised me with this book on Christmas 1984, the day before I learned I was expecting my third child.

A couple weeks later, in January 1985, I was lying flat on my back on the living room couch, re-reading all these favorite stories.

I was flat on my back because that was the only way to keep from getting sick. Despite all the children I've had, pregnancy does not agree with me.

And I was indulging myself in the book because my two-year-old and eight-month old were both asleep at the same time, a rare occurance.

At one point, I set the book down and wondered if I could write a vampire novel. I had always wanted to write a novel and had down quite a bit of research on witches and vampires when I was fifteen in the hopes of writing that novel.

So I lay there, musing on the type of story I would write.

I thought about how so many of these stories came out of the Victorian era.

I thought about how many people tend to think of the Victorian era in very romantic terms.

So, what if I wrote a story about a teen girl who feel in love with a vampire from the Victorian era, except she refuses to acknowledge what he really is?

By the time the kids woke up, and I was changing their iapers, I had a skeleton story in my head. 

I started and scrapped many drafts throughout the years. But I finally wrote the novel in 2008 and self-published it at the end of 2011. Yes, it's "Bryony."

That one book spawned an entire series and inspired a creative stroke in another BryonySeries novel.

Take a look at the lettering on the opening paragraphs - and the font - in the excerpts below.

I wanted to pay homage to that as best as I could without having access to fancy tools. So I consulted with Rebekah who does my book formatting, and I think she did a great job, as you can see scrolling through these images.

She was not able to build the letters with the fantastic detail as the original book. But she cut up pieces of pictures I'd taken of objects with interesting texture and cobbled them together as images, which she inserted near the text.

The first three pages are from "The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories."

The second set of three are from the BryonySeries novel "The Phoenix."

The last page has the list of stories and their authors, in case you want to find any of them online and read them, too.

One last bit of homage: I named BryonySeries character Algernon Demars after Algernon Blackwood, even though the two share nothing in common except the name.

But that's OK, I think.

Final note: the book I own is not the one my mother bought for me. I had lent it to a friend and never saw it again.

I most likely bought my current copy from Amazon. You can, too.