(Editor’s Note: these interviews date 2001-2009, so some information may not be current)
Freda Warrington is the author of a fantastic vampire trilogy, as well as being a renowned fantasy author, her books include
+ A Taste of Blood Wine
+ A Dance in Blood Velvet
+ The Dark Blood of Poppies
+ Dark Cathedral
+ Amber Citadel
+ Sapphire Throne
NOTE: DRACULA’S GUEST was excised from the original DRACULA MSS by his publisher because of the length of the original book MSS. It was published as a short story in 1914, two years after Stoker’s death.
When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbruck (the maitre d’hotel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down bareheaded to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door, “Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late.” Here he smiled and added, “for you know what night it is.”
The archangel Gabriel was mightily pissed off. That in itself was not an unusual state of affairs. Gabriel was frequently melancholy, sullen and prone to explosive fits of temper. Being the angel of death, amongst other, more socially acceptable things, had an infuriating propensity to play havoc with one’s social life. He liked to think of himself as multi-skilled, but mostly everyone just saw the black leathers, the pale ivory skin and raven wings and drew their own conclusions. People also tended to give him a wide berth when he played his silver trumpet. It could get very messy, like the time He asked him to put on jam sessions at Sodom and Gomorrah. He had really blown his audience away. It had taken him centuries to get the stains out of his robes.
You know what you are? A goddamn flaccid penis.”
“And why is that?”
“Because you don’t have any spirit. No spark, no fire, no energy. You’re saggy and limp. You can’t make a goddamn decision without thinking about it for an eternity.”
[NOTE: This essay was published (with some minor differences) in Niekas No. 45 (1998) and was written several years earlier. The "past twenty years" mentioned refer to the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. If I were writing this article now, I would add Kim Newman's Anno-Dracula (Carroll and Graf, 1992) and its sequels, the epic of an alternate universe in which Stoker's heroes failed to destroy Dracula, who vampirized the widowed Queen Victoria and became Prince Consort. Aside from the excellence of characterization and plotting, these novels (and related novellas that have appearedin various anthologies) provide endless pleasure for the reader who enjoys identifying the hundreds of allusionsto fictional and historical characters that Newman has woven into his texts. Many other "honorable mentions"would have to be added, especially in the realm of vampire romance, by now an established subgenre. Also, if this essay were writtentoday, I would have to qualify the statement about the dominance of the sympathetic vampire. Recent years haveseen a "backlash" in the direction of the monstrous, absolutely evil vampire. Nevertheless, the sympatheticvampire remains viable and will never stop appealing to a large percentage of readers.] Read the rest of this entry »
