Bibliography
- the mountains have many voices -
clicking on a title below will take you to a page with more information.
- Promise of Midnight
- Midnight
- Midnight’s Heir
- Heir’s Starlight
- Starlight’s Shadow
You’re a vampire. Being a vampire is pain. – Michael Devon II
Brief Character Sketches
Samantha Clark – Young woman in search of something she doesn’t want to find.
Stephen Young – Owns convenience stores in Harlan. Old friend of Sami’s who gives her a refuge and a new chance at life. A young man both ruled and betrayed by his heart.
Jeremy Bradford – Sami’s new boyfriend. Steve’s mentor. A young man with a knack for being the exception to the rules.
Michael Devon – Sami’s new, close friend and, later, her mentor. Anethdraeg Elder.
Anethdraeg – [ann-eth-dray-ehg] – Vampire ‘House’, made up of folks in Harlan County with common pagan beliefs and who share a common bond. ‘The Family’.
Harlan County, Kentucky* – In the dark corners of America, sometimes hidden things remain. Harlan County is one of those corners. With mountains shrouded in forests and fog with still woodlands where sunlight doesn’t light ground, the nights seem darker – with neighbors sometimes a mile or more away. Always bigger than its inhabitants, this land deep in the heart of Kentucky where coal seams the earth and darkness holds sway over the land, Harlan County is locked in an endless struggle to maintain its roots in tradition. Often each community in the county, or even each family, has the appearance like a whole new world, each with its own customs and traditions.
Many people from Harlan County often see and hear things some would call ‘supernatural’. The people take these things in stride, like their forefathers have for generations. These ‘ghost stories’, passed around the dinner table or heating stove, help pass the time and connect the generations. These stories are often fanciful tales, told for generations…but sometimes they are not. Sometimes the tales are new, with the dark fresh in mind for the telling.
*with special thanks to Preston Halcomb and TL Trevaskis
…the human heart in conflict with itself. – J Michael Straczynski
When I first got the idea for
Midnight in 1996, I knew I wanted to write a different kind of ‘vampire story’. I never meant for the story to be the typical vampires-are-demons, the embodiment of our worst fears, gothic-chiller type story; I wanted to write about ‘humans having a vampire problem’ type story. My characters, therefore, are as human as possible. All of these stories more revolve around the the very real life-problems the main characters face more than than ‘their vampireness’. The vampire is secondary, sometimes even tertiary. Even so, how these people deal with their innate vampireness very much affects how they go about their lives, how they face themselves and their problems. This is what makes their uniqueness stand out. Read more about how my vampires “work” in this
blog post.
The first book starts out with Sami running away from an abusive relationship, searching for herself and some stable anchor to hold her to the ground and allow her to be who and all she truly is. The people she comes to love and cherish as her friends, once she settles into her new home in Harlan County, are vampires. Sadly, as psychologically ill and damaged as Sami is, those three men continue the abuse in the way they treat her — feeding her half-truths and little to no information, mishandling her, and so forth. Of course she finds the things she’s looking for — she’s given no choice but to face herself and deal with what she finds there. The added element of Sami’s discovery of real vampires, including that she carries vampiric genes, provides her another avenue of self-realization and wholeness.
Book two, eighteen years later, is Sami as wife, mother, elder of her family…Book three, thirty years later, is Sami, her off-spring, her heirs, and their kin…Book four, even further into the future, ties up any straggling lose ends…Book five is the prequel I said I would never write but have been dinkering with now since late 2007.
