 BittenbyLev Raphael
Maybe because I grew up in a house haunted by the Holocaust, I was attracted to monster movies as a kid. After all, hadn't my parents survived horrors beyond imagining? And hadn’t monsters tried to take their lives? Frankenstein and Dracula were my favorite horror movies and I watched them every time they were on TV in that pre-DVD age. An early reader, I was delighted to discover that there were actual novels that had given birth to the movies (and all their sequels). But Mary Shelley’s novel never touched me the way Bram Stoker’s did. I read Dracula several times over the years, as taken by it as I was by any classic novel I was reading simultaneously. I still picture the woman begging Dracula for her child, and Dracula crawling down the walls of his Stygian castle. Despite that early taste of vampire lore, I haven't followed every twist and turn of the vampire takeover of American popular culture. I've watched the Twilight movies but haven't read the books, for instance, and in the vast range of vampire novels I've sampled, there's only been one that I've found remarkable. In fact, I keep going back to it: Already Dead by Charlie Houston. What's brilliant about this novel is first of all the concept. Houston’s made his vampire a PI who works at keeping the presence of zombies in Manhattan under the radar. They’re dumb, messy, and gross; knowing they existed might also lead to New Yorkers discovering that their city was honeycombed with vampire tribes who had divided it up into their own turfs. Then there’s the voice: tough, noirish, sardonic, perfectly pitched and believable. The opening line grabbed me so hard, the book didn’t let go for hours: “I smell them before I see them.” Houston has a great ear for dialogue and a good eye for what makes characters unique. I’ve read his novel four times, taught it once, and the students in my creative writing class loved the book, which we used to examine basic fictional techniques. They found it far better written than the Twilight books (or The Hunger Games, for that matter). This last time I read it, his novel made me think of an idea that had crossed my mind while writing my Gilded Age historical novel Rosedale in Love. Back when the book was in progress, I toyed with the making this Jewish banker a double outsider in New York: a vampire. It would have meant turning the anti-Semitic canard of Jews as cultural blood suckers inside out and upside down. I filed the idea away along with a very steamy sex scene in a high class Gilded Age bordello. I decided it was enough to be subverting Edith Wharton’s narrative in The House of Mirth in my book without adding the supernatural and explicit sex. I wasn’t discouraged, though. Not finishing work happens all the time for me: I write a scene or scenes, sketch out ideas for a novel, and they end up in folders. Not every path leads to a finished book right away—or even at all. When I sold my papers to Michigan State University a few years ago, I found the handwritten draft of a novel I’d forgotten I’d written back in my twenties, and also notebooks full of characters and ideas for a Michigan-based thriller that never made it past the conceptual stage. And then this past year, talking to people at a writing conference who—like me—were making the move to e-books from traditional publishing, it hit me that there was good, juicy material I’d filed away—material for a novella. A novella I could launch without having to link it to a collection and try to find a publisher. I saw the book clearly in my head. And I saw that the reason I’d set the book aside: it was an aside. My own fan fiction, if you will. An offshoot of the main idea that didn't belong in that book, but could finally be its own independent book, a novella, thanks to e-books. That was an exciting discovery. The very first long work I did early in my career after short stories was a novella. I loved the short long form but hadn’t worked in it for many years. Once I started, I was done in a few months, including having the book edited, copyedited, the cover designed, the book set up and loaded for Kindle and Nook, the files proofread. Rosedale the Vampyre is a dark story of powerlessness and grief that takes a very unexpected turn when its hero becomes a vampire and realizes he is now one of the most powerful men in New York. You don’t have to have read Rosedale in Love to enjoy it; this book exists in its own universe. And when I finished it, I realized that two other books set in the Gilded Age that I had briefly sketched out also could be novellas, vampyre novellas. I started my career as a short story writer and wrote a novel early on, but almost everything that followed was unexpected because I never imagined crossing genres to write a biographical/psychological study of Edith Wharton, a memoir, seven mysteries, a children's book, two self-help books, a writer’s guide, two essay collections. Finding myself at home in another new genre makes me realize once again that my inner life as an author is as unpredictable as what happens to me out there in the publishing world. Books mentioned in this column:
Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-six years along with a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of twenty-two books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he's seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can't identify, and he's done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His latest book Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile is his second e-book original. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.
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