October—Halloween month!--is a great month for vampire books, don’t you think? Well, obviously publishers agree, too. In fact, today marks the release of at least 3 teen vampire books!! Girls that Growl is mine, obviously. But we’ve also got the third book in the Morganville Vampire series by Rachel Caine and PC Cast’s second book in her House of the Night series.
So for the next couple of days, Rachel, PC, and I are going to be guest blogging on each other’s sites, talking about our own “rules” for vampires and celebrating the releases of our latest books. Oh and we’ll all be giving away free books, too. I’m on PC’s blog today and she’s on mine.
So without further ado, here’s PC. Make sure you comment – she’ll be giving away a set of her vampire books to a lucky commenter!
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When sixteen year old Zoey gets Marked by the vampyre Tracker and the outline of a sapphire colored crescent moon appears on her forehead the good news is she won’t have to take her geometry test the next day.
The bad news is she has to pack her bags that night and move to the House of Night, a private boarding school in Tulsa’s Midtown, commonly known in the ‘real’ world as Vampyre Finishing School or Hell High, where she’ll spend the next four years going through bizarre and unnamable physical changes, as well as a total religious and social shake-up. And that’s only if the whole process doesn’t kill her.
The Change from human teenager to adult vampyre kills at least one in every ten Marked kids.
So the vampyres my co-author and daughter Kristin and I have created are based on biology and then enriched with culture and magic. We came up with the physiological versus mystical basis of our vamps by working with our dad/granddad, who is a biologist. Here are our world rules:
The setting for the House of Night is in a world much like our own, except in Zoey’s world vampyres have always existed. Religion and superstition were all that could explain the phenomena of how perfectly healthy teenagers suddenly began Changing into powerful beings who drank blood and walked the night until modern medicine developed enough to discover that during the hormone surge of teenage years a junk DNA strand sometimes activated, causing an irreversible and incurable physiological chain reaction. During this Change recessive pheromones begin to secrete a trail that only a Tracker vampyre (one with highly developed scent senses) could detect. Once the pheromones become active the fledgling vampyre must be brought within an adult vampyre fold so that the physiological Change can be controlled and slowed, but even when surrounded by the power of mature vampyres, not all human teens survive the transition to become mature vampyres.
Vampyre society is strongly matriarchal. They worship the Goddess Nyx, who the personification of Night, as their main deity. A secondary deity is her consort, the God Erebus, who is the personification of Darkness. Adult vampyres have enhanced human abilities, which means that women are stronger psychically, and over the centuries have evolved into the majority of the leadership roles. Male adult vampyres are warriors, protectors and consorts.
There are five House of Night vampyre finishing schools in the United States, each in a different region of the country. They each have a sister school in Europe. The vampyre society is close-knit and because they are virtually immortal the culture has amassed an enormous amount of wealth, which the Priestesses of Nxy control and the Warriors of Erebus protect.
Vampyres do age and die, but their lifespan normally reaches several hundred years. They have amazing regenerative abilities, but can be killed if their heads are removed, their hearts are pierced, or their bodies are burned.
So take a stroll over to our world and discover the House of Night and our version of the timeless myth of vampyres. Book 1, MARKED, was released May 2007 (and has recently been nominated YALSA Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers List). Book 2, BETRAYED, will be released October 2nd. Book 2, CHOSEN, will be out March 2008. Check out:
http://www.pccast.net/, and coming in October,
http://www.houseofnightseries.com/
music cause the Red Sox were playing so we ended up going to CLINK, this bar in Boston that was converted from an actual jail! It still looked like a jail, too, with bars and original brickwork. The center was open and there were different levels of balconies (where the cells used to be) circling the building, just like you see in regular jails. It has to be one of the coolest bars I’ve ever been to. Here’s my friend Mary and her boyfriend “locked up.” And below, me, evidently posing as one of the femme fatales in Chicago, lol. 
