Insatiable

Published by Zebra in 1993. Paperback.
Reissued by Wildside Press in 2000. Trade paper, $14.95. ISBN 1587151898
Ebook version published by Smashwords in 2010. $2.99. ISBN 978-1-4523-6211-3

Thanks to Anne Rice, the late 1980s saw a flood of vampire novels, and everyone I knew seemed to be jumping on the bandwagon. I resisted doing the same. Privately I sneered at people who jump on bandwagons and felt myself to be vastly morally superior.

Then an idea hit me: Imagine a vampire who is converted by a super-scientific gizmo into a super-vampire, a creature who must drink the blood of other vampires to survive, to whom human blood tastes awful, who is not bothered by the sun, whose bite is agony to his vampire victims. Best of all, because of the scarcity of vampires, he is forced to drink human blood occasionally, and when he does, his human victims experience indescribable ecstasy, so if he doesn't kill them, they recover and spend the rest of their lives yearning for him to bite their necks again. Add that the protagonist, Richard Venneman, is an anal-retentive kinda guy when he's human and very religious, so he is consumed by moral qualms and internal philosophical debates once he becomes a vampire, and then a super-vampire. Oh, and I mustn't forget that in my invented world, a vampire makes a human into a vampire by having sex and a simultaneous orgasm with the victim while draining the victim of blood. (You thought it would be easy?)

What a great idea! I told myself. So I jumped on the bandwagon.

I had a ball writing the book. I must admit, though, that I lost patience with Venneman and his whining and agonizing. But I had made him unkillable and was stuck with him.

I also managed to invent a very gross scene - a few, actually, but one in particular - that everyone who reads the book seems to remember. It has to do with Venneman, as a super-vampire, eating a more run-of-the-mill vampire's head. It nauseated me when I wrote it, which I guess is a good sign.