Guest Blogger: Marc Vun Kannon

Vampires v. Werewolves

If you ask your average paranormal author (author of paranormal stories, that is, not authors who are paranormal), you’ll probably be told that vampires make better characters. They’re mostly human-ish, after all, capable of thought, speech, deliberate action, while werewolves are sometimes human and then, at the same time they get to be interesting they turn into unthinking ravenous brutes. Bummer for the plot, dude, unless we spice up their human selves with pack structure politics and/or sexual strangeness to keep things interesting.

If you ask Joseph Marquand, hero of my soon-to-be-released novel St. Martin’s Moon, what the difference between vampires and werewolves is, he’d tell you it was that werewolves exist and vampires don’t. Once upon a time they made werewolf movies too, but that was before they turned into documentaries. Before he became Earth’s greatest werewolf hunter.

St. Martin’s Moon is set in the future, a time when space travel is a reality and men have established numerous outposts in various bases, colonies, and planets of the solar system. A government of sorts has been established, Special System Services, whose operators do only what they must and no more, to maintain the safety and security of these outposts.

Then came the werewolves, or ‘lupes’ as they come to be known. Lycanthropy as the curse of the Space Age. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? I wrote it and I think it’s weird.

Science fiction and mystery get along well together. The book that gave me the idea was both, but somehow when I read the blurb the notion of a werewolf popped into my head, and they do not go so well together with either SF or mysteries. The reason for this explanations. Both SF and mystery require them, paranormals don’t, in fact they almost seem to do better without them. Fortunately paranormals don’t actually require the absence of explanations, otherwise I’d have had a real hard time just writing the book, not to mention trying to describe it afterward. I just needed to find a link, something to connect a paranormal curse to a lunar colony, and eventually I found one.

I almost didn’t. Write the book, that is. And I never have managed to describe it. It would be a paranormal romance except that Marquand falls in love with the woman, and not the lupe she turns into. The werewolves are classic monsters, not characters, not heroic in any way, although most of them aren’t entirely monstrous either. It would be a science fiction romance except for the werewolves. They do get explained, after a fashion, but since the explanation depends on the ghosts, that doesn’t help much.

Oh yes, the Moon is haunted, did I forget to mention that part?

Like many writers, I started when a story came along and decided that I should write it. Don't ask me why. Others followed, until now I'm afraid to go out of the house with a recorder or notebook in my hand. But I show them, I refuse to write the same story twice!

Coming 5/2011: St. Martin's Moon
The Moon is haunted, but the werewolves don't know that!
http://www.marcvunkannon.com/
http://authorguy.wordpress.com/
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Mark will give away an e-copy of St. Martin's Moon to one commenter. Leave your email address in your comment and Mark will select a winner this week.