I Admit It

It’s embarrassing, but true. I have a total girly-fan crush on folklorist and author Michael Bell. I know that proper vampire bloggers should have crushes on, say, Robert Pattinson, but my tastes tend to run in other directions, I guess.

Michael Bell knows all about vampires–the historical ones, anyway. He is also the author of Food for the Dead, which is a fascinating study of the New England vampire tradition, and on which I leaned heavily while writing Mercy. Here he’s interviewed in an excellent article about said tradition in Smithsonian Magazine, with many details about Mercy (or, as her family called her, Lena).

My favorite bit is where the contemporaries blamed the “neurotic modern novel” for the practice of digging up dead people, cutting out their hearts, and eating them.