Vampires, Viruses, and (Im)mortality

By Mercy’s gravestone.

Just because it’s one day after Halloween doesn’t mean we can’t still be thinking about vampires. Jason Zinoman in The New York Times has a great article about the connections between vampire legends and times of plague and pestilence…at one time, vampires were seen as creatures who spread deadly diseases rather than pale, sparkly romantic antiheroes. He didn’t mention, but he could, the vampire legends of 19th century New England, in which the undead were blamed for the spread of the white plague–tuberculosis.

Those legends and the true story of how belief in vampires affected the life and death of a nineteen-year-old Rhode Island girl named Mercy Brown became the basis for Mercy, my one and only horror novel to date. (More eerie than horrible, really.)