Tag Archives: horror fiction

The Falstaff Vampire Files

Lynne Murray says:

I am so happy to see the cover of my new book, The Falstaff Vampire Files, right over there on the right-hand column of Body Impolitic!

Part of the inspiration for the book was a Bay Area activist for fat men, who liked my mysteries featuring, Josephine Fuller, sleuth of size, but who wanted to see more fat men as well as fat women in fiction. Somehow that idea and the desire to write a vampire book inspired the thought that Sir John Falstaff, perhaps the most famous fat rogue and con man in literature would make an excellent vampire. After all vampires live outside the mainstream of normal human life, and have to reinvent themselves constantly to survive. Who better to do that than a confirmed con man?

Falstaff himself seemed to agree with me. As I began to write about him as a vampire in modern San Francisco, the character immediately stood up, climbed out of his coffin, and demanded to be taken to the Big and Tall Men’s Clothing Store, and then to a restaurant where patrons were eating roast pork and sack sherry to slake his desire for properly seasoned blood.

As far as the humans in the book, I’ve always wondered what a real life psychologist would think if one of her clients talked about meeting vampires. In The Falstaff Vampire Files, Kristin Marlowe, a San Francisco therapist, doesn’t believe in vampires–until she meets one. Worse yet when the vampire tells her he’s Sir John Falstaff, a fictional character, she figures he’s doubly delusional. She starts to believe him when he bites her in the neck, follows her home, and charms her vampire-romance-writing landlady into letting him install his coffin in the spare bedroom–with rollercoaster results.

My goal was to bring both laughter and a few genuinely scary moments (literally from my own nightmares) to The Falstaff Vampire Files. I hope people enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.