Gangs, organised crime and vampires.
One of the starting points for Blood Drunk was realising quite how inconvenient it would be to be a vampire. Sure, the immortality and super-strength would be fun for a while, and who doesn’t like turning into a bat every now and again, but the crippling addiction to fresh human blood is something of a drawback as a lifestyle choice.
How much your average vampire needs varies depending on who you ask, but I settled on about a pint a week. Doesn’t sound like much, right?
Then I thought about it for a bit. How are you going to get a pint of the red stuff, once a week, reliably and for the rest of time? What’s your supply line? I know logistics isn’t very sexy, but it matters. Sure, the old billowing-curtains routine might net you a few more impressionable virgins, but a trail of limp bodies would surely get noticed, even in London, and pretty soon there’d be a mob of gibbering peasants at the drawbridge and you’d have to move castles and redecorate the crypt for the thousandth time. And it would just get boring, all that seduction, picking the silk cloak up from the dry-cleaners and trowelling on the eye make-up, again, when what you really want to do is put your claws up and watch TV.
No, if a vampire wanted to stay healthy and out of sight over the long term it would need organisation, support and resources. It would need loyal helpers, kept in line by avarice or fear, and systems to keep it all hidden.
It would, in effect, be a mob boss. And the thing about organised crime is that most of the people who want to be involved tend to be ambitious, ruthless and not very nice. They might say they’re loyal, but are they? Give them an inch and they’ll be planting a knife in your back and taking the golden fangs for themselves. Pretty soon you’d be trapped in a gilded cage of fear, friendless and paranoid, and oh-so-very hungry. None of it sounds very glamorous.
Good. I didn’t want my vampires to sparkle anyway.
That was part of the logic for starting my central character, Freddie Burns, on the fringes of a rickety organised crime outfit in South London. When he is ripped out of his old life by mass-casualty meeting with a vampire in an old warehouse he finds himself in a dark-mirror version of his old life; older and darker and stranger, certainly, but fundamentally operating on the same logic of fear and a tawdry accountancy of blood.
I realise all of this makes the book sound depressing – I promise it’s not; it’s got jokes and action sequences and a lot of swearing. But underneath that I think I was fumbling my way towards a point about monsters. We like them to be exotic, alien, because they let us pretend for a moment that there are worse things out there than people; that evil exists in the world independent of us. For a few hours while we are reading a story or watching a film we get to believe that the state of the world isn’t our fault. Monsters redeem humanity by the simple fact of existing.
But if vampires are bureaucratic and petty and caught up in all the boring minutiae of life, if the monsters are fundamentally human and no better or worse than normal gangsters, then you get to somewhere perhaps more interesting – you take away the safety blanket of eternal, external evil and put it all back onto us, onto people, the decisions we make and the things we do. What Freddie struggles with, beyond the hangovers, is the fact that in the end you have to choose – stand for something, however hopeless it may seem, or give up and go to the pub. You’ll have to read the book to find out how it plays out.
Discover the Author
Join a new kind of vampire hunter—former gangster Freddie Burns—as he fights for his place, for his family, and for the hell of it in London’s gritty magical underworld. Mostly for the hell of it, to be honest.
Freddie Burns just wants ten pints, a spot of football violence, and to take over his uncle’s fading South London crime business. But when a gangland execution goes wrong, Freddie discovers a new kind of organized crime—one where vampires are spine-breakingly real and monsters hide just out of sight.
Good thing Freddie has a supernatural gift for giving vampires a kicking—them and anyone else that looks at him funny.
Dragged into a world of shadowy organizations, secret sorcerous pacts, gruesome vampire initiations, and a plot to rule it all, Freddie realizes it’s up to him to save the world —or at least not wreck it entirely. He just needs a drink first.
