In 2002 I had a chance to make a career break from writing books on martial arts and took a shot at doing something on the supernatural. My first book on the subject, The Vampire Slayers’ Field Guide to the Undead, was published by a small press and has since gone out of print. It made only a modest splash at the time—just enough to get me booked into libraries and museums as “the vampire guy. ” It was also published under the pen name of Shane MacDougall, partly as a nod to my Nanny’s forebears, and partly because my editor at the time thought my martial arts readers would think I’d suddenly gone round the bend if I started writing about monsters.
While I was doing the research for that book I thought how interesting it would be if real people encountered the versions of supernatural creatures as they appeared in folklore, rather than the versions seen in popular fiction and film.
There are so many bizarre and even shocking aspects of folklore that have never (or at best, seldom) been utilized in fiction that I had to give it a shot.
Ghost Road Blues, however, was my first novel. I had no personal blueprint for constructing a book and when I sat down to plot and write the story it quickly became apparent that for the tale to include the folkloric elements as well as the degree of character development I felt compelled to include, it was going to be either a very big book—a monster of a book, in fact—or it was going to be several books. Turns out that three is just the right number. Ghost Road Blues did very well when it came out, both in terms of sales and notoriety. It was very well received by readers and enthusiasti-cally reviewed.
Exploring the folkloric within the framework of fiction allows for the author to create a mythology for the story that won’t necessarily take the reader in expected directions. The ghosts in my story don’t act the way readers expect, as can be seen in the case of the Bone Man, who rises from the grave, but doesn’t know how to be a ghost, and Mandy whose haunting of her brother misfires in a big way. The characteristics of the werewolf as explored in the book are drawn from a number of different legends, notably the Benandanti in Terry’s story and (perhaps) in Mike’s. And certainly the vampire mythology of the story represents something of a worldview of vampirism, particularly in that there are a number of different species of vampires, ranging from psychic monsters like Griswold, to the more traditional revenants (Ruger, McVey, and others of the “Fang Gang. ”) and the mindless zombielike eating machines—the Dead Heads—
like Boyd. In this last case it’s worth taking a look at the legend of the craqueuhhe, a flesh-eating species from France.
Much of this folkloric backstory is covered in my 2006 nonfiction book Vampire Universe: The Dark World of Supernatural Beings That Haunt Us, Hunt Us, and Hunger for Us (Citadel Press) . A handful of readers (those who’d read that nonfic book) were cleverly able to put together several pieces of the Pine Deep puzzle, and gold stars to them. A second book, The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange & Downright Bizarre (Citadel, 2007) contains additional folkloric and occult clues. I have at least two more folklore books coming out from Citadel that will allow readers to further explore the complex and fascinating world of supernatural predators: They Bite!: The Darkly Delicious World of Supernatural Predators (scheduled for 2009 from Citadel) and Vampire Hunters and Other Enemies of Evil (scheduled for September 2010). The benandanti are covered there in some depth.
The folks who have come with me to the end of the series—first readers, editors, and others—have asked me if this is the end for Crow, Val, Mike, and the town of Pine Deep. Will Mike succumb to the slow death talked about in the dhampyr legends, or will his rather complex family history change that? Is the Bone Man gone for good now? What happened to Mike’s mom? And are the nights in Pine Deep really safe now?
Well, folks, I guess time will tell. Maybe I’ll come back to Pine Deep someday. I suspect there are a lot of stories that wait to be told. After all . . . it is the most haunted town in America and who knows what might still be out there amid the rustling corn and the rows of pumpkins? If I do return to America’s Haunted Holidayland, I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
—JM