Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 6: The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas, Volume I--The Vampire Murders (2000-2001)

I love soap operas. I love their over-the-top, often campy melodrama, their plots that twist and turn in every direction, and the very idea of a story that just keeps on going, cliff hanger after cliffhanger. In the late 1990s I had also recently fallen in love with the fictional town of Nightfire, Texas while writing Cry, Wolf, and I wanted to go back there, desperately. That's really where it all began with this one. I wanted to write a soap opera set in the world of that novel, and so I took a close look at that world, and I realized that it would be more interesting for me if I set the story in the past, long before the events of  the novel itself. I pointed my mind's eye to the year of my birth, and the characters came right out of the ether, eager to share the ... days of their lives ... with me. And so was born my serial novel, The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas.

I also wanted to keep the momentum going from the short stories I had posted on my website, which were, as planned, bringing people back to my site regularly and helping me to sell my novel. I loved the idea of the Victorian era serial novels, or penny dreadfuls; literary cliffhangers that kept people coming back, week after week, to read the next chapter. I thought a story told in this old fashioned, piecemeal style would be even better at keeping readers coming back to my site between standard book releases than the short stories had been. I was working on my next book already, so I knew I wanted, and needed, to keep the interest of the readers I had already gained.

Setting the story in 1974 gave me a creative canvas of about twenty-three years to tell a story, before the characters would come up against the events of Cry, Wolf. I had the three leads already developed in my mind: Ray Don, Bradley Stevens, and Sam Turner, and I was very interested in their humanity. I was drawn to the story of realistic, small town Texas life in general; the everyday people living in this town, dealing with the social issues and world events of the time in which they lived. I would have been happy to write entirely in the fashion of American realism at this point, to keep the characters free of paranormal plot lines until 1997, when that whole werewolf thing was destined to go down.

But then, what would readers of a more reality-based soap opera think if they hadn't read the werewolf novel first? It just wouldn't jibe when they got there. We would go from twenty plus years of serious historical fiction, heavy on the social issues of racism, sexism, the political climate of the late 20th century, peppered with soap opera romance tropes that would add all of the most dramatic ups and downs in the characters' lives, to then ... suddenly the town gets ransacked by a werewolf?

No.

As resistant as I was to the idea, the reality of a soap opera set in Nightfire, Texas was that, while I wanted it to be more Knots Landing, it absolutely had to lean more into the genre tropes of Dark Shadows. Seeing the truth in this, the need for the supernatural to be present in the story from the start, I wanted to find a way to make one of the central protagonists forever steeped in the paranormal, so that the narrative would never lose that thread as the series progressed, and the werewolf-centric events of Cry, Wolf would not seem unreasonable to the reader who discovered Chronicles first and moved on to the novel from there.

So far, I hadn't forced anything into the story that didn't belong there. Adding a supernatural element was a demand made by the world and characters themselves. But I did, for the first time as a writer, resist the solution that they presented to me.

My mind was simultaneously working out the details of another series set in the same universe (still to actually be written), about a 1920s paranormal investigator. His side-kick in these stories was going to be a centuries-old vampire named Valentine Alexas. When I asked the Nightfire Universe the question of how to anchor The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas in the supernatural, while still keeping the main drive of the narrative about every day human struggles, it showed me this vampire, five decades or so after those other adventures he would have had, returning to Nightfire in secret, a death mark on his head, and needing to lie low in a place where werewolves couldn't touch him. I had my supernatural hook ... but I didn't want it, not in the way it had presented itself to me. I didn't want to do Dark Shadows; I wanted to do something original. I wanted to do something new.

I tried to force something else, to avoid the Dark Shadows vampire-next-door plot line. I would have much rather used a werewolf, but the continuity of Cry, Wolf made it impossible for a werewolf to be living secretly in the town in 1974. I thought about making one of the leads a ghost, but it just didn't work. It didn't manifest or even make sense alongside the other everyday human characters. It just wasn't meant to be. The story wanted a vampire; equal parts monster and human. And, yes, it had been done. But then, so had werewolves, ghosts, zombies, time travel, possession ... Dark Shadows had done them all.

But Dark Shadows had hardly originated the premise of the gentleman vampire. I think we have Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula to thank for making the gentleman vampire eternally famous, but we also had an earlier 19th century serial novel called Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood to thank for originating the concept, and we had, more recently, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and its many sequels to thank for perpetuating it. While I feared being seen as ripping off Dark Shadows (the 1991 iteration of which was, at the time, and still is one of my all-time favorite soaps), the gentleman vampire had actually already become an established literary genre. And my vampire, Valentinus Alexas, was not a depraved, yet redeemable murderer like Dark Shadows' Barnabas Collins when he first arrived on the scene, he was not morbidly depressed for all time like Anne Rice's Louis de Pointe du Lac, or flashy and audacious like her more prolific Lestat de Lioncourt, nor was he an irredeemable monster like Bram Stoker's eponymous Count Dracula. My vampire was his own man, so to speak. While there would be inevitable genre parallels for a centuries-old vampire who had been places and seen things throughout history, Valen, as he called himself, just wanted to fit in. He wanted to be taken for human and hide out from werewolves. He was a wealthy philanthropist who mostly wanted to keep to himself and read, while hanging out with his pet wolf Raksha. Certainly his two natures were in conflict, the man and the monster, but it struck me that this is true for all of us. In fact, Valen's inevitable inner conflict made him the most human character in the cast. And he was decidedly well adjusted for having this conflict, compared to the other "gentleman vampires" noted above. At last, I accepted him as a part of this story, and in no time at all, my acceptance grew into enthusiasm. The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas immediately became something unique; a modern-day penny dreadful about vampires, love triangles, and social issues.

Now that we've covered the inspiration, I think it's important to note exactly who I was in life at the time I sat down to write the first story arc in the series. I had just published my first novel, I was building a readership, and I was perfectly happy with where I was going. I had a heart for social justice, and I finally had a platform with which to tackle the issues closest to my heart. Unfortunately, I was also drowning in white privilege and perfectly ignorant to certain realities of racism.

White privilege: if you don't think it's real, then you have it. As for me, I wasn't in a place of disbelieving white privilege; in fact, mine was so bad that I had never even heard the term. I didn't even recognize it as a concept. That's not to say I was blind or ignorant to the evils of racism, I just didn't understand that my perspective was not universal.

Here's why that's relevant:

I made racism one of the key issues in The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas. For the most part, I'm happy with how I depicted it. I feel that I did a lot of things right. Yes, the leads consist of four men, three of whom were white and only one of whom was black. This was something I had seen growing up, on television, in films. Sitcoms and movies tended to cast a "token black" character, and this character was usually comedy relief. I hated that. I thought what I had experienced in school wasn't being represented by these stories. I felt like the idea of a group of white friends having one black friend, who didn't have any other black friends, and who was inevitably presented as a clown, was both absurd and demeaning to black people. So, I wanted to tackle it from within. I wanted a "token black" character who was rescued by white people (a common and offensive trope in stories of the time) to turn around in chapter 2 and rescue the white people. I wanted him to appear to be one more token character from the offset, only to become the hero of the story as it progressed. I feel like I did this fairly well.

I wanted to showcase the racism I had seen growing up; the racism that didn't make sense to me, because I was brought up in public schools post-desegregation, and I had friends of all kinds and always had, and to us race never appeared to be an issue. The most horrible children I grew up with were more concerned with how much money any given family had, rather than their race. In fact, we never discussed or even argued about race. Not knowingly. But then there was the specter of white privilege looming over us, and we didn't even know it.

We saw racism. We saw it in the generation that preceded us and even more from the generations that preceded them. Racist chants and racist jokes flew from the mouths of our relatives, who had grown up in a very segregated and discriminatory society that would have been perfectly alien to my generation of white children. At least for the white children I grew up around. We didn't know why the older generations felt so threatened by people who simply had different shades of skin than we did. And, I do realize that my experience wasn't universal, even as a white child. I know there were and are many white supremacists even today who are a part of Generation X. My point here is two-fold. For one, I saw racism in the '70s and '80s and was very familiar with its cruelty and ignorance, and I wanted to showcase that in my story as realistically as I could from my own memories. Second, I had no idea that racism hadn't literally ended in the 1990s, when it simply didn't seem to exist in my social groups at all.

But the only reason it didn't seem to exist, was because, as a white person, I didn't have to deal with it on a daily basis. That, in essence, is white privilege. I didn't see it, because I didn't have to. I thought we were living in a near-post-racist society, because none of my white friends seemed to be racists, and none of my other friends were ever attacked in my presence. I had the blissful ignorance and privilege of not seeing it anymore. Rarely even hearing it from the generational old guard, because by the 1990s they knew their attitudes were socially unacceptable, and they at least did us the favor of keeping it to themselves, which my mind translated into the idea that they no longer felt the way they used to about race.

So I did this. I depicted the racism of the 1970s I had witnessed in my story. I put those slurs in the mouths of my characters, be they hero or villain. In my mind, they were ignorant, and everyone reading the story would know that. Surely everyone would understand that I wasn't advocating for their language and opinions. It was important to present even the "good guys" as having ignorant racist attitudes, even when they thought they didn't. I got that right, I think. My mistake was in thinking it was obvious that they were in the wrong. The first arc does nothing to challenge them. It does nothing to address the racism of the town head-on. It simply showcases it and then allows it. The characters make ignorant statements that were intended to be just that, but the narrative never makes it clear that these statements were made in ignorance.

Now, I knew that the long arc of the series was going to see racism come to a head; that all of these things would be called out and addressed as the story grew forward; that even the "good guys" would be forced to face and confront their own ignorance and make a choice about whether to recognize it and change, or ignore it and turn a blind eye to the realities of being white in the American south in the 1970s. I knew it, and my white privilege told me that everyone shared my attitudes and that there was no reason to over-explain within the narrative structure of the story.

It wasn't until well after the series was in print that I woke up to the truth of American racism; that I recognized that white privilege was even a thing at all, and that I had been blinded by it all my life, even as a man who valued diversity. It was after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and the white supremacists came out of the woodwork like insects. They were everywhere. Some people I had known all my life became unrecognizable to me. Under the current administration, this has only intensified. Today, I am painfully aware of modern racism, of my own white privilege, of the fact that we are nowhere near living in a post-racist society in these early days of the 21st century.

Of course, the second arc of the series would begin to touch on these issues more directly, but it was still being presented through the lens of ignorance. The black protagonist, Sam, was actually guilty of saying some of the most ignorant things in the entire narrative. And I knew we were going to come back to that and explain it. It's a weird story as to why Sam has no idea, and we'll get there in the third arc, but I didn't think I needed to address it anywhere in the first two. I thought readers would simply "get it." I thought they'd accept that there had to be some out-there reason for Sam's attitude that would be addressed in time, because obviously the ignorant things coming out of his mouth were unfathomably wrong.

And maybe my readers did get it. I suppose it's possible that I'm overthinking the matter. In all the years that The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas has now been in print, I've yet to receive a single complaint about what I now perceive as its racially flawed narrative. Seeing it now so clearly as I do, this genuinely surprises me. I may be the only one who sees my presentation of 1970s southern racism in the story as flawed, but I sincerely doubt it, just as I sincerely doubt that these novels will continue to move forward in time without their flaws being more widely criticized for what they are, if nothing is done to correct it.

All that said, I really do love the series. I love the characters, the story, the soap opera format. And I will be addressing the ignorance of the original presentation in a more permanent way next year, when the series is re-released. I have written an introduction to the re-issue of Volume I, which basically sums up everything I just said, so that readers know how I really feel about the issues the characters are struggling with. In the re-issue of Volume II I'm planning to add a line or two of dialogue, maybe even a scene or two, to balance it all out, to call it out and set the stage a bit better for Volume III, which will tackle racism head-on as planned.

Meanwhile, the characters who live in Nightfire, Texas, be they black, white, Latino, vampire, ghost, or gray wolf, are all very dear to me, and I look forward to picking up their story again very soon.

The first three chapters of The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas were published between March 2000 and August 2001, constituting the first full arc of the series. These chapters were collected as a novella, in hardback and e-book editions, as The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas, Volume I: The Vampire Murders in February of 2013. The novella has since been released in trade paperback and pocket paperback editions as well.

And of course the series has continued with another twelve chapters, that were published between 2005 and 2012, but I'll save my reminiscences on that arc for another blog.

For now, as always:

The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas will continue ...

Next: The Great Debate (2003)