Parasitic. Book One: The Awakening

This novella is my own unique take on the legend of the vampires, and intended to be the first in a series. Having seen the Anne Rice romantic style, the post-modernist Buffy angle and the technological slant of the underrated Channel 4 TV series 'Ultraviolet' (no connection with the Hollywood films) I wanted to do something rather different.

The bloodsuckers here are rather different, being the dying who have chosen to drink from a host rather than accept their fate. This provides the immortality of yore, but at a cost - as well as the usual aversion to sunlight the Parasites can't just feed off humanity at their will - the only blood they can stomach is unique to the one who 'sired' them in the first place. Such dependency leads to obsession and irrationality, which is made all the more complicated when the sire happens to be a friend or even a family member rather than a partner, and sometimes someone of a different gender than the Parasite would have previously been attracted to. Dominic is appreciative of the help of a sympathetic nurse, but later wonders if he is just being manipulated even by those who should technically be his allies.

Some of the most interesting ideas have grey areas, and I feel this is the case here: whilst Dominic remains a sympathetic character but then so does his friend, Ray Lewis, whose own affiliations lead to conflict with the man who had been his best friend in their army days. Amy, too, is no Nosferatu: she is a frightened, vulnerable young woman who is half mourning the loss of her mother and half wondering why her feelings towards her late mother and bereaved father are changing.

It's a grim but gripping tale, one of my darker ones, but with a smattering of my trademark humour provided by a simultaneous plotline (where a young lad tries to get to grips with his twin brother also being a Parasite). I like to think that the Parasitic series is a new tune played on an old fiddle, and to reach into an area that no other tale of the undead has quite covered.