Photo courtesy Brooklyn Book Festival
So, wanna know how well things went at the Brooklyn Book Festival? Then head on over to the StarWarp Concepts blog and read all about my second trip to New York’s premier publishing event, which was held this past Sunday. You’ll find it here.
Next up on the Events calendar is the big one, the Thunderdome of East Coast pop culture conventions: New York Comic Con. And October 11th isn’t all that far away!
Booth 2139 (hall 3C) at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center will be home to StarWarp Concepts for all four days, and I look forward to seeing you there. I’ll be working the booth the entire weekend, so stop by and say hi if you’re in the neighborhood!
Blood Feud is the critically acclaimed first novel in the series, which stars a 16-year-old Goth girl who’s spent the last decade being treated for mental health problems because she can see monsters. It’s only after she meets a shape-shifting monster hunter named Sebastienne Mazarin that Pan discovers she’s never been ill—her so-called “monstervision” is actually a supernatural gift that allows her to see into Gothopolis, the not-so-mythical shadow world that exists right alongside the human world. But before Annie can explain further, Pan and her parents are drawn into a conflict between warring vampire clans that are searching for the key to an ultimate weapon (or so the legend goes)—a key that just so happens to have been delivered to the horror-themed museum owned by Pan’s father.
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Here we have lovely Pan-atic Julie Zannino modeling her shirt at this past weekend’s ComiConn (a one-day comics convention held in Connecticut, hence the name). I had the pleasure of meeting Julie and her husband Joe (who took this picture) at the 2011 New York Comic Con, where they purchased Blood Feud after becoming enraptured by my sales pitch. 😉 T-shirt sales soon followed.
Highlander: Not so much the original Christopher Lambert/Sean Connery film that launched the franchise (let’s just pretend the god-awful sequels that followed never happened), but the 1990s TV series starring Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod. Four hundred years old? Warrior and lover? Flashbacks to historical adventures? Yeah, I guess you could say it had a tiny bit of influence on Annie’s immortal status. 😀
Kolchak: the Night Stalker: Before Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, there was intrepid-but-luckless reporter and monster hunter Carl Kolchak, created by author Jeff Rice in an unpublished novel titled The Kolchak Papers, and portrayed by fantastic character actor Darren McGavin. Kolchak starred in two early seventies made-for-TV movies (The Night Stalker—adapted from Rice’s manuscript—and The Night Strangler, both written by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson), and then in the one-season TV series that bore his name. From vampires and swamp monsters to Jack the Ripper and seven-foot-tall American Indian spirits, Kolchak chased and killed them all, in pursuit of the one great news story that would make him an A-list journalist. Of course no one ever believed him, and he never got that A-list story, but that didn’t mean Carl stopped trying.
Sonja Blue: Author Nancy A. Collins’s punk-rock vampire who hunts other vampires, introduced in the 1989 novel Sunglasses After Dark and still stalking her kind today in brand-new novellas. In an Anne Rice–influenced horror industry, at a time when just about every publisher was seeking to knock off Interview With the Vampire (or at least its success, as publishers do these days with their Twilight, Hunger Games, and 50 Shades of Grey imitations), Sonja arrived on the scene as the anti-Lestat. There was nothing romantic about vampirism in Sonja’s world—it was brutal and ugly and a curse, and being turned into a blood-drinking corpse only meant that Sonja was able to unleash her full anger to kill every stinking vampire she could find.