Inspiration comes in all forms. Mine started with a song.
Linkin Park’s “Forgotten,” deep on Hybrid Theory, isn’t the radio single everyone quotes. It’s the track that feels like a person losing control, searching for vengeance, moving through a dark city, trying to find remnants of his life. The first time I listened to it, an image conjured in my head of a vampire scouring the streets, filled with guilt for what he had done.
Blood Memories is urban fantasy about a man turned into the thing that destroyed his life, hunting beside slayers, killing vampire and draining their memories. On paper: vampires and action. Underneath: a man filled with rage and confusion, a broken identity, and a mind that can’t fix what he’s done.
From the top to the bottom
The song moves like a man in panic, trying to find his way through a twisted underworld that he’s found himself in. He’s searching for something, anything, to bring back some semblance of his life. A piece of his humanity that has been stripped away, leaving only the monster behind. That’s how originally envisioned Malcolm. A tortured soul, lost in his own fury and rage, struggling to find a piece of his humanity after he had been thrust into a world of shadows.
There’s a place so dark you can’t see the end
I wanted the location to feel like its own character, filled with people and sensations. So I created the mythical city of Old Town, a city filled with dark alleyways, broken memories, and shadowy secrets. It drew from many sources, including Detroit, Dallas, New York City, and even Montana. There is a lively atmosphere of a bustling city mixed rural areas with thick forests, then a dark city filled with narrow alleyways and shadowy corners. The perfect place for a vampire who enjoys living in the upper crust of society but also thrives in the dirty underbelly of the city.
A core that’s been forgotten
Most vampire stories thrive on a character filled with centuries of ancient knowledge. But the impact of having these awesome abilities mixed with an unending thirst with a broken memory created a twist to the vampire genre that turned this from action horror to psychological thriller. And that gave me so many avenues I could run with the character, this world, and the reader’s experience, hopefully bringing them on a roller coaster ride all the way to the end.
The memory won’t escape me
“Forgotten” is a contradiction where the past is unbearable and inescapable, but he struggles to remember the details that ground him. I wanted that for Malcolm. That intense memory of the death of his wife and daughter driving him forward as he smooths out a photo, looking at them frequently, mixed with a mind that’s fracturing. He has to frequently ground himself, staring at the photo, otherwise the new memories overtake him.
Why that song, why this book
Every time I listened to this song, my mind traveled to a dark alleyway with Malcolm searching for answers as he struggled to find revenge, struggling with memories that mixed with his own. You can hear the pain in the lyrics, and that’s the pain I wanted infused into my character. It was a concept I contemplated for years, and am thrilled to bring it to life in a novel.
So when people ask me what is Blood Memories, I can say it’s an urban fantasy with vampires, vampire hunters, and memory magic. But it’s also a revenge story mixed with a psychological thriller. It’s also a character study that ponders what makes a person’s soul; is a person’s soul the accumulation of their memories, or is it something else?
Listen to the song, “Forgotten.” You’ll hear Malcolm’s voice there.
—KC
Originally published on Substack.
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