RESURRECTING VAMPIRES BY ​NICK SETCHFIELD

Ginger Nuts of Horror is honoured to be the first stop on the blog tour for Nick Setchfields excellent The Spider Dance (read our review of The Spider Dance here), many thanks to Titan Books for allowing us to be part of this. 

Nick Setchfield is a writer, editor and entertainment journalist whose work has appeared in SFX and Total Film, two of the UK's leading movie and TV titles. He's also been a film reviewer for the BBC and a scriptwriter for ITV's Spitting Image. Over a 20 year career he's interviewed untold actors, writers and directors, along with assorted Jedi, superheroes, starship captains, diabolical masterminds and the occasional quotable Dalek.

The War in the Dark is his first novel. Combining a lifelong love of spy thrillers, international adventure and occult weirdness, it begins the adventures of Christopher Winter, a British Intelligence agent battling demonic forces in the Cold War of the 1960s. 

The War in the Dark was longlisted for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. His latest book The Spider Dance is out now from Titan Books, you can grab a copy by clicking here 

Nick Setchfield was born in Cardiff, lives in Bath and lets his mind wander.

 
One of the true joys of writing the Christopher Winter adventures is playing with genre on a molecular level.
 
The War in the Dark took the DNA of a spy thriller and spliced it with the genetic codes of horror and magic. After unleashing that fiendish hybrid on the world I wanted to go a little further for the sequel, expanding the occult landscape of Cold War Europe. Winter has discovered that demons exist– what else might be waiting out there?
 
I’ve always had a weakness for vampires. I love the richness of their mythology, their sensuality, their intelligence. They’re romantic, erotic creations, poised between the grave and the sheets. And I love all that glorious Victorian theatricality, too, the velvet and the capes and the way they know how to make an entrance. They have style. And they tend to be conversationalists, which is another reason I’ve always preferred them over tedious old zombies (yes, you want brains, I get it, you shambling bore). Conversationalists are good for writers.
 
So I had the itch to play with the undead. But I knew that castles and candelabras wouldn’t fit into Winter’s world of tweed suits and microdots. The clash of styles would have been too extreme. I needed modern vampires – or at least vampires appropriate to 1965. Still terrifying, still stylish, but a threat that felt a little sharper, a little less velvety. Vampires whose DNA could be successfully fused with a spy thriller.
 
There are precedents. I’m hugely fond of the 1973 Hammer movie The Satanic Rites of Dracula – though it’s seen as the embarrassing mutant cousin of the studio’s more traditional chillers. Like its equally unloved predecessor, Dracula AD 1972, it uproots the Count from his historic mittel-European domain and places him in contemporary London, his taloned silhouette looming over Piccadilly Circus and Tower Bridge in the title sequence. At the film’s own press conference star Christopher Lee declared the script “fatuous” and “inane” and later decried it as “a parody – unintentionally so.”
 
But I think he’s wrong. To me there’s a genuine thrill seeing this horror icon mixed up in a story of secret service agents and germ warfare. I love how the movie recontextualises the Count as a Bond-style mastermind, plotting the end of mankind from the highest floor of London’s ultramodern Centrepoint building. It proves to me that vampirism and espionage can be an electric blend, even if it’s sacrilege to many, including the man behind the fangs.
 
Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula comic of the 1970s mines a similar seam, pitting the lord of the undead against a team of present-day vampire hunters. The stories are drenched in gothic atmosphere but they’re propulsive, too, with an energy clearly indebted to action-adventure cinema (Satanic Rites may have been a direct inspiration).
 
And yet Dracula remains Dracula, still kipping in coffins, still dressed for a blood-soaked night at the opera. I wanted to strip away all the cobwebbed trappings while keeping the essence of the myth, reimagined for the jet age of the 1960s.
 
So I thought about how vampires operate from a position of power and stealth, exploiting the folklore around their own existence to maintain dominion. It struck me that the great crime syndicates do much the same. The Mafia and the Camorra enjoy their infamy, weaponise it. And vampires would aspire to be apex predators in society, just like those secret fraternities. They’d be organised. Ruthless and vicious, yes, but in a smart, strategic way. Their victims wouldn’t be there simply to satisfy their blood lust – they’d find a way to monetise vampirism itself, use that unholy hunger to shore up their empire. It’s just business, you know? Somehow that’s even scarier.
 
And while these vampires are amused by their big screen counterparts – “The movies are useful propaganda for my kind,” says one – what if this version of the undead refused to play by the rules? What if crucifixes meant nothing to them? What if they could step on sacred ground and walk in sunlight – in fact, what if they controlled the sun-struck streets of Naples? The Italian coast - isn’t that the last place you’d expect to meet them?
 
You’ll actually encounter many kinds of vampires in The Spider Dance. Some are terrifyingly primitive, little more than ravenous piles of bones and rags (“Tomb-filth” to the highest vampires). Others are victims, of the creatures that created them or the world that fears them. Some have surprising origins, and even more surprising abilities. One you won’t see coming.
 
But the Shadowless - I Senz’ombr – are the deadliest, and that’s why they rule Naples. Naturally they’re also the hardest to kill. They don’t turn to dust in the sun, after all, and the cross is simply a trinket to them.
 
But my man Winter may just have the perfect weapon…
 
 
Find out more about Nick Setchfield on his website: nicksetchfield.com

​THE SPIDER DANCE BY NICK SETCHFIELD 

A genre-defying page turner that fuses thriller and speculative fiction with dark fantasy in a hidden world in the heart of Cold War Europe.

THE TRUE COLD WAR IS FOUGHT ON THE BORDERS OF THIS WORLD, AT THE EDGES OF THE LIGHT.
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It's 1965 and Christopher Winter is trying to carve a new life, a new identity, beyond his days in British Intelligence. Recruited by London's gangland he now finds himself on the wrong side of the law - and about to discover that the secret service has a way of claiming back its own. Who is the fatally alluring succubus working honeytraps for foreign paymasters? What is the true secret of the Shadowless, a fabled criminal cabal deadlier than the Mafia? And why do both parties covet long- buried caskets said to hold the hearts of kings? Winter must confront the buried knowledge of his own past to survive - but is he ready to embrace the magic that created the darkness waiting there?

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