After my first novel Progeny, I wrote a whole slew of short stories, including a story for each of the Wrapped In… series from Sekhmet Press. Those collections were categorized by color; white for ghosts, black for witches, red for vampires. I already had a story called Nightbound but it needed an extensive re-write. That process was a lot of fun and it made that story my favorite of the three.
Nightbound is a small story, self-contained in what is possibly the recent past, all events occurring in one place. But it is also very much in the same universe as The Crimson Calling, in which vampires are not just mythological creatures but rather a species believed to have gone extinct during the middle ages.
Its relation to The Crimson Calling is the same as King’s short story Captain Tripps is to The Stand; same world, same dilemma, but different time and characters.
I have rarely written about vampires or zombies, simply due to the overwhelming glut of fiction already extant on them. When I do find myself inspired to tackle either, it’s because a) I don’t remember anyone else having approached the topic from that particular angle and b) my scenario seems to promise some scares and suspense. Comedic zombies and angsty teen vampires have come and gone; I want to bring them back to their rightful home in the horror genre.
The Crimson Calling has moments of intimacy, but its scope is much broader than that of Nightbound, its events transpiring across the globe like a James Bond novel, and more ambitiously still, across many eras of time. There are a good many characters with varying agendas, unlike the straightforward gangsters versus vamps set up of Nightbound.
However, I should mention that Crimson is the first of at least a trilogy – and that there’s a good chance of perhaps seeing a character or two from Nightbound in a future entry in the Crimson series.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With the success of his first novel PROGENY from Hobbes End Publishing, Patrick C. Greene became known for a brand of horror as emotional as it is terrifying, as engaging as it is suspenseful. Living at night, deep in the mountains of Western North Carolina with his wife and two sons, Greene expresses his morbid interests via painting and illustration when not writing. In addition to his novels Progeny and The Crimson Calling, the short story collection Dark Destinies, and multiple appearances in both The Endlands and Wrapped anthology series, Greene is currently hard at work on what he hopes to be a perennial Halloween favorite called The Death of October. Follow the author on Facebook.
The Story Behind the Book 