Human No
Longer Backstory
By Kathryn
Meyer Griffith
Human
No Longer. It’s my 17th published book – yeah! – and my fourth
vampire novel. First, let me tell you where I got the idea for it. About five
years ago, I was still trying to please the agent who’d sold four of my earlier
Zebra paperback novels (and who I no longer have) and, because she didn’t seem
to like any of my new potential concepts, I asked her what she would like to see. Out of nowhere, she said,
“You know your 1991 Zebra vampire novel, Vampire
Blood? I liked that one a lot. The characters. Well, how about writing me a
sort of sequel with basically the same characters, but with this premise: A
woman, a mother, after being turned into a bloodthirsty vampire, must learn to
adapt to the human world and still be a good mother. You know, how would she
deal with everything when she had children she loved; didn’t want to hurt or
leave them…but still had the need to feed on blood? Still had all the urges and
desires of a vampire?
Yikes.
I hated the idea but, to please her, I went ahead and begrudgingly wrote the
book. I tentatively called it The Vampire’s Children or the Vampire Mother or
something like that. I finished it. Not too happy with it. I had never liked
writing what other people wanted me to write. Stubborn, I guess.
My agent, in the meantime, had begun her own online
erotic (which I don’t much care for writing) publishing company and when I’d
finally gotten done with the novel she was too busy to even read the finished
book. She handed it off to an apprentice intern. An intern? What? Who didn’t
like it at all. Duh. So, disgusted, I tucked the file away on my computer and,
fed up with the whole agent thing, returned to writing what I wanted to write.
An end of days novel called A Time of
Demons and a new vampire novel where the evil vampire wasn’t a mother. In
early 2010 I went with a new publisher, Kim Richards at Damnation Books/Eternal
Press, and she contracted not only those two books but asked me if I’d like to
rewrite, update and rerelease all 7 of my older out-of-print Leisure and Zebra
paperbacks going back to 1984. Heck yes, I said! So for the next 3 years I was
busy doing that. Some of those books were over twenty-five years old and very outdated.
Their rewriting, editing and rereleasing took much work and time.
Then, in 2012, I decided to take a very old book of
mine (Predator) which was contracted to Zebra Paperbacks in 1993 but, in the
end, never actually released, and just for the heck of it, as my 16th
novel, self-publish it to Amazon Kindle Direct. Just in ebook form. A kind of grand
experiment. The first time I’ve ever tried self-publishing. See how it’d sell. Dinosaur Lake. A story about a hungry
mutant dinosaur loose in the waters of Crater Lake that goes on a rampage. Hey,
I wrote Dinosaur Lake before Jurassic Park, the book, ever came out! Really. I
had my cover artist, Dawne Dominique make a cover for it…and it was stunning with a dinosaur roaring on the
front. And I did everything else myself. Editing. Proofing. Formatting. With
forty years and many publishers behind me I felt I was capable. And it’d been
selling so well I decided to
self-publish another one…and I remembered the mother/vampire book. Hmmm. So I
revamped it (ha, ha, inside joke); polished it, and self-published it, as well.
I retitled it Human No Longer. Got
my fabulous cover artist, Dawne Dominique, to make me a lovely haunting cover with
a troubled-looking woman standing outside a spooky house, with two children
behind her in its shadows, on the front and voila! All in all, I don’t think the
book turned out half bad. In fact, with the changes I made I think it’s not bad
at all. Now I just hope my readers will like it.
So that’s the story of Human No Longer.***
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About Kathryn Meyer Griffith...
Since childhood
I’ve always been an artist and worked as a graphic designer in the corporate
world and for newspapers for twenty-three years before I quit to write full
time. I began writing novels at 21, over forty years ago now, and have had seventeen
(ten romantic horror, two romantic SF horror, one romantic suspense, one
romantic time travel, one historical romance and two murder mysteries) previous
novels, two novellas and twelve short stories published from Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press,
Damnation Books/Eternal Press and Amazon Kindle Direct.
I’ve been
married to Russell for almost thirty-five years; have a son, James, and two
grandchildren, Joshua and Caitlyn, and I live in a small quaint town in
Illinois called Columbia, which is right across the JB Bridge from St. Louis,
Mo. We have three quirky cats, ghost cat Sasha, live cats Cleo and Sasha (Too),
and the five of us live happily in an old house in the heart of town. Though
I’ve been an artist, and a folk singer in my youth with my brother Jim, writing
has always been my greatest passion, my butterfly stage, and I’ll probably
write stories until the day I die…or until my memory goes.
All Kathryn
Meyer Griffith’s Books available at Amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Kathryn+Meyer+Griffith
Novels
and short stories from Kathryn Meyer Griffith:
Evil Stalks the Night (Leisure, 1984;
Damnation Books, 2012)
The Heart of the Rose (Leisure, 1985;
Eternal Press Author’s Revised Edition 2010)
Blood Forge (Leisure, 1989; Damnation Books
Author’s Revised Edition, 2012)
Vampire Blood (Zebra, 1991; Damnation Books Author’s
Revised Edition, 2011)
The Last Vampire (Zebra, 1992; Damnation Books
Author’s Revised Edition 2010) You Tube
Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZU77j_q4S8
Witches (Zebra, 1993; Damnation Books Author’s
Revised Edition 2011)
The Nameless One (short story in 1993 Zebra
Anthology Dark Seductions; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition,
2011)
The Calling (Zebra, 1994; Damnation Books Author’s
Revised Edition, 2011)
Scraps of Paper (Avalon Books Murder Mystery,
2003…soon to be an Amazon Kindle Direct ebook)
All Things Slip Away (Avalon Books
Murder Mystery, 2006; Amazon Kindle Direct paperback & ebook 2012)
Egyptian Heart (The Wild Rose Press, 2007;
Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011) My self-made
You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cogCNYKzPqc
Winter’s Journey (The Wild Rose Press, 2008;
Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011) You Tube Book Trailer
address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZYCs2DVhHg
The Ice Bridge (The Wild Rose Press, 2008;
Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011) You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28HZqu-my1g
Don’t Look Back, Agnes novella & bonus short story: In This House (2008; ghostly romantic
short story out; Eternal Press 2012) You Tube Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3q9rZryFMo
BEFORE THE END: A
Time of Demons
(Damnation Books 2010) You Tube
self-made Book trailer with original song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0-U9c2Lwfo
The Woman in Crimson (Damnation
Books 2010) You Tube Book
Trailer Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcRBvDI5G4Y
The Complete
Guide to Writing Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1 (I did
the Introduction)
Dinosaur Lake (from Amazon Kindle Direct 2012)
4 Spooky Short
Stories (Amazon Kindle 2012)
Telling Tales of Terror(I did the chapter
on the Putting the Occult into your Fiction)
Human No Longer (Amazon Kindle 2012)
My Websites:
http://www.myspace.com/kathrynmeyergriffith
(to see all my book trailers with
original music by my singer/songwriter brother JS Meyer)
.JPG)
Blurb of Human No Longer
…a vampire novel of approx. 90,000
words by Kathryn Meyer Griffith
Blurb of Human No Longer by Kathryn Meyer Griffith
Jenny and Jeff Sanders on a summer night become
the victims of a bizarre crime, leaving Jeff dead and Jenny in a coma. Their
attackers aren’t caught.
She returns
to her children and her life. With Jeff’s death his business and their income are
also gone. Jenny, a novelist, hasn’t written a book in years, so she must move
back to her childhood home in Summer Haven, Florida, where years before she and
Jeff destroyed a sadistic family of vampires.
At least her
brother, Joey, who owns a local diner, is there to help them.
But Jenny has
no appetite. She’s edgy. Her eyes hurt. Could be trauma from the attack, or grief.
Until one night, after they’ve moved into the rundown family farmhouse, she
can’t resist the night woods or drinking animals’ blood.
Gradually she
accepts the truth. Her attackers were vampires. Now she’s becoming what she
once hunted and fears she must either kill herself or run. She can’t abandon her
children, but promises herself never to drink human blood; to find a way to
live in the human world. It’s not easy. They settle into the farmhouse, which
local gossip says is haunted, and renovate it. At night she hunts and hides
what she’s becoming from everyone. She fights to be a good mother and not let
the bloodlust overpower her. Gets a job and attempts to fit in.
People, bodies
brutalized and emptied of blood, begin dying. Like years before. With her
blackouts, she fears she may be their killer and confides in Joey. While a Detective, investigating
her husband’s and his daughter’s murders, complicates things.
Jenny suspects
it’s her attackers doing the killings. They’ve found her and demand she joins them–or her family
will die. When she resists, they kidnap her children; to save them, she becomes
part of their killing spree. Becoming a monster like them…until she finds a way
to outwit and ultimately destroy them.
In the end it
takes supernatural intervention, a ghost, and the help of a childhood friend to
set her, and the world, free from the vampires once and for all. ***
354 words
EXCERPT of Human No Longer by Kathryn Meyer
Griffith:
The moon had inched
downwards in the sky as she turned and headed towards the farmhouse. It was
time to return home to her children.
Awareness of the
shadows stalking her, an encircling noose of entrapment, began once she entered
the woods. She’d let her guard down again. So foolish of her.
Before she could run,
the shadows were on her. A steely hand grabbed one arm, another clamped around
the other. Her instincts warned she was in real danger. These were her kind but
not like her. There was this stench of malevolence around them. Strong as
smoke.
Don’t let them
capture you. You must get away.
“Ah,” a voice spoke
near her ear, “you are strong.
Zebulon said you were. I didn’t believe him. It’s beyond me how you’ve come to
be what you are. It’s extraordinarily rare you didn’t die and then became one
of us. You’ll come with us. Now.”
“Who are you?” she
demanded, not struggling to escape. Be smart. Wait for a chance. Think of
Teddy and Sarah. You must protect them.
“I go by Dante. And
you?”
She refused to
answer. “Can’t you read my mind?”
He didn’t answer for
a minute. Then he replied, “It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is you
belong to us. We’ll decide what to do with you. Come along.”
“And if I don’t come
along as you so nicely put it?”
“Then,” his laugh was
somehow sinister, “we’ll have no further use for you. You’ll die here and now.
I’m stronger than you. We’re all stronger than you.”
As afraid as she was,
the words slipped out, “Did you kill my husband?”
“Your husband?” As if
he didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Jeff Sanders. We
were attacked in St. Louis beneath a bridge late one night the end of August.
He died. I lived. Something, a cloud of shadows, swept in and out and left him
dead.”
The vampire didn’t
respond at first as if he were mulling it over.
“Well, did you?”
“Most likely. We
dispatch so many of you. You’re our nourishment. We travel all over your
world.” He snapped his fingers and the crack ricocheted around them. “You can’t
expect me to recall every last pitiful one and where.”
The heartlessness in
his voice made her instantly loathe him, as his grip tightened.
“How did you find
me?”
“What you are called
to us once your change was complete. It’s the way we knew you existed. Distance
doesn’t matter.”
“Are you…am I…a
vampire?”
“A vampire?”
“A vampire,” she
hissed.
Another disgusted
laugh. “Vampire? That’s what your kind think we are, except we’re so much more.
We’re from another…place.”
His free hand waved
in front of her face. “A vampire is a creature you humans made up. We’re not
dead or undead, nor one of your devil’s disciples or any of those ridiculous things.
One day we’ll rule this planet and all you cattle on it.
“I’ll give you a
choice. You join us or not. It matters little to me either way. We just can’t
have you out in the world running free. Alerting people to our existence before
we’re ready for that to happen. It puts us in danger. If you’re not with us,
you’re our enemy–and our enemies we do not allow to live.”
She didn’t want to
join him. Them. She wanted to scratch his eyes out and break his neck. Jeff had
been more than this monster’s nourishment; his death more than a
consumed Happy Meal to her, to Teddy and Sarah. Damn if she was going with
them!
The rage, fear and
loss of the last month boiled over inside her and ignoring the words and
warnings, she tore from their grasp and fled. Her body, lifting from the
ground, moved faster than the wind through the night trees.
Behind her she heard
their curses and pursuit.
She thought of the
farmhouse, longing for the safety of its walls, and suddenly she was there
in her kitchen. Her enemies left behind somewhere in the woods.
She got away this
time. How? Could they track her? Find her? She didn’t know.
She held her breath, listening,
for what felt like an eternity. Nothing. After a while she thought she might be
safe. No one had followed her.
She consciously cloaked her thoughts, her very being,
and shutting her eyes, leaned against the wall so she wouldn’t sink to the
floor.***
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Thanks for sharing with us, Kathryn, I can't wait to read that! Please stop by again, I love having you here!
Until next time, take care!
♥ Julie
