[Shadow Saga 01] • Of Saints and Shadows

Christopher Golden Talks Vampires and Fiction

by Douglas

Clegg

Christopher Golden may just be one of the most prolific authors around. He's

sold more than 23 novels, the bestselling X-Men trilogy Mutant Empire, as well as a bestselling

series of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" novels, which he cowro

te with Nancy Holder. His recent projects include HREF="[http:///booksear...](http:///booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?%=xfontbulktext%

Douglas Clegg: 

What drew you to vampires? What about them intrigues you? Do you think it's

a subgenre of fantasy and horror that can be exhausted, or is it an endless source of

ideas?

Christopher Golden: 

I've always loved vampire stories, but that isn't why I wrote this series. Its

creation was prompted, actually, by one of the fundamental questions of the mythological world

I've created. If vampires could transform themselves, on

a molecular level, into mist or a wolf or a bat, isn't it silly that they would have to stop there? From

that, I began to craft a reason why vampires would *believe* such things to be true, and the

story grew in both directions. As to the latt

er question, I truly believe that as long as there are imaginative writers, there will be new twists on

the subgenre. It's all about the careful choosing of story elements, and how those elements are

then structured.

DC: 

Where do the ideas come from? I'm being a bit arch, since this is a typical interviewer question,

but you seem to have an especially rich treasure trove of ideas, and the energy to put them down

on paper in imaginative ways.

CG: 

The publishing world moves a bit too slow, actually. And that's an

understatement. The three Shadow Saga books, of which OF MASQUES AND MARTYRS is the

latest, are really one major idea with several hundred little ideas thrown in. I

'm fortunate enough to have ideas coming at me from several different angles. From dreams, of

course. From spur-of-the-moment inspiration, which no one can really explain. For instance, my

son watching "Winnie-the-Pooh" videos over and over, creati

ng within me a certain perverse hostility toward those characters, even though I love them, was

the inspiration for my upcoming Signet novel, STRANGEWOOD [due in September 1999.] And

then there are economic motivators, of course. For instance, Hey,

this is suddenly hot, but it bores me...on the other hand, if you twisted it around and did something

similar, but *nasty*...hmmm. Some of my best ideas for work-for-hire projects have come

about in that way. Or the "How come they've never don

e *this*?" angle. That's common as well.

If you split my work between original and

work-for-hire, I guess I would break it down this way: In work-for-hire, I want to get the characters

I'm doing down on paper exactly right. I want to re-crea

te them at their fundamental level. If I can do that, I feel like I've succeeded. In my original work,

however, the motivations are completely different. I don't mind using an element of this or that,

but whatever I choose to do, I want to do in a

way that I've never seen before.