Vampires of the Scarlet Order

After discussing The Pirates of Sufiro and its origin here at the Web Journal, I thought it might be fun to go back and take a brief look at all my novels, introducing them to people who haven’t read them, and telling a little about their origins. I’ll start with Vampires of the Scarlet Order, which generally has received the best reviews of all my novels.

Vampires of the Scarlet Order is an action-adventure novel with a touch of romance that tells the story of an elite cadre of vampire mercenaries who have worked throughout history as pinpoint assassins. Under the command of Desmond, Lord Draco, the Scarlet Order was involved in wars with the Ottoman Empire, The French Revolution and even the conquest of the Americas. As the 21st century dawns, vampires are too expensive, too untrustworthy, and frankly, too passé for governments to employ any longer. Nanotechnology can be employed to engineer more reliable super soldiers. However, governments might be tampering with powers they don’t really understand. The elemental forces of the universe bring the vampires of the Scarlet Order together to put a stop to the humans’ dangerous experiments.

The novel opens in 1492 Spain as the Scarlet Order is working for the Spanish Inquisition and ends in a climactic battle in 2002 Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Vampires of the Scarlet Order began in 2001 when Janni Lee Simner and I were sitting around talking. She happened to wonder what a vampire would make of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Literally, Las Cruces means “the city of the crosses.” She said she had no plans to use the idea and said I was welcome to it. About a week later, a story about a vampire telescope operator who moves to Las Cruces came almost fully formed to my mind. I titled the story “Vampire in the City of Crosses” and sold it to Margaret Carter’s magazine The Vampire’s Crypt. About a month later, I came up with a sequel called “Vampires in the World of Dreams” which Carter also bought for The Vampire’s Crypt.

Over the course of the next two years, I kept writing short stories about vampires in the Southwest. Some of the vampires lived in the present day. Some lived in the past. I finally decided to figure out how all the stories related to one another and I put them together into a novel.

As it turns out, the first draft was quite a bit different from the finished product. In the first draft, it wasn’t the United States trying to make super soldiers. Instead, aliens from another world were trying to create vampires. After setting the book aside for a short time, I decided I had stretched credulity and I changed the novel into its current form.

I have continued to write vampire stories since Vampires of the Scarlet Order. One of them is a prequel called Dragon’s Fall: Rise of the Scarlet Order. That will be released soon from Lachesis Publishing. I also have several other standalone vampire stories. I’ve created a separate blog to discuss vampires and my vampire stories. You can check it out at: http://dlsummers.wordpress.com. You can also keep up with news about the vampires at their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Scarlet-Order-Vampires/159599227447475

You can find Vampires of the Scarlet Order at:

• Barnes and Noble as a Nook Book
• Amazon in Kindle Format
• Amazon as a Print Book