When I was a boy of ten, I stood on the upper steps of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan in Mexico and saw the vast valley of the recent excavations of a hidden past. In my mid-teens, I traveled to Spain, and at the Alhambra, I felt a similar sense of a lost culture that was rich, and yet somehow buried. And then, in my twenties, I spent some nights in what seemed a mythic forest in France, full of the legends of the old gods and goddesses, tales of Druids and of faerie, of sacred trees and kingdoms beneath lakes. It is from all this, and a sense of wanting to unearth the secret history of the past, that brought me to explore the world of The Vampyricon, and The Priest of Blood.

To me, the vampire is an archetype of what has been buried, lost, forgotten -- and still threatens us, but also is a kind of guardian of ancient cities the same way serpents lurk in the depths of buried temples and broken altars. This is how I see Aleric, the hero of The Vampyricon -- he is a messiah of vampires, thrown to this destiny both by his own actions and by the storms of existence.

There is a secret history of the world. We do not know all. The conquerors wrote the history; the vanquished were buried or absorbed. There is so much of the world's past we do not know simply because it has been hidden. From this sense, I began moving toward writing this dark fantasy epic of vampires, sword, and sorcery. The Vampyricon encompasses three books: The Priest of Blood, The Lady of Serpents, and The Queen of Wolves. I hope you enjoy them.