Salem's Lot

"This is not a sexy vampire, but quite a frightening one. Salem’s Lot is a very scary book. Whereas in Dracula , and especially in Interview with the Vampire , the vampires are quite human, the vampire in Salem’s Lot is more like a true creature. It’s an absolute bloodsucker, just intent on eating and killing the people in this small town. Anyone who has seen the series from the 1970s will know it’s just so frightening. There’s a scene with a little boy at the window, flying. Again, using children…Anne Rice, later in the series, does have a child who becomes a vampire, but she’s quite pretty. She’s in a child’s body, but she develops as a woman. Whereas this boy in Salem’s Lot… It’s very dark and grim and gritty. There’s also a priest who doesn’t have the wholesomeness you see in other portrayals of priests. I liked how Stephen King and Anne Rice both changed up the vampire. It’s about how different the vampire can be, which is the fun part of horror. Nowadays, you have writers from all cultures writing about their own kind of vampires. It’s about the isolation. That feeling of isolation is a part of horror, whether it’s in the mind or physically in a rural area. It amps up the fear because where do you run? Where do you hide? If you’re in a haunted house, if you see something, and there are other people around, you might not want to say something, because what are they experiencing? Are they seeing it? Are they going to think I’m mad? Yes, and I would say that, for me, Interview with the Vampire is probably the least scary. It’s just a fun book. It’s dark, but it’s not the same darkness as you get with Stephen King’s books , some of which are very bleak, or with some contemporary books written by Black writers about their history. There was a recent horror film that came out called Sinners, which is excellent. It’s set at a time when there’s a lot of racial tension, and you have these Irish vampires trying to get let in. It’s a really good movie, a modern take on the vampire that I absolutely loved. A lot of the stories I’ve talked about here are classics, but as I said earlier, publishing has opened up, times have changed and you have writers from different cultures with different stories, folk tales, and urban legends. They have the ability now to reach a wider audience and tell them about these things. For example, there’s one story in the book called “Sucker.” Alyssa Alessi takes a vampire story and sets it in her neighborhood, in a city, in a club. It’s vampires out and about doing their thing, like Anne Rice did with Interview with the Vampire . They’re everywhere, but you just don’t see them—or maybe you do, and you’re attracted to that. I wanted to get really good writers from across cultures, experiences, genders, to write stories. Whether it’s supernatural, whether it’s folklore, it’s something that challenges you. It includes speculative fiction, but more on the spooky, supernatural side of the spectrum. These bedrock books are great. However, it’s nice to also say ‘Yes, we were inspired by those books. However, we also have tales. We also have our own lived experiences and our fears and emotions and our way of tackling difficult subjects.’ So that’s what I wanted to do with Latin American Shared Stories. I wanted to open the conversation to a wider audience, but also more writers, and introduce people who like speculative fiction to different voices and different experiences. Yes. It’s writers from a ton of different places because every culture has a different take on a vampire or ghosts and different practices. That’s interesting to me, too, because it adds to the fear factor. If someone asks, ‘Did you know about this creature?’ and you didn’t and they tell you about it, then the next time you walk alone, you might think about it… Yes. There are some Spanish words, but Google is everybody’s companion these days, so it isn’t challenging to read. One story, “Nacho” by Daniel Olivas, talks about different foods he’s eating and, again, you can easily Google to get what he’s talking about, or certain cultural references. That’s what I like, that it will challenge readers to think, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard of that practice or that belief. Let me go look it up. Let me explore. I’ve never heard of that folk tale. Let me go and find out more. I love that story. Let me go read more from this writer.’ For me, that’s exciting, to open the doors in publishing and in storytelling. Because the original books here are all by white Americans. Times have changed, and so publishing should change, and we’re better for it. It’s better for us to understand more about each other, as opposed to being divided and focusing on the differences. What makes us human? Every single person knows fear—what we fear is different, but it is shared across humanity. We all know hunger. We know love. And we all bleed the same colour. Storytelling brings us together. Let’s understand more about each other and where we’ve come from, because I think if we did understand more about each other on a human level, there would be a lot less fear."