Sometimes it’s a good idea for authors to keep mum about their motivations; but other times it seems as though a little explanation may help.

One of my favorite books is “Dracula.” I must confess that I have little interest in the later vampire stories; perhaps it’s just laziness. But a few years ago I was mulling over the idea of a vampire book, and I wondered if you were a vampire today and you wanted access to lots of victims, what would be the best occupation or cover? I first thought of a rock star, but that seemed too facile and kind of silly. Then I thought: of course, an evangelist! You’d travel the country; be accessible to huge numbers of people; be in a position of authority to brainwash these people; have an organization to provide structure; and the most delicious treat of all is that if you were a recognized religion, the IRS couldn’t touch you and you could operate in virtual secrecy! What could be better?

Then the next challenge was to figure out why Lucas Manson and his followers were vampires. I wanted a plausible scientific reason, not just some vague assertion. So I made them a different hominid species. Not Homo sapiens, like us, but something different–Homo cruentus. This is not very far-fetched; as recently as 25,000 years ago remnants of Homo neanderthalensis were living on Gibraltar. In evolutionary terms, this is the blink of an eye.

Then I had to figure out how many victims each cruent needed to survive (or more accurately, avoid painful withdrawal). I came up with one pint of blood per week. The average adult human has ten pints of blood in his or her body. So one victim can feed ten cruents per week. If Manson and his followers numbered one thousand individuals, they would need one hundred victims per week: murdered, harvested, and disposed of. The logistics are challenging! Hence the vast Kingdom Seven Family Temple organization, the Transformation tours, the local churches (decorias), and the crematoriums.

And then I needed a law enforcement agent–Mark Dylan–to investigate this gang of bloodsuckers and reveal the secrets of the temple and do battle with Minister Manson. But as we see, Dylan has his own problems, which can be directly related to the existence of the cruent species.

The sequel, “Kingdom Seven,” is about one-third completed. I’ll decide in the next few months when I’m going to finish it–there are so many books that need to be written!

Thomas Hauck