I joined BookFunnel a few days ago at the recommendation of a fellow author and joined in the Fantasy & Sci-Fi Mania August promo. My book, The Revenant: A YA Paranormal Thriller with Zombies, is one of the books being featured as a FREE download. In this post, I share my inspiration for writing the book.
It started with vampires
I’ve always been intrigued with vampire lore in popular culture, and I don’t know why. Most sources will tell you it’s the romance, the association of blood with other bodily fluids, and the parallel of tooth penetration with…well, you get the idea.
I just like a good story. Vampires (and other supernatural creatures) live by a set of rules they can’t escape–like not going out in the daytime, or having to be invited into a residence–and there’s something comforting and familiar about that.
I’m a teacher, and I was introduced to peer mediation around the same time I started writing seriously. Peer mediation is when students are trained to mediate problems between other students. As the teacher liason for the program, I did a lot of reading around the mediation process, and that’s when the idea struck: write the story of a mediation between a vampire and a hunter. I knew all there was about the characters, their histories and how they got to the point of mediation, I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to end it.
When in doubt, research
My cure for writer’s block is to read around the subject, so I went to the Internet and started researching vampires. I knew the vampire would probably kill the hunter in a fit of rage. I also knew the hunter would not be satisfied unless he’d killed the vampire. Maybe I could find some other sort of happy medium for the two? It was while searching I came upon the idea of revenants.
So little has been done about supernatural revenants–the odd B-movie or novel or video game–that there are no rules compelling their actions. That was one of the reasons I started thinking about using one in my story. If no one really knew what they were or how they had to live their lives, I could create the lore myself. The general definition of a revenant is someone who returns after a long absence. In history, this grew to include people presumed dead, like soldiers lost in the war, who eventually came home. They are associated with vampires, because like vampires, they are associated with death and rebirth.
I realized that I couldn’t build a whole novel around a single character, but my other characters couldn’t be the usual werewolves, ghosts, and witches associated with stereotypical vampires. I made my other protagonist female to appeal to female readers (I had the male angle covered with Zulu, the revenant in my story). I thought of other superpowers I could give her that were different from the norm and settled on seeing auras and being an empath.
The necromancer/zombie angle came from Zulu’s origin story and the simple reason that there had to be an explanation for his rising from the dead.
About The Revenant
To learn more about Zulu, Kat and how the necromancy/zombie angle fits into their story, read The Revenant. In The Revenant: A YA Paranormal Thriller with Zombies, Zulu and Kat join a seer to help save people from catastrophe, mostly as a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real catastrophe begins when they learn the Seer’s brother, Malchus, once a powerful necromancer, has returned from the grave seeking revenge, for he believes the Seer responsible for his death.
Next up . . .
Check back with me throughout the month for more teasers, excerpts, and insight into how I put this book together.
And don’t forget to visit my promo, Fantasy & Sci-Fi Mania August, on BookFunnel to download The Revenant (sorry, but you’ll have to scroll to find it) and more than 30 other books by some very talented sci-fi, fantasy, and YA authors!
Elise Abram 