In which I hit the promotional trail...

Poster for Park Chan-Wook's Thirst

Anyway, tonight’s radio appearance is about the third or the fourth hoop I will have to have jumped through on the way to publication. The first step was writing a longish article for the new issue of Sight and Sound, on the theme – loosely – of how the startling proliferation of vampire product over the last couple of years has not necessarily meant a plunge in quality; and on the secondary theme of how all the best new vamp fictions have forged fresh new alliances between the worlds of supernatural fantasy and the everyday. Naturally, I raved about Thirst, but I also took the opportunity to big up some other recent phenomena: mainly last year’s remarkable Swedish cross-over hit, Let the Right One In, and the HBO series True Blood, which is on Wednesday on Channel 4. Do check it out: it’s sexy and funny and a considerable improvement on its source, the Charlaine Harris series of Southern Vampire thrillers.

With that literary chore tucked away, I took the narrow road to the deep north – OK, a plane to Glasgow – for an appearance at the Wigtown Book Festival. The festival people have sent a car to pick up me and another author, a tall and distinguished looking chap by the name of Marcus Sedgwick. Within about fifteen minutes it emerged that (a) Marcus has, for the last five weeks, been living in a village ten minute’s walk from my own turf in Southern Cambridge (but he is just over the county border and thus counts as an Essex Man) (b) that he has written vampire fiction for teenagers and c) that, without noting my name, he had recently bought a copy of my last book, Moose – a publication so obscure and ill-selling that even I am only distantly aware of it. This delightful set of coincidences set me to wondering whether some God of the Undead is not smoothing paths for me...

Wigtown Book Festival logo

Wigtown was a lot of fun; I met a couple of old friends, notably the novelist Giles Foden, and the hospitality was unimpeachable. My own event was hardly a Woodstock – about thirty people showed up – but the atmosphere was pleasant and some members of the audience were even kind enough to titter at my jokes. I was interviewed by a shrewd and funny American lady who works for the Scotsman, and didn’t seem too offended that I had been impolite enough to have a loud heated argument the night before with her senior colleague on that paper. (It was about which twentieth century Italian poets supported Mussolini. Typical pub topic.) Questions from the audience were thoughtful and sympathetic; one of them was from a puppeteer called Allison. By the time Marcus and I were shunted back to the airport, Allison and I had agreed that I would write a short vampire verse play for her company. Freude!

The next episode was a bit abortive. As you may have read in the national press, a Canadian chap name of Dacre Stoker, a descendant of Bram himself, has been given a very large chuck of change to co-write a so-called official sequel to Dracula. This is not an idea that stands up to much critical scrutiny, but Dacre himself – I interviewed him at Castle HarperCollins in Hammersmith, revoltingly early last Monday – turned out to be a disarmingly modest, straight-arrow kind of guy who made no claims for his book other than entertainment value. And this is fair enough: the prose isn’t any better than your average thick-necked thriller, but it’s a sight better than Dan Brown, and the narrative beetles along quite merrily. He was a nice fellow, in short, and I was sorry to hear that some Man in a Suit at The Sunday Times spiked the story, before I had time to write it up, on the grounds that the vampire craze is over. I hope it is no very cynical asperity that leads me to find these words strangely reassuring...

Thursday will be launch night at the Little Shop of Horrors. Too late to crash-diet, so I’ll try to think up some decent jokes for my thank-you speech.

Per ardua...