More about Blood Crimes

Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers both came out in 1994, and both movies mesmerized me. While there have been other movies about murderous couples on the run, I’d never before seen anything with the sheer audacity of Natural Born Killers, and the circular story telling of Pulp Fiction was revolutionary. I didn’t realize it at the time, but both movies were an influence when I wrote Blood Crimes back in 2008.

Blood Crimes is ostensibly a vampire novel crammed into a hardboiled noir story. I say ostensibly because I made vampirism a viral infection as opposed to something supernatural, with the infection causing physiological changes that resemble what we think of as vampires. The story centers around Jim and Carol. Jim is infected, Carol isn’t, and Jim needs to find the worst predators alive to murder and feed on to assuage his guilt, and Carol has her own reasons for helping him lure these predators and needing to see them slaughtered. The other forces at play are Serena and her hive of club-hopping Manhattan vampires, a private eye hired by Serena to track down Jim, and Metcalf, a sociopathic hitman turned vampire, living in a compound outside of Los Angeles who will do anything to find a cure for the virus. These forces come together in Cleveland where all hell breaks out.

This is an intense novel. It’s a mix of horror, urban fantasy, tough crime fiction, but it’s ultimately as noir as anything I’ve written.