Human No Longer by Kathryn Meyer Griffith is a book I will be reading this week. I wanted to share with you all this awesome looking book. What do you think of the cover?
Looks great doesn't it? Cover is by Dawne Dominique.
Now check out the description.
Jenny and Jeff Sanders, on a summer night, become the victims
of a bizarre crime, leaving Jeff dead and Jenny in a coma. Their attackers aren't caught.
She returns to her children and her life. With Jeff’s
death his business and their income are also gone. Jenny, a novelist, hasn't written a book in years, so she must move back to her childhood home in Summer
Haven, Florida, where years before she and Jeff destroyed a sadistic family of
vampires.
At least her brother, Joey, who owns a local diner, is
there to help.
But Jenny has no appetite. She’s edgy. Her eyes hurt.
Could be trauma from the attack. Grief. Until one night, after they've moved
into the rundown family farmhouse, she can’t resist the night woods and going
out to drink animals’ blood.
Gradually she accepts the truth. Her attackers were
vampires. Now she’s becoming what she once hunted and fears she must either
kill herself or run. She can’t abandon her children, but promises never to drink
human blood; to find a way to live in the human world. It’s not easy. They renovate
the farmhouse, which local gossip says is haunted. At night she hunts, and
hides what she’s becoming from everyone. She fights to be a good mother and not
let the bloodlust overpower her. Gets a job and attempts to fit in.
People, bodies emptied of blood, begin dying. Like
years before. With her blackouts, she fears she may be the killer and confides
in Joey. While a detective, investigating her husband’s and his daughter’s
murders, complicates things.
Jenny suspects it’s her attackers doing the slayings. They've found her and demand
she join them–or her family will die. When she resists, her children are taken;
to save them, she becomes part of the vampires’ killing spree. Becoming a monster
like them…until she finds a way to outwit and ultimately destroy them.
In the end it takes supernatural intervention, a
ghost, and the help of a childhood friend to set her, and the world, free from
the vampires once and for all.
Wow! Imagine being a vampire hunter then changing into a vampire. Now add being a mother and single parent into the mix. You are trying to do your best for your children, help them over their father's death and keep them safe. After all, you are all they have now. Then they are taken and you must become the monster you hunted and hated to save them.
Kathryn has very kindly permitted me to print an excerpt from Human No Longer. So get comfy and enjoy.
Shutting her
eyes, she lingered at the door and listened to the night animals beyond the
glass. They were frolicking out there in the autumn murkiness among the crispy
leaves and cool dirt covered ground. Little creatures, with nocturne eyes and
speedy feet, full of hot blood.
The mother in
her fretted over leaving her children alone in the house but the hunger overpowered
the mother and she snuck outside into the darkness.
She told herself
they’d be fine. She’d be back shortly. That she should reward herself for her
self-restraint all day. She hadn't. attacked one living person. Hadn't gone
crazy or hung from the rafters by her feet. She’d done well.
She told herself
that killing innocent little animals wasn't all that creepy, wasn't all that
bad, considering the alternative. It didn't work. She loved animals and hated
having to kill them at all for any reason. Or had. But, she had to keep
reminding herself, animals died every minute of the day to fill humans’
stomachs. Right? Was what she did any worse than that? All she wanted was their
blood. It was her food.
She felt guilty
only until she captured the large fox, humanely snapped its neck to drink the
blood (which tasted better than anything she’d ever drank or eaten) and then
was too exhilarated to think of anything but further feeding her hunger; not
even that she could run faster than she ever had, could see like an owl through
the darkness, smell her prey miles away and that her teeth were changing. When
she stuck her finger into her mouth she could feel the points. Oh, great.
Little fangs. Oh, Lord, could this get any weirder? She thought about those
horror movies she’d seen over the years where some unlucky human had been
bitten and was slowly turning into god-knows-what and couldn’t believe or
accept it. Was in shock. Now she knew exactly how they’d felt.
Though, in the
end, she did feel regret for killing the poor fox and the one the night before.
But, yes, it was better than feeding off homo sapiens. Damn straight it was.
After ingesting
the blood she felt as if there was nothing she couldn't deal with. No problem
she couldn't solve, no disaster she couldn't avert. She was superwoman.
This wasn't so
bad, was it? It’d occurred to her perhaps if a good person became a
vampire that might be the key. Good person equals good vampire? Bad person
equals bad vampire? She could only pray that was the case. Oh, it could be
worse. She could lust after human blood and not be able to resist. Now that
would be a deal breaker.
She absorbed the
night poised beside a towering tree, its limbs shifting in the wind; inhaled
the dizzying perfumes of the forest. Her lips on the verge of smiling. She felt
better than she had since she’d come out of the coma weeks ago.
Her new world
revolved around her in slow motion. The night birds cooed in their nests. The
air danced among the dying leaves. Insects skittered between limbs and under
bushes. On the breeze there were aromatic wisps of brewing coffee and chocolate
(cake she thought), fresh baking bread and as always now, blood. Animal blood
in the small bustling creatures hiding out all around her and in the distance
the cloying scent of human blood. Her children asleep in their beds. Amazing.
God, the night
was beautiful.
That’s when she
saw the pale figure hiding between the trees to her left. A tall man dressed in
drab clothes watched her.
She merged
deeper into the woods among the thicker underbrush but when she looked back, he
was still on the fringe observing.
Waves of
uneasiness rippled through her and the vertigo was unbalancing. This man
stalking her wasn't her friend. This man was dangerous. If he was a man.
She ran all the
way home at a speed she never would have imagined a human capable of. More like
flying really. Her feet barely touched the ground, her night eyes so keen she
never once collided with a tree or stumbled over a rock.
Within seconds
she was inside the farmhouse peeking out the windows; the mysterious stranger
nowhere in sight. Thank God.***
How creepy is that? I am dying to know who the man is and why he is there. It makes me want to start it now. I suck at being patient.
Are you wondering how Kathryn came up with the idea for this story? I am. I love hearing how stories come about. Here is the back story on Human No Longer.
Human
No Longer. It’s my 17th published book – yeah! – and my fourth
vampire novel. First, let me tell you where I got the idea for it. About five
years ago, I was still trying to please the agent (who I no longer have) who’d
sold four of my earlier paperback novels to Zebra in the 1990’s and, because
she didn't seem to like any of my new potential concepts, I asked her what she
would like to see. Out of nowhere,
she said, “You know your 1991 Zebra vampire novel, Vampire Blood? I liked that one a lot. The characters. Well, how
about writing me a sort of sequel with basically the same cast, but with this
premise: A woman, a mother, after being turned into a bloodthirsty vampire,
must learn to adapt to the human world and still be a good mother. You know,
how would she deal with everything when she had children she loved; didn't want
to hurt or leave them…but still had the need to feed on blood? Still had all
the urges and desires of a vampire?
Yikes.
I hated the idea but, to please her, I went ahead and begrudgingly wrote the
book. I tentatively called it The
Vampire’s Children or The Vampire
Mother or something like that. I finished it. Not too happy with it. I had
never liked writing what other people wanted me to write. Stubborn, I guess.
My agent, in the meantime, had begun her own online
erotic (which I don’t much care to write) publishing company and when I’d
gotten done with the novel she was too busy to even read the finished book. She
handed it off to an apprentice intern. An intern? What? Who didn't like it at
all. Duh. So, disgusted, I tucked the file away on my computer and, fed up with
the whole agent thing, returned to writing what I wanted to write. An end of
days novel called A Time of Demons
and a new vampire novel where the evil vampire wasn't a mother. In 2010 I went
with a new publisher, Kim Richards at Damnation Books/Eternal Press, and she
contracted not only those two books but asked me if I’d like to rewrite, update
and re-release all 7 of my older out-of-print Leisure and Zebra paperbacks going
back to 1984. Heck yes, I said! So for the next 2 years I was busy doing that. Some
of those books were over twenty-five years old and very outdated. Their
rewriting, editing and re-releasing took a lot of work and time.
Then, in late 2012, I decided to take a very old book
of mine (Predator) which was contracted to Zebra Paperbacks in 1993 but, in the
end, never actually released, and just for the heck of it, as my 16th
novel, self-publish it to Amazon Kindle Direct. Just in ebook form. A kind of grand
experiment. The first time I’ve ever tried self-publishing. See how it’d sell. Dinosaur Lake. A story about a hungry
mutant dinosaur loose in the waters of Crater Lake that goes on a rampage. Hey,
I wrote Dinosaur Lake before Jurassic Park, the book, ever came out! Really. I
had my cover artist, Dawne Dominique make a cover for it…and it was stunning with a dinosaur roaring on the
front. And I did everything else myself. Editing. Proofing. Formatting. With
forty years and endless publishers behind me I felt I was capable. And it’d
been selling so well I decided to
self-publish another one…and I remembered the mother/vampire book. Hmm So I
revamped (ha, ha, inside joke), polished, and self-published it, as well. I re-titled it Human No Longer. Got my
fabulous cover artist, Dawne Dominique, to make me a lovely haunting cover with
a troubled-looking woman standing outside a spooky house, with two children
behind her in its shadows, on the front and voila! All in all, I don’t think the
book turned out half bad. In fact, with the changes I made I think it’s not bad
at all. Now I just hope my readers will like it.
So that’s the story of Human No Longer. My 17th
published novel.***
Hmm. Interesting but now I am really curious. 17 published novels? Just who is Kathryn Meyer Griffith? Here is what she has to say about herself:
Since childhood I've always been an artist and worked as a graphic designer in the corporate
world and for newspapers for twenty-three years before I quit to write full
time. I began writing novels at 21, over forty years ago now, and have had seventeen
(ten romantic horror, two romantic SF horror, one romantic suspense, one
romantic time travel, one historical romance and two murder mysteries) previous
novels, two novellas and twelve short stories published from Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press,
Damnation Books/Eternal Press and Amazon Kindle Direct.
I've been
married to Russell for almost thirty-five years; have a son, James, and two
grandchildren, Joshua and Caitlyn, and I live in a small quaint town in
Illinois called Columbia, which is right across the JB Bridge from St. Louis,
Mo. We have three quirky cats, ghost cat Sasha, live cats Cleo and Sasha (Too),
and the five of us live happily in an old house in the heart of town. Though I've been an artist, and a folk singer in my youth with my brother Jim, writing
has always been my greatest passion, my butterfly stage, and I’ll probably
write stories until the day I die…or until my memory goes.
As most of you know already I am a cover freak. So for your pleasure, and mine, here are the covers for Kathryn's other novels:
and her two novellas
There are some great covers there. I am eager to review Human No Longer and then, perhaps, on to Don't Look Back, Agnes. Or maybe Egyptian Heart. But then Vampire Blood was the start of Human No Longer. Ugh! That is what covers do to me!!
I hope you have enjoyed checking out Human No Longer with me. Later this week I will have the review up for you.
For more on Kathryn Meyer Griffith please visit her websites:
As always your comments are most welcome!
Open Minds (Book One of the Mindjack Trilogy) by Susan Kaye Quinn
When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep.
