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We think this is a fabulous post, by the great Jeaniene Frost, so we hope you enjoy this revisit. :)
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Faith and Fantasy
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As a paranormal writer, I’ve often been asked how my supernatural creatures differ from others. Take my vampires. One of the things they can do that many others in fiction can’t is walk around in the daylight. Yes, just like in the original Dracula by Bram Stoker, my vampires have no lethal aversion to sunlight. Something else that repels many vampires in modern fiction, but also has no effect on mine, is crosses. I originally decided on that because I couldn't come up with an answer to the question of how a vampire who pre-dated Christianity would cringe away from a cross, and I have some vampires in my novel who are much older than two thousand years.* Therefore, religious objects in my books don’t have any effect on vampires.
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That doesn’t mean
faith is absent in my stories. In fact, my idea for the origin of
vampires came from the Biblical story of Cain. In my retelling of it,
God’s “mark” was making Cain into the first vampire, cursed to forever
drink blood as punishment for spilling his brother Abel’s (or so the
vampires claim. Ghouls in my books have a different version of what Cain
was turned into, heh). So right from the beginning, I knew I’d have to
deal with the element of faith in my supernatural world.
Still,
the idea than an entire species would agree about spiritual beliefs
seemed an impossible notion even for a work of supernatural fiction.
Therefore, even though I made up a fictitious creationist history for
the undead based on the biblical character of Cain, this doesn't make
the vampires or ghouls in my book automatically Judeo-Christian.
Instead, they represent a wide range of beliefs, including atheists,
Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, pagans, voodoo,
and more. Mencheres, the hero in my upcoming novel, Eternal Kiss of
Darkness, still believes in the ancient Egyptian gods -- which gave me an
excuse to indulge my love of Egyptology with more research about them!
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