I’m honored to have been invited to talk about A Bad Breed this month, as well as my writing process and sundry book-related things. Here are the first two questions, click here to read the whole thing!
Please give us a short introduction to what A Bad Breed is about.
The story is a (very) loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but with vengeful Rosicrucian cults and hot French man-wolves thrown in. I think of it as a big, glorious mashup of fantasy and mystery and horror and romance – all favorite genres. It starts with a monster hunt in Transylvania and ends with gothic melodrama at a ruined castle on the coast of Normandy. Several of the characters do appear in my other books, but A Bad Breed can absolutely be read as a standalone. It does have a sequel though – The Necromancer’s Bride – because Anne and Gabriel deserved their happy ending!
What inspired you to write about a creature out of folklore?
I’ve spent more hours than I care to count poking around the dusty corners of the internet in search of weird folk tales and mythical creatures from different cultures. My first two series feature daevas, which were viewed as demons in the Persian Zoroastrian religion but as angels in India. I expanded the universe of oddities with the Gaslamp Gothic series. It has a large cast of paranormal investigators, some human, some . . . not. The books move between New York, London and other European capitals depending on the mystery to be solved. The latest installment, Dead Ringer, goes Old World with doppelgangers and a golem terrorizing Manhattan’s Tenderloin district. But returning to A Bad Breed, I’ve always wanted to write about werewolves. For some reason, they scare me worse than anything else. But I also wanted to come up with my own twist on the origin story. The title comes from The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition, which was published in 1865 and had this wonderful quote: “The werewolf may have become extinct in our age, yet he has left his stamp on classic antiquity, he has trodden deep in Northern snows, has ridden rough-shod over the medievals, and has howled amongst Oriental sepulchers. He belonged to a bad breed, and we are quite content to be freed from him and his kindred, the vampire and the ghoul.”
