I’d been obsessed with vampires since my first viewing of the 1992 movie version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And after dipping my toe into the fiction writing world, I bit my lip waiting for the right vampire novel idea to surface. Perhaps like most author enthusiasts, although dying to add to the lore, the idea haunted me. What if my rendition of vampires offended readers, disparaged the tropes, or worse yet, bored fans? Still, how could I not create my own vampire legend when these beings were my passion.
As some projects go, my first attempt at a vampire story swerved into the realm of witches and magic. But with a half-vampire, half-witch hybrid main character, my vampire novel lurched in the shadows. I’d already bucked the norm of vampire and witch rules in creating this hybrid character when, at least by most edicts, they can’t exist. The writers of The Vampire Diaries and The Originals series, created witch-vampire heretics and a tribrid, witch-vampire-werewolf character, so I still hadn’t veered too far from the accepted norm. But in my world, where witches were descended from angels and vampires fallen angels, what blasphemy would need to ensue to create a half-vampire, half-witch being? Where did this hybrid character originate?
It followed that if my half-vampire, half-witch character could be born, then were other vampires also born as live beings, vampires from birth? And if naturally born would they also naturally die? And was that crossing too far over a vampire lore line? Did it demystify and dilute their allure? Still, I threw caution to the wind, creating a vampire line that was born from parents and possessed extraordinary healing ability, resistance to disease, sight, hearing, strength, speed, and mental abilities, but after 800-900 years, died natural deaths. My vampire-witch hybrid had a living, breathing, vampire mother and the mother a flesh and blood mother, father, sisters, and brother. This mother, Anne Scott, lived with her family in France until, at the age of three, witches burned them alive.
Anne, the protagonist in Kingdom of the Damned, witnesses this slaughter. She’s rescued by a family friend and they escape to England, impersonating a human mother and child. Blending into human English society, Anne grows into a beautiful woman. By chance she meets the only other vampire she’s ever encountered, a handsome Viking. They fall in love and are engaged. Tragedy strikes again when she discovers him staked through the heart. For Anne, her two traumas translate into a quest to bring peace within the vampire community and with their age-old enemies, the witches.
She travels north, finding her fiancés’ tribe and his killers. But her grief isn’t satiated. Gathering a small band of friends, she sets off on a worldwide campaign to gather like-minded vampires. Not surprisingly her quest gathers notice of a very powerful witch, Sonia, the high priestess of the witch lines. Sonia ignites a feud that spans centuries. Can our vampire hero breed peace among her people and end the hostilities between the races? Or is she destined to burn as her parents did? Kingdom of the Damned spans four centuries leading us to the turn of the millennia. Can vampires maintain their anonymity in a tech-savvy world with cameras posted on nearly every street corner? Are Anne’s people destined for destruction via the hands of the witches, the humans, or are they a dying race that will dwindle to extinction? The vampires may determine their own fates in Kingdom of the Damned.
Kingdom of the Damned: Provocation by Tricia Copeland
Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Publication date : August 27, 2018
Print length : 412 pages
ISBN-10 : 1723066214
ISBN-13 : 978-1723066214
