It’s been a while since I’ve read Twilight, but Jennifer the Damned seems to be almost its opposite. The romanticism of immortal love is traded for the dangers of disposable liaisons, as just one example. Where do you position Jennifer the Damned in terms of classic and modern vampire tales?

My editor likes to refer to Jennifer the Damned as the antidote to Twilight. The absolute inanity of modern vampire tales was certainly one of my inspirations, in the sense that I wanted to combat it with something more substantive, and I drew from those modern stories in terms of setting and tone to try to appeal to the same readers. But of course there’s a lot of Dracula in my book, too, going back to the idea that vampires pose a threat to both body and soul that only the pure of heart who are armed with Christ can defeat. The story itself is really taken from Crime and Punishment. Jennifer is Raskolnikov, testing the limits of human law and morality because she perceives herself as existing outside them. So where does Jennifer the Damned fit? I think that’s a question for readers and critics more than for me. I like to think it’s a literary novel masquerading as a teen vampire story, but maybe it’s the other way around.

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