Insatiable

Published by Zebra in 1993. Paperback.
Reissued by Wildside Press in 2000. Trade paper, $14.95. ISBN 1587151898

Thanks to Anne Rice, the late 1980s saw a flood of vampire novels, and everyone I knew seemed to be jumping on the bandwagon. I resisted doing the same. Privately I sneered at people who jump on bandwagons and felt myself to be vastly morally superior. Then an idea hit me: Imagine a vampire who is converted by a super-scientific gizmo into a super-vampire, a creature who must drink the blood of other vampires to survive, to whom human blood tastes awful, who is not bothered by the sun, whose bite is agony to his vampire victims. Best of all, because of the scarcity of vampires, he is forced to drink human blood occasionally, and when he does, his human victims experience indescribable ecstasy, so if he doesn't kill them, they recover and spend the rest of their lives yearning for him to bite their necks again. Add that the protagonist, Richard Venneman, is an anal-retentive kinda guy when he's human and very religious, so he is consumed by moral qualms and internal philosophical debates once he becomes a vampire, and then a super-vampire. Oh, and I mustn't forget that in my invented world, a vampire makes a human into a vampire by having sex and a simultaneous orgasm with the victim while draining the victim of blood. (You thought it would be easy?) What a great idea! I told myself. So I jumped on the bandwagon. I had a ball writing the book. I must admit, though, that I lost patience with Venneman and his whining and agonizing. But I had made him unkillable and was stuck with him. I also managed to invent a very gross scene - a few, actually, but one in particular - that everyone who reads the book seems to remember. It has to do with Venneman, as a super-vampire, eating a more run-of-the-mill vampire's head. It nauseated me when I wrote it, which I guess is a good sign. First Three Chapters Online To read the first three chapters of the book, click here. For a pdf version of the first three chapters, click here. Ordering the Book The original paperback edition of Insatiable is long out of print. Copies of it show up sometimes in used bookstores and on Web sites for used books. Fortunately, Insatiable has been reissued as a trade paperback by Wildside Press. You can order it from various online booksellers. Use these links: All Direct Amazon Barnes & Noble Books A Million Buy Books Tattered Cover Wildside Press Or you can order Insatiable through any bookstore. Tell them to contact Ingram (the big distributor from whom bookstores order a lot of their books) and mention that this book comes through Ingram's Lightning Source division. Please note that this book is published by means of Print on Demand technology, so it won't be on the shelves at bookstores. You'll have to ask for it. Bookstore clerks are still a bit confused about this whole Print on Demand thing, but it's part of the publishing wave of the future, so eventually the bookstore personnel should be up to speed on it. (And if you encounter some who are still confused, for the love of God, educate them! Click here to educate yourself first.)

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