THE WOLF WITCH is just two days away. AHHHH!!!! To kick off the great werewolf v vampire debate, JE Cammon is here asking...what if?


What Is, What Isn’t

My mentor told me once that it is the author’s job to imagine. Interpreted constructively, it could be that the writer’s function in society is to walk ahead of inventors, as they travel ahead of innovators, so on and so forth. I’m not saying that the writer has sole ownership of the concept of imagination of course, but that is their primary tool, the gift that they are most afflicted with. And I say afflicted because sometimes it can be. Imagine being the only person who realized the world really was flat after all, and that everything, all the continents and seas, were falling right off the edge. If you told someone, you’d be labeled a crazy person, and when it came true, long after you died, they’d stamp the word prophet on your gravestone. Then again, imagine sitting on the porch with your brother, watching birds soar by overhead and saying to him “I think maybe we’ll fly, too, someday.”

Likewise, the paranormal has a certain fascination for people everywhere because of an equally simple and pervasive premise: “what if it were all true?” And of course many, many authors and readers have enjoyed delving into all the different ways one could answer that question. And the two most pronounced evidences of this fact are the popularity of the shapeshifter and the vampire. One is mercurial in its genesis, hidden and hunting, a person who is not a person. A man or woman who, at times is at best only male or female, but at worst a terrifying creature. Maybe they’re living in the sewers beneath your apartment building, and that’s what happened to the previous tenant of 43B. Maybe they sit next to you every week in your favorite coffee shop; you’ve joked about them following you, and unbeknownst to you, they are. The other creature, the vampire, is somewhat the opposite. It has a hidden nature as well, but the aspect of it is immutable. There is a certain eternity wrapped up in the idea of the vampire, a thing frozen by a curse, to remain as beautiful, destructive, and flawed forever, the only thing growing in bounds being its cynicism. They dwell in the shadows of beckoning alleys and the underside of our civilized necropolises.

And perhaps the most amazing part of these two creatures, of the entire exercise of the paranormal, is that nothing is set. There are very popular schools, like Stoker’s, that authors take notes from and then spin off their own tangents from. Twilight’s shimmering types, who sparkle in the sun rather than burst into flame is one example. For me personally, when I considered a reality where such things were a reality, I had to reconsider every single thing about stories and myths and legends. My series, towards the end, barrels down somewhat of a sacrilegious path, and even from the very beginning is somewhat unrecognizable to many fans of the paranormal genre. One of my main characters, a vampire, is African-American for instance. Tall and broad, turned when he was still a slave in the American south. When I dreamt of him, I wondered “If vampirism dehumanizes, what happens when it’s applied to someone striving for but is constantly denied humanity?”

But that was an answer to the question that I found interesting. Another interesting answer might just be yours.

JE Cammon is the author of WHERE SHADOWS LIE. You can find JE online at Dreamer in Daylight. WHERE SHADOWS LIE is available now.