Nick Cole Guest Post: Waiter, There’s a Vampire in My Book

Note from VBC: We’re happy to have author Nick Cole on the blog today talking about his novel Soda Pop Soldier, which released yesterday. The concept is fresh, and we think you’ll dig it.

Yes, I wrote a SciFi novel about video gaming in the future. It’s Call of Duty meets Diablo, and Soda Pop Soldier is a full-tilt, machinegun toting rollercoaster. But, with respect to Vampire Book Club, I wanted to tell you about the Vampire that’s in the book.

It’s Keifer Sutherland. Not Jack Bauer, no. Remember Lost Boys? I totally based this character on Keifer Sutherland’s portrayal of the Vampire David. David is that cool kid in the movie Lost Boys that gets you to do all the things you shouldn’t. In my novel, the main character has to do some illegal online gaming in a dark gothic fantasy world known as the Black. Think the video game Diablo does Vegas. It’s bad. Real bad. There are games inside the Black that can literally change your life, especially if you don’t care that someone had to die for you to win.

The main character is playing a one-handed samurai named Wu, and he’s just looking to get to the top of a tower called the MarrowSpike and win some big prize money. But along the way he ends up in a place called the Oubliette of Torment. Oubliette means ‘a forgotten place’. It’s here that he meets a raggedy man chained up in a prison cell. I didn’t write, “and if you ever saw the movie The Lost Boys, you would totally recognize this guy.”

But it felt like David from Lost Boys was chained up there inside that cage. It felt like the further adventures of David, the best film vampire there ever was. Of course it wasn’t David. The whole thing takes place inside a future video game. So, it was some programmer’s idea of what a Vampire playing a game show host for doing really bad things in a dungeon crawl, would be like.  The Samurai and the Vampire known as the Raggedy Man have some good scenes as they struggle to get the better of each other. The Vampire wants the Samurai to murder a drug addict in a game of chance. The Samurai, or, my main character: a gamer named PerfectQuestion, wants to go on being a human who can live with himself.

I won’t tell you much more because I don’t want to ruin it for you, but I’ll say this: Vampires are fun to write. There’s a lot more going on with them than blood sucking and being cool. But aren’t those the fun parts about writing them? They suck the life out of people and they’re still cool. So, drop by the Oubliette this August 12^th and take a bite out of Soda Pop Soldier.