The Dark-Hunters (876 page)

Along with her work in fiction, Sherri is an accomplished nonfiction author who has contributed to such works as
The Character-Naming Sourcebook, Everyday Life in the Middle Ages, The Writer’s Complete Fantasy Reference,
and essays in
Seven Seasons of Buffy
and
Five Seasons of Angel.
Her articles and short stories have appeared in hundreds of large and small journals and magazines worldwide. She’s also written for television, radio, and was once a copywriter and science fiction/fantasy editor.

Like a literary Willy Wonka, whatever you want, whatever your dream, Sherri can provide it. And despite the wide range of genres, the differences in time periods, settings, and dialects, certain elements remain consistent. There will always be adventure. There will always be some aspect of the fantastic grown from a seed of the mundane world that the average reader can relate to. And there will always be strong heroines and heroes—real people of all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds. Be they schoolteachers, artists, musicians, gods or goddesses, they still have relationship problems, familial obligations, and skeletons in the closet.

That’s the great escape—Sherri’s amazing talent of tapping into the Peter Pan psyche in all people. She lets the reader still believe in magic and pay the bills, work out, car pool, and do the laundry. No matter how fantastic things get, if you believe hard enough it
might
just happen … and it might just happen to you.

How did you get started writing?

I’ve always been a writer. I came out of the womb, literally, wanting to do this. In my Brownie manual, it has scrawled, “When I grow up, I want to be—” and I wrote, “A writer and a mother.” I wrote my very first novel when I was seven and I published my first piece when I was in third grade. I made my first professional sell at age fourteen. I’ve written for every paper at every school I ever attended. A writer is who and what I am and it is what I will always be.

The first story I ever published was a horror short story called “The Neighbors.” I went on to publish many, many more short stories in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. I started writing nonfiction articles for magazines such as
Brides, Seventeen,
and dozens of others because they paid significantly more. Ironically, I ended up selling a nonfiction book first. But it was always my dream to publish a novel.

You and your husband both work full time, you have three kids, and you still manage to put out anywhere from four to eight books a year. How do you do it? What’s your writing regimen like?

Because I’ve always wanted this, I’m basically a workaholic who spends anywhere from thirteen to twenty hours a day writing. It’s what I live for. Writing is my full-time job and I treat it as such. I’ve never understood writers who take time off between books or who write when the mood hits them. I have set business hours and I adhere to them unless I’m working overtime.

My “average” (and I laugh uproariously as I say this) day starts around 11
A.M.
(my husband gets the children off to school). I answer e-mails, make a few business calls. Around noon, I eat lunch, then return to the office to make more calls if I need to, tend to administrative matters and mail. My children come home at three thirty and I spend the next few hours with them. We have dinner between five and six. I kiss the little ones, read to them, and return to my office around seven. Then the phone goes off and I spend the rest of the night writing until I’m too tired to go any longer (usually around four in the morning).

I prefer to work at night because there are no distractions. My friends are in bed, my editors and agent can’t call, and the children are asleep and safe. There’s nothing on my mind except the story. But that being said, those stories have a nasty tendency to wake me up anywhere from 4
A.M.
and on. I am a slave to my muse. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What drove this particular obsession with the paranormal? Did you like scary movies as a kid?

Oh, yeah. My mother was a true horror fan. She lived for it. I grew up with her reading Barker, King, and Straub at the breakfast table. I honestly can’t remember the first time I saw a horror movie; I was most likely in diapers. But I grew up seeing everything from
Amityville Horror
to
The Exorcist
with my mom. We’d be watching late-night
Creature Feature
and she’d be sitting in her chair one minute, and in the next she’d get this glazed look in her eyes and start drooling. “Brains, brains,” she’d chant. “I want brains.…” Then she’d chase us through the house. She scarred me for life, but that’s what I loved most about her. She was the best and she gave me a lifetime love of all things that go bump in the night.

How are the Dark-Hunter books different from everything else out there?

These aren’t your mama’s vampires. Born from my imagination and years of research, the Dark-Hunters are unique. I’ve never been the kind of person who treads the well-worn path of others. I’d much rather find my own way. So with machete in hand, I reexamined the folklore and myths of the vampire and created my own take on how they came into being.

Whereas traditional vampires are innately evil, mine can be, but their vampirism doesn’t come from an evil source per se. It comes from the deep desires of a race that just wants to live a little longer. Fighters and warriors who don’t want to lie down and die because some ancient god cursed them for something their ancestors did. I took the vampire world and reworked it with a new set of rules and laws. I wanted something that would be uniquely mine, something that would surprise the reader in every book so that the story and characters would never grow stale in the retelling.

How did you first think of the Dark-Hunters?

I started the series back in the mid-1980s when I “met” Acheron and based several short stories on him and the vampire hunters he ran with. From there, the Hunters, as they were then called, stayed with me, and I worked on them in between other projects. They are a culmination of my lifetime of interest in vampires and history. The very first Hunter stories were written while I was attending Georgia College, in Milledgeville, Georgia. I wrote the very first Acheron short in Room 222 of Wells Hall.

Most all of your books are part of a series. Have you written any stand-alone books? Would you prefer that over series?

Ironically, I have one book that was published as a standalone, but that wasn’t my fault. (Laughs.) The publisher refused the second book. I don’t think I could do a stand-alone if I tried. I spend so much time with the people and places in the book, and they are so real to me that I always want to go back and revisit them for more. It’s like coming home again.

Most writers focus on only one or two series at a time. Yet you have many more. Is there a reason for that?

The reason why I write more than one series is simple. I love spaghetti. It’s without a doubt my favorite food on the planet. I can eat it for days, but you know, around about that third or fourth day, I do get a little tired of it. By the fifth or sixth day, I’m honestly sick of it. By the seventh I never want to see it again. Writing is the same way—the variety of the different series is what helps to keep it fresh.

I love each and every series I write. They are like my children and I have no favorite. However, I, like all authors, do need a little time-out after I’ve spent months working on a book. If I wrote nothing but Dark-Hunter or Nevermore or the Lords of Avalon, I would burn out on it. I think that may be why most authors who write a single series take a while between each book. You have to freshen the well and give new ideas time to grow.

By writing entirely different series in entirely different genres, I get to continually renew my creative well. It allows me the variety I need to stay healthy and happy.

Your heroes come from a bewildering array of times and cultures. How much research do you do and how do you keep track of them all? Has history always been your passion?

I always laugh whenever someone asks me how I keep track of them. How do you keep track of your family and friends? The Dark-Hunters are as real to me as my family is. I live with them constantly and those details are stored in the same place in my brain as my sons’ shoe sizes, clothing sizes, and eating preferences. My best friend often calls me the idiot savant of all things Dark-Hunter. I think that’s why I can’t remember where my car keys or shoes are on any given day. My brain is too cluttered with Dark-Hunter facts.

As for the research, most of the Dark-Hunters come from the time periods I am intimate with: ancient Rome and Greece, the Middle Ages, and such. The other Dark-Hunters are from areas that I researched a lot in college or I have friends from that background who can help me with details. The easiest thing to say is that I spent ten years of my life prostrate to the goddess Clio.

I was lucky to have been born with a tremendous curiosity. Plus, I’ve kept up with a lot of friends who are now teaching various topics. If there’s something I can’t find, I ring them up and ask.

Why did you choose Artemis to be the goddess of the Dark-Hunters?

Artemis was a minor deity in Greece, but a major goddess in other areas. Ancient writers wrote many, many stories about her. And while some portray her as a virgin (some claim that she asked Zeus for eternal virginity when she was three years old), others portray her quite differently. Her cult followers were never required to stay virgins. It was a common ceremony that whenever a cult member wanted to leave, all she had to do was go to Artemis’s temple and place a lock of hair with her toys and other objects of her childhood on the altar and then she was free to go marry (which Artemis didn’t object to).

She was a natural to lead the Dark-Hunters since she is goddess of the Hunt and is associated with Selene, who was the goddess of the Moon. Not to mention her twin brother, Apollo, is the god of the Sun and of Plagues. If you’re building a world about a race of people who have been banished from daylight, who better than Apollo to pick on? It was only natural, after he cursed his race to prey on mankind, that his twin, who was goddess of the Hunt, would be the one to set up another race to control and kill those who were hurting humans.

But more than that, there are hundreds of different legends and stories written by the ancient Greeks and Romans that often contradict one another. Each ancient writer took a god or goddess and a story and made it their own. Artemis and Apollo were gods of many facets and faces. All the gods were. Apollo is both the god of Healing and the god of Plagues. Artemis is the goddess of Childbirth and is said to have shot her arrows into the bellies of mothers who are laboring, to kill both mother and child. These writers portrayed their gods as being very human with all human foibles.

I have always loved the complexity of the ancient plays. Take Ares, for example: the all-powerful god of War, and yet you often find him in myths where he is being bested by mortals and at times he’s even shown as a crybaby. Ancient writers didn’t shirk from making their pantheon real. We see ourselves in the gods. It’s why I love Artemis so much. She was and has always been portrayed as a goddess of extreme contradictions. She’s complex and highly unpredictable. I never know what she’s going to do.

Where did you find your inspiration for the Atlantean pantheon and their stories?

Since Atlantis is a mythological place that has yet to be proven to exist, I took quite a lot of liberties with it. I love Hesiod and I have always admired his
Theogony.
I spent hours as a child reading and rereading it. I found the origin stories of the Greek gods fascinating and I wanted to create something every bit as complex and gripping. I wanted to build my own world.

The story of the Atlantean pantheon is totally my own. I started with the premise, what if Atlantis was real? Who would have been their gods if not the Greeks? What stories would they have told? What caused their empire to crumble? If I were an ancient writer, how would I have explained their origins and death? And I built my world from there.

One day I want to write my own
Theogony
for the Atlanteans.

Bad boys are a recurring element in your novels. Where do you get your knowledge of bad boys and the crazy things they do?

That has to come from the lunatics I was raised with (sorry, guys). I love the guys in my family, but they are definitely a different breed. You know, they think duct tape really is a bandage and a cure for, oh, everything—ironically enough, modern medicine has proven that it will cure warts. (See, Buddy, you were right and I admit it.) So they may be vindicated yet. Every time I turned around, one of them was doing something remarkably weird and foolish.

As a child, my official job was to call for the ambulance whenever they got hurt—which was often. They are the kind of guys who hook jumper cables to power lines just to see what will happen (I really wish I were making that up). Or who set fire to themselves while having a blue flame contest (again, I wish I were that imaginative).

Case in point, a brother called recently complaining about one of the guys who was in his garage where he keeps his race car and racing fuel (this is the most flammable fluid on the planet). He looks up and the guy is actually smoking while working on the car.

They have never recognized danger.

You also have strong female Dark-Hunters. How much do you identify with them?

They are their own unique people. I’m not sure if I “identify” with any per se. I guess because I was around so many guys, I’ve always been a take-charge kind of person and I respect that in all people, male or female.

Your Web site is amazing. Where do you get the energy to keep it up-to-date, and do you do it all yourself?

I think the Web site has been a real godsend in that it has brought people closer to the books and characters. It’s a wonderful place where friends can meet and chat. Readers have said repeatedly that it’s like a real Sanctuary where they can sit for a bit with old friends and relax.