Welcome to the February 2025 issue of my newsletter, “News from the Crypt,” and please visit Carter’s Crypt, devoted to my horror, fantasy, and paranormal romance work, especially focusing on vampires and shapeshifting beasties. If you have a particular fondness for vampires, check out the chronology of my series in the link labeled “Vanishing Breed Vampire Universe.”
Also, check out the multi-author Alien Romances Blog
To subscribe to this monthly newsletter, please e-mail me at MLCVamp@aol.com, and I will add you to the list.
For other web links of possible interest, please scroll to the end.
In the romantic spirit of February, below is a teaser from my one Harlequin romance, EMBRACING DARKNESS, a stand-alone novel in the Vanishing Breed vampire universe. The publisher’s blurb:
Caring about her beyond a basic need to keep her safe, he could not. Maxwell Tremayne never should have touched her, kissed her, tasted her. It was foolish–dangerous–for a vampire to get involved with a human, let alone a flesh-and-blood spitfire of a woman with curves like Linnet’s. Maxwell had to remember that it was tragedy that had brought them together on this dangerous quest to catch a cold-blooded killer. Even if they survived this struggle unscathed, imagining that they could share anything more than a fleeting affair was as ridiculous as…imagining that he could live another hundred years without her.
You can find the e-book here:
Embracing Darkness from Harlequin
And here:
I’m thrilled to announce that the Wild Rose Press has accepted my light paranormal romance novella “Summertide Echoes.” Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains, it includes the ghosts of a Saint Bernard and a teenage girl.
Also in keeping with the month of Valentine’s Day, I’m interviewing romance author Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy.
*****
Interview with Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy:
What inspired you to become a writer?
I was the kid who hung around the oldest family members to hear their stories. I was read to and learned to read early so it wasn’t long before I made up my own tales. The true inspiration was when my Granny showed me the class prophecy she’d written when she graduated and when I asked why she didn’t pursue a career in writing, she told me “I couldn’t but you should.”
What genres do you work in?
Romance, everything from contemporary to historical to suspense and sweet to heat. These days I primarily write sweet romance.
Do you outline, “wing it,” or something in between?
I always know how a new novel begins and how it ends. I wing everything in between.
What have been the major influences on your work (favorite authors or whatever)?
Some of my favorite authors are Susanna Kearsley, Carolyn Brown, and Sharon Sala.
The largest and most profound influence on my work came from my grandmother. Granny showed me a manuscript she’d written for her 8th grade graduation in 1912. I was fourteen and already wanted to become an author. It was well-written, and I asked her why she didn’t become a writer. She said, “I couldn’t but you should, and you can.”
Her life was far from easy so I understood why she couldn’t, but I took her words to heart and the torch was passed!
What kind of research did you do for the hero’s background in THE SCARRED SANTA?
One of my grandfathers had PTSD (although they didn’t call it that yet) after his service in the Pacific during World War II. I’m the daughter, niece, cousin, and granddaughter of veterans. I’m also an American Legion Auxiliary member. For research, I used print resources and talked with professionals at area VA hospitals and centers. I talked to veterans, too.
A common thread in your Wild Rose Press novels is the motif of a severely injured hero. Could you tell us more about your choice of that theme?
That’s true in the ones currently out although I have two upcoming Wild Rose Press titles where it’s not the case, but I’ll admit many of my novels (with other publishers) have a injured hero.
As for why I choose the theme, it’s because I’ve seen the resilience of many people under duress, after an accident or illness. It’s a way for my heroes to demonstrate their inner strength and yet be vulnerable to love. Also, it makes one heck of a plot device, too!
Please tell us what types of material we’ll find on your blog.
My blog is very eclectic. I write about life events dating back to childhood, guest other authors, share some of my work, and about anything. One of my most popular recent posts was “The Year of the Dictionary”, about receiving my first dictionary and what it meant to me. Another one was about my Pop (grandpa) and Buddy Poppies.
What is your latest or next-forthcoming book?’’
The third book in my historical Laredo series, The Birthright of Ezekiel Wilson, debuts from World Castle Publishing on February 24 and is now available for pre-order.
What are you working on now?
Pre-edits and trimming down word count for “Fear’s Sharp Edge”, under contract to Wild Rose Press as part of their new Men And Women of Valor series. I’m working on another for the same line as well.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Sit down and write. Don’t listen to conflicting advice but follow your heart. Do learn proper punctuation and grammar. Believe that you can and will do this thing@
What is the URL of your website? What about other internet presence?
Weebly
Amazon
Facebook
Goodreads
Twitter
Coming in 2025, The Birthright of Ezekiel Wilson) Book three of the Laredo series, Fear’s Sharp Edge, Uglier Than Homemade Sin, The Cajun Cowboy and more!
*****
Some Books I’ve Read Lately:
ADRIFT IN CURRENTS CLEAN AND CLEAR, by Seanan McGuire. This year’s new Wayward Children novel reveals the backstory of a secondary character in an earlier book, BENEATH THE SUGAR SKY. Uniquely in the series, Miss Eleanor’s school isn’t even mentioned in this installment. Nadya, abandoned at birth and lacking a right arm from the elbow down, spends her first eleven years in a Russian orphanage. She doesn’t mind having only one and a half arms, unable to miss what she’s never had. She watches over the younger children, rejoices in their adoptions, and has no desire to leave the institution herself, despite the prospect of “aging out” within a few years. She’s far from happy when a missionary couple adopts her and whisks her off to the alien land of America. Granted, she finds material comforts and luxuries there, but she never fits in. With her foster parents, there’s dutiful kindness on one side and dutiful obedience on the other, but no true understanding, much less love. They think they’re doing Nadya a great favor by fitting her with a prosthetic arm, which she detests. Deeply fond of turtles and tortoises, she visits the neighborhood pond as often as possible. When she comes across a turtle with “Be Sure” etched on its shell in Russian, she falls through a door-shaped shadow into a water world. Literally so, where even what she experiences as breathable “air” is just the highest, thinnest level of water. In this world, many people bond with the highly intelligent giant turtles that live alongside the human inhabitants. Adopted by a kind family, Nadya eventually forms such a bond and becomes a scout, exploring the wilderness with her beloved turtle partner. Unlike most between-realm travelers in these stories, she grows to adulthood in her proper world, in symbiosis with the water that enfolds her. Ultimately, she becomes not only an adventurer but a hero. She seems to have built an idyllic life, but, as longtime fans know, happiness in this series is always precarious. Like all the unique environments featured in the Wayward Children novels, the aquatic world is strange, captivating, and vividly described. Although I found this book (of course) enthralling and worthy of multiple readings – like its predecessors – it isn’t however, among my favorites. My reaction to the ending could be summarized as, “That’s it? No way!” Your mileage may vary. Fortunately, we can learn the rest of Nadya’s story by reading or rereading BENEATH THE SUGAR SKY.
MISS AMELIA’S LIST, by Mercedes Lackey. An Elemental Masters novel, set in the Regency period rather than the late nineteenth or early twentieth century like most of the series — PRIDE AND PREJUDICE with magic. In 1815, Amelia and her distant cousin Serena travel from their plantation home in the American South to England, where a male relative will introduce them into society. Amelia, who suffers from anxiety, composes lists to keep it in check. One major goal for this relocation is to find a husband for Serena, and Amelia makes a list of desirable qualities. Foremost, of course, he must be an Elemental magician. In this version of our world, most people aren’t aware of magic. But everyone employed on Amelia’s family estate – all of them paid servants, not slaves – knows about paranormal abilities, and some have gifts of their own. Serena herself, incidentally, has a trace of Black ancestry but passes as white. Moreover, she’s also a shapeshifter, although we don’t immediately learn what kind. She’s a Fire mage and Amelia an Earth Master. The recently concluded War of 1812 somewhat biases Amelia against the English, but she quickly finds friends among her new acquaintances (as well as, on the negative side, people who imagine America as a howling wilderness inhabited by barbarians). As for marriage, although unlike Serena she has no particular desire to wed, she’s not totally averse to the idea. The two young women plunge into the London social whirl, meet Elemental mages and Masters from all levels of class and wealth or lack thereof, search for a suitable country house, and make allies among the local nature spirits, e.g., brownies. Only near the story’s climax do they encounter the numinous terror of a major Elemental. This book wouldn’t offer a suitable introduction for a reader new to the series, because it presupposes some level of familiarity with the type of magic used by Lackey’s characters. Also, magic doesn’t figure prominently in the early part of the book, and the supernatural threat doesn’t surface openly until fairly close to the end. (Warning: The blurb gives away too much of that development.) The novel is as much comedy of manners as paranormal fantasy. A new reader might get frustrated and wonder when something would actually start happening. A longtime fan of Lackey’s work and the Elemental Masters world in particular, though, would probably agree with me in enjoying the characters and their interactions as Amelia and Serena navigate the social intricacies of their new environment. The two of them have delightfully different personalities but are equally strong characters, in the senses of being both well written and decidedly self-assured. As for the PRIDE AND PREJUDICE analogy, the girls deal with a charming, financially embarrassed rogue and a rather arrogant, rigid gentleman who underestimates Amelia and incites her to vague suspicion as well as annoyance. Naturally, surface impressions shouldn’t be taken at face value. Who ends up marrying whom may come as an entertaining surprise for many readers; it did for me.
THE GENETIC BOOK OF THE DEAD, by Richard Dawkins. The title refers to this book’s dominant metaphor of a palimpsest, a document whose text has been written over, sometimes more than once. On a literal palimpsest, the original words have been obliterated by the later ones. That isn’t the case with the genetic, anatomical, physiological, and behavioral traces that reveal the ancestral past of animals and other living creatures, so the metaphor isn’t perfect (as Dawkins notes) but still makes a fruitful device for contemplating the evolution of life on Earth. As the cover blurb puts it, every creature can be regarded as “an archive of the worlds of its ancestors.” What do an animal’s body structure, genome, and behavior inform us about the environment that shaped it? Naturally, it’s easy to tell a herbivore’s skull from a carnivore’s by their teeth. We can learn much more about the past of various species by observing present-day creatures, though. A lizard with skin like rocks and sand must have descended from ancestors that lived in a desert; the forebears of insects that look like twigs must have evolved in trees. Many other types of visual deception exist, some truly weird. The “palimpsest” can tell us about animals whose predecessors left the ocean to become land-dwellers, returned to the sea, and some cases even developed back into terrestrial animals. Convergent evolution can result in animals that look uncannily similar although not at all closely related, because they’ve developed to fill the same kinds of environmental niches. One page displays pictures of a variety of marsupials alongside their placental mammal counterparts, some almost indistinguishable to a casual glance. “Divergent” evolution, on the other hand, refers to closely related species that have developed so differently in different habitats that they look nothing alike, e.g., whales and hippos. And those topics take us less than halfway through the book. Some other broad subjects include “the immortal gene” and “variations on a theme,” with fascinatingly detailed examples. Dawkins devotes considerable attention to the concept of the “extended phenotype” (about which he previously wrote an entire book), especially in the chapter titled “Out Beyond the Body Wall.” A gene’s visible expression, such as eye color, is a “phenotype.” Dawkins explores how genes perceptibly affect features of the environment that aren’t parts of the organism itself. Obvious examples might be a bird’s nest or a beaver’s dam. In an exciting twist in the final chapter, we learn we may have acquired a nontrivial portion of our genes from ancient viruses. As a bonus, the book includes many color illustrations.
JOY, by Abigail Santamaria. The first in-depth biography of Joy Davidman Gresham, the wife of C. S. Lewis. (I recall the earlier book by her son Douglas, in contrast, as more of a personal memoir.) Of course, there’s much more to Joy than her marriage to Lewis in his late middle age, and this biography – subtitled, nevertheless, “Poet, seeker, and the woman who captivated C. S. Lewis” – contains a ton of information about her life and career new to me. (And, yes, the title of his autobiography, SURPRISED BY JOY, is purely a coincidence; it comes from a Wordsworth poem.) This book tells us in depth about her childhood, education, literary career, long-term membership in the American Communist Party, marriage to novelist and screenwriter Bill Gresham, plus their involvement in L. Ron Hubbard’s pseudo-science, their conversion to Christianity, and of course her relocation to England to meet and marry Lewis, followed by her cancer diagnosis, apparently miraculous temporary remission, and eventual death. Bill, by the way, gets a more three-dimensional treatment than the typical portrayal of him as mainly an abusive alcoholic. Joy comes across as a passionate, brilliant, idealistic, aggressively outspoken, and sometimes unlikable woman. Rumors that she deliberately formed a relationship with Lewis intending to seduce him if possible are confirmed. And yet the well-known story of their friendship’s growth into mutual, deeply devoted love is also true. Moreover, the account of their relationship reveals the extent to which Joy became virtually an uncredited collaborator on some of Lewis’s later works. To the question of the sexual element in their marriage, inexplicably doubted by an eccentric minority of scholars, yes, they definitely had a satisfying sex life, confirmed by independent evidence that corroborates Lewis’ frank statements in A GRIEF OBSERVED. Santamaria creates a fully rounded, meticulously detailed portrait of Joy that, while not glossing over her flaws, highlights her achievements, strengths, unique character, deep faith, and capacity for love. In addition to many photos of Joy from the age of two until three months before her death, the book includes thorough footnotes and index and an extensive bibliography. Recommended for hardcore C. S. Lewis fans as well as readers who simply enjoy well-written, sympathetic biographies of fascinating people.
For my recommendations of “must read” classic and modern vampire fiction, explore the Realm of the Vampires:
Realm of the Vampires
*****
Excerpt from EMBRACING DARKNESS:
No sign of life stirred inside the building below. Maxwell Tremayne soared on silken wings, circling the three-story split-level. He didn’t worry about chance observers, since the house sat off the road in the center of a wooded lot. The vacant driveway only confirmed the emptiness his inhuman senses detected. Had the owner left temporarily or permanently? Permanently, if she has any discretion, he reflected. Not that her recent behavior suggested any.
He scanned the trees around the house. The sun had barely set, and its afterglow made his head ache and his eyes sting. He knew he shouldn’t have shapeshifted until full dark, but his patience had worn out. From this vantage point he would notice at once if his quarry, or anyone else, showed up. Amid random heat traces that he identified as small animals, a motionless patch of deeper red caught his eye. A human intruder. Max spiraled lower, shrouding himself in a psychic veil that rendered him invisible to human eyes. Through the summer-green leaves, he glimpsed a woman crouching near the edge of the woods. She watched the front of the house with a pair of binoculars.
Not a casual hiker, then, but someone who, like him, took a particular interest in this place. Still veiled, Max glided toward her. He landed a few yards away and let his body melt into wingless, fully human shape.
The female’s scent and the crackling of her aura conveyed fear, frustration, and tightly reined anger. Any ephemeral who knew the truth about that house would be wise to fear its owner, but the other emotions puzzled him, as did her intense watchfulness. She swatted a mosquito just below the cuff of her denim shorts without shifting her eyes from the binoculars.
His nostrils flared, savoring the salty tang of her flesh. The humidity made her T-shirt cling to her breasts. Her soft curves implied a wholesome disdain for obsessive dieting. The sweetness of her natural fragrance confirmed that sign of robust health. She had pale golden hair, a color never found in his own species. Cropped to just above her shoulders, it left her neck bare. If he had time for self-indulgence—
But I don’t. He shook his head, impatient with his own woolgathering. No matter how appetizing this ephemeral might be in other circumstances, here and now she presented a threat to his mission. He had to get rid of her.
-end of excerpt-
*****
The long-time distributor of THE VAMPIRE’S CRYPT has closed its website. If you would like to read any issue of this fanzine, which contains fiction, interviews, and a detailed book review column, visit the Dropbox page below. Find information about the contents of each issue on this page of my website:
All issues are now posted on Dropbox, where you should be able to download them at this link:
All Vampire’s Crypt Issues on Dropbox
A complete list of my available works, arranged roughly by genre, with purchase links:
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Facebook
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Barnes and Noble
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Carter Kindle Books
Here’s a shortcut URL to my author page on Amazon:
Amazon
The Fiction Database displays a comprehensive list of my books (although with a handful of fairy tales by a different Margaret Carter near the end):
My Goodreads page:
Goodreads
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My Publishers:
Writers Exchange E-Publishing: Writers Exchange
Harlequin: Harlequin
Wild Rose Press: Wild Rose Press
You can contact me at: MLCVamp@aol.com
“Beast” wishes until next time—
Margaret L. Carter