PETER AND THE VAMPIRES (Volume One) - Fiction Book Marketing by Darren Pillsbury
The idea for Peter And The Vampires came, strangely enough, from James Joyce's short story "The Dead."
You wouldn't think a kid's horror story would come from a hoity-toity literature classic...but hear me out.
(Spoiler alert for "The Dead"!)
The end of Joyce's story tells how a young woman lost her one true love because he came to her window in a rainstorm, caught pneumonia, and died. Romantic and tragic, right?
But I always thought, "Yeah, well, it's romantic if you LIKE the person...but if they were a stalker, that would be about the creepiest thing imaginable: to look out your window in a storm and see someone standing out there, staring up at your window."
BAM.
I already wanted to write a series of horror stories...and I had settled on a protagonist (basically an altered version of myself at ten years old).
Now I had my first creepy scene: the hero peers out his window during a raging thunderstorm and sees a girl he doesn't like staring up at his window, softly calling out his name: "Peeeeeeeeteeeeeeeeeer..."
Then he finds out something REALLY disturbing.
Thanks, James Joyce.
PETER AND THE VAMPIRES (Volume One) is currently free for the Kindle.
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For fans of J.K. Rowling (the HARRY POTTER series), Orson Scott Card (ENDER'S GAME), and Darren Shan (CIRQUE DU FREAK)…
When ten-year-old Peter moves into his grandfather's creepy old mansion in a small town, bad, baaaaad things start to happen.
A family of charred boogeymen who haunt the garden decide they don't like trespassers...
A classmate with a crush comes back from the grave, and decides to make Peter her Undead Prince Charming...
A creature from Fairieland changes place with Peter's two-year-old sister, leading to a VERY strange babysitting job...
A prehistoric predator snatches children from the town lake, forcing Peter to literally dive into the belly of the beast...
With his troublemaking neighbor Dill, his grumpy grandfather, and only his courage and wit to guide him, Peter has to survive all these things, plus the Greatest Horror Of All:
Fourth grade.
PETER AND THE VAMPIRES is the first in an ongoing series that includes PETER AND THE WEREWOLVES and PETER AND THE FRANKENSTEIN. This book is 120,000 words (370 pages) and contains some mild language, violence, and scary situations.