I’m going to take a small moment to talk about the paranormal.

Maybe it’s my imagination, but in the years since I first began writing my series, there seems to have been quite a number of supernatural/paranormal books and series on the market. Partly because of that, and partly because of my background, I’ve done my best to limit the amount of the supernatural in my work.

Now I have nothing against urban fantasy or paranormal mystery or even paranormal romance; all of those tags can and have been applied to books I’ve read and enjoyed. It’s also not an expression of my beliefs; I’m by no means a sceptic and I freely acknowledge there is a plethora of things we can’t explain. Sometimes, weird shit just happens.

But I made a conscious decision to keep things as close to the “real world” as possible, forgoing the central conceit, of course. It came fairly naturally for me to work things the way I have, with a more scientific explanation, although it did mean there were one or two plot angles that had to be re-thought.

Some might say it’s a thin line, that my genetic rationale isn’t any more credible than the notion of the undead. But, as I said, it came to me naturally, actually originating from the subject of my Master’s thesis back in 2002.

The one exception I make is with regards to character of Ash’s grandmother, Lilith Valerius. I won’t go into details just now, since I plan on exploring it in her short story, In Dreams, but she has, in the words of one of my favorite fictional vampires Geneviève Dieudonné, “A little magic…. Just a touch.”