Interview and contest: Jasper Kent, author of TWELVE

"Good vampire-hunting fun." --SFX

Joining me today is Jasper Kent, whose Napoleonic-era vampire novel, Twelve, is now available in the U.S. from Pyr. The Times calls Twelve "an accomplished, entertaining blend of historical fiction and dark fantasy."

About the novel:
Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, a captain in the army of Tsar Alexander I, is sworn to defend Russia against the onslaught of Napoleon's Grande Armée in the autumn of 1812. He joins forces with a band of twelve Wallachian mercenaries, whose zeal and success in slaughtering the French invaders seem too good to be true.

Soon, Aleksei unearths the gruesome secret behind the Wallachians' abilities and discovers that they make little distinction between Frenchman or Russian. His fight becomes not simply one against Napoleon, but against a far more dangerous enemy.

SUBURBAN VAMPIRE: Welcome, Jasper. The specific type of vampires you've chosen for Twelve are the voordalak of Russia. Do voordalak traits and legends differ much from those of vampires we're familiar with in English-speaking tales?

JASPER KENT: You got me. The fact is, I can’t really claim that the vampires in Twelve are an authentic representation of a particularly Russian folklore. It’s certainly the case that the majority of what we understand to be vampires come from Slavic myth (that which isn’t the pure invention of two centuries of Western authors), but all I’ve done is create the monsters that I wanted for my story, and then made a connection between them and a Russian creature. Many of the specifics of the voordalak and the oopir (a more Ukrainian variant), which I haven’t used, are quite interesting: some of them can only be abroad between noon and midnight (rather than the more traditional hours of darkness); others die if you stab them through the heart, but are revived if you stab them a second time.

SV: Twelve kicks off The Danilov Quintet, a series of five novels that span Russian history from the French invasion of 1812 to the revolutions of 1917. You state on your website, JasperKent.com, that a painting of Napoleon Bonaparte inspired the story. How did the infamous French leader's face lead to an epic tale of war and vampires?

JASPER: The painting in question was Bonaparte sur le pont d'Arcole by Antoine-Jean Gros. In my print he seems a little more wan than in the copies online, but he’s certainly a lot thinner than in his later years. It just struck me that he looked vaguely vampiric, and that led me to think of vampires in the Napoleonic Wars. My first thought was to write a story set in the Peninsula War, but the idea of the cold of the retreat from Moscow soon made me settle on the Russian campaign. I later noticed (and perhaps did subconsciously at the time) a similarity of the painting with Ilya Glazunov’s illustration of Raskolnikov, as shown on the cover of the Norton Critical Edition of Crime and Punishment, which, given Raskolnikov’s self-association with Napoleon, may have been deliberate. That certainly could have been another link that drew me to Russia.

SV: Were you interested in vampires before writing Twelve? Do you have any favorite undead characters from literature and/or film?

JASPER: My fundamental interest in vampires comes from Christopher Lee and the Hammer films. Looking back at them now, I can see so many faults, but they did establish in my mind the fundamental idea of the vampire as an historical character. From that I read Stoker’s original novel – which has never been successfully filmed as far as I’m concerned – and loved it. Two TV series – Buffy and Ultraviolet – in later life persuaded me just how much interesting stuff you can get out of the undead. And then there’s always the 2000AD comic strip Fiends on the Eastern Front from the early eighties, which clearly had an influence.

SV: Your background includes physics and software engineering. Do you feel the logical, scientific side of your brain is an asset or a hindrance in creating works of fiction?

JASPER: Both. When writing stories to which the science is a specific feature, then I’m in a good place to be accurate, but that’s not always a benefit. For instance, one of my unpublished novels, Sifr, is about cryptography, which I understand pretty well at a mathematical level. That means I can be quite accurate, but the downside is that I can then go into more depth than many readers are interested in.

In more general terms an understanding of physics should always be of benefit to any author, since physical things happen, even in fantasy stories. But even then, writing something which is physically correct is not of interest to the reader if it contradicts their perception of what is physically correct. How many times have you seen them shoot the lock off a door in a movie? It’s virtually impossible to achieve, but it’s so well established in the mind of the viewer that it’ll take more than me and a degree in physics to fix the misconception.

On another level, in terms of the process of writing, I find the experience of software engineering quite useful. Writing a 150,000-word novel is a big project and it needs planning and organization, even when there’s only one person doing it. I find many of the techniques I’d use to plan a software project equally applicable to writing a novel.

SV: Did your passion for history first show up when you started writing Twelve, or has that long been one of your many interests?

JASPER: I’ve always been interested in history, though until I started writing, not specifically Russian history. My only knowledge of the retreat from Moscow came from histories of Napoleon, which inevitably give a French point of view. Even now that I’m specifically looking for it, it’s hard to find things from a Russian viewpoint if there is a western angle. Thus for Thirteen Years Later, when I needed to research the Decembrist Uprising, which was a purely internal affair, I could find a number of translations of Russian texts. But now that I’ve moved on to the Crimean War, which is part of British history too, it becomes much harder to find a Russian point of view.

SV: You live with six rats, and Twelve’s prologue involves a chilling Russian folk tale involving rats and monkeys. Do your rodent companions inspire your darker side as much as Napoleon's portrait did...or do you feel rats are undeserving of their negative reputations?

JASPER: As it happens, I’d never even thought of keeping rats when I wrote the prologue to Twelve. I don’t think I’d ever shared the general aversion to them, but I didn’t learn how adorable they were until I was introduced to them by my girlfriend, Helen. Now that I keep rats, I find I have to work hard when I’m writing to make them anything but cute.

SV: The second novel in The Danilov Quintet, Thirteen Years Later, debuted in the UK last spring and will be released by Pyr February 2011. Will there be more voordalak in the second installment, or do you have other horrific creatures showing up in that one?

JASPER; No – it’s voordalaki all the way for me. I am tempted to write a completely non-supernatural novel in the series, since it’s perfectly possible that my characters could engage in utterly thrilling adventures without meeting any kind of monster, but I think readers would feel let down. On the other hand, I do try to apply the rule that an author should only make a single change from reality. If you have a specific, planned reason to write a Dracula versus The Mummy story, then that’s okay, but I don’t think it works to add new monsters just to revive a flagging series.

SV: Thanks so much for visiting Suburban Vampire, Jasper. Best of luck to you, the Quintet, and, of course, the rats.

Contest Rules:
Prometheus Books has generously offered a free copy of Twelve to a Suburban Vampire visitor.  In honor of Bonaparte's sickly image that inspired Jasper Kent's creativity, head to the comments section and answer the following question: Which historical figure or celebrity (past or present) do you think most resembles a vampire?  A winner will be drawn from the entries on the morning of THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7.  U.S. entries only.

To learn more about Jasper Kent and his novels, head to JasperKent.com.