Last week, Jack Tyler gave us a great review of the movie Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The movie is a good example of a genre known as the “secret history.” Secret histories are a close relative to the alternate history genre, where the author might ask you to imagine what would have happened if history unfolded in a different way than you learned in school. For example, the author might ask “what if the Confederacy won the Civil War?” or “what if the Meiji Restoration never happened and samurai fought in World War II?” In the secret history genre, history unfolds as we learned, but there are other things happening that we never learned about. In the case of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, the author asks “What if Abraham Lincoln also slew vampires while he was president?” Another example is The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones about a Native American stalking a small town pastor with a dark secret in the Old West.

My latest book, Vermillion Highways, is also an example of a secret history. It assumes the history we’re comfortable with actually happened, but tells us what vampires were doing as that history was unfolding.

As you’ll see from the cover, Vermillion Highways isn’t my book alone. I collaborated with Lee Clark Zumpe, an author who has received numerous honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections and works as an award-winning entertainment columnist for the Tampa Bay Newspapers. Our process for assembling the book was that we exchanged over 15 of our vampire short stories, read, reviewed and revised them. After some emails back and forth, we realized that if we interwove our stories, we had a history of vampire kind from Roman times to the present.

On Monday, I shared the story “Jiang Shi” from the collection, which was a story I composed by asking if there was a “truth” behind the legendary Chinese vampires of the same name. “Jiang shi” is Mandarin for “stiff corpse.” I’ve always been a little horrified by the idea that someday the technology might exist to interface our brains directly with computers. In this case, I imagined an alien AI coming to Earth and forcibly interfacing itself with someone in the distant past and then using that person’s body as a puppet. Of course, no one would recognize that it was a computer or even technology. It might even be seen as a spirit being or a demon. In effect, I use a modern sensibility and understanding to spin a new kind of (hopefully) creepy, historical tale.

On a side note, I first published this story in 2008. Readers familiar with my Clockwork Legion steampunk series might recognize the Encephalon as a precursor to the alien nanite swarm Legion from those books. Fortunately, Legion proved much friendlier than the Encephalon.

Stories in the collection take you from the distant past to the present day. Lee and I visit Kyoto, Cairo, Paris, New Orleans and even Oz – and yes, I mean L. Frank Baum’s version! As we put these stories together we realized that we had a sort of travelogue taking the reader not only through time but around the world, which gave us the “Highways” of the title. Since ancient times, vermillion has been regarded as the color of healthy, oxygenated blood. So, of course, vampires would travel the Vermillion Highways!

As another a brief aside for anyone who thinks we misspelled vermilion, I’ll point out that the word may actually be spelled with either one or two Ls. We thought vampires who’d been around for a while would prefer the more archaic spelling!

Lee and I didn’t end our history in the present. We actually extended our history into the distant future. In one story I imagine the vampire Carmilla paying a visit to the white house two hundred years after Sheridan Le Fanu’s story and Lee imagines vampires contemplating a post-apocalyptic world ripped apart by human wars.

We hope you’ll take a trip with us down these Vermillion Highways. You can find the book in all it’s formats at: http://davidleesummers.com/Vermillion-Highways.html