Essays & Commentary
Pieces from ELFrederick on the craft, theology, and moral architecture behind Vampires of Tucson. The worldbuilding sources, the genre questions, the reason the books are about the children they are about. Not chapters. The thinking underneath the chapters.
Genre Criticism
Human/vampire romance does not work. The biology, the lifespan, the predator/prey dynamic, the contract no honest vampire could offer — the asymmetries do not resolve. The only honest version of vampire romance is two of them in a room together, across centuries, with everything they cannot say.
Read on Substack →
Character Architecture
When the community that defined you cuts you out, five orientations are available — sever, return, destroy, build parallel, or serve from outside. Which one you land in is the most revealing thing about you. The Barons of Tucson as case studies in every mode the species permits.
Read on Substack →
Why the Books Exist
Horror fiction can witness what journalism stopped asking. The specific weight of a specific child a specific coterie picked because no one was looking. That capacity — witness, not consumption — is the formal job vampire fiction can do that the headline count cannot.
Read on Substack →
Worldbuilding Methodology
1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Testament literature. The actual ancient theology of fallen angels, Watchers, and demonic persistence the contemporaries of Cain wrote about. Modern vampire fiction gestures at this material; the apocrypha lets you build a mythology that holds.
Read on Substack →