English
Take an English royal, add a dash of squandered destiny, a forbidden love, and a centuries old mystery, and you’ve got a novel with a voracious bite in K.J. Wignall’s Blood (Egmont; Fall 2011) This first book in the Mercian Trilogy is a carefully crafted story that weaves vampire history and romance into an intense, highly satisfying read that Anne Rice fans will devour.
Will is a vampire in danger. Heir to the Earl of Mercia, he was brutally attacked and buried in the thirteenth century before he was able to assume his title. Perpetually sixteen, Will’s life has been lonely. He leaves his tomb every so often, adapts to the present day, feeds his bloodlust, and never gets close to anyone. Until now. Waking from a twenty-year slumber, hungry for the blood that sustains his undeath, he meets Eloise—but can’t bear to make her his next victim. Drawn to a girl he can never have, but whose fate seems bound with his own, he feels the need to protect her. But Will has an enemy who will stop at nothing to find him . . . and he’s closing in.
Vampires and Wignall go way back, when he was 14 years old, instead of doing his homework, he wrote a prose poem about a vampire from the vampire’s point of view and treating him as a sympathetic character. Years later, while trying to write a ghost story, his former teen interest in the undead resurfaced thanks to two fortuitous events. The first was a happening upon an ancient hill fort; the second, stumbling upon a remote, abandoned country church. These two random and apparently insignificant events set a thought process in motion, bringing together ideas that had been developing for years together with memories ofother churches and historical sites he’d seen. The effect was so powerful and the ideas gelled so quickly, that he abandoned his ghost story and started work on Blood, the first book of what he knew would be a trilogy.