For a time, I became fixated on vampires. I imagine this happens to everybody at one point or another. While I was writing Transfusion my main, driving belief was that in some karmic sense, being a vampire should be an agonizing thing.
The metamorphosis as well as the physical needs of the vampire in Transfusion were inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and Patternmaster series of novels, particularly Clay’s Ark in which a parasitic alien microorganism invokes within its host a near-uncontrollable drive to survive and reproduce. My vampire is not enviable or desirable; this seemed very important to me. He longs not just for the blood of his lover, but for his meat, guts, bones too. By the end his physical drive has made him a Midas of hunger—he can no longer love without forcing one to become what he is, to experience what he has, and to exist as he always will.
- WL