New York Times best-selling author Debbie Viguié is known for two different kinds of stories: dark fantasy in the general market, and contemporary fiction for the Christian market. With her latest novel, Kiss of Night (FaithWords), she combines the two—with the story of a vampire taking slow steps toward redemption … and God.
Debbie grew up loving Zane Grey novels, cheesy monster movies, and writing. “I actually got my first rejection letter when I was twelve!” she shared. In high school, she read two books that made a huge impact on her: Dracula by Bram Stoker and This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. But her quest to find similar books was frustrated by the lack of Christian characters and morals in the vampire novels she read, and the lack of Peretti’s edge in Christian novels available at the time. That process brought two thoughts to her mind: ‘Why can’t I have a nice, clean, vampire story?’ and ‘If I can’t find what I want, why don’t I write it?’”
The story she envisioned in college 18 years ago–two Christians teaming up with a vampire to save the world from other vampires–became the genesis for Kiss of Night. But Debbie wasn’t content with simply a clean vampire story. She did a study through the Bible in preparation for this series, reading every verse that had the word blood in it, and each chapter of her novel starts with one of those verses.
She also created a mythology for the series that is Biblically-based. “If vampires were real, why would they be real? “ Her answer was that vampirism was a curse given to the most evil of people, those unlikely to turn to God within the span of a normal lifetime. “I tried to get away from the idea that it’s all about eternal love to the idea that it’s all about redemption.”