The Book
Genre: urban fantasy
About Sanguinary:
Only fifty years left before vampires rule the world.Source: Info in the About Sanguinary was from the press kit from the publicity team.
When Dallas police detective Cami Davis joined the city's vampire unit, she planned to use the job as a stepping-stone to a better position in the department.
But she didn't know then what she knows now: there's a silent war raging between humans and vampires, and the vampires are winning.
So with the help of a disaffected vampire and an ex-cop addict, Cami is going undercover, determined to solve a series of recent murders, discover a way to overthrow the local Sanguinary government, and, in the process, help win the war for the human race.
But can she maintain her own humanity in the process? Or will Cami find herself, along with the rest of the world, pulled under a darkness she cannot oppose?
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Meet The Author
Margo Bond Collins lives in Texas with her husband, their daughter, several spoiled cats, and a ridiculous turtle. She teaches college-level English courses online, though writing fiction is her first love. She enjoys reading urban fantasy and paranormal fiction of any genre and spends most of her free time daydreaming about vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, and other monsters. Waking Up Dead is her first published novel. Her second novel, Legally Undead, is an urban fantasy, forthcoming in 2014 from World Weaver Press.
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My novel Waking Up Dead is set in a small town in Alabama—the main character, Callie, dies in Texas and wakes up dead to haunt someplace she’s never been. I wrote it while I was teaching at a college not far from Birmingham, Alabama. As I’ve mentioned in a number of interviews, the idea for the book came to me as I was driving to work one day; I remember seeing just a wisp of fog move across the statue in the middle of the town square. The statue was of some Civil War figure (I was living in Alabama at the time), and I remember thinking that it looked oddly ghostly. In between teaching classes that day, I started writing Callie’s story. It took me less than six weeks to finish that first draft—her voice was just incredibly strong.
But the setting made a strong impact on the story, as well. The Deep South is, I think, a haunted place—it’s haunted by its history, I think, and that history continues to have an incredible impact on its present. The history of slavery and racism still influence everyday interactions in the Deep South, even when people don’t always realize it. At the same time, southerners of all races are fiercely proud of their home, even with all of its haunted past, and that also influences everyday interactions. I think that to some degree, Waking Up Dead illustrates my own experiences as an outsider coming in to small-town Alabama. While I lived there, I met wonderful people and made great friends, but I also saw deeply ingrained attitudes about race and gender that fulfilled some of the negative stereotypes about the South.
Writing about the Deep South—or for that matter, about any place with a rich history—means examining and integrating that history into the setting and events of the story. In Waking Up Dead, the characters must solve a decades-old murder and in the process, face the ways in which a culture’s attitudes have influenced people for generations. Ultimately, I think that’s the only way to deal with history that we might find unpleasant: bring it into the light, own it, and exorcise the ghosts it brings with it.
