Preface
This book has a strange history… of course, it also has a rather strange author (ask anyone who knows me!), so I suppose it’s fitting. I first wrote this book—the Jordan chapters anyway—in 1969, and thereby hangs a tale.
One very interesting fact for the reader (I hope), is that almost every non-supernatural event described in the books (yes, there are sequels coming), actually happened… to me (it might be slightly more accurate to say that they happened to the people who were near me at the time). Yes, I really did pull a tree out of the ground when I was only three years old… and I did stop a car from falling on my father when I was a few months short of my twelfth birthday (I haven’t stopped doing things like that either… despite being past the—ahem—half-century mark, I lifted the front end of our 1990 Chrysler New Yorker a couple of years ago so that my dear wife and co-author could change the tire in a snowstorm). My family really did move from Los Angeles to Marblehead, the only significant deviation from reality being that we moved in 1969, rather than 1973 (well, I had to give Jordan time to grow up from twelve to sixteen, didn’t I?). The first full Jordan chapter is also strictly autobiographical... until the last four sentences.
I will admit that I did tell one “lie” concerning a real-life event portrayed in the book: Jordan being asked to teach a biology class at the unbelievably-young age of sixteen. In my defense, the alteration I made was to make the event more believable to the audience. You see, my wife Barbara was only fifteen when she was first asked to teach a class... and I was only fourteen when the same thing happened to me.
In real life, by the way, at least in my own case, the bureaucrats won, as they usually do. My “boss,” although extremely pleased with my performance, was never able to convince the officials to actually pay me anything for my efforts, and he wound up both officially teaching the class himself, and paying me for the classes I did teach out of his own pocket. The note from administration Tia sees on the school computer system “recommending that this individual not be hired because he caused them such computer problems” is quite real—I remember reading it with disbelief, at the time.
Jordan will keep his job teaching in future books, however... a minor and extremely belated revenge on my part, small and petty of me no doubt... but I’m doing it anyway. This is how you can tell that this book is fiction as opposed to non-fiction: the bureaucrats in it occasionally lose.
Back to the subject of all the strange things which kept happening to me in real life, knowing that I was peculiar didn’t help me solve the problem of why I was peculiar. Now if my father had gone around casually lifting automobiles, the answer would have been obvious—and comforting—but such was not the case. Although quite strong for his size and in superb physical condition(my father and I routinely won first place in father-son joint competitions, at summer camp and other places), my father was no match for me. I had first hurt him (quite unintentionally, I hasten to add) when I was wrestling with him at the age of four, and I began beating him regularly in arm-wrestling before I reached the age of seven (and anyone who thinks that he was “throwing” those competitions in favour of his son had better think again… if the authors of the Oxford English Dictionary had known him well, there would be a four by six glossy photo of him next to words like “Integrity,” “Honour,” “Responsibility,” and “Honesty,” as the prime example of those qualities).
It is also perhaps telling that an artistically gifted friend once caricatured me and several of our mutual classmates in the gifted program at school. She drew a cool, intellectual friend as Mr. Spock, another who had an almost preternatural climbing ability as Spiderman, yet another fiendishly inventive student as the professor from Felix the Cat, and she drew me as… Benjamin J. Grimm, “The Thing” from the Fantastic Four.
At least my obvious intellectual prowess prevented her from drawing me as the Incredible Hulk... I think.
At any rate, I was left with a seemingly insolvable problem: I was stronger than anybody I met, my night vision was uncanny, and I talked—when I wasn’t cracking jokes—as a seventeenth century nobleman would have... why? Well, I daydreamed an answer one day, while sitting on those two rocks which appear in the book on top of a hill half a mile from my (Jordan’s) house: maybe I was actually a vampire and didn’t even know it (I know those rocks well: I dreamed up four novels while sitting or standing on them).
I had to research the vampire cannon rather extensively to see if my wild idea could possibly be right... not as easy a task in 1969 as today, with the internet. However, I found that, yes indeed, according to the literature, it was possible: a child could be “turned” while still in the womb, and would display many characteristics and powers not known to mortal men.
Carl Sagan once confessed that at the age of eight, after reading about John Carter of Mars, he had stood in a field and wished hard to be transported to the Red Planet. I’m certainly not as smart as Sagan, so I refuse to be embarrassed by my having done basically the same thing at the age of twelve.
Obviously (well, it was obvious to me) the only thing to be done was to write down the silly plot so I could get it out of my head. So I sat down at my typewriter (my mother had gotten me one years earlier in self-defence: keeping me away from her typewriter), and three months later, I had a novel, in manuscript, written entirely in first person from Jordan’s perspective.
One funny result was that after my parents (English teachers and authors both) had read my manuscript, we all sat down at the kitchen table to talk about it, and my father remarked that the plot was, to say the least, a little implausible, far removed from daily life. I responded by getting up, walking around the table and picking up my mother in one arm, and then picking up my father in my other arm(bear in mind that I was only twelve, didn’t weigh seventy-five pounds, and didn’t come up to either of their chins), and, holding them both with their feet at least ten inches off the floor, asked in an entirely un-strained voice: “Mom, Dad... this is supposed to be normal??”
They were forced to concede that I had a point.
Then came the great joy—sarcasm intentional—of submitting my work to various publishers. I don’t remember exactly how many I tried, but I kept the rejection letters, in their envelopes, in a pile on my desk to the right of my typewriter, and I didn’t quit until that hated pile was taller than my typewriter.
But I noticed a pattern in the rejections. After eliminating the ones which were simply “form” letters—which almost certainly meant that nobody at the publisher had even read my manuscript—virtually every single one of the rejections said exactly the same thing, which I will collectively paraphrase below:
“We love your work (and we can’t believe that you’re only twelve), and we really want to see more from you, but we’re very sorry, because, frankly, nobody is going to buy a story about a boy who turns out to be a good-guy vampire falling in love with a human girl in high school.”
Now I have to confess to a great deal of stupidity: it took me nearly three years after having read “Twilight” to remember all those rejection letters and put two and two together. Once I did realize how thoroughly different the publishing world no doubt now was, it didn’t take me long to sit back at my trusty old—well, keyboard, now—and start writing the book over again. Shaking my fist at all those long-retired editors, I got to work, and, six months later this time—I guess I’ve slowed down a bit since I was twelve—I had produced the book you now have before you.
I did a different—and I hope, better—job this time around. The plot is identical, but of the original writing, only a single sentence, and one scene—although completely rewritten—survive: the opening sentence referring to “Shadows moved in the hunting darkness...” (I loved it then and I love it now); and the Alex-Jordan fight scene where Jordan finds out why he has all these abilities. Everything else is brand-new, including the fact that the book is now written in multiple first-person, from each of the four viewpoint characters’ perspectives. My writing skills have improved—I most devoutly hope—just a tad since I was twelve.
There are other changes: I didn’t handle the romance as well originally, mostly because I hadn’t found my very own witch yet, at the time. I’ve certainly found her now, and my wife Barbara is a witch, given how thoroughly she’s bewitched me. She coached me heavily all through the Tia-viewpoint chapters, which is another reason why Tia’s character is much improved from the original... and why Barbara is listed as co-author.
There’s also the fact that my portrayal of High School in Massachusetts is no doubt a bit more accurate now, considering that I hadn’t yet attended High School when I wrote the original.
I have one other confession to make, concerning the names of the two main characters: the girl’s name was originally Kathy in the modern setting and Valentina (with two “n’s”) in the seventeenth-century prolog. Barbara wanted to use “Tia,” since she’s loved the name ever since reading “Escape to Witch Mountain,” many years ago, and I did a little research and discovered that “Valentia” (one “n”) is a perfectly good name of long standing, being, among other things, the name of a Roman Port City, so we decided that the character could have the same name in all her incarnations, simply going by a shortened version in 1973.
However, the male lead character’s name was indeed a two-syllable name beginning with “J” in the original. It was—wait for it—JACOB.
I thought about keeping it... in fact, I thought about it for at least ten seconds before deciding to change it. Even with my forty-year-old copyrighted original to wave about as proof, nobody would believe I hadn’t stolen the name.
But the plot is still the same, daydreamed by a romantic twelve-year-old boy, sitting on those rocks on a hilltop, watching as his first glorious autumn in New England swept its colourful magic through the trees.
We hope you enjoy it.
