Archive for March, 2026
Welcome to the March 2026 issue of my newsletter, “News from the Crypt,” and please visit Carter’s Crypt, devoted to my horror, fantasy, and paranormal romance work, especially focusing on vampires and shapeshifting beasties. If you have a particular fondness for vampires, check out the chronology of my series in the link labeled “Vanishing Breed Vampire Universe.”
Also, check out the multi-author Alien Romances Blog
To subscribe to this monthly newsletter, please e-mail me at MLCVamp@aol.com, and I will add you to the list.
For other web links of possible interest, please scroll to the end.
My humorous vampire story “First Day at Human School” was published in issue 49 of the horror zine NIGHT TO DAWN, which you can find here:
NIGHT TO DAWN magazine:
Night to Dawn
A snippet of the story’s opening scene appears below. It’s part of the “Vanishing Breed” vampire universe and stars Dr. Roger Darvell from DARK CHANGELING, CHILD OF TWILIGHT, and various short stories. Check out the series here:
This month’s interview features YA author Curt Richards.
*****
Interview with Curt Richards:
What inspired you to become a writer?
I taught school at various levels for 40 years. During my teaching career, I wrote a weekly article about classroom experiences for our local newspaper. I also fell into directing our high school plays – and eventually writing 2 plays. When I retired, I wrote a book for new teachers. So, I guess you could say that I came about writing gradually.
What genres do you work in?
I am currently working in Young Adult fiction, but my first two publications were nonfiction.
Do you outline, “wing it,” or something in between?
I get a seed of an idea and then let it grow. I don’t know where it’s going but I try not to interfere with its growth.
What have been the major influences on your work (favorite authors or whatever)?
I try to read across various categories of fiction. I read mysteries, romances, suspense, and coming-of-age stories. Really, I like to read anything that catches my attention. I also read nature books and scientific books.
How has your career as a science teacher affected your writing?
I always tend to weave nature into my writing. I love stories that take the character into the woods or any natural area.
Please tell us about your YA novels. What kind of research did you do for the rural 1960s setting?
So far, my novels have been set in areas similar to where I grew up. If I am writing about a particular area, I will go there and observe, take notes, talk to the locals, etc.
I grew up in the 1960’s, so much of what I write I have experienced in some form.
How do the skills needed for writing a play differ from those for a novel? What’s it like having a play of yours produced for the stage?
A play is 100% dialogue, so every word should draw the audience into the setting. Having my plays produced by someone other than me is the greatest high for a writer. To sit and see my work come alive on stage is wonderful.
What inspired you to write your guidebook for new teachers?
I trained 13 student teachers throughout my career. I felt that new teachers need guidance in real-world classrooms and suggestions for handling situations that may arise.
What will readers find in your book on the Lord’s Prayer?
This book is aimed at anyone who may be suffering from an unhealthy compulsion. The main message is that they are not alone and with the love of others and God, they can enrich their lives. The beautiful words of this prayer offer reassuring insights that can be applied to anyone suffering from misguided passions.
What is your latest or next-forthcoming book?
This year (2026) the next book in my young adult series will be released.
What are you working on now?
I am working on the third book in the series.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
I can only say what I have learned from this experience, but I understand that I am not doing this to pay the bills. If that is the case, write what makes you smile, keeping in mind that publishers are there to make money, so don’t be discouraged by rejection. Keep doing what you love. Don’t wait for motivation. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Hard work will open the door to motivation.
What is the URL of your website? What about other internet presence?
Author Website
LinkedIn
Instagram: curtrichards202
*****
Some Books I’ve Read Lately:
SUMMER IN ORCUS, by T. Kingfisher. This is an older YA portal fantasy I’ve previously read in Kindle format. I was glad to find a trade paperback edition I wasn’t previously aware of. Having forgotten most of the details, I was delighted to be able to read it in tangible form. The young heroine follows the template of many of Kingfisher’s female protagonists, unsure of how to cope with the adventure thrust upon her. Beginning in fairy-tale style when she meets the witch Baba Yaga, the story develops into a quest reminiscent of THE WIZARD OF OZ: The heroine gains peculiar but fiercely loyal companions and traverses a varied, often magical landscape toward a goal where she has little idea what’s expected of her. Summer, eleven going on twelve, is the only child of a pathologically anxious, overprotective single mother. When Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed cottage appears in the alley behind their house, the padlock on the backyard gate opens at Summer’s touch. The cranky witch, promising Summer will find her heart’s desire, sends her to another world, accompanied by a talking weasel. (He doesn’t have a name other than “Weasel” and informs Summer he isn’t a magical familiar. All weasels can talk; it’s just that humans don’t listen.) Her portal between the mundane and enchanted realms consists of a hallway lined with stained-glass windows, one of which bears three sentences of advice: (1) Don’t worry about things you cannot fix. (2) Antelope women are not to be trusted. (3) You cannot change essential nature with magic. While the first admonition makes sense, she doesn’t fully understand the others until circumstances reveal their meanings. Summer’s adventure thus also echoes ALICE IN WONDERLAND in some ways, with riddles and, later, punning names. At a loss to identify her heart’s desire, she gets a direction for her journey from three shapechanging sisters, who tell her there’s “a cancer at the heart of the world.” When Summer encounters a victim of that blight, a tree whose leaves turn into frogs, she determines to heal the dying tree if possible. Unlike many portal-fantasy heroes, she isn’t a Chosen One and doesn’t aspire to save the world, just the tree. Being a well-read child, she frequently compares and contrasts her situation with the Narnia books. Unlike Dorothy, she doesn’t worry about getting home, because people in Narnia-type tales always do. She is concerned, though, about whether she’ll return home the moment after she left (and if not, how her mother will react) and hopes she won’t be magically forced to forget the enchanted realm. She soon wins staunch friends, including an aristocratic, foppish hoopoe, who travels with a flock of “valet birds” (they don’t talk, at least in human language), and a wolf named Glorious, who’s a were-house. Every night he changes into a cozy cottage. Amid various side adventures and dangers, they’re pursued by sinister agents of the Queen-in-Chains. After encounters both threatening and helpful, and at least one heartrending loss, Summer directly confronts the mysterious queen. Like the Wizard of Oz, she turns out to be astonishingly different from what the heroine expects. Summer discovers her own superpower — not warlike prowess, magical gifts, or preternatural cleverness, but the emotional intelligence she’s learned over a lifetime of comforting her mother. A satisfying story that restores the heroine to the mundane world with well-earned confidence and maturity.
ENCHANTING THE FAE QUEEN, by Stephanie Burgis. This fantasy-world, enemies-to-lovers romance is the second volume in the projected “Queens of Villainy” trilogy. While having read WOOING THE WITCH QUEEN isn’t absolutely necessary as a prerequisite to this book, it’s advisable, since this second installment provides new information about the invented world to build on what readers learned in the first one. The “enemies” in this novel are rivals on a personal level, not just antagonists because of their countries’ ongoing hostilities. The three self-styled Queens of Villainy, of course, aren’t actually evil. However, they’re devious and ruthless, prepared to do almost anything in their mutual pact to protect their realms from the empire determined to eliminate all obstacles to its domination goals. Lorelei, the faery queen of the mortal kingdom of Balravia, behind her frivolous mask of “notorious fae seductress” (as described in the cover blurb), combines her glamour – both mundane and magical – with fierce intelligence to that end. The reader immediately recognizes the sparks flying between her and her archenemy, the empire’s most celebrated general, as a blend of the overt hatred they claim and the sexual tension they suppress. In short, they’ve been obsessed with each other for years. Since his parents’ execution for treason when he was a child, to make up for the family’s dishonor General Gerard de Moireul has become a paragon of military prowess and unyielding virtue. On the surface, nothing appears more opposite to his rigid self-control than the infuriatingly flippant personality of Queen Lorelei, who literally sheds glitter everywhere she goes. After she kidnaps him into the faery realm, Oberon, her worst rival, forces the two of them to compete together in a series of magical contests. Not only do they discover each other’s strengths and realize they make a highly effective team, they reluctantly begin to like each other. Eventually they reveal their pasts and share their vulnerabilities. I enjoyed their verbal fencing and found their gradual progress from foes to lovers completely credible. Immediately after their ultimate mutual boundaries fall, so does a dire blow, which I won’t describe because of spoilers. Transported back to the corrupt emperor’s court, Gerard walks into a trap. As her only hope of saving him, Lorelei enlists the help of the other two Queens of Villainy. The climax and denouement smoothly intertwine Lorelei and Gerard’s personal plight with the growing international crisis. The emperor, having replaced his loyal, intelligent advisers with sycophants, has fallen completely under the influence of a party determined to “purify” the empire of all nonhuman races. (Does this sound familiar?) The novel has a satisfying conclusion that ties up the immediate plot threads while looking forward to the final volume of the trilogy, MELTING THE ICE QUEEN.
DEATH IN THE PALACE, by Barbara Hambly. Fourth book in her “silver screen historical mysteries,” set in Los Angeles in the early 1920s. These novels essentially constitute an alternate-world, non-supernatural re-visioning of the historical fantasy novel BRIDE OF THE RAT GOD, one of my favorites of Hambly’s works. The main characters in the series duplicate those in BRIDE OF THE RAT GOD under different names. The three Pekinese dogs even have the same names as in the earlier novel. Protagonist Emma Blackstone, an English war widow, has come to America as paid companion to her late husband’s sister, Kitty, aka silent film star Camille de la Rose. While frequently recruited to “doctor” film scenarios (scripts) that need fixing up, Emma mainly functions as dog sitter, errand runner, and general organizer for her flighty sister-in-law. They’re fond of each other despite their very different personalities. Kitty drinks too much – as Emma often wonders, “Hasn’t anybody in Hollywood heard of Prohibition?” – and has short-term affairs with every attractive man she meets, despite being the mistress of the studio’s co-owner. Although apparently a scatterbrained ditz, she occasionally displays unexpected perceptiveness and compassion. Emma, classically educated and orderly-minded, quietly observes the peculiarities of the American Babylon. Even after a year, she sometimes feels as if she’s been transported to the land of Oz. Although still subject to pangs of grief for her late family and husband, she has found new love with cameraman Zal. DEATH IN THE PALACE begins with a letter to Kitty from a young New York millionaire, offering her $50,000 to marry him for one week and then get a divorce. It turns out he’s made the same request of several other actresses. We don’t learn the motive for this odd behavior until late in the story, with its underlying sinister ramifications. The plot moves the regular cast of characters from Los Angeles to New York for the production of a big-budget picture, which Emma compares to being whisked from Oz to Barsoom. Along the way, they encounter various real-life people, including William Randolph Hearst (the mysterious death aboard his yacht early in the book actually happened) and the Marx Brothers in their vaudeville days. Bitter rivalry between Kitty and a female co-star ensues, along with numerous other suspicions, enmities, and complications. The murder in the Palace theater, referenced in the title, doesn’t occur until one-third through the book, with a victim who’s not the one implied by the cover blurb. Toward the end, I had a little trouble following the large cast of characters and their convoluted relationships, but I thoroughly enjoyed the story anyway. Interactions among the people interested me more than solving the puzzle itself, although the solution is also satisfying. I find this series’s portrayal of its historical milieu, with the exploration of southern California in the 1920s, the subculture of the early film industry, and the technicalities of early movie-making, endlessly fascinating. As with most amateur detective series (if you can suspend your belief in so many murders happening within a limited social circle), these novels can be read in isolation, though they work better in publication order.
AGNES AUBERT’S MYSTICAL CAT SHELTER, by Heather Fawcett. Although the title and cover of this novel suggest cozy fantasy, I don’t think that classification quite fits. Granted, Agnes’s refuge for feral felines qualifies as cozy until the outside world breaks in, but that world brings danger and sometimes chaos. As in the author’s Emily Wilde trilogy, a conscientious, hardworking, detail-oriented heroine progresses through an antagonism-to-reluctant-attraction relationship with a capricious, enigmatic, magically powerful man. Widowed Agnes and her married sister, Elise, run the shelter with the help of volunteers, subsisting on a meager budget as they rescue cats from the street, give them food, shelter, socialization, and medical treatment, and find homes for them. According to the cover blurb, the story takes place in Montreal in the 1920s. While the text confirms the location, it never specifies the year (as far as I noticed). All we can infer from the technology in use is a date sometime in the early twentieth century. In this alternate history, magicians openly exist, sensibly mistrusted by the general public. The catastrophic side effects of a magicians’ duel have left the shelter’s previous rented home uninhabitable. Agnes gets rejected by multiple landlords when they learn she intends to move in dozens of cats. Finally, she manages to rent a house from an amiable but rather odd young man named Yannick, who’s only the owner’s representative. To her horror, she soon discovers her actual landlord is the notorious “Witch King,” Havelock Renard, who reputedly almost caused the end of the world. He lives reclusively in the house’s multi-level basement. He’s not only something of a grouch, he’s allergic to cats. In addition to his stock of magical items, his quarters contain a large oven that seems to produce baked goods on its own. So far, so cozy, until Valerie, Havelock’s sister and implacable foe, shows up demanding a grimoire of legendary power. He insists he doesn’t have it among his disorganized hoard of “Artefacts.” Since he himself isn’t quite sure what he does or doesn’t possess, Agnes, offended to the core by the disorder of his shop, takes on the monumental task of sorting and cataloging its contents. Naturally, the two of them develop a reluctant mutual fondness despite their opposite personalities, As the reader would expect, Havelock’s reputation proves to be far from the whole truth. Destruction and calamities ensue. Agnes gets unwillingly drawn into the sorcerous subculture, including glimpses of an other-dimensional magical forest with an atmosphere of numinous terror. Although she cares for very few people as much as for the cats, Havelock eventually becomes a member of that small group. Happily, her feline charges play a vital role in saving the two of them and the city from disaster. A captivating book for fans of cats, urban fantasy, and enemies-to-lovers romance.
For my recommendations of “must read” classic and modern vampire fiction, explore the Realm of the Vampires:
Realm of the Vampires
*****
Excerpt from “First Day at Human School”:
“Uncle Roger, look what I can do.” The pale, dark-haired six-year-old boy rose a foot off the carpet and floated across the living room to alight in front of his uncle.
“Very impressive,” Dr. Roger Darvell replied sincerely. He himself hadn’t been able to levitate at that age. Of course, to judge from the tiny available sample, including Roger’s own three-quarters vampire daughter, all vampire-human hybrids differed in their traits and abilities. Doubtless it hadn’t helped that Roger’s human adoptive parents, much less Roger himself, hadn’t had any clue about his half-breed heritage.
“Just remember, Timothy,” said Claude, the child’s father and Roger’s full-blooded vampire half-brother, “you mustn’t do anything like that in front of people outside the family.”
“Especially at school,” Claude’s human wife, Eloise, added.
“I know,” Timothy said with a long-suffering sigh. He wasn’t a “Tim,” much less “Timmy.” Even at this young age, he’d indignantly rejected any gestures toward forcing a nickname on him. Anyway, he didn’t possess a trace of cuteness to invite one. With adult vampires’ ability to sense emotions, their infants didn’t require visual appeal to enhance the mother-child attachment. Timothy’s thin face, arched eyebrows, and pointed chin gave him an elfin look that might impress most human observers as slightly weird.
“The sun’s going down,” Eloise said. “Why don’t you take Thor outside to play?” Although daylight wouldn’t disable a purebred vampire, much less a hybrid, direct exposure to it caused them discomfort.
The Great Dane dozing in front of the unlit fireplace glanced up and thumped his tail at the sound of his name. “Okay. Come on, Thor.” Timothy darted out of the room with the dog in his wake. Before his birth, Claude and Eloise had bought this spacious house with a privacy-fenced yard in an upscale suburb, although they’d also hung onto Claude’s other properties, including a penthouse in the heart of Los Angeles.
“We’ve been trying to shift his sleep schedule more toward the human norm,” Eloise said, “but it’s a slow process.”
Britt Loren, Roger’s human bond-mate as well as professional partner in their psychiatric practice, watched the boy leave, then turned to Claude and Eloise. “So you’ve really enrolled him in an ordinary first-grade class? Well, ordinary for an exclusive private school?”
“I want him to embrace his human side as well as his vampire half,” Eloise said. “He needs to get properly acquainted with ephemerals other than just you and me. After all, he’ll be living among them.”
Britt nodded. “True, as part of a very small minority group. But what about his extreme adaptability at this age? What if he picks up confusing ideas from the other kids or even the teacher?” That trait could lead to disastrous consequences such as young vampires absorbing human superstitions about their own species. For instance, Claude, like many of his peers born in the eighteenth century, suffered from a phobia of religious objects.
“We’ll debrief him every night,” Claude said, “to nip any confusion in the bud.”
“And we definitely don’t let him watch horror movies,” Eloise added.
-end of excerpt-
*****
The long-time distributor of THE VAMPIRE’S CRYPT has closed its website. If you would like to read any issue of this fanzine, which contains fiction, interviews, and a detailed book review column, visit the Dropbox page below. Find information about the contents of each issue on this page of my website:
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All Vampire’s Crypt Issues on Dropbox
A complete list of my available works, arranged roughly by genre, with purchase links:
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Writers Exchange E-Publishing: Writers Exchange
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You can contact me at: MLCVamp@aol.com
“Beast” wishes until next time—
Margaret L. Carter