Editor’s Note: Thanks for stopping by a special Sunday edition of 7 Deadly Questions. Morgan Gallagher’s debut novel THE CHANGELING drops today! It’s a Bloody Good Read and I encourage all of you to check it out!

1. Most authors are happy writing one novel at a time. Not you. You up the ante by launching a trilogy. Tell me a bit about The Dreyfuss Trilogy and its inspiration.

Well, basically, it’s one very long book.  No, not really. The reason why I know it’s a trilogy, and why I’m launching it like that, is that my writing style is to see flashes of characters and scenes, and I then have to stitch it all together. There is a major section of the ‘story’ written, that I thought was the end of the novel. However, when I set in place all the other bits, leading up to it, it became clear it was two novels. And I’d written the end of the second one. I had the beginning pages of one novel, and the ending of another one entirely. And the ending of that novel, was not the end of the story. It was a climatic event that had been being built up too, over two books. So there had to be a third, to then resolve out the climatic event, and bring the narrative arc to a natural close.

It was quite a revelation, that there were two books in the pages in front of me, and a third to finish it off. But each segment is complete, and of itself. For instance, Changeling, the first novel, is a completely different type of novel to the other two. It’s an intense interior space, with two characters battling against each other, for the entire novel. There is mention of others, but there are no other major characters in the novel. A few support people in places, but it is just down to Dreyfuss, and Joanne. Lucifer’s Stepdaughter, book two, is filled to the gunnels with new people, places and stories. An entire vampire world opens up. Moonchild, book three, picks up the traces from the previous two books about what and where and when vampirism came into being, and unpicks the mythology of the vampires we’ve met, and is based on looking at human development and evolution. All interwoven with the character’s stories.

So I had the middle, really. The beginning, and the middle. I was always writing from that start point, to the end of book two. I could never have written Changeling, without knowing why it had to be the shape it is. And I could not launch Changeling, without knowing exactly where Lucifer’s Stepdaughter and Moonchild was going. There are integral to each other. I had to have the seeds of both, firmly planted in Changeling. Having all three set out as parts of a whole, it made sense to launch Changeling as part of the Trilogy.

Inspiration is a tricky one. I grew up in a very stark and impoverished Industrial working class area. A massive steel works, and a few scattered communities around it, with most people fighting to live elsewhere. But I grew up in a cosseted little pocket of it, as we had more money as we ran a couple of local shops, and I was both of that area, and kept out of it. I was shipped out to a private school every morning, and not allowed to mix with the people and children around me. That had been cemented when I returned to the house one day, as a very small child, after I’d been playing with other kids in the back yards, and it was discovered I had caught impetigo. All the local kids had caught it from the broken sewer pipe we were playing with. So local kids were not part of my childhood: I was raised in a house that locked the doors and cemented broken glass into the tops of the walls around our yard.

So I grew up with a view of two worlds, and the feeling I didn’t belong in either. And one of those worlds, was very dark and violent. When I was very young, we couldn’t sleep in the bedrooms on Friday and Saturday nights, as they had windows facing out into the street. And the running fights up and down the street, would sometimes result in objects coming in through the windows. So we’d bed down on the floor in the living room, as the window faced out into the back yard. That didn’t last for very long, as the police took back control of the streets, but I remember it clearly. I saw someone stabbed to death in front of me, with his blood flowing out into the gutter, when I was 15. Children and women were beaten regularly in this world, and it was to the women’s shame, if anyone knew about it. Men were beaten regularly too, but that was out in the open, with a crowd watching and taking bets.

But I also lived in the nice flowing world of privilege. I sat in a converted Victorian manse house in genteel Bothwell, for my school. I had every toy and book you could want. I had a horse, and spent my summers riding in green scented countryside, picking plums off the trees as I went. And my winters immune to the cold, galloping over the hard packed ground. I moved in and out of these two worlds constantly, and was always acutely aware of the dissonance.

As I grew up, I would sometimes notice that the nice girls in school with me, who were much posher than me, might flinch on occasion, and have a bruise on her arm that looked very much like another’s hand had grabbed it tightly. The monsters were in the posh bits too: just not as obvious.

So I grew up in a land where monsters lurked. And sometimes the monsters were in plain view, and sometimes they were completely invisible. I also grew up in a land that was lyrical and beautiful and filled with magic. But all magic has darkness, and there are monsters everywhere. I’m not sure if that’s inspiration, but it’s definitely the context in which I wrote Changeling. Nothing changed about that violence, and the hiding of the effects of it, as I grew and moved on. Many more life experiences fed into the narrative, and into Joanne and what Dreyfuss tries to do with her. And it would be nice if I didn’t understand that darkness as well as I do. But I do understand that darkness very well, and it has always informed my work.

2. Vampires seem to be everywhere these days. How do you make your story and characters unique enough to stand out in the crowd.

There is nothing new under the sun. We take the same stock of human experience and emotion, and recycle it all into different stories. My vampires have their own traits, which may or may not match others around at the moment. I made a conscious decision, some years back, to stop reading other vampire fiction. And in the main, I have. I have never seen, or read about, a twinkly vampire. (No offence to those who like twinkles. I’m sure if they’d been around when I was a teenager/young adult, I’d have adored them. And I still have the reams of poetry I wrote at the time, to prove that.) I do, on occasion, read other horror writers who have vampires. But it’s their horror work I read, that may or may not have vamps. I reread my ‘classic’ print vampires, when I want a vampire fest, and I watch vampire movies or television. I read stuff that’s interesting, but isn’t horror, that has vamps, such as the Anita Blake novels. But a vampire does not make a horror story, and a horror story does make a vamp. You can have vamps in any genre of fiction – thriller, romance, comedy. Something some people appear to have trouble appreciating. The current trend for ‘paranormal’ being added to everything is something I wasn’t expecting, and is a little disconcerting. I wonder if Stephen King was starting out today… would he be told that ‘Carrie’ was a paranormal thriller? I’m perfectly happy being a horror writer. There just happens to be vampires.

In terms of horror, I don’t like body shock horror, either in print or on the screen. I prefer the dark psychological horror. The horror in the mind. Humans are the basis of all horror, for me. My vamps are humans with complications – horrific complications. They need to drink blood, and feed off life. But they all start out as humans, who live human lives, before they are given, or have forced upon them, the Dark Gift. How do you live a life, if that is part of your basic need? And how do you cope with all that living, given how much of the world is pain and death? Equally, how much joy and passion, could you build into a life, if you had the time and money? But at what price? These are essential human questions, that we all face every day. Vampirism allows up to amplify the signal, and make more urgent, and obvious, the answers. Would you kill, in order to live? The answer in human history is that yes, most of us would, but no, some of us would rather die. The reader has to face what they would do, in Joanne’s place. She is truly trapped, and he traps her in her mind, and she cannot escape making a choice. What choice would you make?

In terms of difference, my essential difference is that Dreyfuss is a psychopath and there is no varnish to that. He was a psychopath as a human. There is nothing romantic or erotic or appealing about Dreyfuss. Whilst he may be intriguing, the reader will be repelled and sickened by his actions. The book is brutal, and it details violence graphically. He wants to tear her down to nothing, and rebuild her in his own image. You cannot understand the mind games, and the pathway Joanne takes, until you understand what it’s like to be completely owned and possessed by someone who is stronger and more powerful than you, who holds all the cards, and who controls the world you live in. Who understands human needs, and uses them to get what he wants, no matter how he is opposed. People often say that women in abusive relationships stay as they like it. From the outside, you cannot understand what has gone on, to reduce someone to the point they cannot leave. The book details that process, and you have to see it, to understand it. You have to understand what she’s rebelling against, to make sense of how her rebellion expresses itself. But there is no saving grace, no surprise twist about Dreyfuss: there is no dark vampire prince. No sudden discovery the nasty vampire is actually the Romantic Hero. Although there is… oh dear, I better stop now.

But I just will say, that if it wasn’t for Harlan Ellison’s ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’ and Stephen King’s ‘Rose Madder’ I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to publish the book.

3. The reviews and blurbs for Changeling, the first book in the Dreyfuss Trilogy, have been amazing. Does that make it easier to sink your teeth into writing the rest of the trilogy (Lucifer’s Stepdaughter and Moonchild) or merely place more pressure on you to keep the momentum going?

Both. The excruciating process of trying to boil down 152 000 words of complex interaction and storytelling, into one paragraph, or even a sentence! Argh. There have been times over the past few weeks when my brain has been bleeding out of my ears, and dripping onto the floor. I’ve had to explain, and at times, defend, the novel, to the point of nausea. Condense, condense, condense… and find the true vein of what is there. Agony. Total agony. But so very useful. I have a confidence about it now, I didn’t have 8 weeks ago, when I decided to launch. In particular, the narrative itself. There is nothing that required change, no story edits, no redoing of sections. The closer I’ve got to expressing the essence of the narrative, the more confidence I’ve gained that the structure is sound. It survives the scrutiny, basically. And getting feedback from those who have read, and reviewed the book, that they have understood what I wanted to express… that’s been amazing. And made me itch to get back to writing the other two.

The pressure ‘tho. The pressure to perform again. Particularly since I know the other two are totally different in tone and structure. Very scary. We’ll see. I have this nightmare that I’ll be the writer who sold everyone a trilogy, and never finished it. And I also worry I’ll rush the writing, and perhaps not spend the time ignoring the books between writing ‘the end’ and the final main edit. I left Changeling for 9 months, from the words ‘the end’ to firing it back up again to run the final author edit. Even if I finished Lucifer’s Stepdaughter this year, it’s not going out until mid through 2012, at the earliest. That’s an immense pressure to hold fast, and stay calm, and do the work, not go for the print button as others are eagerly awaiting it. I already have people clamouring for it.

Although I do have some more to let free, before then. The week after launch, a new blurb for Lucifer’s will go up on site, and I hope to have the cover image done and dusted, by the end of the year. I know exactly how it looks. After all, I do know exactly how it ends!

4. Is the horror/paranormal genre viewed differently in Scotland than here in the States? Is the mythology of the vampire different?

Not so much the mythology of vampires, as we are in Vampire Central in the UK. From Stoker, who was Irish in fact, writing Dracula in the Reading Room of the British Library, to Hammer Horror, the UK is central to the Western vampire mythology. Within the Scottish context, Scot’s history and fiction has always been bloody. We’ve had a lot of body eating, body snatching grimness going on over the ages. The concept of immortals, with dark gifts and epic curses, is very common, and one I grew up with. Fairies in Scotland are not ‘nice’. They are six feet tall, covered in armour, and will hack your eyes out for cutting down their favourite tree. It’s a culture that’s comfortable with supernatural forces being part of everyday life. Even now, I’ll sometimes leave milk and honey out, to attract brownies to come and do my housework. (It does work, if you do it every night, it seems to make you more able to tackle the housework.) But it’s always a two edged sword. They can give, but they can take back. The original tag line to Changeling was “Be careful what you wish for…” and that is a very Scottish take on the world. A wish can be granted, but you might not like what you’ll get. There is always a price.

The vampire elements are very clear to see, within that whole bundle of beliefs, and they directly inform Changeling, as the Fair Folk often steal humans, entice them away. A human can stray into the mounds, spend the night, and leave to find 50 years have passed and their entire lives have gone, and they are sad and broken people, who belong nowhere. That’s a strong theme in my work: isolation, and being cast out.

The Fair also steal human babies, and leave Changelings in the cradles. Whilst this might sound quite quaint, there is a horror to this that belies belief. If you had a baby that cried all day and all night, that could not be comforted, that wasn’t thriving and was clearly ‘not right’… you deemed it Changeling. So you could put the baby on a bonfire and that was that. You hadn’t killed your baby, you had killed the Changeling, who had to be killed as it would only be a draw on the entire community. Somewhere, your human baby was living a good life, raised by the Fair. Cute.

That’s before you get to banshees and bogarts and selkies and the lesser fay. So yes, I think I can safely say, that growing up Scottish, can make a difference to how you see supernatural elements. As both being very common, and knowable and ‘normal’ and also being both light and dark. We have a nice line in lyrical savagery.

Just don’t do a ‘Disney’ Scotland on me, and make all our legends nice and cute and safe and whimsical. I’ll eat your eyes. That’s not to say you can’t have nice whimsical otherworldness, look at JM Barrie. But even Peter Pan has darkness. How can it be real, if there is no dark? Barrie did a wonderful Changeling, actually. His play ‘Mary Rose’, will have the hackles on the back of your neck rising, as you shiver with the pain of it.

5. How would your Dreyfuss character hold up in a fight against some other famous vampires of literature? Could he take Ann Rice’s Lestat in a street fight? Would Steve King’s Straker be able to stand against your vampire?

Should he decide to soil his hands with a gothic melodramatic like Lestat, he’d knock his block off. I’m not so sure about Straker. Straker is a mind game, Dreyfuss may not be up to it. Dreyfuss likes to think he’s a master psychologist, but he’s really not that smart. I suspect Straker would out play him. Dreyfuss is a complete loner when it comes to other vampires. He never goes near the others, and kills anyone who strays near his territory, which is a low kill count, as none of them go near him. And like many of my older vamps he despises the gothic over tones of the newer ones. So Lestat would be booted out of touch. (Please note that the author’s views are not reflected in those of her psychotic creations.)

6. If offered the chance for immortality by one of your ageless characters, would you take it? Why or why not?

Never. When we’ve worked out how to be humans for a hundred years or so, we can then work on living longer. Whilst I’m sure I’ll maintain that my lifespan was too short, whatever it turns out to be, immortality is a curse I’d not carry well. As long as I live to see my son settled and happy in his own life, I’ll be happy to move on when the time is right. Life is too hard, to keep doing this forever. And if I was the only one with the immortality, and therefore I was doomed to watch those I love, and care for, suffer and die… I’d rather jump off a cliff. I will rage against the dying of the light, but I’ll look forward to seeing what happens next. Energy can be neither created, nor destroyed, it can only be transformed.

7. How can people learn more about you?

By reading my book.  Do note, I didn’t say by buying it. You have to actually read it. I’ve told everyone I don’t expect them all to read it, but I do expect them to buy it!

Otherwise, here’s the now familiar set of links:

Buy This Book: Amazon UK Amazon USA Smashwords

Author Pages:   Ethics Trading Amazon UK Amazon USA

Contact Author:  Novel Blog Twitter: @DreyfussTrilogy      FaceBook

About Morgan

Morgan Gallagher is in her late 40s, and should know better, about spending her writing life with vampires. However, she has no choice, as they refuse to go away and leave her alone. She lives in the Scottish Borders, with her husband and their six year old son. A full time carer for her husband who is severely disabled, Morgan also works as a volunteer for several charities and is passionate about the rights of babies, children and mothers. She has campaigned vigorously against child detention during immigration procedures. She and her husband home educate their son and attempt to keep a never ending stream of cats under control. The North Sea pounds their fishing village every winter, and every major storm, the entire family are to be found in the car parked on the headland admiring the view. Apart from the cats, that is, who are at home dreaming of summer.