I came across this review while searching for the name of the anthology where you’d published “A Candle in the Sun,” which is one of my personal favorites in vampire fiction.

I cannot say how immensely pleased I am by the happy coincidence of coming here and discovering that you’ve taken the novella and expanded it into a full-length novel. Sold, sir, most assuredly sold.

I wrote this many years ago. First I wrote the novelette “A Candle in the Sun,” which was printed in a magazine called STARSHORE – and was my first professional rate sale. It was reprinted by Karl Edward Wagner in Year’s Best Horror XIX (spawning my friendship with that late, sorely missed, and extremely talented man).

Later – in a chance meeting at a convention – I convinced a man named Robert Eighteen-Bisang to read the story. He is / was the foremost collector of (and expert on) vampire fiction alive. He came back to me that day after reading it and told me that I simply had to make it a novel.

It took years to get the courage to try not to botch this story at novel length. I’ve been asked if the excerpts from The Book of Judas are real. They are not – I wrote them, paraphrasing from a knowledge of the other gospels. I filled in holes left in the story – added explanations where there were none before, and showed the story through a different perspective. The key is this. Men, in The Bible, were expected to change their lives on faith alone. They universally failed. Mary Magdalene, fallen angel, and vampire, does not need “faith,” she KNOWS there is a Heaven. She knows Lucifer.

There was a time in my life when I was a very religious man. I planned a life as a minister of some type or another, and am actually ordained, though that was through the Universal Life Church, and many years later.

I may be a more spiritual man than I seem…I believe in no organized religions at all – at least not on the surface. What I wanted to do was to show my frustration and my understanding of what the gospels and that old, old story might really be trying to get at.

And I wanted men to be the heroes, Judas in particular.

I hope a lot of people see your review and buy the book.

David