What would you have done if…
…like I, you were the author of books in the Stud Draqual mystery series (A SLIP TO DIE FOR and THAI DIED) that had become such international best-sellers, the chief protagonist a fashion designer of high-end silk clothes, that you’d decided to launch a real-time by-DRAQUAL collection featuring very expensive silk scarves individually batiked by talented Daniel Holz, with designs (jaguars and bats) by American Indian Star Urioste, (barbed-wire and snakes) by Dutchman Johan Ekkel … with other designs by those very same artists (and others) sandblasted by Kerry Dikken onto denim pants and vests later blood-splattered for visual effect…?
…like I, you were approached by one of your publishers who said, “William, since you wrote the very first gay werewolf novel, what can you do for us by way of vampires?”?
Well, I don’t know what you would have done, but I immediately set to work combining everything that was presently happening in my real-time life to include those fictional vampires I was suddenly willingly inviting to join on in.
The result, to hit the bookstores, sometime early next year —
SUCKS! (Vampires Swallow More than Blood). First of The Draqual Vampyre Chronicles, by William Maltese, published by MLR Press
— wherein the sexy and sensuous undead mingle and strut their stuff in the world of high-fashion wherein blood-splattered denim by-DRAQUAL … and silk scarves and cowboy kerchiefs by-DRAQUAL … respectively batiked and sandblasted by Kerry Dikken with jaguar and bat designs by Star Urioste and barbed-wire and snake designs by Johan Ekkel … are blatantly strutted on runways by half-naked studly-muscled men and beautifully-sensuous women … in exhibition halls with walls special-FX dripping blood … Rob Baumbach rock music providing ear-splitting aorta-pumping background sounds — and, then, are purchased at phenomenal prices to be worn by fashion-conscious beautiful people not only seduced into wanting to be part of the new “in” scene but seduced into paying for that privilege with not only their money but with their very own sticky-hot blood.
