JANE LOVERING TAKES AN ALTERNATIVE LOOK AT VAMPIRES

I’ve always wanted to write about vampires.  Partly because there’s something fascinating in a creature that lives off blood, but also because I’ve always wanted to shift the paradigm slightly.  All my novels feature heroes who are less Alpha and more Beta – men who are the heroine’s best friends or quietly in need of saving themselves, so I wanted to change the received wisdom of vampires as being dominant, controlling beasts.  In my latest novel, Vampire State of Mind, they are still in charge, they are gorgeous and glamorous as vampires always have been, but the vampires I have created are fallible, they are stuck in their old-fashioned ways and sometimes in need of saving by the heroine, as much as they, sometimes, attempt to save her.

I’ve also located them firmly in Britain – these are very British vampires.  They believe in filing and order and frock coats, or at least designer jeans.  They don’t bite, unless it’s in special clubs where that sort of thing is allowed, their demons live on thrills and adrenaline so they lead lives where excitement is more important than regularity – and they don’t fall in love.

Vampire State of Mind is a deliberate attempt to subvert the Vampire Genre by taking some of the power away from the vampires and placing it in the hands of the heroine, in this case a council worker called Jessica Grant, who runs the Human/Otherworld Liaison office, acting as PR for the creatures from the Otherworld and keeping them firmly in their places.  Jess is strong, self-deprecating and too chaotic to be allowed in charge of anything more than an electric pencil-sharpener and a sidekick called Liam.

Here’s the blurb.

Jessica Grant knows vampires only too well.  She runs the York Council tracker programme making sure that Otherworlders are all where they should be, keeps the filing in order and drinks far too much coffee.  To Jess, vampires are annoying and arrogant and far too sexy for their own good, particularly her ex-colleague Sil, who’s now in charge of Otherworld York.

But when a demon turns up and threatens not just Jess but the whole world order, she and Sil are forced to work together, and when Jess turns out to be the key to saving the world it puts a very different slant on their relationship.  The stakes are high.  They are also very, very pointy and Jess isn’t afraid to use them, even on the vampire that she’s rather afraid she’s falling in love with …

For more details go to http://www.choc-lit.co.uk/html/vampire_state_of_mind.html
Or http://www.amazon.com/Vampire-State-Mind-Choc-ebook/dp/B008GGBRU2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346587575&sr=1-1&keywords=vampire+state+of+mind

www.janelovering.co.uk
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