Blood Oath: Above Top Secret

Born and raised in Idaho, Christopher Farnsworth graduated from the College of Idaho.

He worked as an investigative and business reporter for several years, and his work has appeared in New Republic, Washington Monthly, the New York Post, a Windows technical manual, and on E! Online.

After moving to Los Angeles he began writing full-time and sold his first script, The Academy, to MGM. He has now written the first book in a series featuring the adventures of Nathaniel Cade, a vampire sworn to protect the president and the United States from supernatural threats. BLOOD OATH will be published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 18, 2010.

Christopher Farnsworth is the great-nephew of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television. He is married to Jean Roosevelt Farnsworth and they live in Los Angeles with their daughter Caroline and performing dog, Sadie.

Learn more at www.christopherfarnsworth.com

I never liked vampires. In fact, the first nightmare I can remember was about a vampire (my parents let me watch “Scooby Doo” at a young age). Perhaps as a result, I've never found them tragic, noble or attractive. They just scared the hell out of me.

Somehow, that never stopped me from seeing dozens of movies and reading countless stories about them. I watched marathon showings of the old Universal and Hammer horror flicks every Halloween. I read Marv Wolfman's Tomb of Dracula in grade school. I can still quote a stage production of Dracula I saw when I was 11. Through it all, I would have told you I didn't like vampires.

But something inside me clearly responded to what vampires represent, and still does.

Vampires are supposed to be scary. Because vampires are evil. They are predators, designed to prey on humans – faster, stronger and more ruthless than we are. We're food to them – not love.

When I found an obscure fact about President Andrew Johnson pardoning an accused bloodsucker in 1867, those random thoughts fused into one idea: a vampire who works for the President of the United States. Still, it took me a long time to actually write the story. I procrastinated. The Writers Guild went on strike, and I had a child on the way. I realized I had to do something while sitting in front of the computer, and I still hesitated. The book had to get me by my throat – excuse the expression – and force me to write it.

I still don't like vampires. But I had to admit, as I wrote the novel, a vampire could be a very good thing to have on your side. To paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cade may be a monster, but he's our monster.

Just don't ever make the mistake of believing he's the good guy.

What compelled you to write BLOOD OATH?
I'm particularly stubborn about ideas, which is not always a good trait for a writer. But there are some that grab me and will not let go – and I will not give up on them until I've tried every way I know to bring them into the world. That's what happened with Blood Oath. I read an account by Robert Damon Schneck of a sailor who was accused in 1867 of killing two men and drinking their blood. He was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, and spent the rest of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. It's one of those weird little facts from history that doesn't fit in the regular school books, and it stuck in my head. I wondered why Johnson would have done something like save the life of a man convicted of such a horrible crime – what possible benefit he could have seen. And that's when I realized, a vampire would actually be a pretty useful tool for the President of the United States. From there, the idea mutated and grew until I had to get it down on paper.

At the time, the Writers Guild of America was on strike, so I couldn't write the story as a script – and anyway, I had so much detail that I wanted to include. So I began writing it as a novel. Eight months later, the first draft was done, and I enjoyed it more than any of the ideas I'd labored on with producers and development executives for years.

There's a lot of documentation in the book. What kind of research did you need to do to make it feel authentic?
In some ways, I've been prepping for this for decades. I've read a good metric ton of books on the paranormal. Long before there were YouTube videos of Bigfoot and History Channel specials on Mothman, I spent time in the dark corners of the library with the work of Charles Fort, John A. Keel, Loren Coleman, Daniel Cohen, Ivan Sanderson, and Frank Edwards. And that's just the 20th Century. There are still hundreds of years of what I like to call "Deep Weirdness" out there.

The availability of this information on the Internet now makes it easier to find, but it doesn't necessarily make it any easier to explain. And often, you still have to go back to the original paper, or as close as you can get. I was a history major in college, so for me, this is the fun part – sifting through all the information to find the right details. Sometimes there's a fine line between history and folklore. I look for the people and things that go right up to the edge – like Johann Konrad Dippel, Marie Laveau, and the TR3A Black Manta – and I make them part of the story.

Why do you think there's such a fascination with vampires and zombies in pop culture?
Right now, we're having a hard time envisioning the future. Forty or fifty years ago, the future was flying cars and cities on the Moon. It didn't work out that way; we've got people wearing suicide vests instead of jet packs. That's frightening. I think it's natural that we're looking to familiar monsters to symbolize all the unknown terrors out there. We know how vampires and zombies work. More important, we know how to kill them. That can be comforting, in a weird way, when you're faced with things like terrorism, economic collapse, and swine flu.

That's the deep, serious answer. The other, equally true answer: they're just cool.

Is your book a "mash-up" of genres? How does it compare to wildly popular books such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?
The book is a mutt in some ways: a hybrid between the spy and vampire genres. It mixes historical fact with a world where everything we've seen in horror movies actually happens. I think people who read and loved Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies would pick this up and feel right at home. Like those books, it's an attempt to assemble a new world out of some familiar pieces. But this is a book set in the present, rather than solely in the past. It includes Iraq, presidential politics, and the War on Terror – with vampires, of course.

What writer or writers have had the greatest influence on you?
I love books. I have since I was four years old. So the list of writers I owe for the things they've taught me through their work is impossibly long. But there are writers I've come back to again and again:

John Rember (my teacher and mentor at college, who told me that "writing is painting yourself into a corner, and then flying out"); Thomas Pynchon (I broke the spine of a copy of Vineland one summer, reading it over and over); William Gibson (the opening sentence of Neuromancer changed the world for me); Thomas Thompson (an unjustly forgotten journalist and author who wrote a book, Celebrity, that is probably the Great American Novel disguised as trashy entertainment); Scott Turow (I go back to Presumed Innocent whenever I want to remember how it's really done right); Lee Child (I pick up his books like an addict starving for a fix); Stephen King (his monsters are not nearly as frightening as what regular people do to each other in his work); Trevanian (whose Shibumi is still one of the best spy novels ever written); John Sandford; John Irving; Kurt Vonnegut; Hunter S. Thompson; Alan Moore; Neil Gaiman; Warren Ellis; Grant Morrison; Jim Harrison; Michael Chabon; Tom Wolfe; Carl Hiaasen; Terry Pratchett; Michael Crichton; John Gregory Dunne; Colin Harrison; Brad Meltzer; John Connolly; Lewis Lapham; Christopher Buckley; Ken Kesey; Richard Farina; Milan Kundera; Bruce Chatwin; Michael Ventura; Charlie Huston; and of course, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
This might sound weird from a guy who writes about vampires, but the best thing I can tell anyone who wants to write: get a life. Seriously. I know that many writers, like me, are introverts. I was most comfortable reading inside the classroom while the other kids hit the playground at recess. But it’s only by going out and engaging the world that I began to write anything worthwhile. My time as a reporter forced me to deal with other people, often in situations that were not pleasant. I interviewed one woman who vacuumed the carpets of her apartment every day; not because she was a neat freak, but because that’s where her children slept to avoid stray bullets from drive-by gang shootings. That detail said more about her life and her strength to endure it than I could have invented. I envy those writers who can sit and invent a world from their desks. But for me, the best writing comes from mining reality and putting the recognizable chunks in the narrative. So get out into the world, and then, at the end of the day, find a quiet spot and write it all down.

Why did you become a writer? Was it a lifelong goal?
I've known I wanted to be a writer since I was five, even though I had no idea what it really meant. But I knew that people paid attention when I wrote something. They understood what I was saying in a way that they never did when I tried to speak. People listened to me, because what I was saying was on the page in painstakingly printed block letters. Writing became my way out into the greater world. I started writing stories, poems, making my own comic books -- anything I could do to get the ideas in my head out where other people could see them. And despite everything that’s changed in my life, the basic goal is still the same. I want people to read what I’ve written. I want them to hear my stories, and to have it change their worlds, even if it’s just for a few moments.

What’s next for Nathaniel Cade and Zach Barrows?
Bad things. In the follow-up that I’m writing now, Zach and Cade travel to a secret prison – a “Black Site” run by the Shadow Company – to investigate the murders of two U.S. soldiers. Of course, it’s never that easy, and once they arrive, all Hell breaks loose – literally. And Cade will fight Osama bin Laden.