The novel “All You Can Eat” promises a vampire story with no cloaks, no angsty teenagers and no V word.
The novel is a humorous, satirical book with a little bit of horror, said Richard Harlan Miller, the book’s author and senior marketing communications manager for WSU’s Center for Distance and Professional Education. The story centers on Darius, a rich immigrant living in Spokane who meets women on the Internet and occasionally kills them.
He never uses the word vampire within the book because it never seemed appropriate for the characters, Miller said. Being a vampire is so much a part of who they are that the word never comes up.
“It’s not really about vampires,” Miller said. “It’s about people who are struggling to live in a modern society and the fact that they can be 150 years old gives them a stranger in a strange land view point that allows them to be befuddled by, amused by and comment on some of the oddities on life in Spokane.”
Miller said he made “All You Can Eat” a vampire novel because, at the time, the genre was unpopular.
“Anne Rice hadn’t written for a while, so I thought it would be a dusty disused genre that I could ransack and twist to my own purposes,” he said. “Once ‘Twilight’ came out, I had already finished the first draft, so it was too late to change my mind.”
If “Twilight” had come out before he started writing the book, he would not have written the story with vampire characters, he said.
“The success of the vampire genre made it much harder to get published because the market’s been flooded with vampire books,” Miller said. “This one is very different.”
The novel takes place in Spokane where Miller lived and worked as a journalist for 20 years, he said. He said he chose Spokane because he knew so much about the city.
“Also, I wanted to set it in a real place because the book is full of outrageous lies. So I wanted it grounded in specific details, street names, directions, shopping malls, stores at the mall. Spokane provided that level of detail,” Miller said.
Trade Book manager Lioubov Baugh said the novel is currently being sold at The Bookie, where Miller will have a book signing from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Nov. 12.
Miller said he will also have an appearance from 4 to 7 p.m. on Nov. 4 at Hastings Books in Moscow.
“If you don’t like vampire books, you’ll really like this one,” Miller said. “If you like vampire books, it will be something very fresh.”
