Books to Die For

Nancy Baker's THE NIGHT INSIDE

What makes a Book to Die For? What makes a book that we come back to time and again? Sometimes the answer is simple: it's a classic or a should-be-classic. Other times, it is tangled up in emotions and memories - some stories just speak to us (and become important to us) because they fell into our lives at exactly the right time.

Today's book, Nancy Baker's THE NIGHT INSIDE, was one of the latter for me. I grew up out in the boonies north of Toronto and while I'd been a horror fan for pretty much forever, pickings were limited in the school library and, to a certain extent, even in the public libraries. As a result, most of my early horror literary heroes were both reasonably mainstream - Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, James Herbert - and, as that list suggests, mostly male (with the noted exception of Anne Rice).

Stumbling across THE NIGHT INSIDE while I was still in high school proved something of a revelation: not only was it written by a Canadian woman, but its tale of bloodsuckers took place practically in my backyard. For the first time in my reading life, monsters had come to my neighbourhood, to streets and venues I recognized. I fell in love. (To this day I continue to have a soft spot for horror stories set in the Greater Toronto Area.)

Back in Rue Morgue #142, I caught up with Baker on the eve of the book's digital re-release to discuss the settings and all things undead. Here's an excerpt:

"I never considered setting it anywhere else," says Baker of the story's locale. "My husband offered me elaborate plot ideas that involved drug dealers and the Mexican Day of the Dead, but I knew I'd never be able to pull that off. It just seemed logical to write about the world I knew. [The main character] Ardeth lived in my real apartment and many of the settings were places that I walked around on a day-to-day basis. In many ways, Toronto seemed like the perfect setting for the kind of story I wanted to tell, which was more intimate and contained than horrific."

THE NIGHT INSIDE follows Dimitri Rozokov, a vampire who awakens in the 1990s after a nearly century-long slumber. He'd originally gone to ground in hopes of losing those pursuing himm yet as he emerges from hibernation, he's captured almost immediately. As his kidnappers wait to deliver him to the mysterious person who hired them, they starve him and force him to participate in pornographic snuff films in which he literally ravages the leads - to death. Enter Ardeth Alexander, a university student hired to do (seemingly innocent) research by the person behind Rozokov's abduction. With the work completed, he employer is now cleaning house of anyone linked to the scheme and Ardeth become Rozokov's latest food source - but instead of accepting her fate, she forms an alliance with the vampire, allowing both of them to take revenge on their captors.

"I never really thought of Rozokov as monstrous, though he clearly has done terrible things in order to survive," says Baker. "In my mind, he was someone who had already spent hundreds of years as a vampire, so had gotten whatever urges towards cruelty he had out of his system long before the events of the book. His real goal is to find a way to make his life meaningful. That's the same challenge Ardeth faces, but she's just starting out on her journey and her vision of what being a vampire means is shaped by media, the same way Rozokov's had been shaped by folklore and religion. ... In the books, being a vampire didn't make you a monster, thought it certainly made it easier. If you were a monster, you made the choice to be one."

THE NIGHT INSIDE and its sequel BLOOD AND CHRYSANTHEMUMS are both available as eBooks from Chizine Publications.