Brought To Book
CJ TUDOR
Chilling events: the horror writer tells us about Alaskan bloodsuckers
Words by Jonathan Wright /// Portrait by Bill Waters
IN THE ESTIMATION OF CJ TUDOR, SMALL TOWN Alaska is “weird and crazy”, but “in a brilliant way”.
Tudor knows this first hand, because last May she visited Talkeetna, two and a half hours by car from Anchorage and home to 1,055 souls.
“Everywhere you looked there were antlers and bits of dead animals on the walls, a stuffed bear, and animal skulls in all the little bars,” she says. “It was just brilliant.”
One reason Tudor was so impressed by what she saw was because it tallied with an atmosphere-setting notion she had for the Alaska-set vampyr (to use Tudor’s own spelling) novel she was working on, The Gathering: that people might display vampyr heads and skulls as trophies.
Central to the book is the notion that not only do humans coexist uneasily with vampyrs, but that the bloodsuckers have good reason to fear us. “They’ve been persecuted and hunted almost into extinction, even though they [mostly] haven’t drunk human blood for centuries so they’re not really a threat,” says Tudor.